The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) Read online




  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 1973 by Clair Huffaker

  Introduction and Readers’ Guide copyright © 2012 by Nancy Pearl

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  A Book Lust Rediscovery

  Published by AmazonEncore

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612183695

  ISBN-10: 1612183697

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART ONE HARD TIMES AT VLADIVOSTOK

  Diary Notes

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  PART TWO ARMED TRUCE AT KHABAROVSK

  Diary Notes

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  PART THREE THE BATTLE OF BAKASKAYA

  Diary Notes

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Final Notes

  FROM THE DIARY OF LEVI DOUGHERTY

  Readers’ Guide for The Cowboy and the Cossack

  Discussion Questions

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  About the Author

  About Nancy Pearl

  About Book Lust Rediscoveries

  Introduction

  I AM perhaps the only person I know who chooses the novels she reads based on whether or not the author has chosen to start the book in question with an epigraph. I am inordinately (perhaps ridiculously) fond of these short quotations at the beginnings of novels that somehow suggest the theme of what follows. My response to a book with a well-chosen epigraph reminds me of the immortal line spoken by Renée Zellweger’s character to Tom Cruise’s character in the movie Jerry Maguire: “You had me at hello.”

  Of course, I can’t tell if a book has an epigraph or not unless I open it up, so I’m initially dependent on all the usual clues: the catchiness of the title, what I already know about the author, reviews I’ve read, recommendations from friends. But when it comes right down to it, for me at least, a good epigraph can make all the difference.

  I don’t remember where, or even exactly when, I first came across Clair Huffaker’s novel The Cowboy and the Cossack. I seem to remember taking the book off a shelf in the fiction section of a library, so if I read it shortly after it was published in 1973, it would have almost certainly have been the public library in Stillwater, Oklahoma, but it somehow doesn’t seem to quite jibe with what I recall of the physical layout of that particular library. (I’m writing this introduction on an uncharacteristically hot August day in Seattle, so evocative of the years I spent in Oklahoma, and I pause here for an online look at the catalogs of the three public libraries where I might first have found Huffaker’s novel—Stillwater’s, Tulsa’s, and Seattle’s—and find that none currently own copies of it. [Not unnaturally, this reinforces my decision to include it in the Book Lust Rediscoveries series.] It’s not altogether surprising that they no longer own it—if they ever did. Most likely it would have been discarded [“weeded,” in library lingo] long ago.)

  I do remember that it was the evocative title—The Cowboy and the Cossack—that initially led me to take the book off the shelf. I opened it and found the epigraph, an excerpt from one of Rudyard Kipling’s poems. Now it just happened to be the case that I was (and am) a big fan of Kipling’s novels and poetry (despite not particularly approving of his imperialist tendencies). To find that Huffaker had chosen the opening lines of “The Ballad of East and West” for his epigraph made The Cowboy and the Cossack irresistible to me. And Huffaker was absolutely right in his choice, as these lines perfectly sum up the plot and ethos of The Cowboy and the Cossack:

  Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

  Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;

  But there is neither East nor West, border, nor breed, nor birth,

  When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!

  I chose The Cowboy and the Cossack as the fifth Book Lust Rediscovery despite or (I have to consider this) because of—contrarian librarian that I am—a pertinent fact about reading tastes, which is that, with very few (notable) exceptions, western novels don’t generally rouse people to a high pitch of pre-reading excitement.

  I always begin the first class session of Genre Reading for Adults, a course I teach at the Information School at the University of Washington, by asking the students to describe their experiences with genre reading. The majority of the students, all of whom are studying to get a master’s degree in library and information science, range in age from twenty-five to forty, with one or two outliers on either side. Over the six or seven years that I’ve taught this class, a consistent pattern has emerged. One or two people will rave about George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. This brings many nods of appreciation and an occasional dissent on the grounds that there’s way too much violence and sex. Someone will offer the opinion that Martin kills off the best characters without regard for the sensibility of his readers. Someone else will shush him, warning that that’s too much of a spoiler for people who haven’t yet read the novels.

  Someone will bring up H. P. Lovecraft, a name that brings blank looks to many class members, who have never heard of him. Another student—almost always a woman—will describe how much she loves Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series. The classicist in the cohort (there is always at least one) will bring up Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

  Occasionally students will mention how their mothers (or grandmothers) introduced them to the Agatha Christie novels. Somebody will bring up Sherlock Holmes, and in the last few years, this has always lead to a detour (which I keep brief) where we ooh and ah over (and once in a while boo) Robert Downey Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch, each of whom has played Sherlock, in film and on television, respectively.

  Someone else—always a woman, this time—will say, with some defensiveness or embarrassment, that she reads romances only. She’ll mention authors like Jayne Ann Krentz, Julia Quinn, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Stephanie Laurens, and Suzanne Brockmann. One or two students (mostly, if not exclusively, women) will enthusiastically agree. Partly to defuse her embarrassment or her defensiveness, but mostly because it’s true, I will toss in at this point that I am a huge fan of Georgette Heyer. Sighs of appreciation will ripple through the class (again, mostly excluding the few males, who are generally unfamiliar with her books).

  No one ever, ever m
entions westerns. Not Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey, or even—this shocks me just a little—Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. Or Jack Schaefer’s Shane. It’s as if the western portion of the genre map, once at least moderately prominent, has regressed to being undiscovered territory for my students.

  Many libraries pull out the genre novels from the rest of their fiction collections, so that fans of the various genres can more easily find what they’re looking for. Or, to use the vernacular of computer speak, these readers don’t have to be distracted by items that don’t fit their search criteria. I’ve never been fond of this approach to shelving fiction, because I believe that it ghettoizes the genres. It implies that some fiction is Literature, and some fiction is Other (really, less) than Literature. Which is, in fact, what members of the literati, including many librarians, believe. It’s right there in the way we designate the nongenre novels and short stories as “literary fiction.”

  When I started working as a librarian, westerns were exclusively the purview of old men (at least they seemed old to me at the time), who could be seen checking the shelves for the latest Max Brand or the newest in the Longarm series by Tabor Evans. The hardback westerns, in their uniform dark (and increasingly dirty as the checkouts continued) cream binding were slightly smaller than non-westerns and singularly unattractive, while the paperbacks (frequently only very reluctantly purchased by a disapproving librarian) had covers featuring rifles, cattle, sometimes a beautiful, half-dressed wench, and occasionally an Indian with a tomahawk or a scalp dangling from his hand. In all my years working in libraries and bookstores, I never—never, hand over my heart—saw a woman browsing those books.

  But both men and women can be found reading Wallace Stegner’s novels, such as Angle of Repose or The Big Rock Candy Mountain; All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy; Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man; Pete Dexter’s Deadwood; or True Grit by Charles Portis; all works of fiction set in the western United States. And all, I would argue, just as much “westerns” as anything written by the likes of L’Amour, Brand, or Grey. Yet you’ll rarely, if ever, find Stegner, Dexter, Berger, et al. shelved separately under the heading of “Westerns,” or labeled with a sticker picturing a bucking bronco or a W. So what’s the difference between them and, say, what we think of as “genre” westerns, like Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage or Elmer Kelton’s The Time It Never Rained. The action occurs in the western states (or, since many of them are set pre-statehood, in the western territories), generally between the end of the Civil War and the early years of the twentieth century. (There are notable exceptions, of course, like Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.)

  Many readers might argue that the difference lies in the quality of the writing: a western, they’d assert, is filled with clichéd language and cookie-cutter plots. They’d add that the characters are little more than placeholders to move the action forward: there’s the good guy, often the sheriff or marshal of the town (think Gary Cooper in High Noon); the loner who rides into town, rights the wrongs, and rides out again (which in itself is a pretty good plot summary of the novel Shane by Jack Schaefer); the scoundrels who rob banks or stagecoaches and shoot men in the back (too many to reference by name); the fearsome, loathed Indian, who’s usually referred to only by his tribe: the feared Apache, the Navajo, and so on.

  And yet. I once read somewhere that we judge genre fiction by the worst of what’s published and we judge mainstream, non-genre fiction by the best. (I’d love to get a reference for this, if only to thank the person who first articulated it.) This way of thinking about fiction leads to a five-word phrase that I despise with every atom of my reader’s being: “This novel transcends the genre.” I’ve always felt that it’s used most often by those people who are a wee bit embarrassed about what they’re reading (and very much enjoying) and want to ensure that others realize that they know the qualitative difference between an “ordinary” genre novel—the sort that one reads only for pleasure—and the one they’ve chosen to read. Ghettoizing westerns (or any genre, for that matter) is not only offensive (at least to me), but it also serves to deny readers the full range of pleasures to be found in fiction, wherever in the library or bookstore collection those books might be shelved.

  I’m sure there are those who have said, and will say, that Clair Huffaker’s The Cowboy and the Cossack does indeed “transcend the western genre.” If people feel a need to describe this terrific novel that way in order to convince themselves to read it, I won’t disagree with them (although I’ll probably sigh—unobtrusively, I hope). But I’m just as happy to describe it as purely a western, albeit a mighty superior one. The story, set in 1880, unfolds around an eventful (and rather unusual) cattle drive: fifteen cowboys are tasked with delivering a herd of cattle from the ranch where they’re employed in Montana (the Old West) to Bakaskaya, a small town in Siberia (the Old East, if you will). Once the men and five hundred longhorns set foot on Russian soil—and it’s a most dramatic entry—they’re accosted by a group of sixteen Russian Cossacks, who assist on accompanying them to their final destination.

  The tale is told by one of the cowboys, nineteen-year-old Levi Dougherty, who idolizes Shad Northshield, his boss, mentor, and surrogate father. This is how Levi describes Shad: “He was purely tougher than a spike. And yet, hard as he was, Shad never asked anything from any man that he wasn’t willing to give twice back.”

  When Levi first meets Captain Mikhail Rostov, the leader of the Cossacks, he seems alien, indeed. But, as he gets to know the Russian, observes him with his men, and sees the respect that’s growing, if grudgingly, between Shad and Rostov, the cowboy and the Cossack, he starts to understand how similar these two men are, though they come from opposite ends of the earth.

  Clair Huffaker’s novel, however it’s designated (or shelved), offers the reader a myriad of pleasures. It’s at once a coming-of-age story, a thoughtful and moving exploration of the possibilities, and difficulties, of cross-cultural communication and friendship, and finally, a crackling page-turner: Drunken cattle! Attacks by wolves! Bad Cossacks! Noble Cossacks! Tartar Warriors!

  The Cowboy and the Cossack is a keeper, and I hope you love it as much as I do.

  Nancy Pearl

  FOR SAMANTHA CLAIR, WHO IS A COSSACK IN LOS ANGELES. FOR IVAN IGOROVITCH, WHO IS A COWBOY IN LENINGRAD. AND FOR A LADY NAMED BIG RED, WHO IS EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE.

  Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

  Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;

  But there is neither East nor West, border, nor breed, nor birth,

  When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!

  —Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West,” 1889

  FROM THE DIARY OF LEVI DOUGHERTY

  BORN 1861. DIED 1905.

  R.I.P.

  HERE LIES A GOOD FRIEND

  PART ONE

  HARD TIMES AT VLADIVOSTOK

  Diary Notes

  IT’S THE spring of ’80 on the coast of Siberia when our greasy-sack outfit first runs up against those cossacks. We establish instant hate for those fancy foreigners, which is reciprocated.

  Various and sundry unlikely things come to pass, like getting our bunch of Montana longhorns drunk on Russian vodka, which I will try to honestly and faithfully relate, as much as is humanly possible.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I’D MANAGED to limp up to the main deck of the Great Eastern Queen to stare off, squinting hard over her swaying wooden railing against the black horizon, hoping to see those first lights along the coastline of the far Siberian Gulf of Peter the Great. I was limping because a big yellow cow had stepped heavily on my foot where I was sleeping near the cattle down in the hold. And that’s enough to make a fella wake up quickly, and maybe even mutter a few choice words of resentment.

  Still in some agony, leaning over the rail looking off, my eyes were starting to be tearful from the foot hurting and from the cold,
howling wind tearing at my face. Hundreds of handfuls of stars were tossed and scattered at random all over the sky, and some of the big ones were hanging so far down on the horizon you’d have sworn they were getting wet, way off over there, from the surging ocean spray.

  “There,” a low, strong voice said from behind me.

  Shad had silently come up, and now he hunched his broad shoulders on the railing beside me, shifted his tobacco, slowly chewing, and nodded so that his deeply creased black hat somehow pointed exactly where to look. I followed his steady gaze, frowning against the wind-made tears in my eyes, and finally made out that a couple of those low-lying stars were dim, distant, man-made lights.

  “Yeah!”

  And then Shad said one more word, very tightly and very hard.

  “Russia.”

  The way he said it, I got a chilly feeling in my backbone that was more than the cold sea wind could account for. I looked at the lights again, and then back at him. “Well—hell, boss. After all this time at sea, any solid land ought t’ look pretty damn good.”

  Old Keats came up then and joined us. “Look pretty good?” He pulled the collar of his sheepskin coat higher around his neck with his good hand and grinned, his teeth chattering briefly. “Me and five hundred cows and bulls have been seasick longer than any of us would care to remember. Anything without waves on it has to appear to be pure heaven right now.”

  Somebody had once pointed out that Old Keats’s name was also the name of some English poet, and he tended to talk in fancy terms, so he’d gotten the part-time nickname of “The Poet.” Maybe his bad left hand had something to do with that too. Old Keats could do wonders with that hand, except he couldn’t lift it higher than his chest. And sometimes, when he got serious and was talking fancy, and went to waving that hand at chest level, it looked like he really was talking poetry, or even making a speech.