People work too hard, speak too little, and love at an angle. 

This is written before she wrote Brokeback Mountain, and proves she has been a serious short story writer for time eternal. This collection shows Proulx building the moral and aesthetic terrain she would later become famous for: masculinity under pressure, love constrained by place, and lives defined as much by what can’t be said as what can.

The sentences are tight, occasionally cruel, and deeply attentive to how environment shapes character long before psychology gets a say.