Mountain Sheep and Man in the Northern Wilds by Valerius Geist (review)

Reviews 75 Climbing in North America undoubtedly lacks the literary brilliance of certain anthologies — for example, Galen Rowell’s The Vertical World of Yosemite — and the close-to-the-rock feeling of most climbing autobiog­ raphies. It is, after all, an historical survey and not a piece of climbing literature. But it does exhibit some of the interesting characteristics of the field — mainly, a spare style of pleasing directness, perhaps the result of working through situations of high danger, where discipline and precision are basic requirements. In the intense controversy of recent times over climbing “ethics” — that is, how much technical aid is too much — Jones takes a comprehensive and thus fair-minded position, while seeming to lean toward the traditional British feeling summed up in Frank Smythe’s words “It is knowing where to draw the line that counts in life. Does the sportsman take an automatic weapon to kill his tiger? He does not.” Climbers have confronted the ethical dimensions of technology much more directly than most other inhabitants of industrial culture, and their attempts to come to terms with “hardware” may be instructive. Climbing in North America will be a useful book; it is a map that has needed to be drawn. It is illustrated by 189 photographs, some of them of stunning beauty, and is only marred, unfortunately, by apparently cursory proofreading. THOMAS J. LYON, Utah State University Mountain Sheep and Man in the Northern Wilds. By Valerius Geist. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. 248 pages, $10.00.) I find books that begin “once upon a time” with a story about a man and a cabin almost irresistible, inviting the reader, as they do, into a vision of things that is both autobiographical and a fairy tale. There are a number of such books and Mountain Sheep and Man is an interesting addition to what must be considered a sub-genre of non-fiction prose. Like Walden and Desert Solitaire — to name some of the ancestors on one side of the family — Mountain Sheep and Man also turns out to be a fable for the times. Mountain Sheep and Man is a companion to Valerius Geist’s first book, Mountain Sheep: a Study in Behavior and Evolution, which won the Book of the Year Award from The Wildlife Society in 1972. It begins, as I say, as a story: “a scientist’s odyssey” into rugged northern British Columbia in 1961 — “The Spatzisi” for those wanting to keep their geography straight — and the adventures he had there with “the land in which he lived, the people whom he met, and the animals that he studied.” The most appealing 76 Western American Literature of those adventures are those concerned with the animals that he went to study — the Stone’s sheep — rather than the land or the people. The people are interesting but not memorable. And while Geist has the power to evoke a sense of place, he has a love (and understanding) of sheep that goes beyond that of either place or people. The exceptions are his evocation of sudden winter storms and his own personal trials. We meet him in the opening chapter in the engaging character of “the ecologist,” concerning whom Geist has a detached and ironic view: “how human these eggheads can be,” he reflects. It is the utterly convincing portrayal of the narrator-commentator that carries the book. At the beginning of his adventures he is a man without an identity either as a type or as an individual. By the end of the book, he exists as a professional and as a personality. He differs from other scientists initially, he says, because he has forsaken the laboratory for the field — in this case the wilderness. But out there he is also unbelievable. Unbelievable that is to those who are familiar with the usual types one finds in the wild: logger, hiker, alienated students, rancher and, yes, even bum. How to know the man, says Geist, is the question. One possibility is to focus on the place he works— the land: “tell of its splendor, the snowcovered peaks, crystal-clear lakes, the morning mist over the meadow, the babbling trout stream, or the...