Thirteen TEX READS HIS PERMIT
Tex has only scorn for the new class of local functionary with a university education, such as the Park Warden, and is scathing in his dismissal of the sorts of things they would learn in university programs devoted to “Silviculture, Sikology, Practical Prospectin’, an’ Needlepoint Embroidery” (“Tex Reads his Permit”). The book-learned Warden he encounters does not disappoint: he is an incompetent woodsman, all officiousness, and condescending to boot; in the story, Tex mixes it up with him on account of disrespectful comments. Interestingly, it’s not book-learning per se that Tex abominates—after all, he clearly had a fair amount of it himself. Rather, the new disciplines being taught at university attract his ridicule, as much for their own sake as for their utter uselessness for a Park Warden, at least in those days—silviculture might come in handy today, though psychology will not be any better now than it was then.
This story is the only one to directly discuss Tex’s long association with the Walcotts, and he mentions them only because the “poaching” within Park boundaries is for them and the Smithsonian. He guards himself very carefully against name-dropping, remarkable for a man who had worked on Hollywood films, both in Banff and in California, as an animal handler (for instance, on Call of the Wild, 1935), and had a bevy of illustrious clients.
—AG