For the sake of his art, Western adventure writer Lee Nelson mounted a sturdy horse, chased down a buffalo and felled it with a single arrow.
For authenticity's sake, he swallowed raw a chunk of the animal's testicle, just as the mountain men did to enhance their virility."My wife said it didn't make any difference," said the burly father of seven. "I wouldn't recommend it."
Little is spared in Nelson's quest for historical accuracy in his "Storm Testament" novels, rough-and-tumble tales of the Old West that have sold half a million copies in the past decade.
At 47, Nelson makes a dozen pack trips a year to the wilds of Utah, Idaho, Colorado and Nevada.
He hunts big game, fords wild rivers and breaks trails in uncharted territory like the frontiersmen and Indians of a century ago.
"It's always an adventure," said sculptor and former rodeo rider Jeff Wolf, who often accompanies Nelson on his expeditions. "You're always doing the unknown, something most people wouldn't think of doing. It's kind of reckless but very exciting."
Born in Logan and reared in California, Nelson was a lackluster student who preferred Jack London or Mark Twain to textbooks and passed hours lost in daydreams of times long past.
Even so, he was admitted to the University of California at Berkeley and later served an LDS mission in southern Germany. On his return, he earned a bachelor's degree in literature and an MBA from Brigham Young University.
The ensuing years found Nelson as a speech writer and ad man, a free-lance journalist, a car dealer and the publisher and editor of the monthly Bitterroot Journal in Hamilton, Mont.
By 1979, Nelson had settled his family in Mapleton. With a passion for history and a few non-fiction books behind him, Nelson wanted to write a novel.
He had begun "The Storm Testament" when the publisher of the weekly Utah County Journal in Provo said he could use a serial to boost readership. At a salary of $500 a month, Nelson jumped.
"It was a nice incentive, like what Dickens used to do," he said. Later, Nelson attended a convention of free-distribution newspapers and found a natural national market.
By mid-decade, his self-described "shopper soap opera" was appearing in nearly 100 weeklies in Utah and throughout the Midwest.
Chapter by cliff-hanging chapter, avid readers followed the exploits of young Dan Storm, who fled the anti-Mormon mobs of Missouri for the Rocky Mountains with an escaped slave at his side.
"If for some reason or another we leave it out one week, we get quite a reaction. They usually phone and say, `Where is it? I was right in the middle!' " said Deedee Sather of The Finder of Bowman, N.D.
It was in researching a later book that Nelson realized there was no first-person account of how it felt to kill a buffalo with bow and arrow from a galloping horse.
"One day it occurred to me - maybe I could do that," he said.
Armed with a plastic bow and arrows, Nelson took a quarterhorse to a rodeo yard and practiced on bolting steers until he felt ready.
Unlucky in the draw for a bison hunting permit, he bought a wild buffalo for $550 from the owner of a private herd, hauled it to western Utah and, using a modern bow of the same size and power as Indian weapons, "got him with the first arrow."
Using an obsidian blade, Nelson quickly castrated the still-warm animal in order to perform the virility rite. He camped in the desert and prepared the remainder of the meat using a variety of 19th-century recipes.
Nelson then tanned the bull's hide. Today, it adorns the river stone hearth in his study, along with the animal's bleached skull.
These days, the serial business has dropped to a handful of papers. That doesn't worry Nelson, who earns up to $80,000 a year on mail-order or bookstore sales from the "Testament" books and other projects published by his own Council Press.
He's just released "Walkara," the seventh book in the "Testament" series.
A Ute warrior born in nearby Spanish Fork Canyon in about 1810, Walkara amassed unheard-of wealth in the Indian slave trade and in daring raids on the horse ranches of Spanish California.
"In that day, being the greatest horse thief was like being Joe Montana of the '49ers," Nelson said. "That was a title of respect and prestige in the Indian cultures."
Fully half of the 15,000-copy first printing has been presold, and Nelson expects to sell out the remainder by mid-June. Later demand will determine how many more books will be printed.
Meantime, Nelson is at work on a new novel he's had in mind for 20 years and is considering expanding his publishing business to include other writers' books.
But he will still make time for his forays into the wilderness.
"It's the subtle things that make a difference," he said. "I find that when you go on a long trip, and there are storms and problems, your eyesight seems to be keener, your senses more alert. You lose weight. Your body gets ready for what's going to happen.
"Every time , I think, `Oh, I should live like this all the time.' "