A Introduction: Why an essential Dobie?
Part 1. Coyote wisdom: This, I believe
How my life took its turn
Voice of the coyote
Part 2. On the trail with a storyteller: Across the Bolson de Mapimi: echoes of the Comanche War trail
Charles Goodnight of Amplitude
Searching for lost Tayopa
The last of the mountain men
On the trail of the panther
Part 3. Open range tales: Snowdrift: the hunt for Montana's last wolf
The dream that saved Wilbarger
Sancho, the tamale-loving Longhorn
Part 4. The Southwestern tempo: Earth rhythms and the Southwestern tempo
The Mesquite
What every curandera knows
The madstone cure
Praying for rain
The campfire
Part 5. The Brush Country: A plot of earth
The buried gold at Fort Ramirez
I remember Buck
Part 6. Wild and free: Cedar fever
The beginnings of Big Bend National Park
The Longhorn's dying bellow
Stompedes
Wild and free
The Paisano, our fellow countryman

Part 7. Europe amid two world wars: . . . from two letters to Bertha
Dobie during World War I
A day with the Basques
Birds under bombs: in England during World War II
Across the Rhine: travels in postwar Germany
Part 8. Texas needs brains: Texas needs brains
True patriots and Pappy O'Daniel
Only a man with eyes in the back of his head
. . . Dobie on civil rights
The difference between liberals and reactionaries
On censorship
Part 9. Life and literature of the Southwest: Professional educators and the "unctuous elaboration of the obvious"
On the Texas Institute of Letters
Along the Devils River-and away from the cedar pollen
Change, change, change
Two Texas barbecues, sixty years apart
The writer and his region
A corner forever Texas
Acknowledgments
Story credits.