Monday, December 26, 2016

Long Odds (1886)

by H. Rider Haggard

One of the enduring characters of Victorian literature is the adventurer Allan Quatermain, created by H. Rider Haggard. This adventurous hero first made his way into print in the novel King Solomon’s Mines in 1885. One of the interesting things about Haggard’s works about Quatermain is that they appeared completely out of chronological order, coming in whatever order the writer was inspired to put his adventures down on paper. In that first novel the character is fifty-five years old. “Long Odds,” from the following year, however, comes from near the end of the great adventurer’s life. Shortly after telling this story to the narrator, “the death of his only son so unsettled him that he immediately left England, accompanied by two companions, his old fellow-voyagers, Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, and has now utterly vanished into the dark heart of Africa.” The story was first published in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1886, and later included in a collection of stories entitled, Allan’s Wife and Other Tales, the following year. Haggard wrote only a handful of short stories about Quatermain, preferring to chronicle most of his adventures in the novels that followed.

The story begins as a reminiscence by Haggard’s famous protagonist, Allan Quatermain, as an old man. But not right away. The actual narrator first tells how he was even in a position to hear the story after spending a few days at the old adventurer’s home.

          He had eaten his dinner and drunk two or three glasses of old port . . . It was an unusual thing for
          him to do, for he was a most abstemious man . . . Consequently the good wine took more effect on
          him that it would have done on most men, sending a little flush into his wrinkled cheeks, and making
          him talk more freely than usual . . . Generally he would not, for he was not very fond of narrating his
          own adventures, but to-night the port wine made him more communicative.

Walking about his study, looking at his many trophies, Quatermain stops before the head of a lion and claims the beast is still giving him trouble. The narrator asks him to tell the story and he obliges. The year was 1879, and Quatermain was in Africa and heard about quite a lot of ivory that was being brought out to the coast from the interior. “It was a risky thing to go into the country so early, on account of the fever, but I knew that there were one or two others after that lot of ivory, so I determined to have a try for it.” Haggard’s description of the countryside in the grip of fever is wonderful, with mists and smoke all about personifying the dreaded disease.

          I used to creep from the waggon at dawn and look out. But there was no river to be seen--only a long
          line of billows of what looked like the finest cotton wool tossed up lightly with a pitchfork. It was the
          fever mist. Out from among the scrub, too, came little spirals of vapour, as though there were hundreds
          of tiny fires alight in it--reek rising from thousands of tons of rotting vegetation. It was a beautiful place,
          but the beauty was the beauty of death; and all those lines and blots of vapour wrote one great word
          across the surface of the country, and that word was ‘fever.’

At one point he comes upon a deserted village and after uncovering the body of a dead woman he goes inside one of the huts. There were five dead natives inside, including a baby, but on the way out he sees a pair of eyes in the corner and hears screaming as he leaves. It turns out to be an old woman left for dead. Quatermain feeds her and takes her to the next village before continuing on his journey.

His first meeting with the lion comes as his group has stopped to rest for the night. When the driver of the wagon comes back with only one of the oxen, named Kaptein, after putting the others out to feed in the grass, Quatermain is furious and sends two men out to find them. Eventually it gets dark, and when the ox begins to get restless the hunter goes out to take a look around without his gun. In the next instant the great lion is on the back of Kaptein biting his neck. Quatermain trips going for his gun, and is forced to play dead while the lion sniffs at his leg. There’s nothing he can do but wait while the lion feeds, and when the animal roars after finishing, it’s returned by another roar close by which he realizes can only be his mate. “Hardly was the thought out of my head when I caught sight in the moonlight of the lioness bounding along through the long grass, and after her a couple of cubs about the size of mastiffs.” The four of them continue to eat, and presently one of the cubs begins licking Quatermain’s leg. “The more he licked the more he liked it, to judge from his increased vigour and the loud purring noise he made.” It’s only after he begins praying for forgiveness of his sins that the men come back with the oxen and scare the lions off.

The next day, the hunter’s dander up, he decides to hunt down the lions. “Like a fool, I determined to attack the whole family of them.” A few hundred yards from the wagon, he studies the terrain and determines that, if they are around, they would be hiding in the reeds near a water hole, “as there is nothing a lion is fonder of than lying up in reeds, through which he can see things without being seen himself.” As for how to flush them out, he decides that fire will do the trick. The wind was up and heading away from the wagon, so he and his partner, Tom, set fire to the reeds while Quatermain runs around to the opposite side out in the open to wait for them to emerge. “It was a risky thing to do, but I used to be so sure of my shooting in those days that I did not so much mind the risk.” After the false alarm of a reedbuck jumping out first he begins to hear the roaring of the lions. They wait on the edge of the reeds, reluctant to come into the open, but soon the heat becomes too much for them. “I never saw a more splendid sight in all my hunting experience than those four lions bounding across the veldt, overshadowed by the dense pall of smoke and backed by the fiery furnace of the burning reeds.”

This is where Haggard ratchets up the suspense. Quatermain has a clear shot of the male as the group is running for the nearby trees. “I was on, dead on, and my finger was just beginning to tighten on the trigger, when suddenly I went blind--a bit of reed-ash had drifted into my right eye. I danced and rubbed, and succeeded in clearing it more or less just in time to see the tail of the last lion vanishing round the bushes.” Needless to say, after all he had been through, “If ever a man was mad I was that man.” Now the hunter throws all caution to the wind and heads into the trees after them. “I was determined that I would either kill those lions or they should kill me.” But the trees and scrub brush afford the lions much more cover than the grass and Quatermain has to move slowly and methodically. Then one of the cubs makes a break for it and, turning quickly, he manages to shoot him in the spine while his partner Tom finishes him off. But that’s when the trouble begins.

          I opened the breech of the gun and hurriedly pulled out the old case . . . when I tried to get in the new
          case it would only enter half-way; and--would you believe it?--this was the moment that the lioness,
          attracted no doubt by the outcry of her cub, chose to put in an appearance . . . Slowly I stepped back-
          wards, trying to push in the new case. It would not go in, so I tried to pull it out. It would not come out
          either, and my gun was useless . . . The lioness was creeping forward on her belly without a sound, but
          lashing her tail and keeping her eye on me; and in it I saw that she was coming in a few seconds more.

Quatermain tries to push the bullet in until his hand slips and the case cuts his wrist--brandishing the scars on his wrist for the narrator to see--all the while waiting for the lioness to pounce on him. It’s then that he hears Tom yelling from behind him, warning him that he’s been backing up toward the wounded cub all along and that he needs to change directions, which he does. Finally, when she realizes he’s not going toward the cub, the lioness bounds off back into the trees. Tom desperately tries to get Quatermain to call off the hunt, but he’s having none of it. He tells Tom to climb up a tree if he’s scared--which he does--then he wraps a handkerchief around his bleeding wrist and heads back into the trees in search of the other three lions.

Armed now with two bullets in his double-barreled rifle, he throws a rock into the bushes and out comes the other cub. The hunter expertly dispatches it with a shot to the heart. Then the lioness comes out after the cub and he puts the other bullet into her ribs. While he reloads the lioness attempts to kill him before she bleeds out, but by then Quatermain puts another bullet into her heart and finishes her off. “Naturally I was considerably pleased with myself, and having again loaded up, I went on to look for the black-maned beauty who had killed Kaptein.” For the next hour the hunter goes up onto the brush and rocks looking for the lion making sure not to miss a spot, but finds nothing. Finally, he decides to give up for the day, and turning back one last time he suddenly sees something. “On the top of the mass of boulders, opposite to me, standing out clear against the rock beyond, was the huge black-maned lion. He had been crouching there, and now arose as though by magic.”

          But he did not stand long. Before I could fire--before I could do more than get the gun to my shoulder--
          he sprang straight up and out from the rock, and driven by the impetus of that one mighty bound came
          hurtling through the air towards me . . . Without a sight, almost without aim, I fired . . . Next second I
          was swept to the ground, and the lion was on the top of me, and the next those great white teeth of his
          had met in my thigh--I heard them grate against the bone.

Fortunately for Quatermain, the bullet hit home and the lion had only enough energy to stand up once before collapsing on top of him. He was also lucky that the lion hadn’t crushed the bone in his thigh. Nevertheless, “I need scarcely add that I never traded the lot of ivory at Sikukuni's. Another man got it--a German--and made five hundred pounds out of it after paying expenses. I spent the next month on the broad of my back, and was a cripple for six months after that. I have been lame ever since, and shall be to my dying day.”

In terms of literary merit to the story, there’s very little. And that’s exactly the point. This is an adventure yarn from start to finish, and the only goal is to make the readers’ pulse beat quicker and heart pound harder as Quatermain faces certain death. Of course today there’s something unseemly in the protagonist’s hunting down of animals out of pure spite, and his bravery a hundred and fifty years ago now seems like little more than unchecked ego. He was Hemingway before there was Hemingway. But putting that aside, this is a view into a world of adventure that captivated Victorian audiences. Africa was the wildest and most mysterious place on earth. The animals were exotic and sometimes ferocious. “It was wonderfully exciting, work, for I never was sure from one moment to another but that he would be on me. I took comfort, however, from the reflection that a lion rarely attacks a man--rarely, I say; sometimes he does, as you will see--unless he is cornered or wounded.” Unlike Joseph Conrad’s more pessimistic--and more realistic--view of African colonialism later on, H. Rider Haggard presented readers with an escape from their stuffy drawing rooms and hum-drum lives by taking them on adventures that, in the days before cinema, were the most exciting thing imaginable. And on that score, H. Rider Haggard’s “Long Odds” doesn’t disappoint.

Saturday, December 24, 2016

The Gift of Cochise (1952)

by Louis L’Amour

This is the reason I love Louis L’Amour. Though “The Gift of Cochise” is a simple story, I would argue that it is deceptively simple and is actually quite impressive in the things that it does. First published in Collier’s Weekly in the July 5, 1952 issue, it’s the story of Angie Lowe who finds herself alone with her two children in West Dog Canyon in New Mexico in 1878. Her husband Ed has gone south to get supplies in El Paso, but hasn’t returned in four months. Outside her door is a group of Apache Indians, led by Cochise, who is appraising this oddity on the frontier. “Three times the warriors of Cochise had attacked this solitary cabin and three tines they had been turned back. In all, they had lost seven men, and three had been wounded . . . A lone woman with two small children had fought them off . . . and she was prepared to fight now.” When Cochise states the obvious, that her man must be dead, he asks why she doesn’t leave. Angie replies, “Leave? Why, this is my home. This land is mine. This spring is mine. I shall not leave.” This is why I love Louis L’Amour. To understand why, you only have to look at another story, this one by Zane Grey.

In the “The Missouri Schoolmarm” Grey has a group of cowboys arguing about who has been writing to the teacher they’re all in love with. One of them, apparently, broke ranks and wrote to her on the sly. Looking at her return letter, one of them tries to argue that she simply wrote it on her own. “How do we know that?” asked Tex suspiciously. “Shore the boss’ typewriter is a puzzle, but it could hide tracks. Savvy Pards?” Really? Savvy Pards? It’s difficult to slog through even one page of this kind of writing, with characters named Tex and the like. Tex? How many cowboys with that name are there roaming around the West? All this kind of writing does is deal with stereotypes, two-dimensional characters with Southern drawls and clichéd language. But when Louis L’Amour has Angie Lowe tell the Apache leader, “I shall not leave,” there’s a dignity to the language which then translates to the character. There’s a respect to giving characters this kind of language that is light years from something like, “I ain’t a-goin’ anywheres, Chief. Ya git me?” This respect for character, which really gives them humanity, even extends to the natives that L’Amour writes about, and this is what sets even the simplest stories he writes apart from the rest of the pack.

After Angie stares down Cochise with a shotgun in her hand, he respects her strength and fighting spirit and what she’s done. But he still believes his people should be able to drink from her spring and says she is unnecessarily depriving them, to which she replies,

          “Cochise speaks with a forked tongue,” she said. “There is water yonder.” She gestured toward the hills,
          where Ed had told her there were springs. “I have no wish to fight your people. I live in peace when I am
          left in peace. But if the people of Cochise come in peace they may drink at this spring.” The Apache
          leader smiled faintly. Such a woman would rear a nation of warriors.

From that point on, his people not only leave her alone but leave her gifts after drinking from her spring. At this point L’Amour provides backstory on both Angie and Ed. Her father was from New York and her mother a Cajun from New Orleans. She was born en route to Santa Fe and married Ed Lowe after her parents died when she was only seventeen. They had travelled south looking for land and Angie picked out the spot, “Here there were grass, water, and shelter from the wind . . . The house was built in a corner of the cliff, under the sheltering overhang, so that approach was possible from only two directions, both covered by an easy field of fire from the door and windows.”

L’Amour writes the story from the omniscient point of view, with the first section going back and forth between the thoughts of Angie and of Cochise, and later between Ed and Ches Lane. After providing the backstory, the second section deals with Ed Lowe. Angie wasn’t sure she really loved him, but he was nice enough, and felt bad for him because he missed the conversation of other people. So when he gets to town and buys his supplies, he heads for a saloon and some pleasant conversation. When an argument breaks out at a poker table, Ed becomes interested. It turns out Ches Lane was unknowingly playing cards with three brothers of a man he had killed in a fair fight. Too late he realizes they deliberately cheated him in order to provoke an argument and be able to kill him just as fairly. But then, “Ed Lowe moved suddenly from the bar. ‘Three to one is long odds,’ he said, his voice low and friendly. ‘If the gent in the corner is willin’, I’ll side him.” Ed’s hope was that making the sides more even would get the brothers to back off, but one of the brothers fired first. All three of them died in the fight, but unfortunately Ed took a shot to the stomach. His dying words were of Angie. The only thing the bartender knew is that he had lived up north, in Apache country. And then Ches Lane makes a fascinating decision. “A man had died to save his life, and Ches Lane had a deep sense of obligation. Somewhere that wife waited, if she was still alive, and it was up to him to find her and look out for her.”

Ches takes along Ed’s horse, loaded with the supplies, and his own and he heads north to look for Angie. “Actually, West Dog Canyon was more east than north, but this he had no way of knowing.” If there’s a spot in the story that strains credulity it’s here, where Ches winds up fighting Indians all along the way and never gives up.

          He rode north, and soon the Apaches knew of him. He fought them at a lonely water hole, and he
          fought them on the run. They killed his horse, and he switched his saddle to the spare and rode on.
          They cornered him in the rocks, and he killed two of them and escaped by night . . . Grimly, the
          Apaches clung to his trail. The sheer determination of the man fascinated them. Bred and born in a
          rugged and lonely land, the Apaches knew the difficulties of survival; they knew how a man could
          live, how he must live. Even as they tried to kill this man, they loved him, for he was one of their own.

But eventually his luck runs out and after falling asleep hard one night, he was too late waking up and found himself surrounded by Apaches. Ironically, their leader was Cochise. L’Amour does a nice job here of creating suspense because of what the audience knows and the characters don’t. Cochise knows Angie. In fact, he had been to the cabin recently to tell her she should give it up and live with their tribe. Though it was obvious by now that Ed was never coming back, she couldn’t leave. Had Ches told Cochise who he was looking for the story might have been resolved there, but Ches had no way of knowing that. When the Indians take him to a hill of red ants to tie him down and torture him to death, he confronts them with everything he can, calling them women and insulting them in order to die an honorable death. Finally, his words hit home. “‘Give me a knife, and I will fight!’ Ches turned on Cochise, as the Indians stood resolute. ‘You are afraid! Free my hands and let me fight!’ He demanded ‘If I win, let me go free.’” Cochise finally agrees and one of the brave picks up a knife to challenge him. But Ches has no illusions, as Cochise says, “I promise you nothing but an honorable death.” Now Ches knows, “He had not only to defeat this Apache but to escape.” He wins the fight, but decides not to kill his opponent. When he get on his horse the Apache’s don’t let him leave, though they let him keep his knife. Then they begin taking him somewhere and refuse to tell him the destination. Finally they show up at Angie’s.

The conclusion to the story is another delight. This, then, is the title of the story. Ches is the gift that Cochise gives to Angie, and though this offends our Western sensibilities of love, L’Amour does a beautiful job in ending the story in a way that makes perfect sense and leaves the reader incredibly satisfied. This story is less a typical “western” than it is a frontier story, which is also what makes it so good to read. L’Amour doesn’t spend any time on the battles that Ches Lane has with the Indians as he makes his way north, because that’s not the point. One of the other nice aspects to the story is the verisimilitude in using Cochise, an actual Chirichua Apache from southern Arizona. The Apaches had a fierce reputation as killers in the Southwest, but then that is only from the perspective of the white man. As Cochise himself said when he finally gave up his battle, “When I was young I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apaches. After many summers I walked again and found another race of people had come to take it. How is it? Why is it that the Apache wait to die?” For so many natives, fighting back against white incursion was the only choice they had if they weren’t going to completely give up and, in the words of Cochise, “wait to die.” Louis L’Amour’s “The Gift of Cochise” is a tremendous piece of writing, and one of my favorites of his stories.