Adventures With a Texas Naturalist/Cache Lake Country

Roy Bedichek DOUBLEDAY, $3.50

OUT of Texas comes a book of freshness and charm to delight the naturalist, amateur and professional alike. I gather that it is Mr. Bedichek’s first book too, at least at this expansive level. He took a year’s leave of absence from his duties in the field of Texas education to put it together, living in a century-old house on the Edwards Plateau — a region which comprises about one eighth of the area of the entire state. It is of this plateau largely, and of the Davis Mountains of southwestern Texas, that he writes. Some thirty years of notes, observation, birdwatching, and exploration are so digested, recorded, arranged, and synthesized that the whole reads as though the man had come in from the desert, the plateau, and the mountains as from a single walk and reported on it by the following morning. It takes skill to do that; and the way in which Mr. Bedichek does it suggests a long apprenticeship in the writer’s art.

To most of his readers the region will be as new as the man, and the casual mention of Highway 290 and the Bankhead Highway U.S. No. 80 will surely send some cars with Michigan, Ohio, and Massachusetts license plates in search of them next summer. In search, that is, of mesquite, vermilion flycatchers, Quereus harvardii with a lower-case h (Harvard’s oak, “perhaps the least oak in the world”); the Inca dove, the armadillo, the golden eagle, the phainopepla (suggestive of the waxwing); the mockingbird at his confusing best, the white-necked raven of the Davis Mountains — “a species that serves this region instead of the crow ”; and the winter wren in Texas. Incidentally, does the winter wren sing in Texas as he does in the Laurentians?

Mr. Bedichek has the mark both of the scientist and the poet: “a fleck of sunlight in a sky almost ready for stars.” He seldom pulls the longbow. He has (what seems to me rare in a naturalist) a first-rate sense of humor. His chapters on nature lore in folk lore and on folk-naming of birds and flowers are flavory stuff. When he says that the frog “is noted the world over for attempting to ingest objects much too large” he clothes you with the naturalist’s cloak, and you are not to be astonished at the report of his friend finding a live duck in a pond with his head in the belly of a bullfrog. And as to the fabulous myth of the hitchhiking hummingbird, migration-bent, he quotes a letter from a gentleman “apparently enraged that I should even raise such a question.” Said the gentleman in part: “Referring to your inquiry, I shot a lovely specimen of the great horned owl two days ago. Imagine my surprise and delight when fourteen tiny hummingbirds tumbled out from underneath the old owl’s wings and side-pockets. . . .” If you would see Mr. Bedichek in righteous anger rising, read him on the killing of the golden eagle by airplane: a sickening footnote to American sportsmanship.

Though it is more than possible that an elderly aunt or a young intellectual would enjoy and profit by Roy Bedichek’s book, it is much more than probable that neither would understand Mr. Rowlands, his point of view, or his craft. You will have to know the smell of the absolute woods in all its frontier loneliness and to be able to read its achromatic language a little for yourself in order to understand, in its queer and completely original way. one of the most attractive books of the year. In this wretched mechanical world of drifting psychoses, the more the pity. There is no word here from any pulpit - least of all on the fatuity of escape. But there is medicine in this book where nothing is prescribed.

So Retimes one tires of fine writing. Mr. Rowlands is no fine writer, but he is a very honest writer; and his intimate, objective account of twelve moons’ worth of living in the country north toward Hudson Bay touches subjective poetry in the most unexpected ways. “Portage to Contentment,” he says in the beginning; and how well does his pack hold together, and how sure he is of the unblazed trail! “Indians don’t leave forwarding addresses”; but some readers will want the address of Chief Tibeash, the author’s companion, teacher, and occasional alter ego. Though I fear the charge would insult him, I should call the Chief a civilized man.

This is a book about living in the woods, when not to know how is to die. The deep snows, the sun on the paddle blade, the smell of rotting pine, the feel of rain, the power of silence, the meaninglessness of measured time, the ever changing balance of life against life — of these things Mr. Rowlands modestly writes at genuine firsthand. Everything a man in the pathless forest needs to know, to make, to gather, to preserve, and to use is here to the last detail. It is Indian lore more than white man’s, and is all the better for that. Accompanying the chapters, up and down the margins, across the bottom of the page, and in frequent full-page spread, are the sightly pen-andink drawings of Henry 13. Kane. They appear to permeate the text — explaining, teaching, amplifying, telling a story, or showing how to make a grass microscope, an Indian top, a smokehouse, long-tailed pie, and a hundred other things. This is Mr. Kane’s contribution: half the book.

Where is that outdoor boy of all ages? Something has been written for him, I think.

DAVID MCCORD