Journeys to the Far North by Olaus Murie (review)

84 Western American Literature and litde children who had little risk.” But Panchika is forced to go to the Vicar for Confession one Saturday when the doyen is out of town, and she gives the old man a confession which causes the obdurate prefect to charge out of the stall “like a man demented.” He violates the sanctity of the confessional by going immediately to the poor girl’s parents and revealing all he had been told in confidence. Panchika, her attempts at repristination thwarted, arrives home to find her mother “collapsed on the bed,” her father “waiting with a heavy razor strop in his hand,” and thus is forced to run “screaming into the night.” The girl takes up with a local playboy, Agustin, son of the town smuggler. Tragedy strikes when the two are discovered at the local inn after a faulty heater releases fumes which kill the boy and render the girl unconscious. The remainder of the story deals with the attempts of the smuggler’s family to thwart the vicar who, having caused all the trouble, self-righteously refuses to allow Agustin a Catholic mass and burial because he had died in sin. The book’s title summarizes Laxalt’s attempt to capture the stories o f his people scattered in a hundred villages and buried in a hundred graveyards. Though a few stories lack merit, the Nevada writer’s book is an engrossing portrayal of the Basque people, a group seldom captured in anything other than oral tradition. His first person account suffers only if the book is taken as an apodictic whole rather than as a sketchbook with strong unifying themes. Laxalt’s knowledge of his subject is unchallenged, and the book is a valuable addition to an ethnic study of the Basques. HENRY JOSEPH NUWER, University of Nevada Journeys to the Far North. By Olaus Murie. (Palo Alto: The Wilderness Society and American West Publishing Company, 1973. 255 pages, $8.95.) This book is a record of Olaus Murie’s travels in the Arctic, some of them, and it is extremely interesting as an account of older, simpler times. One travels on foot, or by dog team, or by canoe in summer; one learns the habits of animals and the natural pace of sunrise, sunset, and the seasons. The weather is a determining element. All around are the dark spruce woods, or the open sweep of the tundra. The context is wilderness, and the wild, natural powers of observation and action grow as the body toughens in authentic tasks and dangers. Journeys to the Far North is an adventure — an excursion, I suppose, now — into reality. Now, in retrospect, I want to be back again, with a loaded sled creaking its way over rough ice or running smoothly and quietly over level Reviews 85 places, with a good team of dogs trotting steadily in front, muzzles low, tails waving high — and the snow stretching away until broken by the blue line of woods where we might camp for the night. In this wild world, food does not come in packages, and fluctuations in its abundance occur from natural reasons. One naturally shares what one has, with the small, close group one travels with. The feelings between people, even across the cultural distance between a young white scientist and a family of Eskimos, are easily known. Murie held no brief for the white man’s burden: I had obtained a muskrat, skinned it, and was preparing the specimen in my tent. W etunnok cam e in on one o f his frequent visits. “Wetunnok, do your people want this meat?” He looked at me questioningly, and finally said, “No, we don’t eat that kind of meat.” I knew very well that they ate any kind of meat. I replied, “All right, then I will eat it myself.” He looked at me with surprise, and then went quietly away. The accounts of Indian and Eskimo people here are insightful and evenhanded . Murie studied the local people’s adaptations to their climate and land­ scape with a practical eye, because he was trying to learn the requirements of the land — not trying to impose on...