The Trail to Bear Springs

New Mexico Territory, 1879. Fifteen-year-old Luke Redding knows horses, rifles, cattle, and hard country. None of it is enough to save his family when a band of renegade raiders strikes their isolated ranch.Left for dead beneath the wreckage, Luke wakes to find his parents and younger brother gone-and his sister Hannah missing. The riders who discover him the next morning are not rescuers. They are a Navajo pursuit party already hunting the same raiders for attacks of their own.Luke has a horse, a Winchester, and a choice: remain behind or keep up.The trail eventually carries him to Fort Wingate at Bear Springs, where he finds Hannah safe and discovers that surviving was only the beginning. With winter coming and no ranch to return to yet, Luke earns his keep in the post stables and freight yard under veteran teamster Nick Turner.There he learns a different kind of frontier work-mules, harness, wagons, water, freight, and the judgment to know when action matters and when it does not.By spring, Luke is traveling the freight road as a paid hand. But old tracks have crossed that road too, and unfinished trouble is waiting in the broken country ahead.The Trail to Bear Springs is a traditional historical Western of survival, hard-earned judgment, frontier work, and a young man learning to carry responsibilities larger than himself.