Annie Proulx - Heart Songs

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This Fourth Estate edition published 2009

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 1995.

Published in paperback in 1996.

Copyright © Dead Line Ltd 1994

A collection of stories, including many from this collection, was published under the title Heart Songs and Other Stories in the United States of America in 1988 in hardback by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

The following stories appeared in a somewhat different form in Gray’s Sporting Journal, “Stone City” copyright © 1979, “The Unclouded Day” copyright © 1985; Esquire, “The Wer-Trout” copyright © 1982, “Heart Songs” copyright © 1986; Harrowsmith, “On the Antler” copyright © 1983; Ploughshares, “A Run of Bad Luck” copyright © 1987.

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint excerpts from: The Golden Casket by Wolfgang Bauer, English translation copyright © 1964 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., reprinted by permission of the publisher; and from Love and Protest, edited and translated by John Scott, copyright © 1974 by André Deutsch Ltd, reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Annie Proulx asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9781857023480

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN 9780007498314

Version: 2017-01-18

‘The style of Heart Songs is a long-rhythmed, almost majestic prose that can create images of perfect newness and accuracy … a polished, unflinching work’

The Times

‘Proulx’s descriptive power is such that when you’re not laughing or cringing, you’re gasping with envy’

Independent on Sunday

‘America’s most impressive new novelist … matchlessly capturing the rewards and rigours of life in the rural remoteness of America’s far north east, the stories in Heart Songs focus on characters almost elementally close to harsh landscapes and hard ways of life. Tough knowledgeableness about their circumstances goes along with a style that is elatingly fresh and crisp with sensuous delicacy’

Sunday Times

‘The writing bristles with laconic insights’

Independent

‘Proulx’s prose is monumental’

Observer

‘Proulx does not romanticise her characters, but with the quiet wisdom that informs her novels, encourages us to understand them’

Daily Telegraph

‘The precision of her observation has a large value that implies an entire culture’

Financial Times

‘Proulx’s feeling for the texture of place and characters is impeccable’

Scotland on Sunday

‘These are wilderness narratives, told with sinewy grace and humour’

Sunday Telegraph

‘Proulx is at home in natural surroundings; her gift for description is both taut and unlavish and she shows the true countryman’s respect for hunter and hunted alike. Her people are alive; the domestic detail as sharply defined as in a Dutch genre painting’

Evening Standard

‘These are magnificent wrenching pieces’

Vogue

‘Heart Songs should be bought immediately’

Beryl Bainbridge

‘Proulx peels back the raw emotions of the lost and alone. Most authors would joyously discard a limb or two in exchange for a droplet of Proulx’s lyrical and dense poetry, while the reader can only sit back and lap it up’

The List

‘Powerfully evoked wilderness … monumental prose … the reader experiences Proulx’s humanity, filtered through her controlled compassion … Annie Proulx is an American original: stark, stern, philosophical and funny’

Irish Times

‘Sharp, memorable, utterly original tales of life in rural New England’

Esquire

‘It is Proulx’s particular genius to be able to locate the remarkable within the unremarkable, the tender within the very grim’

TLS

Cover

Title Page HEART SONGS ANNIE PROULX

Copyright

Praise

ON THE ANTLER

STONE CITY

1

2

3

4

BEDROCK

A RUN OF BAD LUCK

HEART SONGS

THE UNCLOUDED DAY

IN THE PIT

THE WER-TROUT

ELECTRIC ARROWS

1

2

3

4

5

A COUNTRY KILLING

NEGATIVES

Keep Reading

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

HAWKHEEL’S face was as finely wrinkled as grass-dried linen, his thin back bent like a branch weighted with snow. He still spent most of his time in the field and on the streams, sweeter days than when he was that half-wild boy who ran panting up the muddy logging road, smashing branches to mute the receding roar of the school bus. Then he had hated books, had despised everything except the woods.

But in the insomnia of old age he read half the night, the patinated words gliding under his eyes like a river coursing over polished stones: books on wild geese, nymph patterns for brook trout, wolves fanning across the snow. He went through his catalogues, putting red stars against the few books he could buy and black crosses like tiny grave markers against the rarities he would never be able to afford—Halford’s Floating Flies and How to Dress Them, Lanman’s Haw-Ho-Noo, Phillips’ A Natural History of the Ducks with color plates as fine as if the wild waterfowl had been pressed like flowers between the pages.

His trailer was on the north bank of the Feather River in the shadow of Antler Mountain. These few narrow acres were all that was left of the home place. He’d sold it off little by little since Josepha had left him, until he was down to the trailer, ten spongy acres of river bottom and his social security checks.