Twenty-Five IT’S A WOMAN’S WORLD
In this story, women get Tex’s respect when they attain a type of “mountain manhood.” But in this case, mountain manliness is mediated by the domesticity of the heroine: she stays close to camp and avoids strenuous scrambling yet bags the most game. See a similar attitude about women in the remarks about the parallel piece, “Sawback Changes His Mind.” In this piece, Tex’s rustic sidekick Sawback expresses typical misogynist attitudes; Tex chides him for them but in doing so, uses a racist slur about Indian drunkenness (“we’ve guided many a female that took to huntin’ like an Indian takes to lemon extract”). The female protagonist attains a variety of mountain manhood, but mediated, in this case, through the feminine gender role of domesticity. The moral here is rather different from those stories in which women accede to full mountain masculinity, such as the alternative version of this story (as above) or “This Guiding Business,” but the message is still clearly that women can hunt and be mountain women, in this case.
— AG and JR