A Holiday Break: The Big Sky by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.

Books are always the best holiday gift for me. The only thing I like better than the anticipation of reading a long sought after title is the fondness that comes with remembering the discovery of an unexpected treasure.

As I look back on all the books I've profiled here in 2022, the one I'd most like to revisit is The Big Sky by A. B. Guthrie, Jr., which I blogged about back in August. 

Admittedly, I struggled with it, and with its protagonist, Boone Caudill, whom I probably wanted to become something he never would. 

A Strange Man

Everyone who meets Boone comes to a similar conclusion.

A strange man, Boone Caudill, riding rawboned and slouched at the head of the column while his Indian’s braids swung to the swing of his horse. A strange man, with moodiness in him, and quickness to anger and the promise of childlike savagery. Was it the rude half-civilization of the Kentucky frontier that had made him what he was, or his years with the red Arabs of the plains? Watching him ride ahead, his strong shoulders loose and his body giving to the pace of his horse, Peabody concluded he was more Indian than white man. Outwardly he was hardly white man at all. He wore the clothes of an Indian and carried a bag of amulets -- a medicine bundle, as it was called. His voice was rough and deep in his chest, even when the sounds it made were English sounds. His face was dark-eyed, weathered, and often inscrutable. He had a squaw for a wife.

And, although I think some would like to view this as the central question of the novel -- which part of civilization or which part of the wilderness made Boone the way he is -- for me, this seems like a much less interesting question. For Boone is not unique. Boone is the primordial everyman, and asking what made him is similar to asking what made the sky, the plains, or the lodge. Nothing made them. They simply came to be.

Along toward the middle of the day, beyond where even a trickle of water ran, Boone climbed the last lift to the divide. One way the land pitched down to Oregon, to the Flathead and Clark’s Fork and the Columbia and the western sea; the other, it fell off to the Marias and Missouri, to Blackfoot country and Red Horn’s band and Teal Eye carrying his young one in her. It was strange that a man could go off and leave a part of him living behind him and have no power over it and no say-so but only the knowledge that there was a live piece of him that wasn’t with him. It was as if a man couldn’t get free from what he had been and done. He couldn’t be himself alone; he had to be all the other men he was, in the season before and the season before that and the season before that. He couldn’t stand just by what he did now; he had to stand by what he had done in the past, too. Old Dick Summers would understand if he was around to be talked to. Still, it was all right, all right this time. A man knowing he had got himself a young one was all right. It gave him a different feeling from what he had had before, a kind of secret fullness in the chest.

Boone Caudill is no guide -- not through the wilderness, not through the moral universe, not even through himself. So unlike the Pathfinder, in the end, Boone remains lost, not found.

As you enjoy your holiday break, I hope you find some time to curl up with a good book. I know I will.

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This post was written by Eric Lanke, an association executive, blogger and author. For more information, visit www.ericlanke.blogspot.com, follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.