![eternal frontier by louis l eternal frontier by louis l](http://www.louislamour.com/images/covers/_large/lastofthebreedUK1sthardback.jpg)
When your back is to the wall you find out that what you want most is not to save your eternal soul––if it exists-but to live, in the body. And that truth is that human nature is animal. Faced with death, we learn the truth about life.
![eternal frontier by louis l eternal frontier by louis l](https://idoc.pub/img/crop/300x300/eljqr0rrjv41.jpg)
This passage contains what I am calling an ontology for the western. There are times in life when the fancy words and pretty actions don’t count for much, when it’s blood and dust and death and a cold wind blowing and a gun in the hand and you know suddenly you’re just an animal with guts and blood that wants to live, love and mate, and die in your own good time. but out here on the mesa top with a man hunting her to put her back on the grass it was no longer the same. She had been taught the way a lady should live, and how a lady should act, and it was all good and right and true. The hide of truth was peeled back to expose the bare, quivering raw flesh of itself, and there was no nonsense about it. She had never felt like this before, but right now she was backed up against death with all the nonsense and the fancy words trimmed way. But for now, it is enough to say that this is the same world we enter when we read a passage from Louis L’Amour’s 1958 novel Radigan:
![eternal frontier by louis l eternal frontier by louis l](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/RR2Rsobx1VQ/maxresdefault.jpg)
I’ll discuss those values in more detail later. WHAT YOU SEE in the insets to the left are the opening shots of western movies, shots that put a whole set of values in place before a single word is spoken.