Clark’s “Strange Hunting”: The Ritual
Robert Brophy
Volume 3, Number 3b
Clark’s “Strange Hunting”: The Ritual
Robert Brophy
Volume 3, Number 3b
1. Clark’s narrative title “Strange Hunting” should be read as magnificent understatement, intentionally ambiguous: Men hunt cougars / the gods hunt men. It is enigmatic only to those estranged from what Jeffers called “the archetype body of life” (CP 1:512), the truth of earth. There is in the story’s action a sac-rificial inevitability. The human world has, perhaps more distractedly than through conscious malice, transgressed. A trap is set; a fall is foredoomed. Death will be larger than life.
2. The poem’s style and structure are headlong story, showing almost no episodes but continuous flow, a precipitous crescendo up to the surreal ending, a quest taking on preternatural qualities. Lack of verse-paragraphs prevents a reader’s search for careful sequencing but instead delivers headlong phantasmagoria. The narrative, over-thick, serves unbearable compression—as the roles of hunter and hunted are reversed.
3. The panther mutates from an any-color puma to a black, weightless, avenging apotheosis. The hunter becomes Pentheus, victim of his own trespass. The painter’s kill is ritual execution, a sacrifice to the wild; the gods have had too much of men. Curt Harlowe’s final immolation is without self-defense; one cannot fight a god. Archetypically the panther is a divine surrogate, Dionysus and the Christ of the Apocalypse coming in retaliation.
4. The landscape is almost abstract: curtains of white, removal of demarcating signs, an interiorizing of the conflict in flux of thoughts and fears. A distanced screeching becomes Curt’s own. The surface snow is dustlike, deceptive, disorienting; the advantage given snowshoes abruptly becomes a swamping of flight.
5. As to Clark’s theme, one can venture that it is the wild’s pent-up response to exploitation and to the ranch culture’s demythologizing the land into acreage, its corrupting of the land’s mysticism. Acteon has desecrated Diana’s preserve and is called to account.
6. Although the ranchers’ industry is not personally demonized (the Harlowes are not villains), the point is that their kind’s reduction of the landscape to square-footage for grazing space and their utilitarian counting of cattle losses against the panther’s natural need for prey deny earth’s balance and repudiate the food chain.
7. Old Harlowe’s quintessential, monochromic eye for profit is America’s, the unconscious arrogance and ecological sacrilege of the frontier spirit. At its extreme, without awe this profit-motive might fill the Grand Canyon for electric power, count and clear-cut whole redwood forests for their lumber footage, level Big Sur’s Pico Blanco as a lime pillar to be rendered, strip-mine copper for efficiency, extinguish species like Yellowstone wolves. Though perhaps unreflectively, the ranchers’ rapacity mimics and rivals America’s.
8. Clark’s Cardo is Jeffers’s Onorio Vasquez but a step beyond. Cardo actually channels for and from his race, now dominated, demeaned, and dismissed by the Anglo intruder. He bewails the judgment of the territory’s gods and does not exult in it because, at a deeper level, he recognizes his brotherhood with the ranchers through common DNA and blood. No race is an island. But his visions have power and truth; they are the earth’s revulsion, the life-force’s counterstrokes anticipated. The panther is possibly the native’s totem animal, is his race’s mystical connection to the awesome world that demands prayer directed to the hunted deer before its flesh is taken and eaten—so opposite to the rancher’s head-count of beef as a kind of flesh-crop, and its extermination mode against the panther as though a kind of insect needing eradication by pesticide.
9. Cardo’s visions are true like Onorio’s, but he does not coddle them (think here of “The Loving Shepherdess” (CP 2:96) where Onorio’s “chastity-block” to save his visions prevents him from saving Clare). Cardo suffers the primal communications and “transports” them to a civilization which has no ears to hear until it is too late. The tale then becomes a kind of parable and prophecy in microcosm of the marauding race’s future come-uppances—much as Jeffers anticipates apocalypse for Western Civilization in Tamar’s dream of the races going into the sea (CP 1:34–35) and the vision of WWI as spectral, torch-bearing northering troops of extermination (CP 1:39), or in “The Loving Shepherdess,” Clare’s automaton pilgrimage north summing up migrations and heading with them toward extinction (CP 2:74), or in “Thurso’s Landing,” the small family as vanguard of future mass-extinction, seen as presaging the final foundering of the Western ship of fools (CP 2:218–19). In a way Cardo’s voice is like that of Jeffers’s redeemer in the poem of that name, looking back over the landscape that has been ravaged and the weaker races not absorbed but subjected to genocide.
“There never . . . was any people earned so much ruin.”10. Jeffers makes his spokesperson a homesteader who is clearly a half-mad parody of himself in tirade. Clark chooses subtlety over Jeffers’s confrontational stance. Long ago this writer taught a course in Western American Lit-erature in which Clark’s “The Indian Well” was prominent. It concerns a miner-squatter who with his burro Jenny comes on a spring that functions much like the center of the world to which all animals, birds, and reptiles come for drink and to prey on each other according to the exigencies of the food-chain. While the man Sutter is asleep in an abandoned shack, a cougar approaches the spring to drink and Jenny falls prey to him. With dedicated vengeance Sutter waits in ambush all winter and into spring to kill the killer, not only delivering a coup de grace but pumping five additional shots into the dead animal. On its surface the tale is out of Disney, a sentimental Bambi narration. It took class discussion to open the true authorial intent. The cat was not at fault; it followed its nature just as the roadrunner did in capturing a snake, the hawk a lizard, the coyote a rabbit. The crime needing outrage was not the cat’s preying on the burro but the man’s killing this natural predator for doing what it was supposed to do.
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They have done what never was done before. Not as a people takes a land to love it and be fed,
A little, according to need and love, and again a little; sparing the country tribes, mixing
Their blood with theirs, their minds with all the rocks and rivers, their flesh with the soil: no, without hunger
Wasting the world and your own labor, without love possessing, not even your hands to the dirt but plows
Like blades of knives; heartless machines; houses of steel: using and despising the patient earth . . .
Oh as a rich man eats a forest for profit and a field for vanity, so you came west and raped
The continent and brushed its people to death. Without need, the weak skirmishing hunters, and without mercy. (“A Redeemer,”CP 1:406–07)
11. Clark’s work demands reflection. It would seem that his philosophy, like Jeffers’s, is that mankind is part of a wondrous eco-system in which there is interaction and should be interrespect. Animals do what they do by nature and the eco-balance is mostly kept. Humans however create an artificial, self-overserving system in which they claim to be the center and to constitute the only members that count. The reader need sense that both authors write parables corrective of this human megalomania. Otherwise one may read “The Indian Well,” as also “Strange Hunting,” miss Clark’s point, and take away its opposite.
Robert Brophy, Senior Editor of Jeffers Studies and emeritus faculty of California State University Long Beach, is author of Robinson Jeffers: Myth, Ritual, and Symbol in His Narrative Poems and editor of Robinson Jeffers: Dimensions of a Poet.