William Bonney first killed another man when he was just twelve. By the time he was twenty-one he had slain nineteen more. He was known as Billy the Kid, a bloodthirsty outlaw, a boy with buck teeth and a pleasant face who could shoot a stranger in the heart and walk calmly away while birds ravaged the corpse. Drawing on contemporary acounts, photographs, dime novels and his own imagination, Ondaatje takes you inside the mind of Billy the Kid, tracing his bloody passage across the blasted landscape of New Mexico and through the battles with his captor and eventual killer, Pat Garrett.