Christian Petersen fixes his unflinching gaze on the rough beauty of Cariboo/Chilcotin country, capturing in his sights a creature dangerously near extinction -the 21st century cowboy. As he perfectly reigns in the confusion and the displacement of a diminishing band of men living on horseback, hunting the wild mountains and facing the spectre of unforgiving nature, he also creates a modern outcast.Here are the men enslaved to the grind of the sawmill; holed up in dented trailers or wild behind the wheel of trucks speeding down dirt roads to the Fraser; hunkered on bar stools or high in the saddle of a John Deere. Here are fathers, brothers and lovers in search of lost children, unrequited loves and the memories long faded in the wash of fast-running streams and firelight. Here, too, are the unpardoned, raging against what they might have been, what they are and where their pasts have led them. Yet Petersen's characters hollow out a quiet dignity, gentle in the knowledge that they are small in the face of pain, of violence, of jealousy-and of change.