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The Track Of The Cat
Walter Van Tilburg Clark's classic novel -- a tale of four men who fear a marauding mountain lion but swear to conquer it -- is a gripping exploration of the conflict between good and evil.
404 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1949
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About the author
Walter Van Tilburg Clark
44 books54 followersWalter Van Tilburg Clark was an American novelist, short story writer, and educator. He ranks as one of Nevada's most distinguished literary figures of the 20th century and is known primarily for his novels, his one volume of stories, as well as his uncollected short stories. As a writer, he taught himself to use the familiar materials of the western saga to explore the human psyche and to raise deep philosophical issues.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
July 22, 2017
This is a stunning novel -- probably a guy book, I have to say -- about two days and nights on a struggling Sierra Nevada ranch as a mysterious black panther attacks its herds and, one at a time, the three brothers in the family, plus their enigmatic Native American ranch hand, go after it. The vast majority of the story takes place in a blizzard that's almost personally lethal, and the long sequence in Book Three when the brother named Curt first hunts and is then hunted by the panther is one of the most amazingly sustained action/suspense/psychological sequences I've ever read.
The characters are not uniformly sympathetic, and some are worse than that, and the claustrophobia Clark creates in the little ranch house kitchen is almost suffocating -- but things are worse outdoors, where Mystery of a unique kind is waiting in the snow. There's not a bad sentence in this book.
This has been a great reading year for me, but nothing has been much better than THE TRACK OF THE CAT. The comparisons to MOBY-DICK are not off the mark at all. A great American novel.
The characters are not uniformly sympathetic, and some are worse than that, and the claustrophobia Clark creates in the little ranch house kitchen is almost suffocating -- but things are worse outdoors, where Mystery of a unique kind is waiting in the snow. There's not a bad sentence in this book.
This has been a great reading year for me, but nothing has been much better than THE TRACK OF THE CAT. The comparisons to MOBY-DICK are not off the mark at all. A great American novel.
May 22, 2022
I was not familiar with the author Walter Van Tilburg Clark until Larry McMurtry spoke of him in a Foreword in one of his books. He was listing authors that were American Western Literature writers that had an impact on his writing career. Among other authors in this genre are Louis L’amour, Zane Grey, Cormac McCarthy, Willa Cather, Larry McMurtry, William Johnstone and many others.
Back to the book. After reading a sample, I took the plunge and bought the KIndle version of “The Track of the Cat”. It’s the story of a rancher and his family who wake to the sound of bellowing cattle. Something was “worrying” the stock. After some consternation and deliberation, it was agreed it most likely was a black panther or a “black painter“ that had been seen in the area. Two of the three sons on horseback leave in a snow storm to hunt the big cat. The rest of the story is how this hunt and its consequences affect each member of the family.
The book was written in the early 1950’s, and I enjoyed the writer’s characterizations, descriptions of life on the ranch and the hunt. I had difficulty putting the book down, and I highly recommend it if you like westerns.
Back to the book. After reading a sample, I took the plunge and bought the KIndle version of “The Track of the Cat”. It’s the story of a rancher and his family who wake to the sound of bellowing cattle. Something was “worrying” the stock. After some consternation and deliberation, it was agreed it most likely was a black panther or a “black painter“ that had been seen in the area. Two of the three sons on horseback leave in a snow storm to hunt the big cat. The rest of the story is how this hunt and its consequences affect each member of the family.
The book was written in the early 1950’s, and I enjoyed the writer’s characterizations, descriptions of life on the ranch and the hunt. I had difficulty putting the book down, and I highly recommend it if you like westerns.
June 17, 2008
You had better wear a sweater while you read this book. It is so real, and so cold.
January 13, 2020
This was a stunner. The livestock on an isolated Nevada ranch are attacked by a mountain lion and the rancher brothers set out in a snowstorm on a hunt that takes on unequivocally mythic proportions. A couple of months ago, Goodreads asked us to identify the best winter book and I blithely replied that
The Terror
is the best book ever about being cold because I'm the sort of pompous ass who likes to make ex cathedra pronouncements. That was before I read The Track of the Cat. As
Wayne
put it in one of the best reviews ever (See? I can't help myself. Here's another one: all
the best Goodreads reviews
get the job done in
a sentence or two
.), "You had better wear a sweater while you read this book. It is so real, and so cold." Like Clark, Wayne is a Nevadan. He oughta know from real Sierras.
This is the second book stolen from my high school English teacher's classroom that I've read this year. After hauling it around the country for decades and having seen and loved the visually striking if dramatically uneven Wellman adaptation on TCM, I finally got around to this ambitious and artful and wildly entertaining novel, an intoxicating blend of myth and adventure and social realism and psychological drama.
The language in The Track of the Cat is a sheer delight. The sentences are unfailingly mellifluous without being fussy. Clark devotes a great deal of the narrative to careful, thorough accumulation of physical detail, sort of like Dreiser if Dreiser had been a better writer. Sometimes, when Clark goes on at length about interconnected geographical features, I would find my minds-eye faltering and my attention wandering, but, by and large, the effect is very evocative. Indeed, the novel feels more cinematic in its almost excessively granular detail than the very stylized* film. In four hundred pages of meticulous description, there were only two poorly-thought-through bits of business. Two men, without any sort of leverage, lower a coffin into the ground with ropes and, hardened by ranch life though they might be, I was skeptical. Later, the same two men tow a corpse down a mountain behind a horse with a rope. In both instances, uh, gravity?
The claustrophobic, overheated scenes which are set in the snowbound ranch house - among a drunken patriarch; his sour, angry, Bible-thumping wife; their bitter, spinster daughter; the youngest son and his visiting, socially-disadvantaged, Welsh-miner's-daughter fiancee; and an opaque, hostile, Piute ranch hand who has an alarming spiritual connection to the "painter" that menaces the ranch - feel arguably more dangerous to us than the blizzard and the man-killing cat. One reviewer, I can't remember where, described their effect as "O'Neill in a snowstorm," which is just about right. I guess I might flippantly describe the whole as Moby-Dick meets Long Day's Journey into Night meets The Thing, but that sorta makes this superb novel sound like hack-y pastiche, which it decidedly is not. Wayne nailed it. So real, so cold.
*Wellman's ambition, which he pulls off to a remarkable degree, was to make "a black and white movie in color."
This is the second book stolen from my high school English teacher's classroom that I've read this year. After hauling it around the country for decades and having seen and loved the visually striking if dramatically uneven Wellman adaptation on TCM, I finally got around to this ambitious and artful and wildly entertaining novel, an intoxicating blend of myth and adventure and social realism and psychological drama.
The language in The Track of the Cat is a sheer delight. The sentences are unfailingly mellifluous without being fussy. Clark devotes a great deal of the narrative to careful, thorough accumulation of physical detail, sort of like Dreiser if Dreiser had been a better writer. Sometimes, when Clark goes on at length about interconnected geographical features, I would find my minds-eye faltering and my attention wandering, but, by and large, the effect is very evocative. Indeed, the novel feels more cinematic in its almost excessively granular detail than the very stylized* film. In four hundred pages of meticulous description, there were only two poorly-thought-through bits of business. Two men, without any sort of leverage, lower a coffin into the ground with ropes and, hardened by ranch life though they might be, I was skeptical. Later, the same two men tow a corpse down a mountain behind a horse with a rope. In both instances, uh, gravity?
The claustrophobic, overheated scenes which are set in the snowbound ranch house - among a drunken patriarch; his sour, angry, Bible-thumping wife; their bitter, spinster daughter; the youngest son and his visiting, socially-disadvantaged, Welsh-miner's-daughter fiancee; and an opaque, hostile, Piute ranch hand who has an alarming spiritual connection to the "painter" that menaces the ranch - feel arguably more dangerous to us than the blizzard and the man-killing cat. One reviewer, I can't remember where, described their effect as "O'Neill in a snowstorm," which is just about right. I guess I might flippantly describe the whole as Moby-Dick meets Long Day's Journey into Night meets The Thing, but that sorta makes this superb novel sound like hack-y pastiche, which it decidedly is not. Wayne nailed it. So real, so cold.
*Wellman's ambition, which he pulls off to a remarkable degree, was to make "a black and white movie in color."
February 8, 2016
The Track of the Cat by Walter Van Tilburg Clark tells the story of a few days in the life of a Nevada ranching family at the turn of the 20th Century. An unseasonable blizzard has blown in, and a mountain lion has preyed on the family cattle, prompting the elder brothers to track and hunt it. When one is killed and the other begins a multi-day stalk in the storm, the rest of the family--beset by greed, jealousy, and unfulfilled dreams--slowly devour one another.
What I like about the novel: On its surface, the novel tells the story of a pursuit by a very able hunter of a near-mythic panther, and does so in close detail--the reader can feel the effects of cold and wind, triumph and defeat, fear and elation, on Curt Bridges' psyche as the natural world defies him again and again in spite of his ability to wring whatever he needs out of every situation. Parallel to the hunt is the story of the dysfunctional family, preparing the body of the eldest son for burial, each person's weaknesses dredged to the surface. In the midst of this is the aged Paiute ranch hand, Joe Sam, who remains as much a mystery to the Bridges family as they likely are to him. Beyond the surface elements of the novel are the layers of ambiguity, the backstory that is hinted at but never quite told, and the connection to myths much older. Clark blends parts of the Arthurian mythos into his western landscape and American story. Unlike other 'western' appropriations of that myth cycle, Clark mines the legend for psychological complexity.
What I dislike about the novel: in 1949, critics did not receive Clark's novel well. Seen only as a western story, the characters of the alcoholic father and the bible-thumping mother can come across as stereotypes. The domestic side of the story seems overwrought. Clark's first novel, The Ox-Bow Incident, was praised for its realism and deliberate attention to fine detail; the entire novel covers a span of less than a full day. Critics felt that the same level of detail was a problem in The Track of the Cat, but I can see (I think) Clark's purpose. Clark loads each scene with sensory detail, and does so in very tightly controlled spaces--the scenes in the Bridges household have the feel of a stage play. The effect is sometimes overwhelming; the oppressive quality of the mother's vitriol is such that the reader will want to get away from it.
The University of Nevada Press edition appears to have been made from the same plates as the Random House 1st edition; the handful of typos are in the same places. My copy is a high quality trade-paperback that has survived several readings and moves. I recommend the book to anyone interested in literary westerns and/or modern redactions of the Arthurian cycle.
What I like about the novel: On its surface, the novel tells the story of a pursuit by a very able hunter of a near-mythic panther, and does so in close detail--the reader can feel the effects of cold and wind, triumph and defeat, fear and elation, on Curt Bridges' psyche as the natural world defies him again and again in spite of his ability to wring whatever he needs out of every situation. Parallel to the hunt is the story of the dysfunctional family, preparing the body of the eldest son for burial, each person's weaknesses dredged to the surface. In the midst of this is the aged Paiute ranch hand, Joe Sam, who remains as much a mystery to the Bridges family as they likely are to him. Beyond the surface elements of the novel are the layers of ambiguity, the backstory that is hinted at but never quite told, and the connection to myths much older. Clark blends parts of the Arthurian mythos into his western landscape and American story. Unlike other 'western' appropriations of that myth cycle, Clark mines the legend for psychological complexity.
What I dislike about the novel: in 1949, critics did not receive Clark's novel well. Seen only as a western story, the characters of the alcoholic father and the bible-thumping mother can come across as stereotypes. The domestic side of the story seems overwrought. Clark's first novel, The Ox-Bow Incident, was praised for its realism and deliberate attention to fine detail; the entire novel covers a span of less than a full day. Critics felt that the same level of detail was a problem in The Track of the Cat, but I can see (I think) Clark's purpose. Clark loads each scene with sensory detail, and does so in very tightly controlled spaces--the scenes in the Bridges household have the feel of a stage play. The effect is sometimes overwhelming; the oppressive quality of the mother's vitriol is such that the reader will want to get away from it.
The University of Nevada Press edition appears to have been made from the same plates as the Random House 1st edition; the handful of typos are in the same places. My copy is a high quality trade-paperback that has survived several readings and moves. I recommend the book to anyone interested in literary westerns and/or modern redactions of the Arthurian cycle.
December 19, 2023
I had never heard of this book until it was mentioned by author Annie Proulx in the book The Power of the Dog. This is a long book but the author has incredible talent at keeping the tension mounting and maintaining tight control over the story. The book has been compared to Moby Dick as the theme of the book is the hunt for a large black wild cat that has attacked a ranchers livestock. The two brothers set out in the dead of winter to kill this mythical creature but the cat wins the first confrontation and one of the brothers is packed home on the back of a horse to be buried. Meanwhile back at the ranch, the family sees the horse running up carrying the son’s body and knowing the other son will continue the hunt until its end. The rest of the family are trapped in the house because of the weather and they start raging against each other in their grief. Part of the plot is the involvement of an older Native American man that works for the family and he has surreptitiously tried to manipulate the situation with his indigenous magic. I won’t give away the ending but Walter Van Tilburg Clark is a master storyteller. I know I will be reading more of his books.
January 23, 2023
This book was an ice cold horror. I enjoyed the matter of fact writing style and the relatable inner thoughts of the brothers. The scenes of stomping through winter snow storms were so compelling, I could see myself making the same judgments and thought patterns if put in that position. The helplessness of being judged by nature and the cold sting of knowing it is completely indifferent to you and your suffering. There's no escape from tragedy even in the warm shelter of the ranch as the past choices of our characters begin to show the folly of trying to force control on the people around you.
February 21, 2023
Clark’s detailed description of every moment in this story keeps you trapped in the tense dysfunction of the Bridges household and in the spinning, unraveling mind of a brother lost in the mountains in a blizzard. Dream sequences blur the edges of reality lending a mystical layer to the story of the “black painter.”
A new favorite.
Sidenote: I found this book after watching the adaptation. It was part of a curated list of “Snow Westerns” on Criterion. I noticed it was based on a novel by Clark, who wrote The Oxbow Incident, which I also loved. The movie was really cool in some ways, but I was correct in assuming the book would be much better.
A new favorite.
Sidenote: I found this book after watching the adaptation. It was part of a curated list of “Snow Westerns” on Criterion. I noticed it was based on a novel by Clark, who wrote The Oxbow Incident, which I also loved. The movie was really cool in some ways, but I was correct in assuming the book would be much better.
May 26, 2013
I read this when I was 14 and systematically going through every book in my home, starting with some classics. This taught me some some things about my taste in books, I could love a book even if it was sad and didn't seemed to give me closure.
June 30, 2018
I was disappointed with this classic Western novel. I have been going back through my library, reading books that I have purchased through the years and never read, and I was really looking forward to this one. Although it was a excellent example of Naturalism, the scenes with Curt tracking the cougar in the blizzard was as monotonous as the winter white out, and I had trouble connecting the many dream scenes with the events of the plot, either foreshadowing or flashing back. The Native American Joe Sam was an interesting but strange character. The mother and girlfriend reminded me a lot of Wright Morris's PLAINS SONG.
January 16, 2020
This novel takes place in a blizzard on a Sierra Nevada cattle ranch, all in the course of three days. (The only other book that has sent me searching for my mittens is “To Build a Fire” by Jack London. Brrrr!) Thhis is a psychological drama, pitting three brothers against each other and their parents. Curt is the materialist, the angry one. Arthur is the idealist, the dreamer. And Harold the practical one. Then there is Joe Sam, the superstitious old Indian, watching and waiting for the black panther. Actually their are two black panthers: the real one and the imaginary one, who can kill just as surely as the real one. What a fascinating story!
June 10, 2022
Shuld be a 4.5 rating here. A wonderful tale told from the perspective of three brothers in a somewhat dysfunctional family on an isolated ranch in the Sierra Nevadas in the early 1900's. The ranch is terrorized by a large aggressive "black painter," which is cloaked in mystic beliefs about the creature
espoused by an old Indian hired man. The writing describing the family dynamiocs and the hunt for the cat throuogh deadly weather conditions is excellent. Overall a brilliant story covering 3-4 stressful days in the lives of the Bridges family.
espoused by an old Indian hired man. The writing describing the family dynamiocs and the hunt for the cat throuogh deadly weather conditions is excellent. Overall a brilliant story covering 3-4 stressful days in the lives of the Bridges family.
January 22, 2024
There are some great reviews that cover the qualities of this book extremely well.
I won't repeat them.
One thing I noticed: there is some kind of link back to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" -
the white spot on the belly, at one point called one-eyed....
I happened to reread Poe's story the same weekend I finished this book (Poe's birthday).
Clark was deeply in touch with the natural world - it's also what makes Ox-Bow Incident special. In this story, the natural world is not beneficent, not even neutral, and the human one not so good - neither white nor Indian.
I won't repeat them.
One thing I noticed: there is some kind of link back to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" -
the white spot on the belly, at one point called one-eyed....
I happened to reread Poe's story the same weekend I finished this book (Poe's birthday).
Clark was deeply in touch with the natural world - it's also what makes Ox-Bow Incident special. In this story, the natural world is not beneficent, not even neutral, and the human one not so good - neither white nor Indian.
March 24, 2022
Really tense throughout, akin to the Power of the Dog. Human drama is dwarfed and framed by nature, in the form of mountains and storms. The drama of the hunt, the killing and the storm is juxtaposed by the light and warmth of family life, which proves to be equally destructive.
Human relationships and the characters themselves are well drawn and the confusion of being lost in the storm is brilliantly depicted.
Human relationships and the characters themselves are well drawn and the confusion of being lost in the storm is brilliantly depicted.
Read
June 30, 2020A classic Western by a master of the genre about four men who seek to track down a vicious mountain lion. Though they fear it, their drive to conquer the cat is far greater. In a journey characterized by love and hate, as well as hope and despair, the perpetual struggle between good and evil is thoughtfully examined. This book was made into a 1954 film starring Robert Mitchum and Teresa Wright.
August 18, 2024
Walter Van Tilburg Clark writes some of the greatest American prose I've ever read.
I found The Track of the Cat to be a solid addition to his great writing after reading The OxBow Incident.
I will say for all it's wonderful qualities, I think most scenes and situations overstay their welcome as the characters meandered through the plot.
I found The Track of the Cat to be a solid addition to his great writing after reading The OxBow Incident.
I will say for all it's wonderful qualities, I think most scenes and situations overstay their welcome as the characters meandered through the plot.
May 28, 2025
Not a bad novel, a book I can see myself recommending under certain conditions. The tracking of the cat itself isn't bad, but it's maybe one fifth of the book and the other 80% is them eating eggs and drinking coffee. Mundane things and actions are over described without revealing nothing profound or even meaningful.
September 6, 2017
Good mood-setting, but the prose was longwinded and often redundant. Made me want to stop reading, and when I get that feeling, I stop reading. Life's too short.
October 7, 2021
Very Good and very deep into the minds of a family. 4.5 stars.
August 29, 2022
I kept hoping I'd like it better as I went along, but I never did. There were so few decent characters in the whole book, and so many rotten ones that I just couldn't deal with it very well.
January 9, 2017
There was a lot to like, especially the Western landscape/vibe and the interesting, elusive qualities of the black panther, but I think this novel required more patience than I was ready to give it at the time of reading. I am not sure if that was the author's fault or mine so am trying not to judge it based on that. Tons of dialogue, detail and imagery which I normally like, but in this case I found it to maddeningly slow down the plot and character development. Evidently many people compare this book to Moby Dick which makes sense to me because I liked similar things about both and very much disliked similar things about both.
January 21, 2009
An incredible look into the mind of a man bent on revenge against a mountain lion who killed his brother. Some profanity and other bad language.
April 28, 2014
The thoroughness of the narrative demands patience in parts, but it's deserved. Appreciated the author's Afterword. (Why is there ever a Foreword?)
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews