Want to Round Up a Good Read? : Books: A ranch 40 miles outside Tucson seems an unlikely place for a bookshop--unless you’re Winn Bundy and specialize in Southwestern literature.

Winn Bundy is telling a story about the bobcat that visited her bookshop and tried to eat her house cat, Captain Midnight. It seems that darkness had fallen over the Singing Wind Ranch, a lonesome parcel of desert 40 miles southeast of Tucson.

On this cruel and beautiful landscape, beneath soaring hawks and scavenging turkey buzzards, amid a quiet so long nothing could break it--except for the chica-chica-chica of rattlers in the grass--Bundy runs a bookshop.

It’s called by the same name, Singing Wind. The idea is preposterous: running a bookstore out of a remote ranch house, accessible only by a narrow dirt road. Preposterous too is the idea that a shop owner’s drop-by trade includes bobcats.

Anyway, Bundy was sitting in her living room reading a book when a ferocious racket broke out above the roof. A bobcat had climbed into the big pine tree in the back yard and ran smack into Bundy’s cat.

“I guess that bobcat decided he wanted to eat supper,” says the 62-year-old shop owner. “I ran outside and threw rocks to chase him off. Poor Captain Midnight. The bobcat opened up his whole side.”

The kitty survived, although his tail came off in the fracas. As for Bundy, the incident was nothing much, just another strange tale from the Singing Wind, where nothing whatsoever is ordinary.

The Bundys--Winn and her late husband, Bob--opened the shop 19 years ago with $600 they collected for dog-sitting a neighbor’s German Shepherds. The money bought enough books to stock two shelves in an alcove by the front door.

Now, many thousands of books--with an emphasis on the Southwest and Western Americana--are squeezed onto hand-crafted mesquite shelves in two main rooms, and more are piled in nooks and crannies throughout the house. The latest expansion has been into Bundy’s bedroom. Another room is being refurbished to house out-of-print books.

Just don’t ask exactly how many books she has. Her business philosophy is decidedly old-fashioned. No credit cards accepted because she hates the paperwork.

Her inventory, which still isn’t computerized, ranges from children’s books costing $1 to obscure academic works from the 1800s that cost $300. She also stocks fiction, as long as she thinks it’s “good writing.” Among the titles: Toni Morrison’s “Jazz” and “Bailey’s Cafe” by Gloria Naylor.

With the exception of two small ads placed years ago, Bundy has built her business exclusively by word of mouth. Her best promotion has come from friends--fellow graduates of the library science program at the University of Arizona.

Bundy earned a master’s degree there in 1972, and her onetime colleagues have since taken library jobs across the country. Many of them now buy books from Singing Wind. So do other bookstore owners, some as far away as Vermont. They rely on Bundy to recommend books to beef up their collections of Southwestern material.

These old friends and business acquaintances spread the word among other book lovers--more customers for Bundy. They come to the ranch from all over the United States and from Germany, Japan, Africa, New Zealand and Canada, drawn by the allure of the West and by this eccentric book lover who considers the care and education of her guests to be part of her job.

Sometimes she piles them into her Jeep Cherokee to see the Cochise Stronghold and other historical sites. After a bellyful of local color, she might fire up some chile corn bread or bean burritos.

And if Bundy and her guests talk long enough into the night, she puts them up at the ranch, free of charge. The goodwill has paid off handsomely over the years. “I have a lot of repeat customers,” she says.

Others say that Singing Wind’s strength is the wide variety of books.

“She’s absolutely expert at finding the small items that local county and town historical society’s produce,” says Bernard Fontana, a retired historian from Tucson and one of Bundy’s original customers. “They’re sometimes very hard to come by. I don’t quite know how she does it.”

Bundy knows her market. If she has a new work on Indians of the Southwest--Fontana’s area of interest--she usually has the book in hand before he has even spotted it in the catalogues.

“She’ll tell me I have to have it,” says Fontana. “If I beg off and say I don’t have the cash, she says, ‘That’s OK, I’ll bill you,’ and she’s out the door. Every time she comes in, I think, ‘Oh, God, there goes some more money.’ But her instincts are unerring. And she has a super-high energy level. She just wears ordinary people out.”

Much of that energy is devoted to promoting and encouraging Southwestern writers. Bundy’s normal high-spiritedness turns to wanton exuberance when discussing her favorite books with a visitor.

She talks about “Back to Bisbee,” by Richard Shelton, a new book she has already read twice. And “Beliefs and Holy Places,” by James Griffith, and “The Mountains Next Door,” by Janice Emily Bowers.

“Oh, there’s so much good writing being done in the Southwest,” she declares. “It’s incredible. Here, let me show you.”

And off she goes, darting from stack to stack, hunting for titles. She returns with “Stories From Mesa Country,” by Jane Candia Coleman. She grips the book with two hands, like a chalice. “She’s good,” says Bundy. “Jane’s so good. She’s a new voice.”

Then varoooom-- she’s gone again, off to find another favorite book. By the time she’s finished, 20 titles are stacked at the visitor’s feet.

“I like to feel the whole surrounding of a book,” says Bundy. “I savor passages, and sometimes I read them again the next day and feel something totally different.”

But keeping a bookstore afloat requires more than a passion for literature. Bundy’s biggest challenge came nine years ago when her husband died. With her three children grown and gone, she had to keep the 640-acre ranch and the bookshop going largely on her own.

“It was a little scary,” says Bundy, who has a long ponytail, a hearty frontier face, soft blue eyes and a flash-flood laugh that can wash over a room. “I married very young and was always protected. I never had to do things myself.”

She persevered. Tucson writer Lawrence Clark Powell, a longtime friend who retired from UCLA as head librarian, advised Bundy against putting a bookshop in the ranch. He now says he underestimated her capacity for hard work.

“Anything is possible when a woman that determined decides to do it,” Powell says. “It’s a basic belief in books that motivates her. She’s a very passionate woman in that sense, a beacon shining over the whole damn state.”

The first hours of Bundy’s day are usually spent outside, tending her garden or working in the corral. She recently had a field next to the ranch plowed and plans to grow alfalfa there to feed her horses and cows.

Before long the phone starts jangling, and bookshop work soon pulls Bundy inside. Years ago, when time was more plentiful, she’d sometimes take daylong bike rides of a hundred miles or more to Bisbee and back, or go on her own bicycle version of an Old West roundup.

But the demands of her customers have become great, although the shop’s foot traffic is anything but steady. One day she’ll have two people padding around the stacks, and the next day a tour group will roll up, bringing several dozen.

Getting to Singing Wind isn’t easy: Exit I-10 at Ocotillo Road, go 2 1/4 miles north, then take a right at the big black mailbox full of buckshot holes (from the time one of Bundy’s neighbors was teaching his son how to fire a shotgun). Then it’s a quarter mile down a dirt road and over a cattle guard.

Buyers have been known to rap on her door as late as 11 o’clock at night and as early as dawn. More than one eager reader has galloped up to the shop on horseback, hitched his mount to the fence and commenced browsing.

The ranch house is laid out in such a way that customers can scan the shelves without Bundy knowing it. She might turn the corner from the kitchen and find a family of four from Indiana standing in the living room. The father, cradling an armload of books, will say: “When you’re done with the dishes, can I buy these?”

One thing Bundy has learned well over the years: “If they bother coming through the cattle gate, they’re going to buy.”

And they don’t seem to mind the occasional encounter with wildlife. It’s common for bears to trundle up from Mexico and across Bundy’s spread for a cool dip in the San Pedro River, 2,000 feet east. Every once in a while she spots one shimmying up a nearby utility pole to have a look around.

Then there are those pesky bobcats. One day Bundy was down by the San Pedro checking her water wells when she spotted a cat on the opposite bank. Ever curious and utterly unafraid, Bundy sat down and watched it.

The bobcat seemed to like the attention, and began puffing out its chest and growling. Bundy was having a good time, too. She eyeballed the preening cat and said, “Yes sir, you are beautiful.”

The conversation went on like that, two denizens of the Singing Wind chatting across the river like old friends.