Sid Gustafson
Novelist and Veterinarian
Equitarian Philosophy, making the world a better place for horses and horsefolk...
Dr Gustafson's Equine Behavior Educational Services
Appreciating Horses, The Language of Horsemanship, How Horses Heal
Enrichment Strategies to Enhance the Health and Performance of Horses
Veterinary behavior assessments and consultations. Animal-oriented approaches to success with horses and dogs. Behavioral development. Appropriate training, enrichment, nutrition, and socialization. Behavioral approaches to enhance positive partnerships with horses and dogs.
How Wolf Became Dog
Equine Education-The Nature of Horses
Understanding and Appreciating Horses and Equine Behavior
Open Learning Equine Behavior Class
University of Guelph
Nature's Way
Comprehensive Veterinary Services in Big Sky, MT
High Plains Book of the Year 2007
Now Available in Fine Bookstores Everywhere
Literary Fiction
Outback Montana Wilderness Novel
Canine Care
dog first aid, accident prevention, injury assessment, canine behavior, dog injury treatments
Quick Links
Horse and Culture Presentation
Humanities Montana Speaker's Bureau
Dogs and People Presentation
Humanities Montana Speaker's Bureau
Horsemanship from Mr Jake
Straight from the horse's mouth
The results of a willing partnership
Shared leadership wins races
Animal Behavior Services
Helping resolve and manage unwanted behaviors of horses and pets
Washington State Magazine review
Literary Review by Brian Ames
How to race horses without drugs.
Dr Gustafson's NYTimes article on drug-free horseracing
New York Times, The Rail, Raceday Drugs remain problematic for US horseracing
Dr Gustafson's Racehorse Advocacy
Goodby Lasix, and Good Riddance
New York Times story, The Rail
Racehorse Advocacy
Equine Behavior as Applied to the Health and Welfare of Racehorses
Washington State Magazine Review summer 07
HORSES THEY RODE, a novel
By Sid Gustafson '79
Riverbend Publishing, Helena, Montana, 2006
Midway through Sid Gustafson’s new novel, Horses They Rode, I found myself put in mind of all the second chances I have had. His take on the reknitting of family, friendship, and one man’s tumultuous life is such a story—a tale of second chances where hope effervesces across a storyscape of high country, horse corrals, drunkenness, and regret that seems, at moments, irresolvable. It’s a wholly American novel, for of course, America is a land forgiving of first mistakes—where a shot at trying again is fair and right.
Wendel Ingraham, Gustafson’s protagonist, is a ranch hand who has roamed Washington State’s Inland Empire, Idaho’s panhandle, and Big Sky Country on a multi-year binge, leaving a daughter and a broken marriage in his wake. A series of experiences, including encounters with a high-school sweetheart and with mentor, companion, and part-time Blackfoot medicine man Bubbles Ground Owl, leads to his sobriety and amends.
Wendel and Bubbles take jobs as hands on a ranch where they worked as youths. And this is where the novel cries its message in earnest. The protagonist is never so competent as when he’s reunited with his beloved horse. The symbiosis that is rediscovered between them, a language of faithfulness and trust, portends atonements awaiting Wendel. A gathering of horsemen and their mounts prompts language from Gustafson that is a gorgeous but gritty admixture of potential:
“Whoever they were, whatever breed of horsemen, they brought horses and they brought hope, hope that horses could revive a manifest heart.”
At the ranch there are additional reconciliations required of Ingraham. In their execution, he emerges whole, “. . . grateful for all the people who’d gathered to live the life they knew best, everything and everyone connected, men and animals, fishes and birds, grass, trees and stars.”
As in his first novel, Prisoners of Flight, Gustafson often joyfully eschews writing conventions. By turns, his forms are starkly tangible or cloaked in mythology. His prose is exuberant and accessible. Rhythmic, he often reads like a long poem: “Parents want their children with them, children of the land, something about having your children with you on the land, native children on native land.”
Horses They Rode is a one-sitting book. And it’s the kind of book about something important in a world full of books about unimportant things. People should like it.
—Brian Ames ’85
HORSES THEY RODE, a novel
By Sid Gustafson '79
Riverbend Publishing, Helena, Montana, 2006
Midway through Sid Gustafson’s new novel, Horses They Rode, I found myself put in mind of all the second chances I have had. His take on the reknitting of family, friendship, and one man’s tumultuous life is such a story—a tale of second chances where hope effervesces across a storyscape of high country, horse corrals, drunkenness, and regret that seems, at moments, irresolvable. It’s a wholly American novel, for of course, America is a land forgiving of first mistakes—where a shot at trying again is fair and right.
Wendel Ingraham, Gustafson’s protagonist, is a ranch hand who has roamed Washington State’s Inland Empire, Idaho’s panhandle, and Big Sky Country on a multi-year binge, leaving a daughter and a broken marriage in his wake. A series of experiences, including encounters with a high-school sweetheart and with mentor, companion, and part-time Blackfoot medicine man Bubbles Ground Owl, leads to his sobriety and amends.
Wendel and Bubbles take jobs as hands on a ranch where they worked as youths. And this is where the novel cries its message in earnest. The protagonist is never so competent as when he’s reunited with his beloved horse. The symbiosis that is rediscovered between them, a language of faithfulness and trust, portends atonements awaiting Wendel. A gathering of horsemen and their mounts prompts language from Gustafson that is a gorgeous but gritty admixture of potential:
“Whoever they were, whatever breed of horsemen, they brought horses and they brought hope, hope that horses could revive a manifest heart.”
At the ranch there are additional reconciliations required of Ingraham. In their execution, he emerges whole, “. . . grateful for all the people who’d gathered to live the life they knew best, everything and everyone connected, men and animals, fishes and birds, grass, trees and stars.”
As in his first novel, Prisoners of Flight, Gustafson often joyfully eschews writing conventions. By turns, his forms are starkly tangible or cloaked in mythology. His prose is exuberant and accessible. Rhythmic, he often reads like a long poem: “Parents want their children with them, children of the land, something about having your children with you on the land, native children on native land.”
Horses They Rode is a one-sitting book. And it’s the kind of book about something important in a world full of books about unimportant things. People should like it.
—Brian Ames ’85
Outside Bozeman Book Review
Horses they Rode
by Sid Gustafson
Riverbend Publishing
Fall 2006, reviewed by Anna Bjorklund
Author of several short stories, poetry, and a guidebook on canine first aid, Montana native Sid Gustafson is well-known for his practice of natural veterinary medicine. The Bozeman resident is continuing to grow his literary credentials with a second novel, Horses They Rode, released in September.
The story follows the transitory journey of Wendel Ingraham, a racehorse trainer newly divorced and rebuilding his life in his childhood home along the northern Rocky Mountain Front. Against the backdrop of the shifting ranch landscape, the horse trainer attempts to make peace with past loves, wrestles with the disappearance of his five-year-old daughter back in Spokane, and finally unravels the mystery of his own father’s disappearance. Along the way, Wendell finds out about a son he never knew, connecting with the boy while training ranch horses and driving cattle.
Steeped in Native American spirituality and stories, Horses They Rode is a compelling tribute to contemporary ranch culture. Like his debut novel, Prisoner’s of Flight, Gustafson’s latest is thick with metaphor, weaving together both inner and outer journeys. By rail, by horse, and by mountain highway, Gustafson paints a magical landscape as his protagonist recreates his life and connections with others, the land and himself.
Horses they Rode
by Sid Gustafson
Riverbend Publishing
Fall 2006, reviewed by Anna Bjorklund
Author of several short stories, poetry, and a guidebook on canine first aid, Montana native Sid Gustafson is well-known for his practice of natural veterinary medicine. The Bozeman resident is continuing to grow his literary credentials with a second novel, Horses They Rode, released in September.
The story follows the transitory journey of Wendel Ingraham, a racehorse trainer newly divorced and rebuilding his life in his childhood home along the northern Rocky Mountain Front. Against the backdrop of the shifting ranch landscape, the horse trainer attempts to make peace with past loves, wrestles with the disappearance of his five-year-old daughter back in Spokane, and finally unravels the mystery of his own father’s disappearance. Along the way, Wendell finds out about a son he never knew, connecting with the boy while training ranch horses and driving cattle.
Steeped in Native American spirituality and stories, Horses They Rode is a compelling tribute to contemporary ranch culture. Like his debut novel, Prisoner’s of Flight, Gustafson’s latest is thick with metaphor, weaving together both inner and outer journeys. By rail, by horse, and by mountain highway, Gustafson paints a magical landscape as his protagonist recreates his life and connections with others, the land and himself.
'Horses They Rode' full of linguistic gems
BOOK REVIEW
By SCOTT McMILLION Chronicle Staff Writer
Meet Wendel Ingraham. Meet him slouched over in a Spokane train station, ready to flee the life he has botched and the wife who no longer appreciates "his thoroughbred ways." There among the bums and winos, Wendel doesn't look like much, and he knows it. He's a man who admits he is no better or worse than his malodorous companions.
But he's still got some hope. Wendel is going home to Montana, back to being a white man on the Blackfeet Reservation where he grew up. He knows it's his last chance. "Wendel reckoned if he couldn't find happiness in Montana, he wouldn't find it anywhere," Sid Gustafson writes in the opening pages of his new novel, "Horses They Rode.
"Gustafson is a Bozeman writer and veterinarian. "Horses" is his second novel and the first piece of fiction published by Helena's Riverbend Publishing, making the book very much a Montana project.
Descended from a long line of accomplished Montanans, Gustafson uses his intimate knowledge of the state, its people and its horseflesh to create a compelling story of a man who has spent too much of his life battling his own well being, both financial and emotional.
But he's trying. By God, he's trying. And you've got to root for him, from the time he stumbles off a freight train in Browning until the climactic horse race at the end of the novel.
Along the way, Gustafson delights the reader with characteristic linguistic gems. He describes a prairie wind as "bending into trills and caterwauls." Columbia Falls is a town "befuddled by the stink of its aluminum mill."
And here's his description of modern agriculture, seen from the flank of a northern mountain, where Wendel has just been spooked by a grizzly bear: "Farming stared back at them from the plains, precisely rectangled, Mother Earth turned inside-out, scarred deeply and forever," Gustafson writes. "All the distance broken by farming, tillage taking the entire history away from the land, depriving it of any future."
"Horses They Rode" is the story of a flawed man trying to do better, trying to rebuild a life through family and love, through good horses and good friends in familiar country.
Wendel falters some, and learns to never quit trying. And he listens to his friend, a Blackfeet shaman named Bubbles Ground Owl. "Remember reliable things," Bubbles tells him. "Forget the unreliable."
That's good advice in any place.
BOOK REVIEW
By SCOTT McMILLION Chronicle Staff Writer
Meet Wendel Ingraham. Meet him slouched over in a Spokane train station, ready to flee the life he has botched and the wife who no longer appreciates "his thoroughbred ways." There among the bums and winos, Wendel doesn't look like much, and he knows it. He's a man who admits he is no better or worse than his malodorous companions.
But he's still got some hope. Wendel is going home to Montana, back to being a white man on the Blackfeet Reservation where he grew up. He knows it's his last chance. "Wendel reckoned if he couldn't find happiness in Montana, he wouldn't find it anywhere," Sid Gustafson writes in the opening pages of his new novel, "Horses They Rode.
"Gustafson is a Bozeman writer and veterinarian. "Horses" is his second novel and the first piece of fiction published by Helena's Riverbend Publishing, making the book very much a Montana project.
Descended from a long line of accomplished Montanans, Gustafson uses his intimate knowledge of the state, its people and its horseflesh to create a compelling story of a man who has spent too much of his life battling his own well being, both financial and emotional.
But he's trying. By God, he's trying. And you've got to root for him, from the time he stumbles off a freight train in Browning until the climactic horse race at the end of the novel.
Along the way, Gustafson delights the reader with characteristic linguistic gems. He describes a prairie wind as "bending into trills and caterwauls." Columbia Falls is a town "befuddled by the stink of its aluminum mill."
And here's his description of modern agriculture, seen from the flank of a northern mountain, where Wendel has just been spooked by a grizzly bear: "Farming stared back at them from the plains, precisely rectangled, Mother Earth turned inside-out, scarred deeply and forever," Gustafson writes. "All the distance broken by farming, tillage taking the entire history away from the land, depriving it of any future."
"Horses They Rode" is the story of a flawed man trying to do better, trying to rebuild a life through family and love, through good horses and good friends in familiar country.
Wendel falters some, and learns to never quit trying. And he listens to his friend, a Blackfeet shaman named Bubbles Ground Owl. "Remember reliable things," Bubbles tells him. "Forget the unreliable."
That's good advice in any place.
PRISONERS OF FLIGHT
debut novel, 2003
The Permanent Press,
New York
Icelandic Horse Roundup
Dr Gustafson's Equine Behaviour Presentation preview: Appreciating Horses
Getting in touch with horses
Montana Quarterly Magazine
Book Review, Spring ‘07
Horses They Rode
By Sid Gustafson
Riverbend Publishing, 288 pages
Reviewed by Justin Easter
Bozeman author and veterinarian Sid Gustafson has the rare ability to take you from your seat and place you directly in his novel.
He accomplishes this in Horses They Rode not with the all-too-common literary tactics we are used to, but through the use of fascinating imagery. While giving the reader familiar points in Montana to use as reference, Gustafson transports his readers into a different countryside than the one we see from our windows.
Gustafson brings his reader into a world where Indians and cowboys live together, and before the novel even progresses, the affect of this relationship, however strained, is evident to the reader. The nomadic qualities of Gustafson’s characters echo throughout the novel and resonate in any reader who has felt an itch for exploration.
If you are interested in opening a book that will captivate your imagination while encouraging introspection, you need not look further than Horses They Rode. You may put this novel down wondering about the spirit of the mountains, the relationships you have with people around you, or even the relationship you have with yourself. This is, of course, not surprising when you realize Gustafson is using his own experiences to masterfully shape his characters.
Expect to read one of the finer stories related to quickly dissipating Montana culture, and one of the most impressive novels written by a Montana author this year. Hold on to your emotions, because there will most likely be an instant when Gustafson is able to open your mind in a way that is truly fascinating.
Justin Easter
Book Review, Spring ‘07
Horses They Rode
By Sid Gustafson
Riverbend Publishing, 288 pages
Reviewed by Justin Easter
Bozeman author and veterinarian Sid Gustafson has the rare ability to take you from your seat and place you directly in his novel.
He accomplishes this in Horses They Rode not with the all-too-common literary tactics we are used to, but through the use of fascinating imagery. While giving the reader familiar points in Montana to use as reference, Gustafson transports his readers into a different countryside than the one we see from our windows.
Gustafson brings his reader into a world where Indians and cowboys live together, and before the novel even progresses, the affect of this relationship, however strained, is evident to the reader. The nomadic qualities of Gustafson’s characters echo throughout the novel and resonate in any reader who has felt an itch for exploration.
If you are interested in opening a book that will captivate your imagination while encouraging introspection, you need not look further than Horses They Rode. You may put this novel down wondering about the spirit of the mountains, the relationships you have with people around you, or even the relationship you have with yourself. This is, of course, not surprising when you realize Gustafson is using his own experiences to masterfully shape his characters.
Expect to read one of the finer stories related to quickly dissipating Montana culture, and one of the most impressive novels written by a Montana author this year. Hold on to your emotions, because there will most likely be an instant when Gustafson is able to open your mind in a way that is truly fascinating.
Justin Easter
"This is a fascinating novel." Jim Harrison, literary novelist perseverant, Yellowstone River fly fisherman, a Legend of the Fall himself, Dalva, and Wolf
Prisoners of Flight Book Review The Independent, July 2, 2003,
the Hamptons, Long Island, New York
By Joan Baum
We wince, we keep reading. This first novel by a Montana doctor of veterinary medicine moves with compelling, sometimes beautiful, and sometimes brutal, imagery. Shelley is famously blunt for opening his elegiac tribute to Keats, “I weep for Adonais -- he is dead.”
But here’s Gustafson, starting off this strange tale of bonding in the Northwest wilderness with “Henson’s dead.” Hen Son, part Blackfeet Indian, part Cree, had his name anglicized by the military. Later on, what Vietnam did not destroy, Captain Henson lost to a freak fishing accident and an inability to reconnect with the world of civilization -- an eye, his wife, his ranching business, though not his love of nature or a capacity for deep friendship with the narrator, Dr. Sling Roop, a veterinarian.
Their lives go back to training days in the Air Force Academy and then, after being shot down over the China Sea, to time spent at the Hanoi “Hilton,” where they were tortured. Prisoners of flight, they become prisoners of those memories. Ironically, they also find escape from the past in flying.
Prisoners of Flight begins with a brief present-tense prologue by Sling, who is airborne, but as he recalls Henson’s recent death, and “clouds bleed up the setting sun,” his judgment falters and the plane goes down. Injured, stunned, memories invade, and the stream of consciousness that ensues constitutes the actual story that will eventually connect with the prologue and explain how Henson died. The memories are many-layered but center on the recent weeks when Sling and Henson lived together in the wilderness after they flew blind and crashed in a desolate part of northern Montana. Within minutes of that crash, two college-age girls appeared, having seen the plane fall. They are twins, running away from an unhappy home and searching for their dog, who bounded into the forest. The situation is bizarre, but Gustafson avoids the expected and with great skill pulls their stories together, showing how they are all prisoners of flight. Essentially, however, the novel is a kind of love story between Sling and Hen, two maimed souls whose intimacy allows them to communicate with subtle gestures and code taps, and whose fierce need to escape into a pure, albeit dangerous sky, speaks volumes about the psychological and physical damage wrought by the Vietnam war, the addictions it bred, and the irreparable social discontent it generated.
It’s amazing what Gustafson packs in, including lore about veterinary medicine, some of it as discomforting as it is true, about what even the most compassionate animal lover has to undergo interning and then in practice. War made Sling “an animal” and drove him to drugs, but another war drew him to alcohol -- the losing battle against “stupid heartless people” who insisted he put their healthy pets to sleep. He loses wife, son, daughter, and home. Nonetheless, he is an admirable, decent human being, and readers will lament the passing of his kind: Machines? Not for him. They don’t know “the tone, the surge of capillaries, the pulsing blood.” People today “insist on machines—numeric proof, undeniable proof. They don’t trust a doctor’s touch, not anymore. I’m on my way out.”
In the wilderness, with Henson, Sling finds the insecurity he needs to slow him down and allow him to be a fully sensate being. “Living here is a ceremony, replete with sacrifice and rapture.” Together, in nurturing mode, Sling and Henson teach the girls what it means to live and face death. Yet, for all his instinctive and intuitive smarts, Sling knows he is not an animal, that man cannot live in the wilderness, that flight has limits. This is a haunting book. As summer deepens and city folk look to nature, to the outback, to so-called roughing it, it is refreshing to come across a literary account of The Real Thing -- so graphic, so poetically rendered.
Prisoners of Flight, a novel by Sid Gustafson, The Permanent Press, 176 pp. $18
Copyright © 2002 East Hampton Independent News Co
Living the literary life: Sid Gustafson, a veterinarian by day, published two books this summer along with a pair of short stories
By SCOTT McMILLION, Chronicle Staff Writer, July, 26, 2003
It might be some kind of literary record, at least as far as local authors are concerned.
Sid Gustafson, a Bozeman veterinarian, has had two books published this summer, along with two short stories in new collections of literary work. The plot synopsis of Gustafson's first novel "Prisoners of Flight," (The Permanent Press) sounds a little suspect: two 50-ish former Vietnam POWs crash their small plane high in the Montana Rockies, only to find a well-stocked cabin and a pair of college-age twin sisters. But the story never takes the obvious plot twist. Rather, the tale remains chaste and goes interior, deep inside the mind of protagonist Sling Roop, an alcoholic veterinarian with only one good ear. Sling and his buddy, a Cree/Blackfoot named Henson with only one eye, have a long history together and their days at the Air Force Academy, their time in prison camp is only part of it.
It soon becomes clear that they stay so long in the backcountry only because they want to. They have marooned themselves by choice, looking both for a place to hide and a place to seek. Although the story line has some minor weak spots, the book's imagery and sparse, elegant language pulls you through. Linguistic gems pepper almost every page. A jet's contrail, Gustafson tells us, is "a scar of flight." And when a cloud slips under the moon, it leaves the world "sipping blackness." Sling focuses on his senses, relying on his nose, tastebuds and fingertips to diagnose his patients and divine his surroundings. Yet he knows the dangers of living too closely in the sensory world. "I know how the senses can deceive," Gustafson writes. "They aren't math and physics, sensations can fool a mortal." His second book is less literary, but likely to be a good seller. Entitled "First Aid for the Active Dog," (Alpine Publications) it relies on the skills he applies in his day job and tells people how to take care of their canines when mishaps happen and there's no vet around. "I like that book," Gustafson said. "It balances out the edge the fiction has, that some people wrinkle their noses at." The slim book avoids technical jargon and is packed with practical information on everything from plucking porcupine quills to administering canine CPR to diagnosing altitude sickness. The two short stories (Gustafson has published a number of others in literary magazines) appear in two Birch Brook Press collections entitled "The Suspense of Loneliness, Stories of the Forlorn," and "Tales for The Trail, Adventures in Air, Land and Sea."In the latter book, Gustafson's story "Sequel," is the lead story and the one on which the book's cover design is based. A novel, a nonfiction how-to book and short stories in two collections, all in one summer. It's not a bad trick for a 48-year-old full-time veterinarian. Gustafson, a Conrad native, comes from a creative and literary family. His father Rib, also a vet, has written books about his own life in the Hi-Line country and about Lewis and Clark. His sister Kristin, a lawyer, published a book about maritime law. His brother Eric, a teacher and musician, wrote a lengthy history of ancestors who were World War II heroes. And another brother, Wylie, is a country music recording artist and songwriter whose famous yodel is used in Yahoo! commercials. Gustafson works on animals at his Church Street clinic and lives in an upstairs apartment, where he writes every day, usually around mid-day when the press of sick animals and distressed owners hits a lull. "All the urgent veterinary stuff gets handled early in the morning," he said. The novel took five years to write, he said, and the dog first-aid book took a little longer. There's more on the way. Another novel, entitled "Horsemen," is now making the rounds of publishers and Gustafson will supplement the dog book with one that addresses first aid for horses. Few people in this area know of his literary work, although he has fans around the country, in places like Louisiana and New York's Hamptons, where literary magazines have been publishing his work for several years. "I've got enclaves of fans in places I've never been," he said. Gustafson will appear July 29, 2003 at the Country Bookshelf in Bozeman, at 7 p.m., to read from his new work.
the Hamptons, Long Island, New York
By Joan Baum
We wince, we keep reading. This first novel by a Montana doctor of veterinary medicine moves with compelling, sometimes beautiful, and sometimes brutal, imagery. Shelley is famously blunt for opening his elegiac tribute to Keats, “I weep for Adonais -- he is dead.”
But here’s Gustafson, starting off this strange tale of bonding in the Northwest wilderness with “Henson’s dead.” Hen Son, part Blackfeet Indian, part Cree, had his name anglicized by the military. Later on, what Vietnam did not destroy, Captain Henson lost to a freak fishing accident and an inability to reconnect with the world of civilization -- an eye, his wife, his ranching business, though not his love of nature or a capacity for deep friendship with the narrator, Dr. Sling Roop, a veterinarian.
Their lives go back to training days in the Air Force Academy and then, after being shot down over the China Sea, to time spent at the Hanoi “Hilton,” where they were tortured. Prisoners of flight, they become prisoners of those memories. Ironically, they also find escape from the past in flying.
Prisoners of Flight begins with a brief present-tense prologue by Sling, who is airborne, but as he recalls Henson’s recent death, and “clouds bleed up the setting sun,” his judgment falters and the plane goes down. Injured, stunned, memories invade, and the stream of consciousness that ensues constitutes the actual story that will eventually connect with the prologue and explain how Henson died. The memories are many-layered but center on the recent weeks when Sling and Henson lived together in the wilderness after they flew blind and crashed in a desolate part of northern Montana. Within minutes of that crash, two college-age girls appeared, having seen the plane fall. They are twins, running away from an unhappy home and searching for their dog, who bounded into the forest. The situation is bizarre, but Gustafson avoids the expected and with great skill pulls their stories together, showing how they are all prisoners of flight. Essentially, however, the novel is a kind of love story between Sling and Hen, two maimed souls whose intimacy allows them to communicate with subtle gestures and code taps, and whose fierce need to escape into a pure, albeit dangerous sky, speaks volumes about the psychological and physical damage wrought by the Vietnam war, the addictions it bred, and the irreparable social discontent it generated.
It’s amazing what Gustafson packs in, including lore about veterinary medicine, some of it as discomforting as it is true, about what even the most compassionate animal lover has to undergo interning and then in practice. War made Sling “an animal” and drove him to drugs, but another war drew him to alcohol -- the losing battle against “stupid heartless people” who insisted he put their healthy pets to sleep. He loses wife, son, daughter, and home. Nonetheless, he is an admirable, decent human being, and readers will lament the passing of his kind: Machines? Not for him. They don’t know “the tone, the surge of capillaries, the pulsing blood.” People today “insist on machines—numeric proof, undeniable proof. They don’t trust a doctor’s touch, not anymore. I’m on my way out.”
In the wilderness, with Henson, Sling finds the insecurity he needs to slow him down and allow him to be a fully sensate being. “Living here is a ceremony, replete with sacrifice and rapture.” Together, in nurturing mode, Sling and Henson teach the girls what it means to live and face death. Yet, for all his instinctive and intuitive smarts, Sling knows he is not an animal, that man cannot live in the wilderness, that flight has limits. This is a haunting book. As summer deepens and city folk look to nature, to the outback, to so-called roughing it, it is refreshing to come across a literary account of The Real Thing -- so graphic, so poetically rendered.
Prisoners of Flight, a novel by Sid Gustafson, The Permanent Press, 176 pp. $18
Copyright © 2002 East Hampton Independent News Co
Living the literary life: Sid Gustafson, a veterinarian by day, published two books this summer along with a pair of short stories
By SCOTT McMILLION, Chronicle Staff Writer, July, 26, 2003
It might be some kind of literary record, at least as far as local authors are concerned.
Sid Gustafson, a Bozeman veterinarian, has had two books published this summer, along with two short stories in new collections of literary work. The plot synopsis of Gustafson's first novel "Prisoners of Flight," (The Permanent Press) sounds a little suspect: two 50-ish former Vietnam POWs crash their small plane high in the Montana Rockies, only to find a well-stocked cabin and a pair of college-age twin sisters. But the story never takes the obvious plot twist. Rather, the tale remains chaste and goes interior, deep inside the mind of protagonist Sling Roop, an alcoholic veterinarian with only one good ear. Sling and his buddy, a Cree/Blackfoot named Henson with only one eye, have a long history together and their days at the Air Force Academy, their time in prison camp is only part of it.
It soon becomes clear that they stay so long in the backcountry only because they want to. They have marooned themselves by choice, looking both for a place to hide and a place to seek. Although the story line has some minor weak spots, the book's imagery and sparse, elegant language pulls you through. Linguistic gems pepper almost every page. A jet's contrail, Gustafson tells us, is "a scar of flight." And when a cloud slips under the moon, it leaves the world "sipping blackness." Sling focuses on his senses, relying on his nose, tastebuds and fingertips to diagnose his patients and divine his surroundings. Yet he knows the dangers of living too closely in the sensory world. "I know how the senses can deceive," Gustafson writes. "They aren't math and physics, sensations can fool a mortal." His second book is less literary, but likely to be a good seller. Entitled "First Aid for the Active Dog," (Alpine Publications) it relies on the skills he applies in his day job and tells people how to take care of their canines when mishaps happen and there's no vet around. "I like that book," Gustafson said. "It balances out the edge the fiction has, that some people wrinkle their noses at." The slim book avoids technical jargon and is packed with practical information on everything from plucking porcupine quills to administering canine CPR to diagnosing altitude sickness. The two short stories (Gustafson has published a number of others in literary magazines) appear in two Birch Brook Press collections entitled "The Suspense of Loneliness, Stories of the Forlorn," and "Tales for The Trail, Adventures in Air, Land and Sea."In the latter book, Gustafson's story "Sequel," is the lead story and the one on which the book's cover design is based. A novel, a nonfiction how-to book and short stories in two collections, all in one summer. It's not a bad trick for a 48-year-old full-time veterinarian. Gustafson, a Conrad native, comes from a creative and literary family. His father Rib, also a vet, has written books about his own life in the Hi-Line country and about Lewis and Clark. His sister Kristin, a lawyer, published a book about maritime law. His brother Eric, a teacher and musician, wrote a lengthy history of ancestors who were World War II heroes. And another brother, Wylie, is a country music recording artist and songwriter whose famous yodel is used in Yahoo! commercials. Gustafson works on animals at his Church Street clinic and lives in an upstairs apartment, where he writes every day, usually around mid-day when the press of sick animals and distressed owners hits a lull. "All the urgent veterinary stuff gets handled early in the morning," he said. The novel took five years to write, he said, and the dog first-aid book took a little longer. There's more on the way. Another novel, entitled "Horsemen," is now making the rounds of publishers and Gustafson will supplement the dog book with one that addresses first aid for horses. Few people in this area know of his literary work, although he has fans around the country, in places like Louisiana and New York's Hamptons, where literary magazines have been publishing his work for several years. "I've got enclaves of fans in places I've never been," he said. Gustafson will appear July 29, 2003 at the Country Bookshelf in Bozeman, at 7 p.m., to read from his new work.