Three THE LAST GREAT BUFFALO DRIVE
Tex relates a number of past film experiences in this story, though not the months he and his family spent in California, when he worked in Hollywood as an animal handler, notably on The Call of the Wild. From raucous by-play during the shooting of a silent movie and mockery of the Alpine folk costumes (lederhosen in particular) featured in the film through a well-deserved but painful assault on the backside of a pain-in-the-ass assistant director with home-made buckshot, the atmosphere rings true to anyone who has ever had the misfortune to hang around a movie set as an extra or a relative. Tex clearly spent a good deal of time working on movies. His mockery of what directors thought looked real vs. reality is especially fresh and apt. Both the buckshot episode and the unintended killing of a buffalo, then a rare animal in Canada, were, if true, very masculine hi-jinks and would lead to much more serious consequences today. The rough-and-tumble of those days is one point of this story, with the implicit message that one could no longer get away with such macho goings-on (for better or for worse, with the decision left to the reader).
—AG