The Great Mormon Cricket Fly-Fishing Festival

These stories range from “The Vision of Hehaka’To,” with a Lakota Sioux hunting food for his starving family, to “Bonefish in Wyoming,” where a worn out cowhand struggles to land a prize—the ghostly bonefish of the Caribbean depths.

The rest of the nine stories seem a bit meager. “The Fragile Commandment” possesses the sudden punch of a fist in the breadbasket as a brutal farmer is done in by a pitchfork.  “Courting Miss Ellie” resonates with the eerie charm of shy love at a hasty funeral. One of the more memorable yarns, “Bootleggers,” has a pair of ranch-raised teenagers meeting murderous greed face-to-face. Growing up in Mountain Country, Tom Bishop listened long and hard to the old-timers’ tales, and it shows. —William Garwood