The Track of the Cat

by Walter Van Tilburg Clark and VAN TILBURG CLARK WALTER

Book Overview

Walter Van Tilburg Clark's classic novel -- a tale of four men who fear a marauding mountain lion but swear to conquer it -- is a gripping exploration of the conflict between good and evil. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803263074
• ISBN13: 9780803263079
• Release Date: January 1981
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Length: 344 Pages
• Weight: 0.83 lbs.

Customer Reviews

High Sierra Drama

Almost unknown when it came out in 1949, `Track of the Cat` contains an important message for our environmentally threatened world of 2009. Second novel of Walter Van Tilburg Clark, author of the famed `The Ox-Bow Incident, ` `The Track of the Cat` is also a masterful work by one of America's underappreciated literary giants. Like its predecessor, `Track of the Cat` is set in the pine and juniper dotted foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. An isolated ranching homestead is where the drama unfolds. It's the early 1900`s and winter has crept in unusually soon to the Sierra. And something is attacking the Bridge family's prime herd of cattle. The mayhem of the panicked cattle caught high up in the Sierra snowdrifts mirrors the tumult back at the Bridge family ranch house. Of the three Bridge family boys, the first to notice something gone awry, "...to hear the far-away crying, like muted horns a little out of tune," is the sensitive, introspective nature-lover, Arthur. But the eldest son, Curt, aggressive and cynical, brawn behind the ranch holdings, soon hears it too. Convinced that a giant mountain-lion----a `black painter` as he calls it---is harassing the family fortune, he soon drags his dreamy brother out on the hunt for the mysterious killer. While the maniacal Curt and otherworldly Arthur battle the elements in search of their elusive killer, another drama begins back home. Middle son Harold plays umpire in an increasingly tense conflict brewing between his naïve and comely soon-to-be wife, hyper-pious mother, drink besotted father and hysterical little sister. While his brothers remain out hunting longer than expected, Harold attempts to calm the increasingly despondent mother and an increasingly drunken father. As Arthur's horse soon returns with its frozen and very dead master upon its back, the tense household evolves into a domestic free-for-all. Mother retreats into her citadel of fire and brimstone faith, blaming her son's demise on his `godless` and `heathen` ways. The father, like some inebriated Falstaff, attempts to mask his pain with false humor and ridiculous theatrics. Baby sister Grace disintegrates at the news of her favorite brother's death. Even the outsiders in the Bridge family saga, Gwen, Harold's barely tolerated fiancée and Joe Sam, the ranch's Native American cowpoke, are caught up in the Bridge's dysfunctional family feud. Patient and kind, Gwen fights with her conflicted desire to both escape the maelstrom engulfing her in-laws and at the same time, help out Harold with his domestic struggle. The taciturn wise man of the high desert, Joe Sam stonily and almost contemptuously watches as the white man's family undoes itself with greed and pride. As if such melodrama were not enough, the novel climaxes with the unfolding of Curt's lonely and tragic tale. Left brother-less by the marauding and always unseen cat, Curt becomes obsessed with destroying the killer of his brother and devourer of th

Great Book

The book is almost as much as a classic as Moby Dick is. It's the same thing, man versus nature. And Mr.Clark tells the story with such detail that you believe you're standing there with the characters.