Odd Jobs (67 page)

This jumble is good; at times the mimetic effort becomes perhaps too muscular and colorful, as in this version of northern lights:

We are given, in any case, a great deal to visualize, and relatively little to hear and to feel. The travellers are laconic with one another, though some pungent things are said. The motives of the central two, Cecil and Sutton, are rather lightly indicated. Both, as if escaped from the author’s youthful circus novel,
Cat Man
, are circus-minded, with stunts they now and then perform. Cecil hopes to catch a bear, a squaw, and a Big Foot in these Rockies, and Sutton to settle down and mine gold, but rather fantastically: their quests don’t communicate excitement, and in the end Cecil’s bear seems to be both captured and forgotten. Perhaps this thinness of sympathetic motive holds a truth: the men of the far frontier were more concerned with getting away than going to, and the trip to the edge was its own mystical purpose. The foreground figures stand in this lovingly wrought homage to a stupendous terrain much as the little figures are planted in a great wilderness canvas by Frederick Church or Albert Bierstadt, to supply a sense of scale. Mr. Hoagland is better at “characters” than character; walk-ons like Ouddo, a deaf and affable old killer ensconced in eremetic luxury, and Switzer, an unarmed, Bible-quoting pilgrim carrying a bag of appleseeds, crackle with an authentic
American crankiness. Among these vital, humanoid eccentrics should be included Big Foot, or Sasquatch, who turns out to be an apparition of hypnotic reality, smelling of “a mustardly piquancy or the vanilla scent of joe-pye weed” and after a while becoming just one more of the fauna in this remoteness, with “its peacock or parroty scream,… its baboon muzzle and bearish set of teeth, its body haired all over like a shaggy pony’s, its hands like a giant man’s or an ominous ape’s, its forehead and face more spiritual than intelligent but more human than animal.” Like Moby-Dick, this creature (whose presence makes Cecil feel woozy) reifies the murky and ominous meaning that gazes at man out of the external world in all its impervious magnificence. By setting himself in pursuit of this meaning, Mr. Hoagland joins cause with the Transcendentalists, and wilderness mystics like John Muir (in whose praise he has written a rapturous essay), and that long line of American novelists who have attempted in one gorgeous grab to say it all. He has come closer than most.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s
Reindeer Moon
has the one thing missing from
Seven Rivers West
—a lovable protagonist, whose travels and travails we follow with continuous concern. Her heroine, Yanan, tells her story in a limpid, unassuming voice that engages us from the start:

Such a voice—firm and direct yet afloat in an indeterminate subjective space—avoids the two aesthetic perils of third-person ventures into the Paleolithic like Jean Auel’s best-selling volumes: the peril of sounding like animated anthropology, and that of sounding like one more querulous, ego-ridden modern novel. Yanan’s people feel, as do we, anger, fear, love, and jealousy. But their sense of personal possessiveness is qualified by a clan solidarity more intense than ours; they know hunger as a constant companion; their relationship with animals is close and murderous; and their religion is interwoven with earthly survival.

On the earthly level,
Reindeer Moon
tells of Yanan’s maturation, from a child to mother, in the space of perhaps four years. The years are harrowing but typical, for these semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers of the sub-arctic steppes, save for the winter when the cruel deaths of her mother and then her father isolate the still-girlish Yanan, with her little sister, Meri, in a wild world bare of clan protection. In the tale’s most compelling and alarming episode, the two children manage to survive with the help of a similarly isolated female wolf and her one cub, and eventually make their way, living like animals in burrows and crevices, off roots and frogs, to a lodge of their kin. On the unearthly level, Yanan, as her opening sentences announce, dies young; yet she continues, as “a spirit of the dead,” to experience and to function in the life of her clan, as a guardian of her people’s lodge. In its matter-of-fact interlarding of a brief life with its wide-ranging afterlife
Reindeer Moon
is something of a tour de force, but rarely feels strained, or cute. Partly under her own volition and partly under the magical influence of the tribal shamans, Yanan as spirit takes the form of a number of creatures—a wolf, a deer, a raven, an owl, a bustard, a lion, even a mammoth—and re-enters reality from their angles. The novel gains thereby an entrancing variety and airiness of texture, while deepening its basic theme, which I took to be the terms upon which we human animals enjoy our place in nature.

Mrs. Thomas’s writing runs smooth and almost colorless and rarely thickens into one of Mr. Hoagland’s poetic knots. But our awareness of such a basic comfort as shelter is exquisitely sharpened by a simple sentence like “As we reached the middle of the woods in the early evening, tiny, grainy snowflakes began to fall.” Yanan and Meri have that day abandoned the lodge where their father’s corpse lies—he has died, after days of delirium and coma, of an infected wolverine bite—and the tiny, grainy snowflakes, falling into their hopeless trudge through this vast inhuman wilderness, have the weight of terror, of our young species’ terrible frail loneliness. Food, too—what it means to be a carnivore—is comprehended anew, through the dozens of pitiless killings described in the novel with a coolly detailed accuracy. And the necessary tightness of the social weave that holds hunger and cold and predators at bay is illustrated by the cunning shape of the plot: Yanan’s fatal sin, her break with the clan, comes during a fight precipitated by her stealing and destroying, to spare her sister’s feelings, what she takes to be the pelt of the wolf cub who became a brother to her sister during the winter they were forced to live with wolves. And they had come to that pass, really,
through an impetuous decision of their father’s to remove his family from the larger clan because of an imagined slight. From one breach of order, others flow; no violation of taboo or mutual trust goes without its disruptive effect, and all must be repaired.

The incessant mending of the tribal consensus includes placatory rites directed at the gods—the Bear and the Woman Ohun. Man has extended his social net upward into the air, and rising smoke carries offerings of blood and meat to the spirits. The urgency of these natural and supernatural interconnections lends
Reindeer Moon
an intrinsic coherence and suspensefulness that modern novels, describing a world where the social unit is relatively loose and diffuse, must grope for. In
Seven Rivers West
, the deaths and matings, as set down by Mr. Hoagland’s modern male sensibility, have a disjunct abruptness, as if to point up the cosmic indifference that frames such dramatic animal moments; in
Reindeer Moon
, the pace feels softer—each crisis rounded in the telling so that we can follow its curve, each event a fruit held and pulled from the tree of life.

As Yanan tells us at the outset, hers is a woman’s tale. Its feminist overtones are audible but not strident. Since, from the pharaohs on, women have been assigned a back seat in history, there is a tendency to claim prehistory as their turf. “Men own the meat,” Yanan tells us, but “Women own the families, the lineages.” Her cousin Teal instructs her, “You came from a strong lineage, a Fire River lineage. If you’re afraid of initiation or coitus, you mustn’t show it.” The implied moral of Yanan’s heroic trek with Meri is that
women can do it
. Wielding the heavy spear taken from beside her father’s corpse, she hunts with the men. She fights being beaten by her husband and, when the time comes, proudly attempts to give birth to her child away from the lodge, with only little Meri in attendance. She overreaches: women in the time of
Reindeer Moon
still must be creatures of endurance and submission. They less make things happen than have things happen to them. “What is happening to me?” Yanan asks herself when she first makes love, echoing the exact words her mother uttered when she found herself dying of a hemorrhage. Teal tells Yanan, “These women’s things—menstruation, initiation, childbirth—they aren’t very difficult and don’t need skill or knowledge.… They just happen. You need only to keep quiet.” When Yanan asks, “Why must I?” Teal answers grimly, “We must. It’s the Woman Ohun’s plan.” Yanan’s, and Mrs. Thomas’s, vision of triumphant femininity is endearingly embodied in the hulk of an old female mammoth, the leader of a herd that Yanan joins in her spirit form—the most remarkable
in a delightful, humorous, and scrupulous series of empathetic animal portraits:

This monstrous yet not unfriendly vision, with its womanly breasts and blood-colored tint, corresponds to Mr. Hoagland’s affecting, quizzical portrait of Sasquatch and to Melville’s great picture, in the eighty-seventh chapter of
Moby-Dick
, of “The Grand Armada,” the whale society, complete with nursing mothers and amorous couples, “suspended in those watery vaults”: a vision, that is, of something quite
other
in nature, beyond the confines of human culture, that yet gazes back at us with eyes not so unlike our own.