In his epic masterpieces ‘Lonesome Dove’ and ‘Streets of Laredo,’ Larry McMurtry breathed new life into the vanished American West and created two of the most memorable heroes in contemporary fiction: Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call. Now McMurtry dazzles us once more with the long-awaited story of their early adventures.
As young Texas Rangers, Gus and Call have much to learn about survival in a land fraught with perils: not only blazing heat and raging tornadoes, roiling rivers and merciless Indians, but also the deadly whims of soldiers. On their first expeditions -- led by incompetent officers and accompanied by the robust, dauntless whore known as the Great Western -- they will face death at the hands of the cunning Comanche war chief Buffalo Hump and the silent Apache Gomez. They will be astonished by the Mexican army. And Gus will meet the love of his life….
That’s from the back of my paperback copy. And, as usual, Dead Man’s Walk is all of those things, but it is also -- possibly -- something not described.
Call and Gus stood together, watching. They had never before seen a party of Indians on the move. Of course, in San Antonio there were a few town Indians, drunk most of the time. Now and then they saw an Indian of a different type, one who looked capable of wild behaviour.
But even those unruly ones were nothing like what Call and Gus were watching now: a party of fighting Comanches, riding at ease through the country that was theirs. These Comanches were different from any men either of the young Rangers had ever seen. They were wild men, and yet skilled. Buffalo Hump had held a corpse on the back of his racing pony with one hand. He had scalped Zeke Moody without even getting off his horse. They were wild Indians, and it was their land they were riding through. Their rules were not white rules, and their thinking was not white thinking. Just watching them ride away affected young Gus and young Call powerfully. Neither of them spoke until the Comanches were almost out of sight.
This is clearly the story of “young Gus and young Call” and, as such, it is somewhat limited in its scope. Young Gus and Young Call, after all, have to grow up to be Old Gus and Old Call, so there are only so many scrapes that they can get into in Dead Man’s Walk. But their view here of the “wild Indians” is revealing for what it says and what it doesn’t.
In the narrative, Buffalo Hump and his Comanche warriors had just attacked the squad of Texas Rangers, killing some and scalping others. The encounter unnerves young Gus and young Call, and makes them both realize that they -- even as famed Texas Rangers -- are up against something neither of them understand nor, likely, are competent to deal with.
The land before him, which looked so empty, wasn’t. A people were there who knew the emptiness better than he did; they knew it even better than Bigfoot or Shadrach. They knew it and they claimed it. They were the people of the emptiness.
A lot of Dead Man’s Walk is about this journey through another people’s emptiness -- or, more pointedly; another people’s fullness that was only perceived as empty. Time and time again, young Gus and young Call will encounter these Comanches, and the Comanches will slowly kill more and more of their number, steal more and more of their horses, until they are practically alone and barefoot in the emptiness.
They were scared: they had ridden out of Austin into a world where the rules were not white rules, where torture and mutilation awaited the weak and the unwary, the slow, the young.
Thematically, there is this clash of cultures, this way in which “white rules” has been surrounded and subsumed by the “people of the emptiness,” and there are only a handful of times in which McMurtry allows the white rules to exert themselves.
“Ain’t you going to scalp him?” Bigfoot asked. “You killed him. It’s your scalp.”
Call was startled. It had never occurred to him to scalp the Comanche boy. He was a young boy. Although he was glad that he had escaped death himself, he felt no pride in the act he had just committed -- the boy had been daring, in his view, to float down a swollen river, armed only with a knife, clinging to a dead mule in hopes of surprising and killing an armed Ranger. The reward for his bravery had been a bullet wound that nearly tore his head off. He would never ride the prairies again, or raid farms. Although he had had to kill him, Call thought the boy’s bravery deserved better than what it had got him. There would be no time to bury the boy, anyway -- the thought of cutting his hair off did not appeal.
“No, I don’t want to scalp him,” Call said.
“He would have scalped you, if he could have,” Bigfoot said.
“I don’t doubt it,” Call said. “Scalping’s the Indian way. It ain’t my way.”
“It’ll be your way when you’re a year or two older, boy -- if you survive,” Shadrach said. Then he casually knelt by the Comanche boy and took his scalp. When he finished, he pulled the boy well back into the current and let him float away.
It’s small, and it’s feeble, but it is Call’s (and McMurtry’s) way of exerting his misplaced frontier morality. Most of the time, however, it is the Indians and their ways that drive the Rangers, not the other way around.
As Buffalo Hump approached, holding his spotted pony to a slow walk, Call felt the air change. The Comanche’s body shone with grease; a necklace made of claws hung on his bare chest. Call looked at Gus, to see if he felt the change, and Gus nodded. They had entered the air of the wild men -- even the smell of the Indian horses was different.
They change the very air around them, enveloping their white adversaries with an “air of danger,” or the “air where quick death is.”
And even when Call and Gus try to adapt to these Indian ways in order to better survive in their emptiness, they are miserable failures.
“How do Indians ever kill them?” Call asked, looking at the buffalo. It seemed to be merely resting, its head on its knees.
“Why, with arrows -- how else?” Bigfoot asked.
Call said nothing, but once again he felt a sense of trespass. It had taken three men, with rifles, pistols, and knives, an hour to kill one beast; yet, Indians did it with arrows alone -- he had watched them kill several on the floor of the Palo Duro Canyon.
A sense of trespass. That sums up the hidden part of Dead Man’s Walk pretty well. Gus and Call are trespassing in a place they don’t belong. They collide again and again with this rough reality, and throughout, despite all the painful lessons that they are given, they never seem to adapt or truly learn.
“We’re back where it’s wild again,” Call said.
Lady Carey happened to overhear the remark -- she drew rein for a moment, looking toward a faint outline of mountains in the east.
“Yes, it’s wild, isn’t it,” she said. “It’s like a smell. I smelled it in Africa and now I smell it here.”
“It means we have to be careful,” Call said.
Lady Carey looked again at the distant mountains.
“Quite the contrary, Corporal Call,” she said. “It means we have to be wild, like the wild men.”
And that’s, ultimately, the problem. Young Gus and Young Call can’t be wild, because they have to become Old Gus and Old Call. Perhaps Dead’s Man Walk can be read as the set of experiences that helped form those essential characters, but, frankly, I found myself more frequently rooting for Buffalo Hump and wishing for his story to be more fully told.
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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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