The Hunter Author:Hugh Fosburgh Perhaps the outstanding thing in Hugh Fosburgh's novel is his magnificent characterization of people and animals. But The Hunter has much besides this masterly characterization. It has superb writing - clean, terse prose, uncluttered by superfluous words. It has a love story that is tender yet spirited. It has the elemental excitement of the... more » chase - the feverish moment when a dog stiffens and snuffs the air and breaks to the track, the drive that thrusts man and beast alike along the trail until they are ready to drop.
Basicall this is the story of a man who had a passion for hunting. He was no native woodsman; he was well educated, aware of the comforts of life, and in love with a woman who loved him. But he kept to himself his deep and secret feeling about the mountain ranges, about the beasts that roamed the wild fastness of the hills, about the dogs whose baying echoed through the chasms as they followed the trails of the mountain lion. It was this kinship that led him to live in the remote foothills, with an eccentric old woman for housekeeper, and to hunt the big cats that slipped through the thickets and over the snow of the Sangre de Cristos. To Monk Taylor this life offered an illusory promise - a something that he himself hardly understood.
Then came a hunt which was different. There were two visitors from the East along with Monk - one coarse and overbearing, the other eager but ignorant. The lions seemed to have disappeared, fresh troubles developed with every passing hour. When at last the slimax came, it affected all of them profoundly, but none quite sso much as Monk. For to him the hunt brought an experience which shook the roots of his being and shattered his self-reliance as a bullet shatters a glass.
The Hunter is an exceptional novel, exceptional for its flawless writing, for its suspense and pace and wry masculine humor and for its unforgettable descriptions of men and beasts. it is one of those rare novels with an effectiveness which is lasting and which gains in retrospect rather that diminishes.« less