The Fire Arrow: A Barnaby Skye Novel (Barnaby Skye Novels) [Mass Market Paperback]

Richard S. Wheeler (Author)

Book Description

Series: Barnaby Skye Novels | Publication Date: February 6, 2007

Barnaby Skye, the most durable and unforgettable character in modern Western fiction, returns in this harrowing tale of survival from his early years in the Rockies. 
In the midst of a brutal winter, Skye's beloved Crow Indian wife, Victoria, is critically wounded when a Blackfeet raiding party attacks a Crow hunting camp. Despite Skye's attempts at doctoring, Victoria's life hangs in the balance as the two, left alone in the frozen wilderness, struggle to survive cold and starvation.
Miraculously, an old mare and her foal wander into their camp.  Victoria believes they have been sent by her spirit guide, and finds the strength to ride.  Skye and his wife make their way toward Victoria's home village on the Musselshell River.  Breaking winter trail is a slow and laborious process, but at the end of the journey they will find peace.  Or will they? 
Skye's love of whiskey puts his life, and Victoria's, in peril when they encounter a renegade band of Yankee traders taking a wagon-load of a cheap and poisonous raw alcohol to trade among the Indians.  Their leader, a former West Point officer, forces Skye to guide them, but all the while the legendary mountain man plots to ruin their deadly enterprise.
In The Fire Arrow, Richard S. Wheeler has fashioned an unforgettable tale of love and survival in the unforgiving wilderness of the American West.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Rough luck plagues mountain man Barnaby Skye in this fourteenth installment to Wheeler's colorful Skye's West series (The Deliverance, etc.). Once a British seaman, Skye is a hunter and trapper in 1850s Yellowstone country, where he lives with his wife Victoria, a Crow Indian, and her people, the Absaroka. When Victoria is horribly injured in a Blackfoot raid, Skye stays behind to nurse her after her people depart. The miraculous appearance of two horses provide transportation out of wintry Blackfoot territory, but traders rob Skye's rifle and kit, and he returns to the Absaroka a pauper-and with horses they consider a bad omen. Exiled, Skye is tricked into working for a ruthless gang of fur traders who bilk the Indians for their valuable buffalo hides, doling out rotgut whiskey as payment. During a disastrous drunken trading exchange at Victoria's village, Skye is forced to act as translator, leading the Indians to blame him for their misfortune. Skye is once again an outcast, but vows revenge on the traders. In what may be the best Skye's West novel to date, Wheeler deftly balances the violence and brutality of frontier life with the love and tenderness of a husband and wife caught between cultures.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Montana mountain man (and former Royal Navy seaman) Barnaby Skye returns in this episodic new western. It's a novel, but it feels more like a series of stories: how the Blackfoot Indians raided the Crow camp and Barnaby's wife was struck by an arrow, how Barnaby nursed her back to health, how they made their way to safety, how Barnaby found work at Fort Sarpy, how he fell in with a bunch of nasty Yankees, and so on. Luckily, Wheeler's engaging writing style, which evokes the Old West with remarkable power, keeps the novel from feeling too disjointed, and, let's face it, it's always nice to spend time with Barnaby. Recommended most heartily to fans of the long-running Skye series (it's going on 20 years old) and to anyone who likes a good, old-fashioned western yarn. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Forge Books (February 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765351722
• ISBN-13: 978-0765351722
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,380,173 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Richard Wheeler began a late-in-life career as a novelist at age fifty, and by his seventy-fifth year had written seventy novels. He began life as a newsman and later became a book editor, but turned to fiction full time in 1985.

He started by writing traditional westerns but soon was writing large-scale historical novels and then biographical novels. In recent years he has been writing mysteries as well, some as Axel Brand. His Lieutenant Joe Sonntag series occurs in 1940s Milwaukee, and focuses on life in a big, smoky industrial city just after World War Two.

He has won numerous awards, including the Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement in the literature of the American West, and also six Spur Awards from Western Writers of America. He has received more Spur Awards than any other living author.

He grew up in Wisconsin and migrated West, holding newspaper jobs in Phoenix, Oakland, Carson City, and Billings. His wife, Sue Hart, is an English professor at Montana State University in Billings.

He has been focusing more and more on biographical novels. One of these, published in March, 2010, is called Snowbound, and is about the explorer John C. Fremont's tragic fourth expedition. It won a Spur Award.


For a quarter of a century he's largely made his living from writing fiction. That reality astonishes him. In his mid-seventies now, he is still dreaming up new stories.

Note: There are other Richard Wheelers writing books. One is an historian of the Civil War, and another writes histories of the Marine Corps, and another is a social scientist. Richard S. Wheeler is the novelist.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well done novel of the West, February 21, 2007

By 

Russell Davis "Western Sensibility" (Nevada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Fire Arrow: A Barnaby Skye Novel (Barnaby Skye Novels) (Hardcover)

Richard S. Wheeler is probably one the best known Western authors working today. He's won five - count 'em, five - Spur Awards, and written a large quantity of novels. If you read in the genre today, chances are, you've read one of his.

FIRE ARROW is the 14th (I think) book in the Barnaby Skye series, detailing the life of the former British seaman turned mountain man. It's the second of these books I've read - the first one I read was THE DELIVERANCE - and by a country mile or so, the better of the two. More on that in a moment.

The story begins in mid-winter, when Skye's wife, a Crow Indian woman, is horribly wounded during a Blackfoot raid on their camp. Left to survive on their own, things look pretty bleak until an old mare and her foal wander in from the cold and give them a way out. Throughout the course of the novel - which covers their journey back to her people, a run-in with dishonest Yankee traders, and Skye having to leave his wife to find enough work to rebuild their few possessions to the point of survival - the horses come to have a special meaning.

Now, I've probably given short shift to the storyline - but the truth is that the story of this book is too wide to summarize very well in a short paragraph. Read the description on Amazon, then read the book and you'll see what I mean. And here's sort of the kicker: I don't like the main character very much at all. Maybe I'm not supposed to and perhaps one day we'll discuss that very idea on this blog. But... what I want to get at in this review - and what's important for readers to know - is what Richard Wheeler does as a writer in this book to make it a damn fine read. And that is the case regardless of whether or not I like Skye as a character and an accomplishment in its own right.

First and foremost, much like Ed Gorman's work, Wheeler does an extraordinary job of capturing the details of the West: the landscape, the people, the tools of the time... it's all here in marvelous detail. He doesn't mess it up and his descriptions often sing. Here's a bit, from page 69, as Skye and his wife work their way home: "... But now the drifts were building, and sometimes the crusts didn't hold them and they floundered waist-deep in snow. Ahead was open country, not a patch of trees, not a creek, not a sheltered hollow, not a stand of cottonwoods to feed the mare, no limbs to weave a hut, only a windy snow-covered land in which the wind had rippled the snow into ribs and ridges."

Damn, that's nice, folks. Great pacing and rhythm, the tone is spot-on.

Here's another, as a secondary character describes a rifle on page 122: "'A Model 1852 Sharps," Chambers said. "Fifty-two caliber. Anything hit with a ball that size stays down." He lifted the rifle off its rack and handed it to Skye. Everything was unfamiliar. It had a sliding breech action and used linen or paper cartridges...' The passage goes on, giving the details that make this weapon - which had a capper that rotates and holds ten - so unique for its day.

The entire novel is like this: little things and big things that Wheeler uses to describe the landscape and times his characters inhabit. Really extraordinary detail, in my opinion, and it is this attention to detail that makes the novel worth reading.

Now, I want to go back to the main character for a minute and explain my dislike. It has nothing to do with the writing - I need to be clear on that - and everything to do with the fact that Skye is kind of a vulgar man who likes his booze too much and thinks poorly of almost everyone else around him. He is not a nice guy, but I'm pretty sure he's not supposed to be. That said, he has his own code of honor that is understandable, if a bit disagreeable at times.

If I have any complaints about the writing in this novel, it's that I'm not always impressed with how Wheeler handles dialogue. And this complaint is limited as well, since sometimes the dialogue is quite good and at other times falls flat - perhaps because the characters themselves are so plainspoken, which is such a contrast to the beauty of the prose used to describe the settings.

All that being said, Wheeler has once again produced a very credible novel of the West that deserves attention. Even better news for those on a budget... it's also available in paperback, and you don't have to read the whole series to understand this one. If you like Wheeler's other books, don't skip this over this one. It's worth every penny - hardcover or paper.

Russell Davis
Westerns for Today

5.0 out of 5 stars Richard Wheeler's "The Fire Arrow", December 31, 2010

By 

Woodstock - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Fire Arrow: A Barnaby Skye Novel (Barnaby Skye Novels) (Mass Market Paperback)

I love Richard Wheeler's series of Barnaby Skye and own them all! A great book for people who like to read Westerns!