One of the hardest things to write, it seems to me, a child of the urban canyons, is a good historical novel of the American West.
There have been truckloads of thin Westerns, and any number of works long on historical fact and short on fictional art. But a novel that is historically sound and artistically excellent and that tells something true about — you should pardon the lit’ry bromide — the human condition, is a rare accomplishment.
Walter Van Tilburg Clark, however, accomplished it twice, first in “The Ox-Bow Incident” and then in “Track of the Cat.” Clark must also be rare among authors for having had two of his books translated rather successfully to the screen — “Ox-Bow” with Henry Fonda and “Track” with Robert Mitchum, whose menacing poutishness is not far off the mark for the role of Curt Bridges.
Clark, who died in 1971, is one of that sizable band of American writers who are associated with areas other than those in which they were born and grew up. He was born 100 years ago — Aug. 3, 1909 — in East Orland, Maine, and moved to Reno, Nev., at age 8, when his father was appointed president of the University of Nevada. As an adult, Clark spent much time in the East: He received an M.A. from the University of Vermont in 1934, and for 10 years taught in the public schools of Cazenovia, N.Y.
But Nevada is his literary turf. Both “Ox-Bow” and “Track” are set there, as is his only other novel, “The City of Trembling Leaves,” a coming-of-age novel set in Reno at just about the time (the 1920s) he himself must have been coming of age there. He also published a highly acclaimed collection of short stories, “The Watchful Gods and Other Stories.”
“The Ox-Bow Incident,” about a lynching, is considered Clark’s masterpiece, and maybe rightly so, but I’ve always preferred “Track of the Cat.” It was first published in 1949, also to considerable critical acclaim.
Sixty years on, “Track of the Cat” remains in print, and a rereading of it for the author’s centenary reveals that age has not withered it at all. It is a powerful, absorbing novel about the hunting down of a marauding mountain lion. The lion is a real enough danger, for it kills the Bridges family’s cattle caught out in a freak October snowstorm.
But the lion is essentially a device, albeit a good one — sort of like a certain white whale — for revealing the family members’ true enemy, which is themselves, manifested in their individual weaknesses and conflicts of will.
There are the mother and father, aged about 70, who hate each other. She is domineering, bitter, religion-warped; he is a maundering drunk. They have three sons, all single and working the ranch: Art, the oldest, dreamy and sensitive; Curt, arrogant, aggressive, ambitious; and Harold, barely 20, inexperienced, unsure of himself, yet probably the most sensible of the lot. An unmarried daughter, Grace, is more than somewhat neurotic.
Beyond that, there are only Gwen, daughter of a neighboring family, who wants to marry Harold (and he her), and Joe Sam, an ancient Indian hired hand given to trances.
The long story is told in four parts: Art and Curt’s hunt for the lion, during which the animal kills Art; the preparations for Art’s burial back at the house; Curt’s lone hunt; and, finally, Harold and Joe Sam’s expedition to find out what has happened to Curt.
Far and away the most gripping section is Curt’s hunt. There may be few scenes in American literature to match it for excitement, and it is all the more praiseworthy in that it is done with just one person and uses only limited internal dialogue.
It is 100 pages of mounting tension as Curt pursues his quarry, growing ever more disoriented and paranoid under pressure of the unseen enemy and the constant snowfall. We wonder which is really the hunter and which the hunted. Panicking, hallucinating, Curt devises increasingly futile schemes by which to keep track of time and progress when, in fact, he has no true idea of time’s passage and, it becomes clear, he is making no progress at all.
Two things dominate the book. One is the cat, seen only fleetingly but omnipresent nevertheless. The other is snow. Even the Inuit cannot have more ways of referring to snow than Clark does, and he makes it something to fear and respect as much as the cat. Snow is everywhere: whirling, swirling, falling, deepening, waiting — a snow-battered world reminiscent of Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel.”
All of this is told with deft handling of imagery, metaphor and symbolism: isolation in a house, the mysterious cat, references to the puniness of mankind against the expanse of snow and wilderness — the kind of graspable elements that make a book an English teacher’s dream. Plus it’s a ripping good yarn.
Roger K. Miller, a former Wisconsin newspaper editor, is a novelist and freelance writer and editor.
FICTION
The Track of the Cat
by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
$20
