Jim Kjelgaard’s Adventure Magazine Stories
Jim
Kjelgaard (pronounced kel-guard) is best remembered for his young adult
adventures featuring dogs, young boys, and always set in the outdoors. A few of
his best-known books are Big Red (1945), Irish Red (1951), Outlaw
Red (1953), and Stormy (1959). But Kjelgaard was also a regular
contributor to pulp and slick magazines in the 1940s and 1950s, including Black
Mask, Argosy, Western Story, Weird Tales – one of Kjelgaard’s stories in Weird Tales, “The Man Who Told the Truth” (July 1946) was ghost-written by Robert Bloch – Short Stories, Collier’s,
Saturday Evening Post and many others. He had a particularly good
relationship with Adventure where (by my count) 36 of his stories
appeared between 1942 and 1963.
Of those,
16 chronicled the exploits of a Native American poacher, Charley Hoe Handle, outwitting
a game warden named Horse Jenkins. The first, “The Ambush of Hoe-Handle
Charlie” (Sep. 1945) is a about Horse – named “Brannigan” in this first story –
setting a trap for Charley, who is planning to spear walleyes out-of-season. (Charley’s
name also changed after this story from “Hoe-Handle Charlie” to “Charley Hoe
Handle”.) “The Ambush of Hoe-Handle Charlie” and the tales that followed are
well-crafted with a pleasing and easy-to-read colloquial style, which can be
seen in this passage from “The Buck-Baiting of Charlie Hoe Handle” (Mar. 1946):
“Horse bucked his canoe along, taken’
advantage of every little eddy and quiet place while he did so. He knowed that
Water’s Shoot was a tough place, but he had gone through tougher.”
The Charley
Hoe Handle stories are told from either Horse Jenkins or Charley’s perspective
and as the series developed, a grudging respect and even a low-wattage friendship
sparked between the men, as is obvious from Charley reminiscing about Horse in the series’ final entry, “Charley
Hoe Handle’s Bear Hunt” (Oct. 1950):
“Only he [Charley] knowed that, of all the
wardens what had ever been on his trail, which was every warden what had ever
been in Stick County, Horse had come the closest to puttin’ him in jail. He was
a mighty good warden, and Charley couldn’t help likin’ him.”
The real fun of the Charley Hoe Handle stories
is figuring out how Charley is going to fool Horse again and again. Charley is
clever, likable, but (and this is a big “but”) he is also portrayed as sneaky,
and a few racial slurs are thrown into the narrative – always from Horse’s
perspective – that are uncomfortable for most modern readers.
An early
example of Kjelgaard’s standalone work for Adventure is “The Snow Devil”
(Oct. 1942). A crisp and entertaining tale about a nasty outlaw, Markson, hiding
away in the Canadian wilderness from “a little affair in Montana” where two
lawmen died, “Markson’s bullets in their hearts.” As the story begins, Markson
kills another man stumbling through the icy snow towards Markson’s isolated mountain
cabin – “anybody who came up the Tabna in December was a fool” – and even more foolish
he had ten pounds of gold in his pockets. An amount of wealth that made murder
easy for Markson. With his pockets full of gold, the outlaw sets out for
civilization, but in only a few hours he realizes he’s being stalked by a
starving wolverine. The ending is a tad ironic, if a little too pat, and the winter
setting is shivery and cold.
“The
Moon of Slatted Ribs” (Jan. 1949) is the type of tale that made Kjelgaard a
bestselling author. Its style and plotting are better than “The Snow Devil” and
many of Kjelgaard’s other earlier Adventure stories. A solitary wolf is
starving after an early winter storm blankets the wilderness:
“The cold came very early that fall. It was
a biting, savage thing that imprisoned the lakes and rivers beneath three feet
of ice, tortured the trees until they screamed, and stilled the very air. And,
when the cold subsided, snow fell.”
The nameless
timber wolf is desperate for food. The mice are hidden beneath an impenetrable layer
of ice, a jay remains enchantingly out of reach. When the wolf smells a bull
moose in the air, he begins what is likely a hopeless hunt for such a large and
powerful animal. “The Moon of Slatted Ribs,” a title that refers to the wolf’s emaciated
body, is a vigorous and exciting tale that highlights Kjelgaard’s obvious love
of the outdoors and his knowledge of animals and the wilderness, both.
All of Jim
Kjelgaard’s stories that appeared in Adventure – those that I’ve read
anyway – are swift and entertaining, and very much worth tracking down.
See
below for a listing of Kjelgaard’s stories published in Adventure.
|
a little more about Jim Kjelgaard… ·
Jim
Kjelgaard (James Arthur Kjelgaard) was born on December 6, 1910, in New York
City. His early life was spent on a farm in the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania.
He attended Syracuse University but left before graduating with a degree. According
to Contemporary Authors, “[Kjelgaard] worked variously as a trapper,
teamster guide, surveyor’s assistant, factory worker, and plumber’s
apprentice” before becoming a full-time writer in 1939. That same year, he
married Edna Dresen. The two had a daughter, Karen, and his first novel, Forest
Patrol, was published by Holiday House in 1941. His writing won a Spur
Award for Wolf Brother (Holiday House, 1957) and the Boy’s Life Award
for Ulysses and His Woodland Zoo (Dodd, 1960). Jim Kjelgaard died by
suicide on July 12, 1959, in Phoenix, Arizona, after suffering with health problems and severe pain due to arthritis. Jim
Kjelgaard’s stories in Adventure
… Standalone
Stories: “The
Duel” (June 1942) “George
and the Retriever” (Oct. 1947) “The
Buck at Cross Lake” (Jan. 1948) “Of
the River and Uncle Pidcock” (Nov. 1948) “The
Shooting of Frenchy Dumont” (April 1949) “The
Moon of Slatted Ribs” (Jan. 1949) “Meeting
on the Ice” (May 1949) “Black
Ice” (Aug. 1949) “Some
Must Die” (May 1950) “Carnival
at Toomey Creek” (Aug. 1950) “Jasper
and the Criminal” (Mar. 1951) “Up
Where Death Begins” (April 1963) Charley
Hoe Handle Stories: “The
Ambush of Hoe-Handle Charlie” (Sep. 1945) “Charley
Hoe Handle and the Reluctant Muskie” (Dec. 1945) “The
Buck-Baiting of Charley Hoe Handle” (Mar. 1946) “Charley
Hoe Handle and the Loony Trout” (Sep. 1946) “Charley
Hoe Handle and the Great Big Bass” (Dec. 1946) “Charley
Hoe Handle and the Fifty-Buck Beaver (Feb. 1947) “Charley
Hoe Handle and the Spirit Wolf” (May 1947) “Charley
Hoe Handle vs. Man’s Best Friend” (Aug. 1947) “Charley
Hoe Handle’s Chicken Party” (May 1948) “Charley
Hoe Handle and the Witches’ Fire” (Aug. 1948) “Mechanization
of Charley Hoe Handle” (Oct. 1948) “Charley
Hoe Handle and the Weasel’s Chance” (Dec. 1948) “Thanksgiving
at Charley Hoe Handle’s” (Nov. 1949) “Charley
Hoe Handle Gets Caught” (Jan. 1950) “Charley
Hoe Handle Goes Native” (June 1950) “Charley
Hoe Handle’s Bear Hunt” (Oct. 1950) |
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