Clair Huffaker: The Cowboy and the Cossack

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.

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.

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.”