Mountain Men

THE BIG SKY (386 pp.)--A. B. Guthrie Jr.--William Sloane Associates ($3.50).

The Big Sky is one of those books that has obviously taken a lifetime maturing in the writer's mind. It is a strong and savory tale of adventure with the first white hunters in the West. Honestly imagined and true to history, it is also a parable of the way the pioneers, as immoderate as children, took their measureless paradise and spoiled it.

A. B. ("Bud") Guthrie Jr. grew up in Choteau, Mont., where his father was the first high-school principal in the county. The dazzling air and blue immensity of the Rockies, the profound distances of" the Great Plain: are memorably present in his novel.

Author Guthne's mountain men--buffalo hunters, trappers and guides--are seen, smelt and heard with a consistency and solidity of understanding that makes most other writing about them seem perfunctory or fake. All the romantic qualities that a boy could find in these figures --their lonely hardihood, keenness and courage--are combined with a realist's grasp of them as rough and wayward fugitives from society. The idiom of their thought and speech has never been so richly used in fiction.

The hero of The Big Sky is a raw Kentucky boy named Boone Caudill who goes West after he hits his Pap a lick with a piece of firewood. In St. Louis in 1830, he and his friend Jim Deakins join up for a keelboat expedition to the wild Blackfoot country at the headwaters of the Missouri. The cargo for trading is mostly whiskey; but their ace-in-the-hole, counted on to save the scalps of the whole company from Indians, is a twelve-year-old squaw named Teal Eye, daughter of a Blackfoot chief.

But once they have passed through the vast and lonely country that is now Nebraska and the Dakotas, Teal Eye runs away. Three days later the Indians attack and kill all the party except Boone, Jim and sardonic Dick Summers, a man swift and animal-sensitive, who ranks as the most vivid scout in literature since Natty Bumppo, in James Fenimore Cooper's Leather-Stocking Tales.

Nature & Fate. In seven years Boone and Jim, roaming around the Rockies, become seasoned mountain men, almost indistinguishable from the Indians in their grease-and-bloodstained buckskins and their way of life. Then Boone and Jim say goodbye to Scout Summers and head north to find Teal Eye; Boone had always had a hankering to settle down with her as his squaw.

The narrative of the violent Kentuckian's search for his love has the poetic improbability of something that might actually have happened. He finds her and joins her tribe, the Piegans, in the mountain valley of the Teton River, "winding, busy but unhurried, with a mind and time to have a look at things as it went along." Living with the Indians suits Boone. "A man could sit and let time run on while he smoked or cut on a stick with nothing nagging him and the squaws going about their business and the young ones playing, making out that they warred on the As-siniboines." The novel ends with Boone's paradise lost and the first great migration of prairie schooners setting out from St. Louis for the Oregon Trail.

The Big Sky belongs with George Caleb Bingham's painting, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, as a work of art worthy of the artless wanderers who gave an American ring to the word freedom.

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