Some people stumble onto their calling. Tara Klager dug hers out of the dirt. She had a plan: Leave the suburbs, settle a small homestead in the shadow of the Canadian Rockies, and rebuild the foundation of the Border Leicester, a heritage sheep so scarce in Canada that keeping the breed alive feels like an act of resistance. And then, on an ordinary day in May, two pieces of worked quartz turned up in her pasture, and everything she thought she understood about her forty acres shifted. Prairie Wool is a memoir of plans changing. It is a tale weaving the threads of one woman's journey from Ontario to New Brunswick to Alberta with the history of sheep in the Canadian West, the science of grazing, the ethics of raising animals well in an age of scale and speed, and the disappearing tallgrass prairie that once fed bison and now vanishes a hundred football fields at a time. It is also the story of a woman discovering where - and to what - she belongs. The land she farms turns out to be a thoroughfare that has recorded in its dirt countless lives lived long before her own, and reading this record changes how she reads herself. Written with humour, unflinching honesty, and a journalist's keen sense for detail, Prairie Wool belongs on the shelf beside the best tales of realization and determination. It will speak to farmers and wool lovers, to readers who have yearned for more or different or elsewhere, and to anyone who has ever tried to make a home in a place they weren't born to.
