Winter Count by Barry Lopez

 

What I remember most from the first visit, however, was neither the dryness nor the cactus but the wind. When I was a child in California the Santa Ana wind that came west to us from this side of the mountains seemed to me exotic but aloof. The wind I found in this upper Sonoran country with my father was very different. It was intoxicating. The wind had a quality of wild refinement about it, like horses turning around suddenly in the air by your ear. Whether it blew steadily or in bursts its strength seemed so evenly to diminish as you turned your face to it, it was as though someone had exhaled through silk. I have never since felt so enticed or comforted by the simple movement of air.

This slim volume of short stories [9 total] by the noted naturalist, Barry Lopez highlights his knowledge Plains Indians and the Land---very much the Land.

Those familiar with Lopez, either thru his work with National Geographic or his nonfiction works Arctic Dreams and Of Wolves and Men can expect the writing quality to be high and the observations of natural phenomenon to be gimlet focused.

That is, indeed, what one finds here.

I will say each story, while interesting, is of the elliptical style, where often the point or even the finale of the story is a bit…lost in the horizon, very much like the horizon of the Land Mr. Lopez describes so well.

At a slim page count [my copy runs 112 pages] and written with clear intelligence, I am not sorry I spent time with it.

I will admit, I am philistine enough to long for tighter plotting once I finish such New Yorker fare no matter how Western or skillfully done.

“Trouble Weather” by Lauren Paine

 

Carter stood up. His height seemed to tower over her. “Your family likes Nevada, doesn't it?”

“Yes. We've had it hard here, but we like it…we're going to stay.”

“Then do something for Nevada. Not just for Will, but for Nevada… for yourselves. Pioneers don't come to a wilderness just to take, ma'am… they come to give.”

“I'll do it,” Mister Alvarado.

My first encounter with the mighty prolific Mr. Paine.

I hardly know if this example is typical, but it struck me as on par with mid-to-late L’Amour: brisk, amiable, nothing deep, and given to a bit of preacher-ness.

Note, not preachiness, which is pushing the lesson a little too hard at the expense of story, but rather Preacherness, where the piece and the point of view seem intertwined.

Without looking around, Dago said, “The Indians used to have, Carter let the deed die with the wind. You go on back to town.”

Overall, a fine story, no roof shaker but fine afternoon fare all the same.

Apache Ambush by Will Cook

 

Lovington was in the barn, still alive, hanging by his wrists from one of the rafters. The Apaches had sliced through the calf muscles and his feet kept twitching. Another had flicked out Lovington’s eyeballs with the point of his knife. They hung on his cheeks like boiled eggs dangling from bloody strings.

The metallic clank of spurs roused Lovington and he croaked, “Shoot me! In th’ name of God-- shoot me!”

Now that is undoubtedly stark, particularly for a novel penned in 1955.

In Apache Ambush, Mr. Cook dishes up another one of his hyper-competent cavalry procedurals.

The land is right, the protocol is right, the men are dust-caked and hard.

It has predictable formulary elements to it that prevent it from being raised to an A level but the ride along the way is so true to lived experience that is easily head and shoulders above many a formulary tale by others who lack his life-experience.

I read Cook for his starkness and also for his offhand observations of the human character, as in the next extract.

Like many weak men, he easily mistook desperation for courage and this ride, in spite of pain and discomfort, would remain a hallmark in his life.

In my estimation, lesser Cook is what many another western author strives for on their best days.

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

 

Bergson went over in his mind the things that had held him back. One winter his cattle had perished in a blizzard. The next summer one of his plow horses broke its leg in a prairiedog hole and had to be shot. Another summer he lost his hogs from cholera, and a valuable stallion died from a rattlesnake bite. Time and again his crops had failed. He had lost two children, boys, that came between Lou and Emil, and there had been the cost of sickness and death. Now, when he had at last struggled out of debt, he was going to die himself. He was only forty-six, and had, of course, counted upon more time.

The opening extract from Cather’s 1913 novel is just one of the gemlike observations from this gorgeous novel.

It was offered as one of The 100 Best Western Novels by editor Jon E. Lewis.

It is not your formulary Western chockful of rootin’-tootin’-shootin’ action by any stretch of the imagination—if that is what one requires, look elsewhere.

But…but, if one allows the prose to wash over one, the people with their hopes, dreams, internal frictions in a small Nebraska town come alive.

Cather’s own experience growing up on the plains fuels the reality of what she offers.

Like most of their neighbors, they were meant to follow in paths already marked out for them, not to break trails in a new country. A steady job, a few holidays, nothing to think about, and they would have been very happy. It was no fault of theirs that they had been dragged into the wilderness when they were little boys. A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.

Here the rural envies the cosmopolitan, but the tables are turned.

Which are we?

“I'd rather have had your freedom than my land."

Carl shook his head mournfully. "Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder."

Ponder this precious diamond of a throwaway line.

People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.

Or this observation in tune with the tides of life.

When she went out into the dark kitchen to fix her plants for the night, she used to stand by the window and look out at the white fields, or watch the currents of snow whirling over the orchard. She seemed to feel the weight of all the snow that lay down there. The branches had become so hard that they wounded your hand if you but tried to break a twig. And yet, down under the frozen crusts, at the roots of the trees, the secret of life was still safe, warm as the blood in one's heart; and the spring would come again! Oh, it would come again!

A truly gorgeous novel.

Wise, mature, observant. Real.