b o o k R e v ie w s 463 Where the Sea Used to Be. By Rick Bass. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 445 pages, $25.00. Review ed by Kate Boyes Hedgebrook Writers Colony From the opening quote by trapper Osborne Russell, who dis cusses wolverine eating habits, to the final scene of a corpselying in the belly of ahuman-shaped coffin, the power of hungerdrives Where the Sea Used to Be. In this novel about the search for oil, Rick Bass contrasts our elemental hungers for food, love, and com munity with our aberrant hunger to devour everything on and below the earth’s surface. Swan Valley, in a remote area of Montana, serves as the novel’s set ting and as one of the novel’s main characters. Just before snow closes the one road leading into Swan Valley, Wallis, a young geologist, is sent there to search for oil. His boss is Old Dudley, an oil man who has “been eating the whole world” for seventy years (3). Dudley is con vinced a gusher lies under the valley, and he has destroyed several geol ogists by overworking them in his decades-long quest for that oil. However, Dudley has been reluctant to live in the valley and handle the search himself, even though his only child lives there, because the place makes him uneasy. He knows the forces of nature make the val ley a place where “man [is] not king” (118). Bass uses brilliant, sometimes disturbing images to show us how the people of Swan Valley, a place of isolation and prolonged cold, might appear to outsiders. When W allis enters the valley in the winter, the people are feasting outside. “They brushed the wind blown snow . . . from the [roasted] pig’s head” and “cut into him with silver knives. . . . Those gathered around the pig made small gasping and groaning sounds of pleasure” (22). Later, Wallis finds a massive sockeye salmon hanging in a refrigerator: “The curved, toothy, underslung jaw; the wild eyes; the torpedo-shaped head . . . it was all as shocking to W allis as if a human body had been hang ing [there]” (32). Later he discovers a body, that of a drowned man left in the river so townspeople can visit it periodically (81). What seems bizarre eventually makes sense. Bass changes our per ceptions through writing that is rich in intricate and delicately crafted details of the interactions between humans and the land. In this novel, “the land” as an abstract concept is transformed; the land becomes a conscious living being that literally shapes human hungers and the actions taken to satisfy those hungers. Bass’s breathtaking language takes readers beyond the comfortable, familiar urban mind (the mind that intellectualizes relationships with nature, the mind that might be 46 4 WAL 3 4 .4 WINTER 2 0 0 0 tempted to argue about anthropomorphism) and shows us the natural world through the wild mind (the mind that knows snow storms can be intentional). Bass shows us nature from the center of its belly. Some hungers go beyond gluttony because they are never satis fied. In Where the Sea Used to Be, Bass cautions us about what can happen when an insatiable hunger-beyond-gluttony for nature’s riches devours our humanity. The Buckskin Line. By Elmer Kelton. New York: Forge, 1999. 287 pages, $22.95. Reviewed by Lew is Toland New Mexico Military Institute, Roswell Elmer Kelton faces two somewhat opposed audiences. His fans expect stories about the Texas frontier and ranching, while he gained academic respectability through The Time It Never Rained (1973); other novels, distinguished by the absence of the traditional, white, coming-of-age protagonists, solidified his reputation: The Day the Cowboys Quit (1971), The Good Old Boys (1978), and The Wolf and the Buffalo (1980). The Buckskin Line falls between these goals of sat isfying both fans and critics. In Buckskin, though, he returns to an orphaned young man torn between impulsiveness and self-denial. Rusty Shannon joins the thin line of Texas Rangers as Secession approaches. His leg wounded by an arrow, he recovers with the Unionist Lon Monahans, whose daughter rather easily becomes his...