The Flock

Blending natural history, politics, and allegory, Mary Austin champions local shepherds in the losing battle against the quickly developing tourist business in early twentieth-century California. The Flock is based on Mary Austin’s first-hand experiences. She met many shepherds while visiting the Tejon ranches of Edward Beale and Henry Miller and cultivated relationships with men others often thought of as ignorant, unambitious, and dirty, listening closely to their stories. Her neighbors were scandalized, but Austin respected the shepherds’ ways of thinking. In The Flock she captures their way of life, not as part of a romantic bygone era, but as exemplifying potentially radical ways of living in and thinking about the world. She blends natural history, politics, and allegory in a genre-blurring narrative championing local shepherds in their losing battle against the quickly developing tourist business in the Western Sierra. Barney Nelson, a rancher, hunter, and environmental activist, is widely recognized as one of the most original voices in environmental literature today. She has enhanced her new afterword with a selection of never-before-published drawings by Mary Austin that were the models for the lovely, authoritative engravings in the first edition, published in 1906. The Flock, readable, informative, and perennially fresh, should bring Austin’s work to a broad new audience.