This is going to be my third and final post on Green Hills. If you haven’t read the first two, you can find them here [hyperilink] and here [hyperlink]. In those posts, I focused on Hemingway’s use of description during transition sequences. I want to look at his descriptions in a different area today.
We’re going to look at a section in Ch10 (pg. 130 in my edition). I get the sense that for Hemingway, the hunt is as much about the journey—and about communicating the experience as he writes—as it is about the catch itself. And I think his use of description supports this idea. The scenes and physical features of the environment play critical roles in the advancement of the narrative, as the hunting party pursues the target. So let’s look at the passage. The hunting party has just set out from camp on the trail of the kudu. Hemingway writes:
In the car we turned to the right on the road, drove on up past the mud village and turned off the road to the left onto a red, hard, clay track that circled the edge of the hills and was close bordered on either side with trees. It was raining fairly hard now and we drove slowly. There seemed to be enough sand in the clay to keep the car from slipping.
So we see them drive past a village. They turn onto a red, clay road—color and texture. At the end he adds that the clay must be sandy, and despite all the rain, the road has kept its shape. If you’ve ever driven on a dirt road in a hard rain, you know how quickly it can turn into a shapeless, muddy bog, one that will swallow the wheels of a car, nevermind human feet. We see the sights around them as well. They’re passing a range of hills, moving through a close-in wooded area. And it’s raining, so it’s gray skies all around.
This is their path. After a time, one of the trackers calls them to stop. He spotted kudu tracks in the road. Again, Hemingway’s description of the appearance and shape of the road is critical here, because it alerts them to the kudu. Hemingway describes the hard edges of the tracks in the clay, tracks which would keep their shape better in hard, sandy clay than washed out mud; and that hard edge tells them that the kudu passed only minutes earlier. They’ve found their quarry. The chase is on.
They leave the truck and follow the trail. This leads them “through thick brush and then out into an open patch.” The rain picks up. Hemingway stops to clean his glasses and the rifle sight. As he continues, “we skirted the edge of the open patch and then, ahead, there was a crash and I saw a gray, white-striped animal making off through the brush.” They’ve found their quarry!
Turns out, it’s a cow, not the buck they’d been looking for. The triumph Hemingway’s been building toward ends in disappointment. The descriptions that Hemingway slips in build into the impact of that moment, especially as he works them together with the thoughts, conversations, and actions that are critical parts of the experience. Again, the mud alerts Hemingway (and the reader) to the trail of the kudu. As the rain picks up, Hemingway notes that this is a benefit as it helps hide them from their quarry. And then we get the revelation, passing out of the thick brush (the setting for the pursuit) into the open space (the setting for what should be the climax of the hunt—the kill).
I’m reminded of a scene from the movie Creed. The director begins the final fight with a long shot following the protagonist. It starts in the locker room, progresses out into the dark enclosure of the tunnel, passes through the screaming crowd, and then opens up into the wide space of the arena, lights and all, with the boxing ring there in the middle. Hemingway’s path from the enclosure of the trees to the wide open field creates the same progression: the journey, building expectation, building toward the climactic encounter.
And that makes the letdown for Hemingway all the more heavy.
And after this first disappointment, it’s only downhill from there. The scenery changes, from pointing the way toward the expected goal to a series of empty scenes, all with the sought after object—the kudu—conspicuously absent. The rain turns from friend to foe. I’ll leave it to Hemingway himself to close things out, using the scenery to hammer home this anticlimactic ending to the journey of the hunt:
We circled back in the rain getting thoroughly soaked, saw nothing, found the car, and as the rain lessened and the road still seemed firm decided to go on until it was dark. Puffs of cloud hung on the hillside after the rain and the trees dripped but we saw nothing. Not in the open glades, not in the fields where the bush thinned, not on the green hillsides. Finally it was dark and we went back to camp.