My mother was walking alongside in the snow when the moment arrived. She claims it was Valentine’s Day, and of all people, she should know. I attended a one-room school house outside of the French Canadian town of Mascouche, Quebec, and later in the metropolis of Montreal. At some point, an overworked school teacher wrote a note home to my mother to say that someday I would be a writer. The rest of the family laughed.

When William MacLeod, a member of an American fur trapping party, is forced into Spanish New Mexico to seek help for a wounded companion, he finds love and encounters a vengeance that will test his power to fulfill the promises he made.

Nature punished the land, and every living creature on it, as a merciless sun sucked out the very moisture the people and the cattle needed to survive. And still, it didn’t rain. But as disaster looms a man schemes to acquire Rancho Colinas de Oro, the land granted to William MacLeod and his wife, Francesca.

During the years, 1821-1848, Mexico governed the states of Nuevo Mexico and Alta California, sending north from Mexico City, leaders incompetent to handle the problems of this land in turmoil. But what Mexico and its provinces all had in common was their fear of encroachment by all things American.