Killer of Witches

 

The Life and Times of Yellow Boy, Mescalero Apache

W. Michael Farmer

In the cold November wind of 1865, five hundred Mescalero Apaches at the Bosque Redondo Apache/Navajo concentration camp near Fort Sumner, New Mexico, vanished one night under the watchful eyes of the U.S. Army. They were never caught. Among them is a five-year-old boy who becomes a legend around the fires of the Mescalero.

Ussen, God, Creator of life, gives the boy, grown to a warrior, a gift of Power. With his Power he is so accurate with his Yellow Boy rifle he can kill witches by shooting their eyes to send them forever blind to the Happy Land of the grandfathers. He is immune to ghost sickness, and he will be known as Yellow Boy.

Yellow Boy must soon test his Power to find and kill a giant, Mexican-Comanche witch, his bald head painted to look like a skull, his body tattooed with black spirals and flames, and the leader of a band of Comanches and Mexican banditos who have murdered and scalped all but a small remnant of Yellow Boy’s People. It is a hunt and odyssey that ranges for years across the American southwest and Mexican Sierra Madre Mountains.

Killer of Witches is a powerful story, truth told with fiction transporting the reader to a different background, culture, history, time, and religion. It is the other side of Apache history told by a People fighting the tsunami of Americans migrating west and the terrors of supernatural beliefs appearing in their lives.

Published:
Publisher: Hat Creek
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About the Author

W. Michael Farmer

W. Michael Farmer combines ten-plus years of research into nineteenth-century Apache history and culture with Southwest-living experience to fill his stories with a genuine sense of time and place. A retired Ph.D. physicist, his scientific research has included measurement of atmospheric aerosols with laser-based instruments, and he has published a two-volume reference book on atmospheric effects on remote sensing. He has also written short stories for anthologies and award-winning essays. His first novel, Hombrecito's War, won a Western Writers of America Spur Finalist Award for Best First Novel in 2006. His novels telling the story of the Mescalero Apaches  Killer of Witches, The Life and Times of Yellow Boy, Mescalero Apache, Book 1 and Blood of the Devil, Book 2 won Will Rogers Medallion Awards and were New Mexico–Arizona Book Awards Finalists in 2016 and 2018. Mariana’s Knight, The Revenge of Henry Fountain won the 2017 New Mexico–Arizona Book Award for Historical Fiction and Blood of the Devil, Book 2 was a finalist. Apacheria, True Stories of Apache Culture, 1860-1920 won the 2018 New Mexico–Arizona Book Award for History-Other and was recognized as the 2018 New Mexico Book of the Year and as a top twenty book about the southwest by the Pima County Library system. In 2019 Knight’s Odyssey, Knight of the Tiger, and Apacheria won Will Rogers Gold Medallion Awards.

Other Books By W. Michael Farmer

Stand-Alone Books

Sorted First to Last

Series: Chato's Chiricahua Apache Legacy

Sorted First to Last

Series: Legends of the Desert

Sorted First to Last

Series: The Apache Kid Chronicles

Sorted First to Last

Series: The Life and Times of Yellow Boy, Mescalero Apache

Sorted First to Last

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