The Wild Girl: The Notebooks of Ned Giles, 1932 [Audio CD]

In 1999, elderly photographer Ned Giles explains one of his photographs to a man attending a New York showing of Giles's photos. The image is of a young Apache girl in a Mexican jail. The girl, Giles says, was called "the wild girl," and was found naked and starving in Mexico's Sierra Madre. The man purchases the photograph, leaving Giles to remember the girl's story, and his own, in detail. The tale, relayed by journal entries, flashbacks, and from the point of view of several characters, is set in 1932 and begins with the girl running desperately through the arroyo below the Sierra Madre while the cougar hunter Billy Flowers chases her.

Seventeen-year-old Ned Giles joins a large expedition as a photojournalist to Mexico to retrieve a kidnapped boy from the Apaches. Ned makes friends with wealthy and outspokenly gay Tolley, cultural anthropologist Margaret, and his own young assistant, Jesus.

Meanwhile, Flowers chases the Apache girl again, as she has escaped. The girl had been with her family, in a raid led by her crazy brother-in-law, Indio Juan, when they kidnapped the rich rancher's little boy. She remembers the kidnapping as she hides in a cave from Flowers. When Flowers finally catches the wild girl, he has no idea what to do with her, and so he takes her to the nearby town jail.

In the tiny village of Bavispe, Sonora, Ned encounters the shocking sight of the Apache girl tied to a post in front of the jail. He arranges to bathe and clothe her. Along with his friends, he hatches a plan that should benefit everyone, including the girl and the kidnapped boy --- trade the girl for the kidnapped boy. A small band consisting of Ned, the girl, an English butler, Tolley, Margaret, Jesus, and two Indian scouts set off to accomplish the mission. The Apaches soon capture them, and Ned finds himself in "...another world, a world with its own sun and moon, and its own separate race of man" --- and in imminent mortal danger.

As a tribute to Jim Fergus's talents as a storyteller, I literally could not put down this novel, staying up until nearly dawn to finish it. The characters are full-blooded and alive; the adventure unfolds at a breathless pace and the descriptions are lyrical. As I watched Ned Giles leave chilly Chicago to set off on his adventure, my mind movie changed from black and white to warm Technicolor. The story felt so real that I actually checked (several times!) to be sure that the word "novel" hadn't somehow changed to "nonfiction" on the jacket flap. This is one of the best books I've read in years, and a story that will remain with me. Very highly recommended.

--- Reviewed by Terry Miller Shannon

It's funny how authors invest the very act of writing with a kind of sweet magic, whether to exorcise demons, or merely to kink history by telling the way it should have been.

Now Jim Fergus, one of the West's premier literary storytellers, has undertaken the resurrection of a long-dead Indian child, and given her the history he wishes she'd had - not the painful truth of her existence.

"The Wild Girl" is, in every respect, a historical novel, inspired by several true stories. Fergus embroiders his tale with enough threads of truth (and a healthy bibliography) that it resonates with authenticity, but the heart and soul of the story are equal parts of Fergus' hope and imagination. And it's a little prayer that somehow the truth can truly be rewritten.

Fergus is a poetic writer, but not a florid one. His gift is in simple prose, vivid action and human stories. Like other literary writers of the West, the landscape and climate loom large as distinct characters that color the hearts, minds and actions of the human players. For the money and genre, Fergus is as good a storyteller as Kent Haruf, William Kittredge, Ivan Doig and Thomas McGuane, and with Mark Spragg and others, represents the next wave of gifted regional authors.

(And for those fans of Fergus' columns and nonfiction, a sad note: His faithful yellow Labrador Sweetzer, a fixture in Fergus' 1999 road-essay book, "The Sporting Road," died in 2003.)

This new novel's journal structure, punctuated by third-person segments from other points of view, is an authorial minefield, but Fergus tiptoes through it skillfully. While telling his story in the journal structure might have been safer, it also would have mirrored the structure of "One Thousand White Women." The current commercialism of publishing notwithstanding, who can blame an author for not wanting to repeat himself?

Moreover, who can blame an author for wanting to rewrite an unpleasant history? "The Wild Child" is a tragic life seen through a prism of time, heartbreak and distance, and the light has been refracted into something poignant and spiritual.

Jim Fergus weaves an enduring tale of Ned Giles' trials and tribulations growing up in an unknown corner of the United States.

Set during the Great Depression, Giles sets off on an adventure to free a young white boy from the bronco Apaches. Fergus is masterful in entertwining a great adventure with the personal growth of Giles as he struggles to learn that life is seldom black-and-white.

When Giles looks back over the decades at his time in the southwest, it's with the acknowledgement that all of the decisions that we make send us down a path in life that is uniquely our own.

Fergus tells his story with the same detached, honest assessment as Giles does when he's hiding behind his camera, capturing the lives of the bronco Apaches.

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