How This Setting Works: Rural Montana in Winter Range by Claire Davis

In Claire Davis’s Winter Range, a literary crime drama published in 2000, rural Montana is a moody and consequential force that develops throughout the story, influencing how the characters interact, dictating their choices, and even undergoing its own complicated transformation. The setting is so well drawn that it becomes a character in its own right, and a close read reveals how you can bring similar life to your own backdrops.

The plot traces a messy, slow-burning love triangle and revenge opera between sheriff Ike Parsons, an outsider from Wisconsin; his locally raised and range-bred wife, Pattiann; and Chess Stubblefield, the man she dated in her chaotic, booze-soaked youth before a battery of scandals drove her out of the state, after which she managed to exorcise her demons and return reformed.  

In the opening pages, a freak snowstorm settles over the rangeland, an ominous event that both caps off the tribulations of a seven-year drought and promises, once it’s passed, to reinvigorate the desiccated landscape. But first it has to run its violent course.

We begin in Ike’s point of view as he walks through town, the author immediately braiding character with setting. Some of what we learn is up close and subtle, like when a truck slides on a patch of ice and the nameless driver glances through the windshield, nodding at Ike in what seems like apology. Then, in the same paragraph, Davis zooms out, leaving Ike behind as she lyrically situates the town in the state, the state in the region, and the region on the continent, limning the mountain ranges to the north and south. As the chapter continues, so does the braiding, Davis weaving together the setting, the expanding cast, and the economy they’ve all been losing their grip on during the long years of drought.

Throughout, she takes care to use the same evocative language to describe both setting and character, always balancing the amount of time she spends on each and yoking them together with image patterns and contrasts.

For example, here’s a riff about the setting:

Just outside of town—a flat-open slab of white over hardpan and scrub, a scattering of sage and cactus and greasewood punching through, a skiff of tumbleweeds dashing over the icy surface, swooping about in the wind.

And here are a few focused on character:

Ike shook his head and a clot of snow flopped down from the brim. “World’s gone to the dogs, I guess.” Parsons glanced in a storefront window, sucking his stomach in. At forty-two he was still a solid man, but softening at the edges and he did not take kindly to it. Too many sedentary hours behind the desk, too many miles on the road.

This is where things get interesting. There’s a contrast in the two descriptions, which come nearly one after the other. The land is spare, insistent, and enduring, “punching through” and “dashing over” the weather, but Ike is “softening,” “sedentary,” and “not tak[ing] kindly to it.”

The town is home to lean, industrious rangers and the lenders and service providers who support (and sometimes exploit) them. Most of these people steadily interact with the setting in Davis’s detailed portrayals of working life on ranges. There’s a lot of fusion here, the characters melding into the setting and vice versa.

Meanwhile, the contrasting description of Ike serves to peel him away from this lifestyle and the values it encompasses. We gradually learn the locals have come to see Ike, once a cop in big-city Milwaukee, as an outsider who married into their culture and can’t be trusted to understand that their innate authority supersedes whatever power he wields as a mere elected official, even one they voted for after the previous sheriff disgraced himself. When he moves against Stubblefield because the latter, teetering on the precipice of ruin, is starving his cattle, Ike finds himself alienated still further for imposing himself on another man’s land, even though the whole town despises Stubblefield because of his heavy boozing and well-rounded weirdness.

As the characters are drawn deeper into conflict, the setting looms larger and larger, arcing alongside the cast as it unleashes storms, claims a life, drives ruination, and acts as a stage for all manner of human engagement, from sex to industry, sabotage to redemption.

Reading the book over twenty-five years after it was published, it’s not without an uncomfortable meta-politics that excludes Indigenous peoples from its long and descriptive historical accounts of the land, although there is mention of a reserve and a wayward Indigenous character, so it’s possible the author intended the local First Nations to be made conspicuous by their absence—the settlers don’t seem to have much respect for them, if they think of them at all.

That aside, Winter Range easily accomplishes the difficult task of turning setting into character. Writers who want to try something similar should focus on how Davis balances and offsets depictions of her settings with descriptions of her characters and, more importantly, how she brings sweeping change to both.