Old Three Toes and Other Tales of Survival and Extinction by John Joseph Mathews (review)

Old Three Toes marks another installment in the recovery of Native American literatures launched over the last several decades. Scholars already aware of John Joseph Mathews’s other landmark contributions to the field, most notably his novel Sundown (1934), will find this posthumously published manuscript of nine short stories provocative within several overlapping areas of interest, including Native studies, environmental literature, western American literature, regionalism, naturalism, and animal studies. The collection also constitutes the second manuscript unveiled by Susan Kalter, who pilots the recovery of Mathews’s oeuvre. Her first recovered manuscript, Mathews’s autobiography Twenty Thousand Mornings (2012), augments his life’s work and expands the critical knowledge of Mathews’s significance as “one of the early shapers of the Native American novel” (xviii). Old Three Toes continues to highlight Mathews’s remarkable literary achievements and reinforces his importance to twentieth-century American literature.

These short stories depart from the other genres Mathews published in his lifetime. Although Kalter tells us that he drafted approximately thirty-four short stories, most of them leaned toward non-fiction, and he published few of them (137, 172). This unfinished collection, however, he composed during the 1960s and imagined as a boy’s book (ix). Their settings draw from a wide array of regions, from the American Southwest to the western coast of Scotland, and he narrates the stories from the perspective of various animal and bird protagonists, following the trajectory of their lives from birth to violent death. The rhetorical force of Mathews’s writing remains uneven, but its unpolished moments do not diminish the staggering effect of each story or the overall impact of the collection. Its effect does not merely project human feelings upon animals, a practice Kalter claims Mathews “despised” (149). Instead, these stories read as a refocus of perspective, one infused with emotional hyperbole at times but nonetheless genuine in its imagination of nonhuman animals and bold in its decentering of human life. At its best, Mathews’s prose tenders striking imagery of the natural world, such as when he describes the sandhill cranes in flight as “a kite string that had been severed high above the earth” and the ground below as “yellow sand hills and broken earth that cast inky shadows, and the yellow of the hackberries and the cottonwoods and the willows made the streams into yellow arteries of the earth” (26).

The collection unabashedly addresses conservation concerns, adding diversity to the corpus of environmental writing still sometimes accused of being racially homogenous. Humans do not fare well in these stories, from the incompetent hunting of both men and boys to the malicious use of cyanide and woefully inept conservation efforts. Mathews pulls no punches against what he clearly considers to be the dysfunctional and destructive relationship between humans and the natural world. Outrage often attends the emotional devastation of these stories as in nearly every instance the animal protagonists die wastefully. Kalter later reminds us of the veracity of Mathews’s portrayal, as “wild animals almost never see old age or die without violence” (143), yet these stories exhibit wasteful violence as a symptom of human corruption. For example, hunters and ranchers in the titular story of the collection, when thwarted by a particularly skillful and elusive mountain lion dubbed Old Three Toes, decide to kill him with a bomb dropped from a helicopter. From Old Three Toes’ perspective, Mathews writes, “He crouched and waited for the attack which never came. His racial memories urged him to take this position and fight for his life, but there was nothing in these memories about the attack of mechanism. The bomb killed him instantly” (128). Mathews’ frequent use of the phrase “racial memory” troubles nearly every story. Scholars interested in intersections between race and animality in literature will be intrigued by the use of this phrase as an explanation for the survival instincts of the animals. Mathews also employs other phrases that...