The movie is a passion project of Andy Garcia, who has made a number of very good films based on Latin American history. It centers around the Cristero Rebellion in the late 1920s in several Mexican states. An aftershock of the Mexican Revolution, the rebellion was a response to a heavy-handed enforcement of the anti-clerical provisions of the Constitution of 1917 by President Plutarco Elias Calles, an atheist and one of the more radical of the revolutionary generation of political leadership. It is instructive to remember that at exactly the same time, the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia were engaged in a full-scale assault on the Russian Orthodox Church.

Garcia portrays General Enrique Gorostieta, who was recruited by the Cristero rebels to lead their military efforts. Interestingly, Gorostieta was himself not a particularly religious man; indeed he was a modernist and a skeptic. He seems to have taken on the job out of a mixture of military/political ambition, ego and a genuine liberal’s belief in the principles of religious freedom.

That makes for a hell of an interesting character.

Garcia is just one of a stellar cast, which includes Peter O’Toole and the lovely Eva Longoria. It’s a big-time movie.

From the trailer (see it here), the action looks authentic and well-depicted. I find the tragic history of Mexico in the early 20^th Century fascinating and I confess that the iconography of partisans in their sombreros and bandoliers, armed with Mauser and Winchester, is deeply compelling to me.

I really admire Garcia for his efforts to bring Latin American history to life and I thank him for this tale of la Cristiada.

That there is what folks in North Dakota call a dead ringer...

This Thursday morning I spent a delightful half hour with Theodore Roosevelt.

No, I’m not suffering from one of my periodic historical delusions (I haven’t had camp coffee with P.J. Pretorius for months). I was invited to meet Joe Wiegand, a nationally renowned Theodore Roosevelt reenactor.

What a delightful man. Not only does he look the part and carry off the mannerisms (both verbal and physical) convincingly, he genuinely conveys the great man’s zest for life, his boundless intellectual curiosity and his love for nature and the best of his nation. Clearly, Wiegand shares those traits with the man he portrays.

The Colonel (“my friends call me Colonel”) was in Sisters, Oregon, for a presentation at Sisters Middle School. The presentation was part of a tour organized by the Oregon Historical Society (OHS) and sponsored by Wells Fargo. It includes stops in Beaverton, Eugene, Klamath Falls, Salem, Prineville and Portland, among other cities.

Unfortunately, my 7^th grade daughter was engaged in her own pursuit of the strenuous life — on a science field trip to Smith Rock State Park. She was most disappointed to miss T.R., but the Colonel heartily approved of her endeavor. I missed the presentation due to other interview commitments, but I certainly enjoyed my all-too-brief coffee with the Colonel.

Wiegand is deeply immersed in the history of The Gilded Age and passionate about bringing it to life as entertainment and education. He decries the kind of “presentism” that rejects our heritage because some of it offends 2012 sensibilities — which is preaching the old-time religion to me.

This man has one heck of a fun gig. He’s been to the White House and visited our National Parks (perhaps T.R.’s greatest legacy). He’s spending the summer in the Badlands of North Dakota, living the strenuous life when not performing. Bully for him, I say!

Find out more and watch video clips at http://www.teddyrooseveltshow.com.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to fetch up the rifle and head out to the woods. I have an appointment with Kit Carson’s shade…

Me & T.R.

His name is "Multiple Deadlines" and he has it in for me.

I stumbled upon a very cool site last week and thought to share it with my compadres of the silicon trail. (Best I can do right now with multiple deadlines staring me down like a pissed off Cape Buffalo).

Gorillaland is the Web home of Greg Cummings, a conservationist and author of a thriller that purports to be in “the best tradition of Wilbur Smith and Clive Cussler.” Can’t speak to the novel, but the site is a marvelous treasure trove of Africana. I direct your attention particularly to The Lodge Library, where Cummings has posted a collection of biographies of great hunters (Percival, Bell, Burnham, etc.) and a vintage library of books available for free download (Selous, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry Morton Stanley, and more).

There’s also a collection of vintage movies set in Africa, old time radio shows…

Head on over for an armchair safari and I’ll see you down the trail in a week or so — if that Cape Buffalo doesn’t hook-and-stomp me into a greasy stain.

The epic, centuries-spanning struggle reached a savage peak when the forces of the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent attempted to take the Mediterranean isle of Malta, the bastion of the Order of the Knights of St. John — known  simply as The Religion.

The Knights were warrior-monks of the first order. Their Turkish foes were the finest warriors in the world at the time. Each, in the eyes of the other, was the very spawn of Satan.

Had the Turk taken the fortified island, they would have controlled the sea lanes of the eastern Mediterranean and posed a direct threat to Sicily and Italy. Malta, like Vienna, was a frontier outpost, the last chance to stop the expansion of the mighty Ottoman Empire.

Tim Willocks turned the epic of the 1565 Great Siege of Malta into one of the most compelling frontier tales I’ve ever read: the 2006 novel “The Religion.” A frontier tale? Really? Hell yes. Allow me to explain:

Willocks’ hero is the soldier-of-fortune, Mattias Tannhauser. Captured as a youth in Hungary and raised as an Ottoman Janissary, he is a man apart, a skeptic of all faiths, an arms dealer, a lover of women and of life. Willocks describes his hero thus:

“The key to Tannhauser for me was his love of life, which is rooted in both his vast curiosity about the world and his love for his companions. All his decisions and actions are motivated by these two characteristics. This is what makes him not only an adventurer but, as Chandler so wonderfully put it, ‘a man fit for adventure.’

“Mattias Tannhauser is a man in search of hidden and eternal truths, a man — though he doesn’t know it — in search of a family, a man in search of redemption from a terrible past, a man of tremendous learning, a man of the wide world, a man of adventure — and as loyal a friend as anyone, man or woman, could ever wish for. He’s also a healthy heterosexual, may God forgive him, and is inclined — when provoked — to acts of pitiless violence. Cut that into equal parts and I’d allow it was a fair measure of his character.”

The Ottoman Jannisary was as badass a warrior as any in history. Tannhauser learned his brutal trade in their company.

Tannhauser’s appeal is distinctly modern — though not handled anachronistically. He is a hero of the “hard-boiled” school, his own agent amid hordes of cause-driven fanatics.

What puts Tannhauser in my pantheon of Frontier Partisans is this: Raised among the Turk, he is a classic example of Richard Slotkin’s “Man Who Knows Indians,” a frontiersman, able to infiltrate and plumb the secrets of the besieging “savage.” He even wields the archetypal armament of the frontier scout, a rifle — in this case a fine wheel-lock hunting piece: Rare for the period, but plausible, especially for a professional arms dealer.

Tannhauser is one of those “marginal men” that exert such fascination on me.

You want to be a frontier scout, you've got to be a rifleman... even in 1565.

I have seldom read a story so compelling, whose hero cleaves so close to my own ideal — flaws and all. Willocks understands that man so imbued with a lust for life must display Tannhauser’s ruthless survivalism. Mattias Tannhauser would never wait for the other guy to draw first.

“It’s hard for me to remember a novel in which the hero did exactly what I wanted him to do. Such heroes were never violent and swashbuckling enough; they always showed too much mercy and fake moral superiority in situations where it would get them killed.”

Willocks acknowledges his fascination with the violence that forms the heart of his tale:

“I love writing scenes of warfare and violence. The practice of medicine obliged me to examine the world as frankly and honestly as I could, to observe and record pain, bodily contents and ugliness with fascination rather than revulsion.

“I’m also very interested in the phenomenon of human cruelty and its manifest allure. Therefore, if I’m going to portray violence or cruelty, I feel obliged to do so as truthfully as I can; otherwise it seems to me a form of titillation. All the violence — and very much more — portrayed in my book took place in 1565. The one thing I can say for certain is that no matter how bloody my novel is, the reality was unimaginably bloodier still.”

For me, “The Religion” belongs on the same shelf as “Blood Meridian,” the novels of James Carlos Blake, the tales of Robert E. Howard — those grim blood brothers who expect no mercy … and show none.

I was thrilled to read recently that an Italian-led consortium is bringing Tannhauser to the small screen in a miniseries. Hopefully HBO or Showtime will pick it up; it’s ideal for them. More importantly, it appears that the long-awaited sequel “Twelve Children of Paris” may see the light of day this year.

Ft. St. Angelo, Malta.

Visit Stephen Bodio’s Querencia for details, including ordering information. I’ll definitely be picking up a copy.

Bodio’s foreword encapsulates what I find so endlessly fascinating about what an academic might call “Comparative Frontier Studies.” (For me, it’s just “what I do”). Every frontier has similarities, which makes them resonate against each other, but also cultural differences that make each unique and exotic.

“It is important for the American reader to realize that Cherkassov lived not just in another century, in another country, and on another continent, but in another world than ours. It is possible and sometimes informative to see the ethnically-Russian free Siberian hunter, the “promishlennik”, as the equivalent of a North American sourdough or Rocky Mountain fur trapper, but their situations were quite different. America’s western frontiers opened after the American Revolution ended and were closed after Manifest Destiny, the railroad, and the Indian Wars, only about a century later. Whereas the first Cossack trappers started to explore east of the Urals as early as the late 1600s, and much of the immense Siberian forest is still roadless today. While there have always been a scattering of free trappers, smallholders, and remnant Native tribal peoples living a free hunter’s life there, it is well to remember that Nerchinsk, Cherkassov’s first Siberian post, was to quote Shtilmark “…known mainly as a place of exile and penal servitude.”

I just love this stuff. Hats off to Stephen Bodio for helping to bring the book to the English-speaking world.

Asa Carter/Forrest Carter.

I’d be hard-pressed to name two novels that affected me more growing up than “Gone to Texas” (“The Rebel Outlaw Josey Wales”) and “Watch For Me On the Mountain” (aka “Cry Geronimo!”) by Forrest Carter.

Somehow I missed his most famous work, “The Education of Little Tree,” which I’ve never read.

But those two novels and the lesser “Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales” fit right in with all the landmarks I discovered or created in building my own cultural and mythic landscape.

They were anti-establishment, almost anarchist. The idea that governments can’t be trusted but strong, brave, honorable men can be resonated with me as a teen and — though my worldview is a little more sophisticated than it was when I was 15 — it does to this day.

The books extolled the virtues of independent mountaineers and had a certain romantic guerrilla sensibility. Carter’s Geronimo pursued guerrilla warfare as a sort of mystic art. His villains were the agents of state power — American Federals or Mexican Federales — who wouldn’t leave, couldn’t leave, a mountain warrior be.

Carter died in 1979. “The Education of Little Tree” — his purported autobiography — caught fire. People liked its earthy, close-to-the-land message of harmony. It was a fraud.

The success of the novel and the enigmatic nature of its author led to some digging — and that digging disturbed some skeletons. Forrest Carter turned out to be Asa “Ace” Carter, a Klansman and Alabama governor George Wallace’s principal speechwriter. Before “Little Tree,” his most famous words, spoken by Wallace, were: “Segregation Now! Segregation Tomorrow! Segregation Forever!”

And it wasn’t just talk, either. Carter was apparently a violent racist bully who his distant cousin and George Wallace biographer Dan Carter called “something of a psychopath.”

That’s a neck-cracker. This guy who wrote sensitive and genuinely nuanced portrayals of ethnic characters was an out-and-out racist asshole. Disappointing to think that what seemed to my 15-year-old mind a principled anti-statist message had its genesis in resisting the guvmint’s intrusion into the god-given right to keep the black man down.

Kinda casts things in a different light…

What the hell was going on there? Was Carter’s change of identities a way of escaping his past? Was he seeking some kind of redemption? Was it just a con? Maybe he really was just batshit crazy.

The estimable Allen Barra wrote a piece back in 2001 for Slate on the Carter saga and I think this bit likely hits close to the mark:

American Indian activist Vine Deloria, Jr. long ago noted that white American men who would bristle at the suggestion that they had African or Asian blood are often quick to claim Indian ancestry so long as the connection is on the mother’s side (as Carter said his was) and Cherokee (also as Carter claimed)….

…many American males see a spiritual kinship between their ancestors, the savage Celts and Anglo-Saxons, and the American Indian, and to be born with Indian blood somehow better justifies being born with a chip on one’s shoulder than being born white.

Carter’s story came to a sordid end.

One night in June (1979), Carter stopped off to visit one of his sons in Potosi, just south of Abilene. Perhaps two hours later, an ambulance arrived to pick up Forrest Carter’s body. The death certificate listed “aspiration of food and clotted blood” as probable cause. It also mentioned a “history of fights.” A story circulated that Carter had gotten into a drunken fight with his son and choked on his own vomit; one of the ambulance drivers said the scenario fit. An old friend from Birmingham conjectured that a fight between father and son broke out over the treatment of Carter’s wife, whom he apparently deserted in Florida.

Racist. Drunk. Charlatan. Helluva storyteller.

There’s a documentary released just this week on public television that explores this strange tale. “The Reconstruction of Asa Carter” looks fascinating. Friends watching Asa Carter rave about the black man and saying “this is not the person I knew.” Another says Carter was “one of the most complex people I’ve ever known, and you wonder if anyone really knew him. Sometimes you wonder if he ever really knew himself.”

I can’t help being drawn to stories like this. I guess it feeds my sense that we’re all strangers in a strange land — especially to ourselves.

This movie is based off of a bestselling three-book series. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic era (the future) in a city called Panem with 12 outlying districts. Every year the Capitol of Panem hosts the annual Hunger Games. One girl and one boy between the ages of 12 and 18 are sent off to fight to the death in an arena and all of the games are televised for everyone to see. In this amazing frontier kind of story, Katniss Everdeen is a 16-year-old girl who lives in the poorest district — District 12. Katniss knows how to shoot a bow quite well and she also knows how to hunt. She is a girl that knows how to survive alone in the wilderness. Katniss is pretty tough. In this story, Katniss’s little sister Prim is chosen for the 74^th annual hunger games and Katniss volunteers to replace her as tribute to go and fight to the death in the arena. I think that takes a lot of bravery to do that for someone you love.

I have read all the books and I thought this movie really followed the book well and they did an amazing job with all the complicated parts of this story. Jennifer Lawrence did an outstanding job portraying Katniss on the big screen. The whole entire cast did a great job, portraying all of their diverse characters. This story is not a light one; all of these tributes must make the ultimate sacrifice for people’s entertainment because they were chosen out of a hat. If the kids don’t know how to fight and survive, the penalty is death and there can only be one survivor.

The Hunger Games has some amazing scenery. It was shot in North Carolina and Kentucky, where many movies like Last of the Mohicans were shot, with dense forests and amazing waterfalls and lakes. In the books it really described the scenery and they nailed it in this movie. It was really cool to see the story come alive.

I think this story will inspire young people — especially girls — because Katniss is really tough, knows how to shoot a bow and can survive. I hope it will inspire people to learn more about survival skills and to fend for themselves, like learning how to hunt. Before I read the books I already knew how to shoot a bow — and not a compound bow, an old fashioned long bow like Katniss uses.

My best friend introduced me to the books and I loved it, I didn’t think I would like it because it seemed like it was sci-fi but I started reading and couldn’t stop. After I read it I was inspired to shoot my bow more often so I could get as good as Katniss was. I hope this story will inspire young people to become tough and to learn how to do things to survive. The story is a futuristic frontier story and I think that is really cool.

The Wild East is terra incognita to most folks in the West. For my generation, it was a land beyond an Iron Curtain — it’s entire history obscured by the fog of the Cold War. Yet Eastern Europe has a fascinating frontier history; indeed, for centuries it was the most significant frontier in the world — that between the West and the Ottoman Empire.

Many a fine frontier tale can be found in those steppes and forests and one of the finest is “With Fire And Sword (Ogniem i Mieczem),” a historical novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz published in 1884. Sienkiewicz is best-known in the West for his Nobel Prize-winning “Quo Vadis,” but his trilogy of novels about Poland’s tumultuous 17^th Century is considered a national epic.

This Polish epic recounts the great Ukrainian Cossack uprising of 1648. In 1999 it was made into a movie directed by Jerzy Hoffman. It was, when released, the most expensive Polish film ever made. All that money is up on the screen, in spectacular battle scenes and sweeping panoramas of a gorgeous country.

The movie is a rousing good time — an old-fashioned swashbuckler filled with knights of touchy honor, undying love at first sight, triumph, tragedy and dollops of broad, sometimes slapstick humor.

We in the West are accustomed to thinking of Poland as a historical victim, a flat, difficult-to-defend country repeatedly carved up by aggressive, militaristic neighbors. Brave but doomed. But at the time of our tale, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was the largest and most powerful political entity in Central Europe. Its aristocracy was a fighting cadre of proud and hardy noblemen, accustomed to rough log forts and lodges, bred to the hunt and to war. Their Winged Hussars were the most spectacular and fearsome cavalry formation in Europe.

For more than a century, the Poles were standard-bearers in the perpetual battle against the expansionist Ottoman Empire.

With Fire and Sword captures all the pageantry and the rough majesty of life on the Polish frontiers and also offers up the barbaric splendor of the Cossacks. Fans of Harold Lamb’s Khlit the Cossack stories will rejoice in seeing the Zaporizhian Sich brought vividly to life.

The Cossack Rebellion was led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky, portrayed brilliantly by the redoubtable Bogdan Stupka, who reappeared in 2009’s Taras Bulba. He’s the highlight of the movie, also populated by Michal Zebrowski, who made a vivid turn as the villain in the Russian film 1612, and former Bond girl Izabella Scorupco.

The battle scenes are spectacular and the violence of the age is not sanitized. Be warned: watching “With Fire and Sword” may spark a fierce interest in Polish-Ukrainian military history.

“With Fire And Sword (Ogniem i Mieczem),” is widely available with English subtitles.

My Frontier Partisan heart beat a little faster at the release of the trailer for the History Channel’s miniseries “Hatfields & McCoys,” due out Memorial Day. (Not least because of the potent, dark stomp of the song that plays over it: “Bartholomew” by The Silent Comedy). Watch it here.

This is one of the great American stories — the facts being more interesting by far than the stereotype-laden folklore that has accreted around it. I read a fair bit about the feud back in college and I’m going to refresh my knowledge before I watch the movie.

Coincidentally, I just picked up Sharyn McCrumb’s new book, “The Ballad of Tom Dooley,” a novel based on the 1866 murder immortalized in the famous folk song (Doc Watson’s version is preferred to the Kingston Trio’s). All this and “Justified” — I’m on a bit of an Appalachian binge.

From "Beyond the Black River," by Gregory Manchess

I have a curious relationship with Fantasy as a genre.

I’ve never read much of it — generally preferring straight historical adventure or history — but what little I’ve read has had a profound effect on me.  Like many others of my generation, I read “The Lord of the Rings” once a year every year for many years. And Robert E. Howard is the tale-spinner who first made me say to myself “I want to do THAT!” For better or worse, REH sent a 13-year-old boy down the path that led to this incessant keyboard pecking, this compulsion to make my way and my living through song and story.

In both Tolkien and Howard, I found stories and characters that resonated with my fascination with Wilderness and the men who roam there.

I still remember the sense of frisson I experienced when I read this passage in The Lord of the Rings (Book I, Chapter 9, “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony”):

“Suddenly Frodo noticed that a strange-looking weather-beaten man, sitting in the shadows near the wall, was also listening intently to the hobbit-talk. He had a tall tankard in front of him, and was smoking a long-stemmed pipe curiously carved. His legs were stretched out before him, showing high boots of supple leather that fitted him well, but had seen much wear and were now caked with mud. A travel-stained cloak of heavy dark-green cloth was drawn close about him, and in spite of the heat of the room he wore a hood that overshadowed his face; but the gleam of his eyes could be seen as he watched the hobbits… As Frodo drew near he threw back his hood, showing a shaggy head of dark hair flecked with grey, and in a pale stern face a pair of keen grey eyes.”

I knew who he was. This man, Strider, was a Frontiersman.

“…In the wild lands beyond Bree there were mysterious wanderers. The Bree-folk called them Rangers, and knew nothing of their origin. They were taller and darker than the Men of Bree and were believed to have strange powers of sight and hearing, and to understand the languages of beasts and birds.”

By God, these were the same men who stalked the forests around Fort Pitt or penetrated Comancheria to pursue fearsome raiders and protect the small folk of from “foes that would freeze their heart or lay their little town in ruin if it were not guarded ceaselessly.”

Says Robert E. Howard scholar and my former comrade on the shieldwall at The Cimmerian, Al Harron:

“…the mysterious, ancient people (The Dunedain) assisting a younger populace against the dangerous of the untamed land despite being looked down upon reminds me a little of Natty Bumppo.”

Indeed.

Le Loup, historical trekker and keeper of the excellent Woodsrunners Diary Web site, traces the origins of the Ranger from medieval England to the American colonies:

“The Ranger occupation goes all the way to the late medieval period. There is little doubt in my mind that Tolkien based his Rangers (Strider) on these early English Rangers. Searching for these Forest Rangers brings up other terms such as Verderers and Foresters, and although these people did patrol the forests and protect the game, they were not actually mentioned as Rangers until much later on.
The Ranger’s job was to patrol the forests and to look for trespassers and poachers, but also apparently his job was to protect the forest inhabitants, to discourage robbers etc from raiding woodland dwellings and hamlets. This is exactly what Aragorn did in Lord Of The Rings, and this occupation extends right into the New World and the 18th century.
Rangers were hired to patrol the countryside looking for any enemy and raiding parties of Indians or French and Indians. These were individuals who were expected to warn the settlers and townspeople in advance, and to cause as much damage to these enemy as was practically possible.
Later these Rangers were formed into groups or band and eventually became formal units such as Rogers Rangers.”

The first Robert E. Howard Conan story I discovered was “Beyond the Black River.” ( I must digress for a moment and make this note: If you only know Conan of Cimmeria through movies or other media, you should track down Howard’s original stories and accept no substitutes. The real deal, 100 proof Conan is something entirely separate and different from … that other thing).

Anyway, I read “Beyond the Black River” about a year after I first read LOTR and again experienced that frisson as Howard described the men who had settled on the Pictish frontier:

“They were of a new breed growing up in the world on the raw edge of the frontier — men whom grim necessity had taught woodcraft. Aquilonians of the western provinces to a man, they had many points in common. They dressed alike — in buckskin boots, leathern breeks and deerskin shirts, with broad girdles that held axes and short swords; and they were all gaunt and scarred and hard-eyed; sinewy and taciturn.”

Howard was a Texan and obsessed with the history of the dark and bloody ground of his homeland. He had also read much of the work of Robert W. Chambers and Joseph A. Altsheler, who wrote extensively of the early colonial frontier. In “Beyond the Black River,” Howard translated the American frontier into a fantasy setting, which allowed him the liberty to take themes that have resonated through American history and literature in a strange and dark direction.

The late Steve Tompkins wrote that,

“‘Black River’ is extraordinarily compelling precisely because it is so at odds with American history. No shining city on a hill will be built in the primordial Pictish Wilderness. The Picts will not lie down in front of the bulldozer of Hyborian Manifest Destiny but instead hijack the vehicle and put it in reverse…”

Tompkins argues ardently for a reading of Howard’s Pictish Wilderness tales that puts him squarely in a tradition that runs from Hawthorne to Melville, Cooper to McCarthy:

“Nothing else in modern heroic fantasy borders so closely upon classic American literature, and if the Black River of genre classification can be crossed, if bias and snobbery fall like Fort Tuscelan and Valenso’s stockade, these stories will take their rightful place.”

For his part, Harron makes the case that the power of fantasy to universalize a tale makes “Beyond the Black River” applicable well beyond the American frontier:

“(The tale) is frequently seen as an allusion to the Colonial period of American history, and given Howard’s love of that period in history and the very evocative milieu of “Beyond the Black River,” it’s easy to see why. However, that’s not to say that the story is only about the plight of American settlers, Manifest Destiny, colonists-and-injuns, and other such tropes of Western literature: it could also be applied to the heaving Roman Empire’s expansion into dark Germanic territory, or Spain’s conquest of Mexico, or even the Vikings’ struggles with the Skrælings. ‘Beyond the Black River’ is more universal, and deeper, than a mere ‘Conan of the Mohicans’ escapade.”

Harron is quite right, of course — that ability to universalize a tale is one of the great gifts of quality fantastic fiction. However, given my proclivities, I am entirely satisfied to read “Beyond the Black River” as a tale from the American frontier. For me, Conan found his real-life counterparts in Simon Kenton, Sam Brady, even the dark figure of Lewis Wetzel. Howard would have included the Texan Big Foot Wallace.

Tolkien once wrote, “I much prefer history, true or feigned…” For me, his legendarium and Howard’s forever evoke images of forbidding forests and grim, weathered, taciturn men ranging them — stealthy protectors of those who would live free from fear of foes that would freeze their hearts…

Dunedain — Rangers of the North by Justin Sweet.