Reviews for The Deer Stalker

The average rating for The Deer Stalker based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-12-13 00:00:00 John Davis This book is Zane Grey's depiction of an actual event, the Kaibab Deer Drive at the Grand Canyon in 1924. I had never heard of such a thing until I read It Happened at Grand Canyon recently. There was an essay there about the deer drive, and it mentioned that Grey witnessed the event, publishing this book about it the following year. I have a whole set of Zane Grey titles so of course I had to jump right into this one after reading the Grand Canyon book. Even though I knew the results of the drive by reading the essay, there was still plenty of suspense here in the buildup to the event, and the frustrations Grey's ranger character deals with as he tries to both do his job a he sees it and satisfy the government muckety-mucks who are poking their noses everywhere. Not to mention those greedy ranchers who want the deer gone so they can put their cattle all over the place. Our ranger also has to try to help the man who comes up with the idea for the drive, and this is not an easy task. McKay might as well have been a government man for all the help he was. A man who only has ideas but not the drive and intelligence to carry them out is not the type to be in charge of such a project! And let's not forget the romance, Grey always gives us a nice healthy romance. Will our ranger meet the woman of his dreams? Will she recognize him as the man of hers? Sigh. Few writers can describe the Canyon territory as well as Grey, even though he does sometimes get a bit lush with his words. No matter, whether you have been there or not, this book plops you right into the heart of Grand Canyon country. Settle in and enjoy!

Review # 2 was written on 2020-12-12 00:00:00 Michael Carlin I've read everything by Louis L'Amour, but somehow not the other "king of westerns," Zane Grey. I decided to fix that and give this a whirl. Deer Stalker is definitely a Western, but it's an unusual one. There are no gun fights, not a lot of attention to horses aside from them being a way to get somewhere, and it's set in the 1920's, so there are cars and trucks. On the plus side, the books lead female character, Patricia, gets a lot of screen time, which many Westerns don't do. Thad Eburne (horrible name) is a man who left the East to come West and fell in love with the country. He works for the forestry service as a ranger, mostly attending to the huge deer herd in the Buckskin range. But mankind has meddled and killed off all the predators, so the deer population is out of control and starving to death. Thad agrees to go along with a desperate plan to try and save as many of the deer he's come to admire as possible. Along the way he meets Patricia, another refugee from the East Coast, who came West to get away from a never-identified scandal. She seems to be a very honorable and admirable woman, so I'm not sure what she might have done to get in so much trouble out New York way. Naturally, she and Thad meet and fall in love over the course of the book. The descriptions of the land, the spirit of the west, and the early theme of conservation are all great. A bit less so are many details we never get filled in. What happened to Pat back east? Who are the forces that oppose the attempt to save the deer, exactly, and why are they so against it? For that matter, what did they do, precisely? It's an odd book in some regards, and seems to end on a cliffhanger of sorts, but there's no second book. I have to admit, based on an admittedly small sample size, so far I prefer L'Amour.