THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996 TAG: 9604260722
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY GEORGE HEBERT
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
As the Wolf Loves winter
David Poyer
Forge 351 pp. 23.95
David Poyer's latest is about wolves. And a lot more. The author is an Annapolis graduate who lives on Virginia's Eastern Shore and has turned out, in the course of 14 novels, some exciting marine fiction. He is back on shore again (as in two previous books with Pennsylvania settings) for this one.
Timber wolves, re-introduced into the rugged terrain of a place Poyer calls Hemlock County, are big players, symbolic and otherwise. But there are also powerful sub-dramas - echoing issues we read about every day - swirling all over the snowy Allegheny-Plateau where wolves and scandal and tragedy converge in the winter of Poyer's tale.
There is Ainslee Thunner's fight to save a family oil-gas outfit from take-over hatchetmen. And the humane struggle of Dr. Leah Friedman to ease the pain and loneliness she encounters through her independent clinic. And little Jammy Benning's losing battle with AIDS. And his sister Becky's valiant efforts to help, and her own battle for survival when she gets lost following a wolf she imagines is a disguised prince with healing powers. With her, the author has also illuminated another headline issue: She has been the victim of a child molester on the faculty at her school.
The central human character, however, is an aging woodsman, a retired oil-field hand named Racks Halvorsen whose sense of decency turns him into a tireless detective on snowshoes when he stumbles on skullduggery in the wilderness he knows so well.
When Halverson and the spirited 12-year-old Becky find themselves prisoners of a thuggish team running a gas swindle for Ainslee Thunner's company, a harrowing ordeal of escape threads through the final chapters of the novel.
But first Halvorson finds he must play a bit of a game with his captors, agreeing to dredge up some of his old expertise for the snuffing of a gas-well fire with dynamite. How he does this with limited equipment and assistance makes for a breath-stopping episode.
And more tension builds from there, as he and the girl drag themselves across the wintry landscape toward civilization, using all the woodcraft the old man can summon to fashion crude weapons, start a fire, find protection from the weather at night and outsmart their dog-led human pursuers.
Their final salvation - with one of the wolves taking a somewhat mystical role - gives the narrative a high-pitched climax.
The author leaves us wondering on a few points - like whether the villainous or the virtuous were most responsible for bringing the wolves in - but small matter.
The book, like others in Poyer's Hemlock County series, is in part an ecological sounding board for the author's views about the destructive effects of human greed. It is also another showcase for his intimate acquaintance with the wild and the man-made, especially when they confront each other. He writes with just as sure a touch about the Pennsylvania petroleum industry as he did, say, about the working divers of the offshore Gulf rigs in his earlier Louisiana Blue.
These elements and the down-to-earth dramas, all of them, guarantee good reading. by CNB