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The Track of the Cat

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Clark's follow-up to City of Trembling Leaves and Ox-Bow Incident is an ambitious but not totally successful attempt at conveying the cold indifference of the natural world and man's supreme isolation in the universe. Often melodramatic, this tale of a clasically dysfunctinal family of ranchers living in the Sierra Nevada is most notable for one extended tour-de-force sequence: Clark's detailed, snowflake-by-snowflake description of a man's disorientation and eventual descent into madness as he tries to find his way out of a mountain blizzard. This harrowing section of the book may be justification enough for reading Track of the Cat.

Almost unknown when it came out in 1949, `Track of the Cat` contains an important message for our environmentally threatened world of 2009. Second novel of Walter Van Tilburg Clark, author of the famed `The Ox-Bow Incident, ` `The Track of the Cat` is also a masterful work by one of America's underappreciated literary giants.

Like its predecessor, `Track of the Cat` is set in the pine and juniper dotted foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. An isolated ranching homestead is where the drama unfolds. It's the early 1900`s and winter has crept in unusually soon to the Sierra. And something is attacking the Bridge family's prime herd of cattle.

The mayhem of the panicked cattle caught high up in the Sierra snowdrifts mirrors the tumult back at the Bridge family ranch house. Of the three Bridge family boys, the first to notice something gone awry, "...to hear the far-away crying, like muted horns a little out of tune," is the sensitive, introspective nature-lover, Arthur. But the eldest son, Curt, aggressive and cynical, brawn behind the ranch holdings, soon hears it too. Convinced that a giant mountain-lion----a `black painter` as he calls it---is harassing the family fortune, he soon drags his dreamy brother out on the hunt for the mysterious killer. While the maniacal Curt and otherworldly Arthur battle the elements in search of their elusive killer, another drama begins back home. Middle son Harold plays umpire in an increasingly tense conflict brewing between his naïve and comely soon-to-be wife, hyper-pious mother, drink besotted father and hysterical little sister.

While his brothers remain out hunting longer than expected, Harold attempts to calm the increasingly despondent mother and an increasingly drunken father. As Arthur's horse soon returns with its frozen and very dead master upon its back, the tense household evolves into a domestic free-for-all. Mother retreats into her citadel of fire and brimstone faith, blaming her son's demise on his `godless` and `heathen` ways. The father, like some inebriated Falstaff, attempts to mask his pain with false humor and ridiculous theatrics. Baby sister Grace disintegrates at the news of her favorite brother's death. Even the outsiders in the Bridge family saga, Gwen, Harold's barely tolerated fiancée and Joe Sam, the ranch's Native American cowpoke, are caught up in the Bridge's dysfunctional family feud. Patient and kind, Gwen fights with her conflicted desire to both escape the maelstrom engulfing her in-laws and at the same time, help out Harold with his domestic struggle. The taciturn wise man of the high desert, Joe Sam stonily and almost contemptuously watches as the white man's family undoes itself with greed and pride.

As if such melodrama were not enough, the novel climaxes with the unfolding of Curt's lonely and tragic tale. Left brother-less by the marauding and always unseen cat, Curt becomes obsessed with destroying the killer of his brother and devourer of the family fortune. The book's second half centers on Curt's drawn-out and painful demise from both an insane hubris and unforgiving Sierra blizzard. With each brilliantly crafted sentence, Clark painstakingly documents Curt's descent into a hell of his own making. Captain Ahab meets King Lear. This is page turning stuff and as one reviewer rightly remarked, the book's last half is reason enough to read the whole of `The Track of the Cat. ` Forget Jack London, Walter Van Tilburg Clark is the master chronicler of man versus nature. With his translucent prose, the pinion-studded hills and basalt-strewn peaks acquire a personality all their own. The natural world becomes a near-sentient antagonist to Curt's bumbling and blinded Oedipus. While always exquisitely hewn, Clark's prose is never anything but accessible and straightforward. While reading `The Track, ` I felt completely transported to Curt's lonely, surreal world, traipsing aimlessly through the October snow with bulky snowshoes, destruction and madness creeping ever closer.

Despite occasional lapses into hackneyed melodramatics, `The Track of the Cat ` grips its reader, never letting go. It is a truly engrossing tale spun in some of the finest wrought prose of post-1945 American literature. More than that, Clark's story provides an ominous parable for our troubled millennium. Its message is one espoused by the naturalist Arthur and shared by the aboriginal Joe Sam: those who refuse to acknowledge and accept their place on nature's mighty wheel are doomed to fall off it. The arrogant and rapacious Curt is not unlike us `civilized` folk who often feel we can manipulate the natural world to fit our own caprices. Clark's novel carries an ominous warning to the Curts of this world. With ice caps shrinking and precious resources dwindling, `The Track of the Cat` reminds us to give distance and respect to that giant `black painter` looming above, hungry, ready to devour us.

The book is almost as much as a classic as Moby Dick is. It's the same thing, man versus nature. And Mr.Clark tells the story with such detail that you believe you're standing there with the characters.