Stilwater
One thousand square miles of coastal scrub—inundated by monsoon floods in the winter, baked dry in the summer, and filled with the deadliest animals in the world—Stilwater Station seems an unlikely home for a cattle operation. But in the countless miles beyond the station compound roam tens of thousands of cows, many entirely feral from a long period of neglect. Twenty-three years old and traveling with nothing more than a few pairs of boots, shirts, and jeans, Rafael de Grenade has been hired on to a ragged crew of ringers and stockmen to bring the cattle in for drafting. Over a season they use helicopters, motorcycles, bullcatcher jeeps, horses, ropes, and knives along with intuition, strength, muscle, and wit to win Stilwater Station back from the wild.
A deeply poetic inquiry into our desire to make order where we find wildness, Stilwater suffuses us with salt and scrub and blood, blurring the line between domestic and feral in wondrous, unsettling ways. This is a whirlwind of men, women, cattle, horses, machines, and landscape in collaborative evolution, all becoming different manifestations of the same entity—the Australian Wild.
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Rafael de Grenade
Rafael de Grenade is the author of Stilwater: Finding Wild Mercy in the Outback. She has traveled to many countries as a land steward and scientist, and her writing has been published widely in literary and scientific journals. She divides her time between the southwestern United States and Chile.
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