Nature writing has been with us longer than the printing press; whether it be by poets or philosophers it is one of the taproots of literary expression. Sometimes a nature book like The Hidden Life Of Trees will even sneak into the best-seller lists.
Zane Grey leveraged his popularity as a western writer to indulge his love for nature writing. His books teem with descriptions of natural wonder; he traveled the world seeking places unspoiled by men and considered the sea and the desert his religion.
If you follow the popular view, Grey was all about shootouts and dry gulching and riders of the purple sage. But read him and his true passion becomes clear. He was into rivers and mesas first, stories second, if that.
That is my view from an admittedly very small sample size: The Wanderer Of The Wasteland and this, a collection of five short stories which hardly lives up to the ideal of Grey as western writer.
Action sags as the narrative abruptly shifts focus. Characters often speak in flat, declarative ways as they embark along worn, set paths. What draws Grey out is the magnetic pull of the great outdoors:
The valley was dead. Desolation reigned supreme. Tappan could not see far toward either end of the valley. A few miles of white glare merged at last into leaden pall. A strong odor, not unlike sulphur, seemed to add weight to the air.
That is from the opening section of the first story, “Tappan’s Burro,” which follows the life of a prospector named Tappan as it intertwines with his load-bearing companion, Jenet. It starts with Jenet’s difficult birth, and her growth into a “big, gray, serene beast of burden” able to survive whatever difficulties Tappan’s journeys place in her path.
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| A wild burro. Death Valley is not known for its hospitability, but it sustains some 17,000 wild burros today. In "Tappan's Burro," Jenet's adaptability to both arid and frosty climates is a recurring theme. Image from http://digital-desert.com/wildlife/wild-burro.html |
This includes an unwise venture into Death Valley, where Tappan finds gold but also trouble in the form of claim jumpers who attempt to kill him. A woman later persuades Tappan to abandon his burro and ride off with her, setting him up for predictable heartbreak. Tappan is reunited with Jenet for a final section where the pair are caught on a mountain by a massive blizzard that threatens to bury them under feet of snow.
“Tappan’s Burro” is barely more than an excuse to dally in nature, whether it be blazing hot sand or icy drifts. Long sections relate the beauty and horrors of the world Tappan explores. People are little more than afterthoughts. Even the title character Jenet is presented very naturalistically, an animal with no attempt at characterization beyond a stout ability to survive her owner’s dangerous life choices.
“Jenet, it takes a human bein’ – a man – a woman – to be faithless,” Tappan tells her. “And it takes a dog or a horse or a burro to be great…”
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| Zane Grey poses at his writing desk. The author of some 80 books, not all of them western stories. Many of them were about his travels and fishing. He died in 1939 but remained a best-selling author for years. Image from https://www.beachamjournal.com/journal/2021/01/zane-grey-author-of-riders-of-the-purple-sage-was-born-149-years-ago-today.html |
I might have enjoyed this story more if Tappan wasn’t such a moron. Whether it is a likely ambush or a designing woman, he is easily fooled and stubborn in his bad choices. When it comes to the finale on the snowy mountain, Tappan ignores the danger to himself because, as he tells an unfortunate human companion, he decides: “I might like a little spell of it, seein’ it’d be new to me.”
Whether that be ignorance or fatalism, it results in some more of Grey’s nature writing, this quite harrowing as Tappan faces some of the bleakest fury Mother Nature can dish out. He must not only find his way to safety but fend off the efforts of his increasingly desperate companion to kill Jenet for food.
There was an element of déjà vu in the snowstorm’s relentless attack mirroring that of Death Valley’s heat waves at the story’s beginning. That Tappan himself is also so unchanging might be Grey’s point, man counting for nothing measured against the finality of the cosmos:
The stars shone white in a deep blue sky – passionless, cold, watchful eyes, looking down without pity or hope or censure. They were the eyes of Nature.
Arresting, existentially disturbing, and more than a bit inert. I found Grey like that in the next two stories here, too.
These tales are westerns, too, except this time the west in question is not in the United States. “The Great Slave” is set in western Canada, out around the Athabasca River, while “Yaqui” begins in the Sonoran Desert of western Mexico. Both feature Indian protagonists.
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| "He communed with the stern god of his ancestors and watched the flashing
Northern Lights and listened." Siena commutes with the spirits of Nature in "The Great Slave." From an illustration included in the 1922 first edition by Charles S. Chapman. Image from https://www.amazon.com/Tappans-Burro-Other-Stories-Zane/dp/B00085TBPW |
In “The Great Slave” Siena is the only adult male member of his tribe, which is quite weak when confronted by the mighty Cree tribe that bully them. All Siena can do to eke out a bare existence for himself and his people is catch fish. One day Siena shares his food with some passing white men. In return they gift him with a rifle. Suddenly Siena is able to slay land animals and, with it, gains great power. But the envious Cree manage to capture him and his tribe and enslave them:
His fame had been their undoing. Slaves to the murderers of his forefathers! His spirit darkened, his soul sickened; no more did sweet voices sing to him on the wind, and his mind dwelt apart from his body among shadows and dim shapes.
Finally, rather unconvincingly, he finds a way to freedom. Short as it was, I could not wait for “The Great Slave” to end. Siena speaks in monotones about his destiny “to save the vanishing tribe of Crows” and imagines the gods in the trees and sky telling him the same. Meanwhile, I kept wondering when that gun of his would run out of ammunition.
Slavery is also the fate of Yaqui, the tribe leader in the other story. Here, the slavers are white, Mexicans who see Yaqui’s tribe as both a threat and a sellable resource. While the Cree in “The Great Slave” allow their slave Crows to live and look after themselves in a fashion, the slavers of “Yaqui” kill many of Yaqui’s tribe simply for blood sport. This sets up the revenge tale that makes for “Yaqui’s” drawn-out finale.
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| "In times of flood this mountain stream would carry grains of gold as far
as it flowed down on the desert. Yaqui saw in it a menace." An illustration by Frank Street of Yaqui in captivity, separated forever from his family, featured in the first edition of Tappan's Burro. Image from https://www.amazon.com/Tappans-Burro-Other-Stories-Zane/dp/B00085TBPW |
Grey had the right motive. He writes about the genocidal indignity Yaqui and his people suffer: “Indians had hearts and souls the same as white people. It was a ridiculous and extraordinary and base thing to be callous to the truth.” But the outcome is very odd. The narrative shifts focus to a slave owner’s cruel son and his fiancée who get the singularly bad idea of having Yaqui appear at their wedding with a bladed weapon.
This might have been satisfying had Grey given his characters a spark of life. But no. Whether hero or villain, they lack for vim, resonance, or personality. Supposedly Grey was criticized for this lack of a human element in his work, and I felt it here as I did reading Wanderer Of The Wasteland. I looked forward to the last two stories with trepidation.
Set in South America, “Tigre” is one of the shortest, and certainly the simplest, story in the collection. A jealous plantation owner sets his mankilling jaguar, Tigre, to attack a worker he just dismissed for suspected romancing of his wife. The wife knows the accusation is untrue, but once Tigre is unleashed her conscience impels her to pursue the worker and warn him of Tigre. Outrunning a jaguar may seem unlikely, except this one happens to be blind.
It is a silly story, with a goofy set-up and tinny dialogue:
“Señora, we have not greatly to fear ahead,” he replied. “But behind – a trailing tigre warms with the night! We must not lag!”
“I’m not tired. I can walk so, all night; but the steps, the cries, frighten me. It grows darker, and I stumble.”
Yet “Tigre” has a definite energy about it, a tautness in the way it is constructed with Tigre’s arrival signaled at every turn. Grey also develops some positive interaction between the wife, Muella, and Augustine, the worker. It turns out Augustine does love her, and is eager to sacrifice himself for her. Muella does not love him but pretends otherwise to keep him from what she claims would break her heart. It isn’t that deep, but it has an unusual vibrancy that kept me interested.
The final story, “The
Rubber Hunter,” is also set in South America, and does the best job of marrying
Grey’s love of nature with a gripping yarn, in places reminiscent of Joseph
Conrad. The protagonist, Manuel, is a rough man who lives on the outskirts of
the law in Peru. He travels upriver to find enough rubber to live out his days
in comfort. In the process, he picks up a strange man of few words who tags along.
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| "Gradually the strip of shade under the full-foliaged bank receded... When the tangled balls of snakes melted off the branches, and the water smoked and the paddles were too hot to handle, Manuel shoved the canoe into the shade of overhanging vines." The Amazon as depicted in "The Rubber Hunter." Image from https://www.audleytravel.com/us/south-america/region-guides/the-amazon |
In time a kinship develops as Manuel finds himself liking the man and his stoic nature. With that, he begins to warm up to his own humanity, and senses in time that his companion harbors a deep, painful secret, one Manuel can well relate to. In time, a rough communion develops in Manuel’s mind: “The fancy grew upon him that he had come to be to Señor what Señor was to him. He sensed it, felt it, finally realized it.”
The message of the story, much like that of “Tigre,” is well presented: That the subtle bonds of a shared humanity can be brought out in the most unlikely of ways, a kinship not of blood but of shared experience.
All this takes place amid the lush splendor of the Amazonian jungle, which Grey describes with a sureness and force that works in concert with the human drama, and feeds into the suspense. He isn’t spinning his wheels with the nature stuff this time; he makes it flow with his story.
“The Rubber Hunter” runs
a few pages longer than it needs to, but it demonstrates for me a reason for Grey’s
lasting popularity and special place with his audience. Does it make up for the
poorer stories before it? No, but I’m glad I read it, however rough the journey
getting there had been. Grey sure can paint a picture, but he does better by me
when he fills his busy landscapes with people who make you care.
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