Word: mccrae
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...that start, the narration wafts aloft into further elegant absurdity, as follows: "Known throughout south Texas as the Great Western, she came walking up from the muddy Rio Grande holding a big snapping turtle by the tail. Matilda was almost as large as the skinny little Mexican mustang Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call were trying to saddle-break...
...McCrae and Call? We've heard those names before. The two Texas Rangers--each just 19 as Matilda and the snapper heave into view, and with glory, the death of the buffalo herds and the fencing of the open range still ahead of them--are of course the heroes of McMurtry's magnificent horse opera, Lonesome Dove. A personal note: this reviewer is unreliable on the subject of Lonesome Dove, which he rereads with increasing fondness whenever he encounters a November in his soul...
...When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake--not a very big one ... 'You pigs git,' Augustus said, kicking the shoat. 'Head on down to the creek if you want to eat that snake.'" The gritty particularity of the snake, the pigs and McCrae's irritation start things off right. It is acceptable for Augustus to be a hero--which he is, flat out--if his stage is a ridiculous outpost so man-, woman- and dog-forsaken that not even the rattlesnakes are safe...
...less beguiled reader might have turned away when the author, a couple of years ago, came out with a sequel, The Streets of Laredo. There were problems; Call was an old man, and McCrae had died toward the end of Lonesome Dove, after their Hat Creek Cattle Co.'s long drive to Montana. But Laredo worked as a tip of the author's sweat-stained Stetson to Lonesome Dove, and that was good enough...
...Dead Man's Walk were not a prequel, it would be worth only glancing notice. As things are, it is a satisfactory foothill, with the grand old mountain in view. There are no heroics, though there is plenty of calamity. Call and McCrae, too young and foolish to know better, short on everything except energy and ignorance, have joined a ragtag outfit called the Rangers, less a military force than a band of hungry looters, commanded by a puffing, self-anointed general. This faker has heard about Santa Fe, then a Mexican settlement, but does not know where...