The Trackers

Finding the Telltales

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Let’s see if I can lay down a reading track for you. Edie, a friend, is a prolific reader and has opened my eyes to reading books I normally wouldn’t read. Austin, her husband, tells everyone he doesn’t read books, he listens to their audio narrations. He enjoys the dramatic nuances the narrator(s) adds in presenting what would to him be text as dry as toast.

Austin opened my eyes to how books can be consumed. I’m not much of an audio book consumer. To stay awake, I have to do something in addition to listening, but then I lose concentration. Since I’ve both broadened the books I’m reading, and I’m writing novels, I’ve learned to adjust my reading to catch the dramatic nuances. I’m now getting much more out of books.

This is why most book reviews in this newsletter have an excerpt, demonstrating not only what makes the book an interesting read, but capturing a bit of the conflict we readers find so interesting. If readers of this newsletter come away with a better sense of capturing that for themselves, whether reading or listening, so much the better.

The drama and nuances are in there, waiting for us to find and follow.

Which leads us to The Trackers by Charles Frazier. 

Val is a depression era painter on a public works project, painting a mural in a post office in Dawes, Wyoming. He stays outside of town on a ranch owned by Long, an arts patron. Long is wealthy, a former WWI sniper, with an interest in politics. He’s married to Eve, who has a checkered past as a traveling singer and hobo.

Part of what makes The Trackers fun to read is what lurks in the background- the myths of the West, sorting truth from the facts. Val’s mural is The Trackers- two Crow guides and John Colter, with buffalo in the background. But Val meets Faro, Long’s right-hand man and with a reputation as a dangerous killer.

Here are Val (the narrator) and Faro porch sitting, drinking beers, getting to know one other. Listen (inside your head or read it aloud) to the back and forth:

I said, People come in for postal business and to see what I’m doing, how I’m spending their tax dollars. They like to tell me what they think is interesting about Dawes and what ought to be in the mural. Your name comes up.

Faro said, What? A historic figure?

—A survivor of the Wild West. A remnant of the past. One of the last of the . . .

Faro broke in and said, I’m not the last of anything. Plenty of people older’n me still roam above the ground. Aim yourself toward one of those elders. I knew a fellow over in Nebraska, an old Sioux warrior named He Dog. Died not long ago. About a hundred. Rode with Crazy Horse. Fought at Little Bighorn. You ought to have painted him. He had a face looked like the side of a canyon.

I said, Well, if all the stories they tell about you were true, you’d have to be about ninety yourself.

—Some days I feel it. Some days I feel twenty.

—They say you did all kinds of things. That you were a gunfighter.

—Good God. Being in a couple of gunfights doesn’t make anybody a gunfighter.

—They say you were down in New Mexico during the Lincoln County War and that you and Billy the Kid were friends. That you helped him and Pat Garrett set up the con where he wasn’t killed but went to Mexico.

Faro looked off and thought. Real flat he said, OK, you got me on that one.

I was startled and showed it. I said, What? You knew Billy?

Faro said, So we’ve established you’ll believe anything?

In this trail sign of the story, Faro enjoys teasing an Easterner like Val. And playing two shades of coy mixed in with some gray reality.

Long’s wife, Eve, takes off, and the reader wonders why she gave up a nice gig, married to a wealthy guy, no more riding the rails to survive. Has she gone back to her old life? Needing to keep his reputation pristine for a career in politics, Long hires Val to go find her. Val can’t turn the generous payment down and finds himself a modern-day tracker, traveling across the continent and into cities. The confluence of the trails—will he find her? Why did she leave? What price does Val have to pay?—keep us reading.

As you read in the passage above, Frazier doesn’t like quotation marks to delineate dialogue. I’m sure he has his reasons. Here’s my take: it slows me down. I had to take more care, more time than normal. Had it been a lesser book, I would’ve put it down, unfinished.

Here’s the other thing. As I read the dialogue, it pulled me away from the characters. I imagined a narrator spoke their parts, which I’m sure is the opposite of what the author intended. I hope you can read it more closely. Maybe my friend Austin knows best in how to consume a book like this—by audio narration.

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As another western story, I glanced at James Wade's All Things Left Wild. This was Wade’s debut novel and he’s written several others since. Haven’t had time to read it, but the prologue caught my eye:

Two barn swallows hopped and danced between thin branches in a grove of tangled salt cedar, never getting too close or too far from another. It was as if their movements were circumscribed by some choreography they were born knowing, and should either decide to quit the routine, the other would surely die of incertitude, and the world would become in an instant a less balanced place.

I watched them, turning away from the sad scene in front of me. The cemetery wasn’t much to look at, unless you were needing to look at wood crosses and chewed-up dirt. There were a few rocks. Somebody had tried to set up a little fence around the graves and their markers, but it didn’t take and now there were old posts lying about on the ground like bodies waiting to be buried themselves.

The narrator is sixteen-year-old Caleb who, together with his brother Shelby, lost their mom to illness. Their dad ran off some time ago. They steal horses from Randall, who they blame for laying off their dad, sort of what goes around comes around. Randall sets out to get them back. Randall has problems of his own- his wife blames him for losing their son during the horse raid. The exact circumstances are unknown. Was it an accident? Did the boys kill him?

Only one way to find out.

All the Best,

Geoff

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