"Animals and landscapes have not had this weight, this precision, in American fiction since Hemingway's young heroes were fishing the streams of upper Michigan and Spain." — San Francisco Chronicle A flock of great blue herons descending through a snowstorm to the streets of New York... A river in Nebraska disappearing mysteriously... A ghostly herd of buffalo that sings a song of death... A mystic who raises constellations of stones from the desert floor... All these are to be found in Winter Count, the exquisite and rapturous collection by the National Book Award-winning author of Arctic Dreams . In these resonant and unpredictable stories Barry Lopez proves that he is one of the most important and original writers at work in America today. With breathtaking skill and a few deft strokes he produces painfully beautiful scenes. Combining the real with the wondrous, he offers us a pure vision of people alive to the immediacy and spiritual truth of nature.