Bearstone Books in Order

The Bearstone books follow Cloyd Atcitty, a fourteen-year-old Ute boy who has spent years skipping school and has run away from a group home. At the start of Bearstone, he is sent to work for Walter Landis, an aging rancher on an isolated Colorado farm. Cloyd expects another place where he doesn't belong. Walter expects trouble.

Instead, the two form a difficult, believable bond. Walter is blunt, stubborn, and still holding onto dreams of the high country. Cloyd is angry, homesick, and wary of trusting anyone. Their work together, first on the ranch and then in the mountains, gives both of them something to prove.

Colorado's San Juan country is a full character in these stories.

In Bearstone, Cloyd finds a small turquoise carving of a bear and keeps it close as he heads with Walter toward the old man's abandoned gold mine. The trip brings him into the territory of a grizzly thought to be Colorado's last. The adventure has danger, but its real center is Cloyd's growing sense of responsibility, for Walter, for the bear, and for his own choices.

Beardance picks up with Cloyd and Walter returning to the mountains, this time searching for a lost Spanish mine. Gold quickly becomes less important to Cloyd than reports of a mother grizzly and her cubs. When the cubs are left vulnerable, he faces a harsh test of endurance as winter closes in. The sequel puts more focus on wildlife survival while continuing Cloyd's journey toward confidence and maturity.

The series is a mix of wilderness adventure, conservation story, and coming-of-age novel. There are horses, mines, storms, high lakes, and close calls, but the books take time with the quieter parts too: hard work, grief, friendship, and learning when to ask for help. Walter and Cloyd don't become easygoing people. They become people who understand each other better.

Cloyd's Ute identity and his connection to bears are central to the story. The books also draw on the importance of the Ute Bear Dance, while keeping the main action rooted in Cloyd's personal experience. Readers looking for a rugged outdoor story with an intergenerational friendship at its heart should begin with Bearstone, then continue straight to Beardance.

The stakes are wild, but the relationship is what holds the series together.