A Heartbeat in the Desert
Kathryn Wilder’s The Last Cows: On Ranching, Wonder, and a Woman’s Heart is a book that feels alive—dusty, tender, and full of pulse. It’s not just a memoir about ranching; it’s a meditation on what it means to belong to a piece of land and the creatures that depend on it. Wilder invites readers into a life that’s both rugged and luminous, a place where cattle move like shadows against the canyon walls and where the author herself wrestles with love, loss, and identity. Her writing has that rare ability to make you smell the sagebrush and feel the ache of a long ride under an endless sky. It’s a memoir rooted in the natural world, but it’s also a journey through the wild terrain of the human heart.

Life Between Dust and Grace
At its core, The Last Cows traces Wilder’s life on a remote ranch in the American Southwest, where she finds meaning and resilience among the rhythms of the land. The book weaves together her experiences of raising cattle, caring for the environment, and navigating her own emotional landscapes as a woman who has known both heartbreak and healing. Wilder’s reflections shift fluidly between the personal and the ecological, showing how closely tied our lives are to the soil beneath us. She doesn’t shy away from the hard parts—drought, death, and disconnection—but she also finds beauty in the smallest details: a calf’s first steps, the whisper of wind through dry grass, the resilience of the desert itself. Each page feels like a prayer to the power of persistence and the grace of small miracles.

Writing That Feels Like the Land Itself
Wilder’s prose is rich and deliberate, like the pace of life she describes. Her sentences have weight, the kind that lingers after you’ve read them, and her imagery is vivid without ever feeling forced. You can sense the writer’s deep respect for nature and the way it mirrors her own inner landscape—sometimes cracked and weathered, sometimes breathtakingly alive. There’s an honesty to her storytelling that feels rare; she writes about imperfection with the same reverence she gives to beauty. Wilder doesn’t romanticize the ranching life, but she finds poetry in its truths, crafting a narrative that feels both grounded and transcendent.

A Memoir of Resilience and Reverence
What makes The Last Cows stand out among memoirs of the natural world is its emotional candor. Wilder doesn’t just describe the land—she lets it speak through her. The book captures the tension between survival and surrender, between holding on and letting go. Whether she’s describing the heartbreak of losing livestock or the quiet joy of watching the sun spill over red rock cliffs, there’s a reverence that runs through her words. Readers come away not only with a deeper appreciation for ranching life but also with a renewed sense of connection to the earth itself. It’s a story about finding wonder in endurance and grace in impermanence.

A Love Letter to the Land
Kathryn Wilder has written a memoir that feels timeless, one that hums with both grit and grace. The Last Cows is for anyone who has ever felt the pull of open spaces or the comfort of solitude. It’s for readers who understand that tending to animals or landscapes is, in many ways, a form of tending to oneself. Wilder’s reflections remind us that love—for people, for place, for the world itself—is both the hardest and most necessary work there is. This is a book to read slowly, to linger over, and to carry with you long after you’ve turned the last page.

Sometimes I dream about moving out West and living closer to the sky. It's not my life, but maybe in another one. In the meantime, I'm drawn to books like this: Wilder's wandering look at decades of ranching and cowboying, parenting and grandparenting, trying to balance what makes sense economically against what is best for the land.

This was a relatively slow read for me, partly because it's not really the sort of book with a lot of plot (character development, yes; A–Z plot, no) and partly because it's just quiet, lovely writing, and I didn't feel a need to rush it. Wilder takes readers through some family and land history and some of the considerations of raising cattle on public lands (the short version: public land =/= cheap or easy), but mostly it's quiet moments in cabins and searching for calves in the snow, crossing unpredictable rivers on horseback, butting heads, getting injured or escaping injury, getting back on the horse.

I read a book recently by someone who lives his life in the city, and among other things he kept coming back to the idea that there were no real cowboys left (because, basically, modern-day cowboys have access to things like air conditioning). And I kept thinking about "The Last Cows" as I read that—kept thinking that that other writer had no concept of what it actually meant to be a cowboy, or do cowboy work; he had an image in his head, and any deviation from that image made him assess the real-life thing as less real.

One for readers of "Claiming Ground" and perhaps "A Mile in Her Boots".

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.