Two THIS GUIDING GAME
It turns out that some of the best mountain men are in fact women and girls. Tex was delighted by any client’s ability to shake off city behaviour, as in the first episode, in favour of rugged mountain masculinity, and his delight was not limited by (though it was certainly shaped by) conventions about gender. When an anxious and haughty family father turns back to town and the nearest stock ticker after a few days on the trail, his wife and four daughters turn out to be excellent mountain men, fulfilling all the requisites of the mountaineering hunting ethos, from pranks right down to excellent shooting. Tex’s mountain masculinity is, therefore, of an especially broad and comprehensive sort, connected not primarily to sexed bodies but more to gendered behaviour (or rather, in this case, to cross-gendered behaviour). As in other cases, Tex combines a type of outdoorsmanly machismo with a counter-cultural willingness to accept transgressions of convention, in this case gender-bending, and even to revel in them. Only the know-it-all professor comes off as irredeemable; even though he comes around to Tex’s view of fires in teepees, he makes it out to have been his own idea—hardly a surprise in an academic.
—AG