Of Moose & Men

PEMMICAN (319 pp.)--Vardis Fisher--Doubleday ($3.95).

This is the definitive book on the preparation of pemmican, and incidentally, a novel about the Hudson's Bay Company of a century ago, and one of its rugged chief traders.

David McDonald is a big (6 ft. 2 in. 220 Ibs.) man and true, who eats his buffalo liver raw and sometimes wonders whether he is a man or a moose. In the 23rd book of his long and musky career, saga-gaga Novelist Vardis Fisher (Testament of Man, seven volumes so far, five to come) surrounds David & Co. with tons of Indians--bucks, squaws, half-breeds--plus prairies full of buffalo meat, oceans of rum, and a plot made of walrus blubber. David is a deep thinker, but on somewhat specialized lines; he broods mostly on pemmican and squaws, in that order.

Squaw and Pemmican Unite. David's pemmican is not a simple hunk of dried buffalo meat. It needs, for its perfection, to be compounded with thimbleberries, grasshoppers, elk marrow, pounded buffalo tongues, moose noses, beaver tails, fish fat, porcupine belly and otter blubber, not to speak of flies and maggots. Squaws, too, could be improved upon. But when Hero David meets a squaw whose bare bosom makes him think of a pair of "sun-darkened thimbleberries," the two passions of his career are united; he is a goner. To reassure critics of integration, Author Fisher takes pains to show that Squaw Sunday, princess of the Blackfeet, is really white. Covered as she is with bear grease and vermillion, she smells pretty bad. But to a man who can survive temperature cold enough to split a tree and "mosquitoes as big as owls," this is by no means a deterrent.

When he is not trying to wash off all that bear fat from Princess Sunday, big dimwit David is trying to hold up his end of the fur trade against the encroaching North West Company--or "pedlars," as they are called by Hudson Bay's old guard--and H.B.'s head man, Lord Selkirk, a contemptible character who weighs only 110 Ibs. While brooding on his diet ("In a day or two he intended to eat an entire raw liver, for he had been feeling groggy lately; a straight meat diet was getting him down"), David manages to get himself tied up to a tree while a squaw supervises a small Indian boy in cutting off one of his thumbs. He gets free, of course, and goes back to "making pemmican and thinking."

Adorable Blood. His thoughts move on to love, to the tender day he found Princess Sunday eviscerating a buffalo: "She looked so adorable, with blood smeared over her face . . . She sliced liver off and he plopped it into his mouth, a piece as large as one of his hands, and he chewed and gulped and choked, with liver juices bursting out of the corner of his mouth, his eyes winking at her contentedly."

By now, even the hungriest reader might find the most sympathetic character a half-breed named Buffalo Dung, who deeply dislikes David and aims an arrow at his digestive juices. Unhappily, Buffalo Dung misses, and the epic staggers to its end like a strayed moose caught in an Armour's assembly line. By then, for those who wonder Quo Vardis Fisher?, heap big David and contented new Squaw Sunday are headed West, perhaps to Hollywood.

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