The Peripatetic Reviewer

Meantime I do keep a spasmodic diary of expeditions to the woods and streams. Some of the entries, as of my surf-casting for striped bass (100 hours of fishing for each striper beached is a fair estimate), are monotonously brief. Others, of our trout trip to Nova Scotia or our ten days fishing for salmon on the Northwest Miramichi, are chronicles (complete except for the last day) relating something of the anticipation, the family banter, the setbacks and the unexpected — records my mind will return to in the vacancies of winter. With these each year I keep a list of Wild Life Seen with the naked eye and without the aid of field glasses.

The list is usually headed by the white-throated sparrow, the herald of the Canadian woods, whose call is the first you hear as you follow the guide up the tote road to camp. Then, when I am in luck, there will be at least one reference to an eagle. This year I saw a superb golden eagle — saw him first (through glasses) perched like a sentinel on the gaunt dead tree above his nest on a high shoulder in the Dartmouth Grants; saw him closer, winging no more than 25 yards overhead, as we pulled our canoe in off the Dead Diamond at dusk. Always there is the spruce partridge, the fool hen, shooing her chicks off the path like a distracted housewife, or eying you in supposed concealment as she sits in full view on her spruce stump.

Her brisker cousin the ruffed grouse is a lady of quality. One morning last July, finding that I had left my dry flies in camp, I came hurrying down the trail from Basin Pool. I had left my rod with my wife and Howard our guide, and was armed only with my light rainproof jacket, which I had in my hand. I was traveling quietly, and it was not until I was right beside the spring hole that I was heard and seen by the family of baby partridges who set up an anguish of piping. Up the trail like an arrow came the hen. There wasn’t time for any broken-wing decoy, and in fury she drove at my legs. I retreated, and using my windbreaker as a cape in the best Belmonte style, I diverted her to one side. Back she came in another rush, and again the cape turned her aside. Meanwhile I was talking to her in what I intended to be a cajoling tone of voice. Seeing that his wife was still alive, the cock now appeared, and he was something to look at with his scarlet eye and his black and white ruff. They joined forces, and although I had never heard of an angler being pecked to death, it seemed as if this might turn out to be the first time.

“Don’t be silly,” I kept saying, as I warded them off with the windbreaker, “I am not going to hurt you. Get along into the woods.”

The chicks had already scurried uphill and at last the parents followed. But the mother still wasn’t sure. She paused for a moment on a dead log as if to launch herself on one last assault. “Go on, old lady,” I said, “you’re a good girl.”

The kingfisher denouncing our invasion of his water; the night hawk swooping for insects over the Home Pool after sunset; the trees from which the bear has torn the bark in his search for grubs; the moose prints in the beaver marsh; the snowshoe hare with their lugubrious feet; the little brown bear in George’s trap, and Alma, George’s daughter, crying, “Kill him quickly, Daddy! Kill him quickly!”; the doe that comes down across the river for her evening salad; the raven devouring a grilse which had been stranded in a shallowpool — these are incidents common enough in any forest which one from the suburbs travels far to see. The pity of it is that one has to travel farther and farther to find such secret places. The jeep, the plane, and the ever-extending roads are penning the wild life into smaller and smaller pockets.

After the spell of New Brunswick I return to our country cottage, only twenty-seven miles from the center of Boston, with a new sense of companionship. I counted myself lucky to be on hand when a hawk which sometimes scours our woods was set upon by a pack of irate small birds; the bully shed feathers in his hurried retreat and I have one of them in my fishing hat. I work hard to catch a glimpse of the raccoon family who frequent our back porch in search of bacon fat and leave their thanks in their tiny greasy fingerprints on the steps. From a cellar window at dusk I can watch father raccoon lift the lid of our garbage container and lower himself to reach the bag of lobster scraps he craves.

I enjoy the gray squirrel scampering over our bedroom roof; the bright-eyed chipmunk who flickers in and out of his hole in the stone foundation only a step away from the screen door; even the rabbits who eat the heads of our zinnias — never my idea of an attractive flower; most of all the deer, so unexpected in this settled countryside, who up to this year have left their signature in the soft mud of our courtyard. But the neighborhood is changing fast: a new two-lane highway has bulldozed its way through the finest woods in Essex County and now passes within half a mile of our ridge. Already the pastel-tinted colonies are springing up, and soon we shall have more dogs and cats, more children, more neighbors, but far fewer of the secret sort.

Ever since he established himself with An Almanac for Moderns,Donald Culross Peattie has been a roving naturalist, feeding his insatiable curiosity about this country and happily busy with his pen. The wild life which I glimpse in a flash of seconds, he studies over the years, observing, reading, checking the early records of Audubon, Dr. Bachman, or the Bertrams, father and son, as he compares our forest life of today with what it was a century ago. In Sportsman’s Country (Houghton Mifflin, $3.00) Mr. Peattie has written a refreshing animal book, skillfully illustrated by Henry B. Kane. It is not a how-to-do book — how to kill trout in six easy chapters; rather, it is a study of the habits, courage, character, and beauty of some of our finest American fauna — the bobwhite, the gray squirrel, the red-tailed hawk, the black bass, the red fox, the mule deer, the black-tailed jack rabbit — of the country or water they take to and of how they have survived despite the odds.

I like Peattic’s curiosity; I like his account of the gray squirrel hegira down the Ohio in 1809 when the river was strewn from bank to bank with gray squirrels on an advancing front of 130 miles. Such a migration is almost past belief, but I am told a sizable one took place in Connecticut not long ago. I like his description of what makes the perfect bass lake, and of the layers of life which inhabit it. I like to know that the white-tailed jack rabbit will cover twenty-two feet four inches at a leap, and that Peattie himself once clocked Jack at thirty-five miles an hour. In relating these organisms to their environment, Mr. Peattie is often the defender: he reminds us that the red fox and the hawk are not wanton destroyers; he reminds us — when we deplore the lack of game — that two hunters in the fall of 1883 killed 300 dozen quail in a seventeen-day hunt. That was in the days when restaurants charged thirty cents apiece for quail on toast, He tells us the tragedy of the Kaibab deer and of what happens today when the deer in Yosemite are fed Popsicles. Hunters and anglers will enjoy this book; so will those who simply like to think of animals.

Joyce Cary is an English novelist who defies the easy label. He is one of the most versatile of English authors — he writes about vagabond artists and endearing blowsy women, about African natives and their English administrators; and now, in his new book, he tells the story of a political rabble-rouser. His books have made a swift series of impacts upon us, coming in rapid succession after years of neglect, and all are fun to read.

Prisoner of Grace (Harper, $3.00) is the story told by a wife, a good-natured, intelligent woman, as she follows the ups and downs, the subtleties and dilemmas, of her husband’s career. The book covers thirty years of marital discord and political success. Chester Nimmo is a bright lower-class politician at the time of the Boer War when Nina marries him, and the chronicle of his advance through the rallies, the riots, the flying vegetables, and the betrayals in the name of good government is brisk, lively writing all the way.

The book lacks something of the surprising variety which we expect in Cary’s work, and this I think is because a close view of a temperamentally mismated couple necessarily focuses on the causes of their incompatibility, which are ingrained and never change. The same things happen over and over again, for Nina never learns to cope with Chester’s methods and he never learns how to hold her interest. The pattern of flight and recapture is repeated so often that the novel, in spite of shrewd analysis and some very funny episodes, becomes predictable, even a trifle monotonous.

As an artist and writer, Tom Lea of El Paso has been particularly attracted to Mexico. In The Brave Bulls he told and illustrated the story of the desperate ordeal of a Mexican matador. Now, in his second book, The Wonderful Country (Little, Brown, $3.75), he is writing of the borderland between Texas and Mexico in the years just after the Lone Star had been admitted to the Union. His hero, Martin Brady, is a man of both countries. As a young boy, Martin saw his father, a Confederate veteran, shot to death in a street fight. That night young Martin killed the killer and slipped across the border to safety. He found sanctuary at last in the great hacienda Valdepeñas. There he was trained as a vaquero or ranch hand, and there, as his cold courage and deadly aim were better appreciated, he was singled out as a pistolero. As a gunman he protected Cipriano Castro from an assassin, and as an armed guard he helped convey the silver ore from Castro’s great holding, the El Tigre Mine.

Martin has killed for personal reasons and in the border fights against the Apache — and the habit grows. Mateo Casas, the kindly Mexican who took him in when he was homeless, gives him the warning: “The life with firearms, it grows — to a habit of blood. Much blood is much sorrow. I have seen it. You are seeing it. It is the sorrow of my Mexico. Will you live your life in it?” Thus Martin’s story is the story of a young adventurer — in his twenties when the book begins — who is struggling to rid himself of the gun habit, struggling to repatriate himself in the Texas from which he fled.

There are qualities in this book which make it an exceptional Western. Since it is a frontier story, it is essentially a story of men, and chief among them Martin, whose change and development are vigorously portrayed. Secondly, I am much taken with the Remington-like brush strokes of Mr. Lea’s prose as he draws the vast, colorful background of the Mexican province of Chihuahua; scenes such as the burning of the hacienda at El Carmen, or Martin’s infuriating interrogation by General Marcos Castro, or his homecoming to the great fiesta of San Juan, are as hot as chile. Last, but not least, are the superb black-and-whites in which the author has depicted the great horse Lágrimas, the character of Puerto, the little border town, and those symbols of Mexico which so long held Martin captive.

Bill Mauldin went out to Korea taking with him not Willie and Joe, those muddy, bearded doughfeet who gave us such a perfect low-down understanding of the war in Italy: this time he takes with him Joe alone. Joe, still single, has become a rookie war correspondent after five years of high school on the G. I. Bill, and his letters to Willie back home tell the story of what Mauldin thinks of Korea. Bill Mauldin in Korea (Norton, $2.95) is the first humorous thing I have read about that unhappy place; and while the humor is wry and sardonic, as it was in Up Front, it certainly establishes the right mood in which to convey the sympathy, understanding, and indignation which the author shares with the Infantry, the Marines, and the Naval aviators whom he lived with on his visit. Loneliness and discomfort, honesty, grit, bewilderment, and what T.R. called “ bull-doggishhangonitiveness” — it’s all here, and with drawings to point it up.