Seven TEPEE TALES
The framing device in this story is rather different from the others. The author puts himself in the position of a client from New York, with his wife, who solicits hunting stories from “Jim and Buck,” who are happy to oblige. The Buck character clearly stands in for Tex, with his experience of guiding a party from New York for over twenty years, as Tex did. Tex’s virtuosity as a story-teller comes through here too, in his impersonation of a character significantly more grizzled and less tempted than he was to intersperse erudite Latinisms and Latin puns, Scriptural allusions or other language games into a “mountain man” narrative. The fact that he is able credibly to frame the story this way, himself playing the urbane narrator, suggests a good deal about the ambivalence of his actual position vis-a-vis his colleagues and his customers in the mountains.
—AG