One FIFTH AVENUE PILGRIMS AMID THE GOATS
This account, written as a letter from “Tex” to a friend, draws a clear line between real hunters and outdoorsmen who might smoke and be thin as a rail, but who can walk up and down mountains all day, and university graduates from fancy schools with degrees and athletic achievements but no sense of outdoorsmanship. Authenticity, class, education, masculinity, and bodies all matter very much here. Tex strongly identified himself as the former, and clearly found the poseurs he sometimes had to guide very tedious. One gets the sense that he was sometimes treated rather cavalierly by customers because he was a working man for hire, and not “one of them.” Rather than complain about it, he found a way to make them look as foolish as they were—in stories such as this one. A young Ivy Leaguer eager for a chance to shoot a grizzly declines, when they finally find one, because he would have to cross a stream and get his feet wet, which he refuses to do. The story ends with Tex contemplating how he might even prefer the effete and pointless work (at least for a mountain man) of driving a bus to guiding this sort of customer. The question of authenticity is addressed clearly here: a man who can hunt and take care of himself in the mountains is a real man. People with money and fancy degrees from fancy schools start this game at a disadvantage. Supposed athletic prowess also knocks points off. Mockery directed at a guide with a thin body (of which he even makes fun himself) only makes the mocker look silly. The hunter’s refusal even to cross a stream and get wet is the final nail in the coffin of his masculinity—the guide retreats in disgust. This is an odd mixture of machismo and a kind of anti-establishment counterculture sensibility, characteristic of the place betwixt and between inhabited by Tex.
—AG and JR