The Wolf Is My Brother

© 1967 by Chad Oliver


Oliver was an intriguing writer of about a dozen science fiction and western novels. Though he isn’t a household name, he had won literary respect during his lifetime. The Wolf is My Brother won an award from the Western Writers of America for best historical novel the year it was released. I had never heard of him until I came across his first book, Shadows in the Sun, in a hole-in-the-wall used books store two years ago. I read it, liked it, and reviewed it, here. Then, a few weeks back, I came across this western and, recalling the name, picked it up.

The most interesting thing about Oliver was his full-time occupation, Professor of Anthropology. As such, the themes of the two books are similar: one culture inevitably buckling under a stronger, more advanced one, suffering death through absorption. In Shadows in the Sun, it is the human race at the hands of an invisibly invading alien force. In The Wolf is My Brother, it is the America Indians losing to the ever-expanding, ever-advancing White Man.

There are no winners here. The novel is told from two main viewpoints, that of US Calvary Officer Colonel William Foster Curtis and a Comanche warrior named Fox Claw. Adversaries from the outset, though they don’t know it, the two are gradually brought together by societal forces out of their control (“Manifest Destiny” and the Department of Indian Affairs for Curtis; the conflict between accepting the Reservation Policy and the ancestral warrior spirit for Fox Claw). At the end, one loses his life to gain it, as they say, and the other loses his soul.

The novel is spare, grim, unrelenting. The reader, like the character, feels himself in the thrall to forces greater than himself, unable to change the script or leave the play. Life on the prairie, especially during the hard winter months, is delicately and painfully described in all its awful detail – how ever could a soft man like myself survive in those days? Historically, the novel exudes authenticity to the point where it feels almost as if Oliver heard the tale at his great-grandfathers knee.

The novel also bears the authenticity of real life: literary and plot devices which I thought would come into play don’t. The result is a sloppy story, as sloppy as reality. The murder of Fox Claw’s surrogate son by US soldiers; the siege of the settlement of Adobe Walls by rebelling Indians; Curtis’s sham of a marriage and sham of a life (he lives with a terrible secret committed a dozen years earlier in the War between the States). It’s all there in the story, adding flavor but not fuel. As a writer myself this confused me, and I’m not of definite opinion whether it is for the better of the story or not.

The main thing, the important thing, for me at least, is it’s believability. Oliver creates – or recreates – a world long gone and places you in it, painfully and gloriously so, that for a few brief hours you will forget you live in the 21st century, where men no longer carve out a brutal existence, living knife to mouth, one step always ahead of the elements, natural or otherwise, that can snuff them out as easily as blowing out a candle.

Grade: B+