It’s a gratifying memory: late August near the Alberta-Montana border. Small sandstone cliffs across the Milk River lit orange by the setting sun. In my hands, Fred Stenson’s open-range western, Lightning. As night fell and the cliffs dimmed in Writing-On-Stone Provincial Park, I could almost hear the sound of hooves in the distance as I followed a Texas cowboy on a massive cattle drive from Montana to Cochrane. Then gunshots, and later the clacking of billiard balls in dusty frontier saloons. The past and present blurred and connected.

I finished Lightning that night and crawled into my sleeping bag awash in the satisfaction and yearning that accompanies the end of a good story. Thankfully, Stenson has written another story with the same richly textured weave of history and narrative — this time about adventure-seeking cowboys who left Alberta to fight for the British in the Boer War at the end of the 19th century. And The Great Karoo — the third book in Stenson’s informal trilogy on 19th century Western Canada — is just as rewarding.

The book tells the story of Frank Adams, an Alberta cowboy who enlists at Fort Calgary with other young locals hoping to fight in the war. Adams and his horse Dunny are shipped to South Africa, and the new soldier is left to ponder his motives for enlisting, as the Canadian Mounted Rifles experience the cold of South African nights, the bullets of the Boers and the callousness of British “army logic.” This logic is particularly hard on the soldiers’ horses, who are regarded as expendable by senior officers. The cowboys struggle to adjust to this harsh way of being as they cross the unfamiliar landscape of South Africa’s Great Karoo desert.

The Trade, Stenson’s Giller-nominated portrayal of the fur trade and the first book in the trilogy, unfolds on a fenceless landscape. So does Lightning. By the end of the 19th century, the West had been significantly changed and fenced off by ranchers and homesteaders. Stenson thought that historical shift would be a good place to close the trilogy. “I think that those young fellows of that era, in this place, would have been raised on all these stories about buffalo hunting and free-living Indians on the prairie, all those kinds of things,” says Stenson. “All those old adventurous times. And maybe they felt that the Boer War was their last chance for a big adventure.”

For Adams, like many other soldiers, the realities of war quickly overtake the romantic illusions he held in Alberta. His time in South Africa is marked by constant loss. “Even in the moments of glory and achievement,” he observes, “there was always less than there had been before. Horses that had been alive were dead or ruined. Men who had been perfect in their young bodies were gone or reduced in some lasting way.”

It’s ultimately a bleak portrayal of war. “It wasn’t a goal at the beginning to say, ‘I’m going to show war for the hollow sham and terrible thing that it is,’” says Stenson. “But I think, inevitably, that’s what you end up proving, because if there’s one thing that human beings do over and over and over again that shows our lack of progress as a species, it’s going to war.”

The story is not without hope, however. As Adams struggles to keep integrity in the confusion of war, his humanness, and that of his fellow soldiers, is revealed in the moments of kindness they share with each other — and even, sometimes, with their enemies. Adams often kicks away army logic in favour of friendship, love and compassion. The Great Karoo shines with glimmers of goodness amidst the morass of war.

Like the other two books, The Great Karoo is impressive not only for the thrill of its story, but also its attention to historical accuracy and detail. “I always have believed that readers are capable of spotting falseness in things that they know nothing about,” Stenson says. Thus, his stories reflect a ton of research. For The Trade, Stenson researched perhaps too much — he started the book in 1985 and worked on it for 15 years before it was published. He was far more efficient in writing The Great Karoo. “Rather than trying to learn everything that you can and then create a story, (I’ve discovered) that it’s actually helpful for me to write at the same time as I research and kind of let the research suggest the story,” he says.

Whatever Stenson does, it works. The Great Karoo is a wicked ride and a fine way to end the trilogy.