Plying Perilous Waters

The indefatigable Larry McMurtry has rounded us up yet again, herding us along a fictional trail that promises to be even longer in miles and pages than the cattle drive in “Lonesome Dove.”

This time, however, McMurtry is going to let us rest now and then. “Sin Killer,” he says, is the first volume of a “four-decker, in which we follow the adventures of a great English sporting family, the Berrybenders, as they make their way through the American West in the years 1832-36.” The novels are set on or near the four rivers they travel: the Missouri, the Yellowstone, the Rio Grande and the Brazos.

This is the Missouri segment. In 1832, Lord Albany Berrybender, infatuated with the idea of shooting animals he has never shot before, charters a steamboat in St. Louis and heads upriver with his wife, his mistress, several of his 14 children, a small army of servants and hired boatmen, three chiefs returning to their tribes after a diplomatic mission to Washington and a few real people, including frontier artist George Catlin.

From the beginning, the vacuum of the empty prairies they pass through tugs at the group’s feudal hierarchy and Old World certainties. No one is more affected than the oldest Berrybender daughter, Tasmin, who jumps ship to marry Jim Snow, a mountain man also known as the Sin Killer because of his religious convictions.

Jim is a man of few words, Tasmin a woman of many. She is a voracious reader; he can barely decipher a few Bible verses (his conversion having come not in church but by having been struck by lightning and survived). At bottom, she is as practical as he but, in a wilderness she knows only through the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, she is for the moment ignorant and foolish.

Their romance and their quarrels proceed in a way that seems oddly familiar until we realize that Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn played these characters, under different names, in more than one movie. “Sin Killer” is a comedy, though it can be downright grim--a balance that McMurtry achieved in his last novel, “Boone’s Lick,” and that no other writer of westerns has quite matched.

On McMurtry’s frontier, as on the real one, the penalty for stupidity or bad luck is severe. Two women captured from the steamboat and held for ransom in a Mandan village are beaten by the tribe’s women and raped by its men. McMurtry says so plainly; but although the beatings are described in detail, we are spared the rapes. They would have upset the balance, disturbed the tone.

McMurtry has never been one to sentimentalize Native Americans. The Mandans are doomed--smallpox nearly wiped them out in 1837--and therefore pitiable; but the individual members of this tribe and others in the novel are intelligent and dull, cruel and generous in the same proportion as the white people.

Lord Albany’s foolishness is deeply ingrained, and he pays for it with parts of his anatomy (though without losing his zest for the chase). While buffalo hunting, he shoots off part of his foot. An enraged chief with a knife lops off some of his fingers. Caught in a blizzard, he is frostbitten and may lose a leg. The prospect is unnervingly real that he will be limbless before two novels of the four are done.

Indeed, by the point “Sin Killer” ends--with the steamboat stuck in the ice, still 100 miles from the safety of Ft. Yellowstone--the casualty list is extensive. Other members of the party, drawn by the freedom of the West, have deserted. Just as Lord Albany has run out of claret--a whole keelboat full of it, pilfered and drunk by the boatmen--one could fear that McMurtry will run out of characters. But new people turn up as the expedition moves west. Characters who have minor roles in “Sin Killer”--such as Tasmin’s sister Mary, a sinister 12-year-old who talks to snakes and smells out edible roots--are surely destined for bigger things. And it’s worth noting that no fewer than three of the women, including Tasmin and Lord Albany’s mistress, are pregnant.