Bobcat Year by Hope Ryden

Abstract

358 Western American Literature bond with those who have gone before her. Moffat writes of a literal, pioneer trail and a metaphoric, personal one. She tells us that for her they fuse, that the literal and the metaphoric come together in the western moun­ tains. At the start of her trip, Moffat’s first descriptions are so factual that it is not easy to recognize preoccupations with states of mind. The land, not Moffat, is “alien”; morning is “like a bad day in the Scottish Highlands.” (She had lost a friend there.) Moffat, as seen by us through language, is unresponsive, better-oriented to things she already knows, caring about quantitative measure, using language that is controlled, unimaginative, unfeeling, but without falsification. “The country looked flat, but once into it, it was a maze of dry gullies of varying depths.” By Wyoming there are changes. Moffat reports herself “punch-drunk with images.” As she becomes changed by experience her sentences expand, her ideas become more complex, and image and metaphor become abundant. She uses cliches, seldom chooses what gives pleasure as a perfect word; and yet words work for her. She can call a “vista” a “world,” and when her statement comes after paragraphs of increasingly-expansive prose a reader can set aside cliché and believe that Moffat means and feels that what she looks out on could in fact be everything. Hard. Road West depends on language that makes dual statements. The language of experience, that looks as if it derived from an actual preliminary journal, gives us emergent metaphor and style that come spontaneously when life becomes joyous; superimposed, controlling metaphors order the book and establish its overview. Sometimes the languages are distinct; sometimes they blend; always they interrelate. We cannot tell how near an actual journal, how near spontaneity the book is. And metaphor can tease. Specu­ lation on those problems could well be a reader’s hard road west. JOANNA LLOYD, Rutgers University Bobcat Year. By Hope Ryden. (New York: The Viking Press, 1981. 211 pages, $15.95.) Nature writing as a literary genre has become increasingly popular as the public’s environmental awareness has increased. Consequently, there have emerged a number of writers with the special combination of creative writing ability and scientific knowledge necessary for true nature writing. The combination of undistorted, unsentimentalized factual accuracy with vivid, evocative writing that creates an experience of nature in the imagina­ tion of the reader makes special demands that not every writer can meet. Hope Ryden is one who has achieved that combination. Reviews 359 This is Ryden’s seventh book about wild animals, three of those for children. Her others have dealt with wild horses, coyotes, and the Florida Key deer. She is an accomplished nature photographer as well as writer, and this book, like her others, presents a series of photographs to illustrate her text. This book, however, is different in approach. Her original plan had been to observe a captive bobcat family from the birth of a litter of kittens on through their growth and development. When her plans went irretriev­ ably awry with the death of the litter, she was left with a variety of observa­ tions of and experiences with bobcats in various parts of the West, but with no other unifying element than the species itself. Ryden solved her problems by writing a fictional narrative of a year in the lives of a population of bobcats in Idaho. Such an approach presents many dangers to the nature writer — anthropomorphism, sentimentality, excessive dramatization — but Ryden has avoided them all. Birth and sudden death, hunting and play, failure and success are all presented sim­ ply as accepted elements in the life of a wild predator whose survival is always precarious. In such a presentation, she deals with behavioral patterns, including problem-solving techniques and motivation, but she carefully keeps these processes within the range of a bobcat’s conscious awareness and instinctive response. She uses patterns she has actually observed in various contexts in various places, fitting them into her narrative framework in ways that seem acceptably probable. Ryden’s style is clear, direct, and interesting without being overly dra­ matic. Her sympathy...