RADIGAN - Book review

Louis L’Amour’s novel Radigan was first published in 1958.

Tom Radigan has worked on his land at Vache Creek in New Mexico for five years with the help of half-breed John Child. He’s taken aback when a Texan woman, Angelina Foley, comes into the nearby town claiming the land is hers, not Tom’s. She backs up the claim with a Spanish grant and about thirty men, mostly hardcase gunfighters, and several hundred of cattle.

Told in third person omniscient point-of-view, the story moves along fast with L’Amour’s inimitable wry viewpoint.

Radigan’s gaze was ‘disconcertingly direct in times of trouble, and men who faced him at such times found that gaze unnerving and upsetting to sudden action. At least such reports had come from three men... two others had been in no condition to volunteer any information’ (p5).

Radigan and Child are joined by the latter’s adopted daughter, eighteen-year-old Gretchen; he traded four horses for her from the Comanche Indians.

Convinced that the Foley claim is bogus, Radigan is determined to fight for what is rightfully his.

Like many L’Amour westerns, you cross a well-described land, knowing that the author has trod and ridden here and he is familiar with the whole terrain. And there's a map of the relevant area. The various characters are neatly drawn with a few brush-strokes. The descriptions are at many times visual, so that you’re there:

‘Raindrop felt his cheeks with blind, questing fingers... the black trunks of the trees were like iron bars against the grey of gathering pools’ (p12).

‘The stage rolled to a stop and the cloud of dust that had pursued it now caught up and drifted over it, settling on the horses and around them’ (p57).

‘Firelight flickered on the flanks of the horses and reflected from polished saddle leather’ (p82).

There is a fist-fight or two, a gunfight, all leavened with suspense and action, and not forgetting humour:

‘he was thinking, working around the herd of his thoughts trying to get a rope on the one he needed...’ (p120)

‘Loma Coyote was not much as towns went, and as towns went, Loma Coyote would someday go’ (p155).

‘My name is Will Haftowate. And that’s what you’ll have to do’ (p161).

A satisfying quick read.

Return of the wolf

It’s a controversial objective; reintroducing species to a habitat they roamed before being exterminated. Wolves were reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park in January 1995 and January 1996 – 66 in all. Now, the estimate is that there are over 1,000 wolves in the northern Rocky Mountain. A similar programme has met with success in Arizona and New Mexico. A livestock compensation system is in place.

The idea of reintroducing wolves to Scotland and Wales has been mooted…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_reintroduction

Iberian wolf

 

Here in Spain, the wolf is back from extinction without recourse to reintroduction. There are about 250 breeding groups and more than 250 individuals in Spain’s mountainous regions. There has been an increase in reports of attacks on animals, rising to almost double the 1,500 figure of 2005. Conservationists express surprise at how fast the wolves have multiplied, which seems a little odd since they’ve had the North American experience to draw upon.

Until the 1900s the Iberian wolf inhabited the majority of the Iberian Peninsula. Franco’s government started an extermination campaign during the 1950s and 1960s that wiped out the animals from all of Spain except the north-western part of the country, where there is still a fairsized population in Sierra de la Culebra.

Today, the hunting of wolves is banned in Portugal but allowed in some parts of Spain. There are reports of wolves returning to Navarre and the Basque Country and to the provinces of Extremadura, Madrid and Guadalajara. A male wolf was found recently in Catalonia, where the last native wolf was killed in 1929; however, this animal was found to be an Italian wolf (Canis lupus italicus) migrating from France! Tourists everywhere...

The Spanish wolf figures in my short story ‘Cry Wolf’ featured in Spanish Eye, 22 cases from Leon Cazador, 'in his own words'. Here is an excerpt:

Fernando Lopez was what you would call, in English, a poacher turned gamekeeper. A cunning rather than a clever man, he had been a hunter of wolves—a lobero—for many years, learning the tracking skills from his father and his father before him.

When I was fifteen, our parents brought us to stay in Spain for almost a year. “Family problems,” Mother said. And during that time, my brother Juan and I often left Pilar behind and went into the mountains to track wild animals and bring home a brace of rabbits. During one of these escapades, we stumbled upon forty-year-old Fernando who was setting a trap to catch a lone wolf. That was thirty years ago. Wolf traps are now illegal.

Fernando was taciturn but somehow we three got along. Perhaps our youthful enthusiasm and respect for his lore was appreciated. Anyway, he asked us to join him on a wolf hunt the following week. Although we knew we would have to concoct some innocuous story for our mother to cover our absence, we couldn’t miss this opportunity, so we agreed. Our friendship grew from that time on.

Thirty years ago, the wolf was regarded as a pest. “The wolf must be exterminated as its continued existence is a blemish on our standing in the civilised world,” the mayor of Fernando’s town had declared. “Spain appears to be a Third World country. We must get rid of the wolf plagues, as Britain and France have done, so we can be civilised.”

The government of the day offered bounties for dead wolves and even supplied strychnine to landowners and the peasants who worked the land. It would be interesting to find out whether the incidence of new widows and widowers increased from this period.

- Spanish Eye, p74

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