By Nevada Barr
A total random find during our summer visit to Vancouver. We had a rare late afternoon in Kits without any plans and I suggested we go for a pre-dinner walk to visit a couple of used bookstores. Our first stop was Tanglewood Books on West Broadway and Vine.
Olman came across some good finds and even our kid found several graphic novels she wanted to read. I didn’t find anything until I spotted this slim 1993 paperback in the mystery section. I’d never heard of Track of the Cat before, but I was intrigued by the premise of an intrepid female park ranger investigating a suspicious death in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Texas.
Since it was such a slim paperback, I brought it with me for our family trip to Shelter Island, thinking that I wouldn’t have time to do much reading. I was right – I only read the first chapter. When we got back home, I went straight to work the following morning. I was seriously vacationed out and it took me a while to recover from being away so much this summer. I did a lot of zoning out to Netflix (ie. Better Call Saul, highly rec’d by Scott and Kareen). I read some more of Papillon, but I needed to immerse myself in a tightly structured plot, so I went back to Track of the Cat. I was pleasantly surprised to discover this book was much better than I thought it’d be, and it took me only a few days to finish the book.
Author Nevada Barr was a former park ranger herself so she offered lots of insight into the politics and mismanagement that can go on behind the scenes of the National Park service, as well as the ongoing tension with neighbouring ranchers. Interestingly, Track of the Cat was written in the early 90’s and even back then, wildfires were a big concern, especially since this was set in south Texas. Despite being written 30 years ago, the writing is quite forward-thinking – a lot of the issues the novel touched on are still very relevant today.
I also related to the strong pro-animal/anti-people subtext. For example, when Anna realized that the dead ranger she discovered had mountain lion marks on it, this was her reaction:
Now the lions will be hunted down and killed. Now every trigger-happy Texan would blast away at any tawny shadow that flickered in the bush. The government’s bounty quotas on predators of domestic livestorck would go up. Lions would die and die.
“Damn you, Drury,” whispered Anna as ways to obscure the evidence appeared in and were discarded from her mind.
The mystery itself was decent enough, but it was more the setting, dark humor and good writing that made the book enjoyable for me. At times, it reminded me of Generation Loss, another unusual murder mystery featuring a tough yet vulnerable has-been NYC photographer whose eye for detail and obsessive tendencies get her in trouble. With TofC, I guessed the killer about halfway through and sure enough, it wasn’t someone on Anna’s list. It didn’t mean there weren’t any other surprises. Despite being able to figure out the killer (though not the motive), the story was still sharply written and I also liked the character of Anna Pigeon. She was definitely flawed and made mistakes, which of course made her relatable, but she was also obsessively single-minded and had her own sense of morality that was more aligned with the laws of nature than those of society.
Barr had some nice lines that were perfect for a neo-noir mystery featuring a hapless park ranger-slash-detective. When Anna was hospitalized for a near fatal fall off a cliff, she gets “ awakened to eat a supper not worth being conscious for and again, later, to take a sleeping pill.” It’s these little nuggets that made the story so likable. But there was a darkness there too, especially when it came to humanity as a whole. By the end of the book, I realized how fitting it was for Barr to transpose what’s essentially the existentialism of the noir detective to a “lone” park ranger.
Why did she see such evil when no one else could? Sheila was dead. No one had cared desperately about her. Not even Christina. People wanted to go on with their lives and jobs and plans. To see a murder would interfere. Anna understood that. And the lions that might die in reaction? Even people who care about animals thought of them basically as things: things to eat or wear, own, take pictures of. Things for people to use and enjoy. Sad to lose one, certainly, but nothing to lose sleep over. That was the attitude that prevailed and Anna had learned to live with it.
Now if only some streaming giant will make an Anna Pigeon series someday!
