The Work of Wolves

The Work of Wolves is a 2004 work of psychological fiction by Kent Meyers. Set in rural South Dakota, it concerns fourteen-year-old Carson Fielding, an aspiring horse trainer who suffers the pain of growing up in an abstracted and isolated town. Fielding’s early romantic relationship with an older, married woman becomes known by her wealthy rancher husband, who projects his bitterness into abusing his wife’s horses. The novel has been lauded for being one of the most significant literary works to draw its subject matter from South Dakota, illuminating a beautiful and tragic state whose representation suffers from a poverty of literary and intellectual attention.

The novel begins by introducing the life of Carson Fielding. He has recently bought his first horse from a rancher named Magnus Yarborough. While Magnus sees the exchange as a purely economic event, not caring about Fielding’s obvious lack of experience, the young Fielding feels ready to accept the responsibility of caring for the unbroken steed.

The rest of the novel takes place years later. Now a young adult, Fielding has become an expert horse trainer well known in their placid reservation border town. After being solicited by the wealthy and frightening Magnus, Fielding agrees to train his fleet of horses and teach his wife how to ride. Initially reluctant to agree, he slowly forms an attraction to Magnus’s wife, which she reciprocates. The domineering rancher discovers their bond and lashes out, abusing the horses as a proxy for his savagery towards relationships that seem to defy him.

Magnus’s inhumanity involves several other characters who work together to protect the horses from abuse. These include Earl Walks Alone, a Lakota Native American from the nearby reservation who is striving to escape a depressed reservation life by studying his way into higher education; and Willi, an exchange student from Germany with a difficult familial past. Earl Walks Alone is independent by choice, rejecting his high school peers who have recklessly gotten into drugs and alcohol. Willi has come to the Dakotas to learn about its indigenous past, seeking his own roots. A second Lakota, Ted Kills Many, also enters the narrative, acting as a foil to Earl Walks Alone who represents a resignation to the cultural malaise and fate of the reservation.

Each of the characters, equally imperfect creatures, reaches into a distinct personal past to inform their attempt to save the horses. Willi’s family was complicit in Hitler’s Nazi Germany during World War II; his rejection of Magnus’s tyranny is doubly a rejection of this legacy. Earl Walks Alone reckons strongly with the question of moral versus legal criminality, as his attempts to save the horses collide with his idealism, which seemed previously to rigorously and categorically exclude legal crime. Ted Kills Many’s charge is to clear away his own addictive and negative emotional patterns and see humanistic value in the act of working with his friends to save the innocent creatures. The plot involves the many injustices experienced by the two Native Americans on their reservations in a country that sees them as irrelevant and relegates them to second-class status.

The novel leaves its main subplots unfinished, showing that the conflicts that power them extend outside the bounds of a single narrative and are interwoven in South Dakotan history. One of these conflicts is between one’s love for the land and one’s desire to forge new paths away, especially embodied in the Native American characters’ rejection of (sometimes resignation to) the world created for them in their reservation. Another is the conflict between tradition and individualism, which is framed as a temptation to leave the reservation town and as Willi’s rejection of his family’s past after it wages a mental war against his experiences.

The novel ends by reflecting on the earth as itself a site of change. The wolves from which the title gets its namesake are no longer present in the town. The characters have undergone their own unique transformations and stopped a moral crime. Meyers suggests that stories of loss and redemption like theirs can serve as tools that unite people from disparate backgrounds and pose potential paths for remembering and reclaiming identity.