Brand of a Man by Thomas Thompson

 

The boy spun in his tracks. The sudden movement startled the horse and the animal shied. For a moment the boy and the man stared at each other, a smiling, unshaved stranger with a gun, and a wide-eyed kid, unmasked by surprise until his face was as easy to read as gathering weather. The boy was hurt and bewildered, too young to understand the adult world around him, too old to cry openly about it.

This paragraph appears on the first page of this 1958 novel from Thomas Thompson. Such facile observations of humanity and character limned in easy yet poetic expression [“as easy to read as gathering weather”] appear on practically every page.

This brief novel [128 pages] bears all the marks of being a mere formulary Western but Thompson is clearly not content with simply spinning an action-filled yarn [he does that here, too.] He is equally interested in seeing the world around him with wide-open eyes and aiding us in seeing that world, too.

Where we usually get “He rode into town,” we get this bit of laconic poetry.

The horse shied suddenly, and at the side of the road a laggard, earth-bound squirrel sat bolt upright on a rock and spit high-pitched, chattering accusations at the double-burdened horse as it passed. He’d spend the summer here, then the fall and the winter, and around the seasons again, raising a family, living his small orbit of existence, finally dying. A small animal, willing to challenge something a hundred times its own size for the privilege of sitting on a rock…Owen came back to the present.

If such clear-eyed observation written in clean brisk prose is your cup of tea, then you’ll be in heaven with this one.

I warn, though: Reading such philosophers of the west as a regular diet can ruin one’s appetite for lesser fare.