
The Trail to Bear Springs
- Western
- Historical Fiction
- Adventure
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 small 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. He can 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 is 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 riding the freight road as a paid hand. But old tracks have crossed that road too, and some unfinished trouble is waiting in the broken country ahead. The Trail to Bear Springs is a traditional historical Western of survival, hard-earned judgment, and a boy learning to carry responsibilities larger than himself.



