Clark's Third Novel: Lonelinesss, Cold, and Terror in the West

The Track Of The Cat, by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Random House. 404 pp.

With his two previous books, "The OxBow Incident" and "The city of Trembling Leaves," Walter Van Tilburg Clark began to rejuvenate the American west as a setting for upper-middle brow literature. In "The Track of the Cat," a simple adventure story with deep psychological undertones, he continues this project.

The Bridges family lives alone on a ranch in an isolated valley of the Sierra Nevada at the turn of the century. One night, during the first snow of the year, one of the sons awakes in the bunkhouse to hear the cattle crying far out in the storm. Subsequently he and one of his brothers ride out to investigate; a few hours later his body is carried back to the ranch slung to his horse. His brother remains in the mountains to hunt down the killer.

Most of the story deals with this lonely hunt, and also with teh tight complex tensions which are released in the Bridges family by the death of the first son. The third and youngest son is left at the ranch to cope with the messy psychological situation created by his brother's death, among his sister, his parents, and his fiancee. By exercising fantastic self-control, he keeps the tensions in hand msot of the time, but just barely.

Meanwhile Curt, the second brother, is wandering through the snow-checked valleys, tracking the panther which killed his brother. This man is the real master of the family, the hunter, the bully, the realist who has scoffed at his brothers for believing the tales of their old Indian handyman about a black panther as big as a horse who can't to killed with bullets. Clark really hits his stride in the description of curt's gradual disintegration under the onslaught of snow, time, hunger, fatigue, fear, and his own imagination. The long, magnificently told story of curt's hunt is undoubtedly the best part of the book.

Black Panther

The spectre of the black panther breeds over the whole tale, moving constantly in the thoughts and dreams of the men, even those who profess not to believe in its existence. However, the author never makes it clear, or even partially clear, what this symbol is supposed to mean. Does it exist only in the minds of the men who fear it, or does it represent a malignant spirit which wants to drive them out of the valley? Whatever his concept of the black panther was, Clark doesn't carry it through. Therefore, one begins to suspect that the black cat is only literary device for effectively creating a ghostly mood to overhang the Bridges family's internal strife. I don't think that ws the original idea, but by leaving his purpose open to such speculation. Clark's otherwise sharp psychological study is dulled.

Nevertheless, "The Track Of The Cat" is a deeply engrossing bock. What Clark misses by his indefinite allegory and also by his sometimes tedious portrayal of petty details (endless scenes of housework in the ranch kitchen for instance) he makes up for in his absolutely unsurpassed descriptions of the mountains, the storm, the break-up of a strong man under stress, and the general atmosphere of coldness, loneliness and terror.