Violence erupts periodically and then fades just as quickly, creating barely a ripple in the flow of the narrative. McMurtry's brisk, mordantly comic tone gives mayhem a casual, unreal quality. When Lord Berrybender forks Bobbety instead of his intended target, a French priest, we get this: "`Egad ... 'scuse me ... what's this now?' Lord B. asked, rather unclear in his mind as to what he had just done. Bobbety emitted a single piercing shriek; before it had ceased echoing, Drum Stewart a Scottish aristocrat and fellow hunter had rushed over and covered his empty eye socket with a napkin. Tasmin herself felt the room swirl for a moment, but she didn't faint. `Be damned, what have I done?' Lord Berrybender cried. His son, one-eyed now, sat sobbing. `You've made Bobbety a cyclops, Papa,' daughter Mary said cooly -- `only his one eye is not quite in the middle of his head, as it should be in a proper cyclops.'
"`Loss of an eye is only an inconvenience -- many men have borne it," Drum Stewart said, resolving, privately, to take his meals with the mountain men from then on, their tempers being somewhat more reliable than that of the Berrybenders.'"
Later in the novel Indians kill an Irish humbug by sewing him into the body cavity of a dead buffalo, and Jim Snow drives a spear clean through the chest of a Blackfoot warrior who lives to tell the tale. But all this death and suffering seems barely felt. You half expect the dead and injured to jump up and run off stage at the end of the chapter.
Casual violence alternates with casual sex in The Wandering Hill (the title, incidentally, refers to an Indian legend about a threatening mountain that moves). There's action under the stars and in the bushes, by Indians as well as whites, and lots of talk of "copulating" and "rutting." The tie between Jim and Tasmin seems principally carnal.
Jim eventually returns to the Berrybender camp with his young Indian wife, who cheerfully takes on the role of doting nursemaid to Jim and Tasmin's newborn son Monty. Snow queasily adjusts to fatherhood. Tasmin, who came to America steeped in the heroic fantasies of James Fenimore Cooper, ponders the realities of New World romance.
"Was her husband, Jim Snow, in love with her? It hardly seemed so, although of late he had been an amiable, courteous, and fervently passionate male. Yet the fact was, love was reckoned differently on this raw frontier."
This impulse to demythologize, deromanticize, the Old West is a strong and welcome element in this novel as in much of McMurtry's work, including his masterpiece, Lonesome Dove. That said, The Wandering Hill is fairly thin gruel, entertaining perhaps, but not a book you'll be tempted to read twice.
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