Word: slade
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...third and best novel, Robert F. Jones tracks the elemental grandeur of Alaska from feral Eden to pipeline ruination. In 1950 Bush-Pilot Buddies Jack Slade and Sam Healey are forced to land their aging C-47 in the icy outback. Charlie Blue, a Tlingit Indian shaman, appears and assists them through a surpassingly beautiful valley to rescue. The pilots promise to return, but before they can, Healey leaves Slade holding a smoking pistol and a murder rap in the wake of a saloon brawl. End of partnership. Slade settles down to homestead the secret valley. Thirty years later Healey...
Jones' cast are rawboned archetypes. Debts to Hemingway and Jack London are duly paid. But a peculiar vein of mysticism transforms the tale. Exerting his territorial imperative, for instance, Slade is aided by a transubstantial raven, a platoon of aged Japanese marines (survivors of a 1940s infiltration of the Aleutian Islands), and the icebound corpses of prehistoric mammoths. But the grand gesture proves as impermanent...
...orphan cub, is taken in and raised by kindly Widow Tweed, whose farm occupies a patch of rural terrain somewhere in the American midcentury. Down the road a pace is the shack of Amos Slade, a grizzled old hunter who keeps a grizzled old hound dog named Chief and a cheerful hound pup, Copper...
...paced as the desert drive in Raiders of the Lost Ark-and almost as violent. More important, they suggest a dimension of conflict within as well as between the antagonists. Will Tod escape not only the surly Chief but his old friend, now a deadly nemesis? Will Tod defend Slade, who has sworn to kill him, against the attack of a huge, ferocious bear? Will Tod and Copper ever be friends again...
...Slade's got this conspiratorial whisper when he's talking and he leans close to you. "You see, it wasn't all that razzle-dazzle that you read about in the paper. Hell, we grew up with the man." Slade is hanging back from the limousine; leaning against a wall. "It wasn't that at all." He speaks like he's letting you in on a big secret. "Look, when you're doing factory work and you're a kid--now this was cannery work, mind you, and they wouldn't allow no radios in the plant...