Dispirited Warriors
HECKLETOOTH 3, by David Shetzline. 304 pages. Random House. $5.95.
Whatever it is that makes a man suddenly stand and challenge the rules of his society, risking everything he has secured for himself, has been a classic inquiry through all literature, but it is particularly relevant for America today. The common fury in the hearts of the disenchanted can extend beyond Black Power and campus rebellion into suburbia, and farther. In David Shetzline's second novel, that rage explodes during a forest fire in the timber country of Oregon. Before the fire is smothered by a snowstorm, it has scorched the lives of several middle-aged American males.
The rebellion begins at Heckletooth Mountain's Logging Unit Three, when Lee Replogle, a 46-year-old Forest Service worker, sees a big bull elk about to gore his pet hound and shoots him in a reflex of instant anger. Elk are out of season, and Replogle has been a dutiful Government employee. But he sees himself as "a punk" and a sucker who has never got anything from a society filled with takers. Near by, the first flames of the fire flicker. Suddenly, he feels a compulsion to prove his manhood by defying the law and packing out 700 Ibs. of poached elk meat, despite or perhaps inspired by the fire.
The tale rises above the level of a mere adventure story as the author, using interior monologue and flashback, probes the minds and lives of Replogle and at least three other men drawn to the fire and the scene of Replogle's crime. Game Warden Bobby McGill pursues Replogle with the vengeance and self-righteousness of a whore gone straight. He had himself been a famous poacher until he was injured in a fall while trapping beaver illegally; the injury has forced him into honest work and accepting wages from a society that he sees as basically corrupt. Doc Mechling, a wealthy physician from the nearby town of Sixes, refuses to help trap the poacher because he believes that one man's guilt is inconsequential compared with the monstrous shame of modern times, with its "computers ticking, tapes and circuits and warheads, detonators, deaths, millions of deaths." Jack Kendriks, chief of the fire fighters, who at 39 feels that younger, better-educated men are catching up on him, helps Replogle escape with his poached meat, in a humanistic act of generosity from one defeated man to another.
Author Shetzline, a onetime Forest Service lookout himself, has the gift of using sometimes lyrical, sometimes colloquial, language to describe the woods, the men, and the fire that consumes both: "Each time the cull deck shifted, tons of fuel would resettle and a hundred dozen sparks would be sucked upwards like the spores of some livid fungus." As his dispirited warriors of the soul wander the fire-blasted countryside, a suspenseful psychological drama is created that subtly expresses the themes of innocence, guilt and the corruption of the individual by society.
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