Lean but vigorous

Usage examples of wiry.

From a wiry old woman with mud-brown skin, he mastered the botanical secrets of the land, learning how to make curare from strychnos vines, malarial prophylaxes from cinchona bark, barbasco insect repellent, and a topical painkiller from waxy red genipa berries.

West and south stretched a rolling plain, thinly begrown with shrubs not like Terrestrial sagebrush in appearance: low, wiry, silvery-leaved, Due north rose the sheer black wall of Kusulongo the Mountain, jagged against the Milky Way.

A boy still, though approaching manhood rapidly, Bek was small and wiry, but made up for his size with agility and speed and surprising strength.

Wondering at the reason for such a cool reception by the local lawman, Blu studied the shorter man, noting his wiry but well-muscled build and the nervous twitching of the fingers on his right hand.

Unhampered by a buckler Blake took full advantage of the nimbleness of the wiry horse he rode and which he had ridden daily since his arrival in Nimmr, so that man and beast were well accustomed to one another.

He was a lean, wiry figure, barely taller than Bunion, skin as brown and grainy as the bark of a sapling, hair grown thick down the back of his neck and along his arms.

Once inside the main building they were met by a wiry man in a dark-blue plaid wool shirt, jeans, and chukka boots.

Alastair, his steadfast chauffeur and a spry, wiry man for his one hundred years, started complaining as soon as Dagon had asked how things were at the castle.

Stantori and Lester Treadwell, a lean, wiry man in his fifties who was in charge of clearing the deadfall, had taken a four-wheel drive truck up the logging road toward spike camp as soon as it had gotten light.

He had twisted his wiry hair into short dreadlocks, and had never looked better.

Before he knew what had happened, Durk was rolling on the floor of the corridor, his teeth full of wiry black hair, his arms straining to hold a pair of clawlike hands away from his throat.

She was small, wiry, and beautiful, a gladiatrix dressed in leather armor over a coarse tunic.

I pummeled him with one clenched fist, grabbed his sandy wiry hair with my other hand and banged away at him.

A single great tree flourished near the center of the gulch, while tufts of wiry grass were scattered here and there among the rocks of the gravelly floor.

And men began springing to their feet and scrambling out of their shelters, and staring around them and waving their hats and shouting congratulation and encouragement, and ducking suddenly as more bullets came whistling in, and from a low rumble the sound rose to distant thunder, and from that to nearer uproar, and Truman and Cranston made a rush for their own herds, ordering the men to side line and hopple instantly, for the surviving horses were excitedly sniffing the air, pawing and snorting, and then there hove in sight up the valley the wiry leaders of the herd, galloping wearily, behind them a dull, dust-hidden, laboring mass, the main body of the Indian prizes swept away at sunrise.