Fox Hunt

HUNTER'S HORN (508 pp.)--Harriette Arnow--Macmillan ($3.50).

Nunn Ballew, a poor farmer from the hills of Kentucky, worked in the coal mines until he had saved enough money to buy 200 run-down acres of what had once been the fine land of his ancestors. But before he could begin building the place up, he felt bound to scrap his ambition. King Devil, a big red fox which haunted the countryside, had run his favorite hound to death. For years Nunn devoted himself to hunting King Devil while his children grew more bitter, his wife Milly more resigned. When impoverished Nunn Ballew sold some of his livestock and paid $70 for two pedigreed hounds, to raise them from pups with no purpose in life except to catch King Devil, he was ashamed to face his family and his neighbors. To his astonishment they were overwhelmed with pride and admiration--"the onliest real fine things we've ever had"--and the dogs brought him a kind of backwoods fame and prosperity. Bootleggers treated him with respect, the AAA lent him fertilizer for his fields, a dog-loving storekeeper advanced him credit, and the whole countryside conspired to keep his secret when he did a little moonshining to get the family through the winter.

Novelist Arnow, who was born in Kentucky and taught school in Pulaski County for six years, handles the talk of the hill people and evokes a picture of the countryside with the sureness of Elizabeth Madox Roberts. There is no question of her success in picturing the profane and pious old people, the backwoodsmen with fine old names like Ballew and Hull, the proud parents who gave their children names like Alben W. Barkley Tiller, the farmers working on the WPA or in the automobile factories of Detroit.

The book's humor is broad and some times raucous, but the sort of countrified slapstick that is amusing in Erskine Caldwell or Jesse Stuart is mildly unsettling when combined with Mrs. Arnow's delicate and sensitive prose; she seems to have forgotten that people seldom like to hear a woman swear.

Like The Track of the Cat (TIME, June 6), Hunter's Horn invites the inevitable comparison with Herman Melville and his classic tale of Captain Ahab's pursuit of Moby Dick. That Melville's influence can be dangerous is shown in this case by the fact that Nunn Ballew's chase of King Devil has little of the intensity of Ahab's passionate quest after the white whale. In the end, the hunting down of the great fox is only an interruption in the more interesting story of a family's fight to win back its place in the world.

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