An Author Still Writing His Way Through Big Sky Country

Thomas McGuane, whose new novel, “Driving on the Rim,” comes out on Thursday, is the only member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters who is also in the National Cutting Horse Association Hall of Fame. Yet he claims not to be a real rancher. “All the ranchers I know have had back surgery, operations on their rotator cuffs,” he said recently. “They all have new knees. I’d like to think I belong to that breed, but I don’t.” But neither is Mr. McGuane a hobbyist or a dude rancher. Together with his wife, Laurie, he raises black Angus cattle here on a 2000-acre spread in the foothills of the Absaroka mountains in south-central Montana, country where the sky really is big: a vast blue dome under which a sea of grass surges back and forth. Mr. McGuane also breeds and raises cutting horses and, at 70, still competes in cutting competitions. Trained to cut, or separate, a cow from its herd, cutting horses are as quick at changing directions as basketball point guards, and at least one of Mr. McGuane’s horses, a retired champion named King, is more intelligent than most newspaper reporters...more