52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
55. Winter count.
Short stories from the author of Of wolves and men, which I understand was a nonfiction sensation and established him as something of a voice for the environmentalists. Stunning. Mostly concerned with acknowledging, maybe revering, the numinous in the natural world — shells, stones, weather. There are also a couple of stories, perhaps the most affecting, where historians/anthropologists, after long study of their subjects stories and culture, are overtaken by the meaning underneath and can no longer remain objective, or even function well anymore. In the title story, a professor who has spent his life memorizing the winter counts (single sentences marking a notable event as a way of recording the passage of time, among northern plains native americans), stands almost in terror of the futility, and possibly sacrilege, of presenting these often conflicting and wholly personal primary records at a conference:
He hesitated for a moment at the edge of the stage. He wished he were back in Nebraska with his students to warn them: it is too dangerous for everyone to have the same story. The same things do not happen to everyone.
A similar realization happens in the last story, ‘The location of the river’: the narrator is a historian who is examining the record of a predecessor who makes an astounding claim about a river disappearing for a season in Nebraska, a story told to that predecessor by the Pawnee Indians he lived with. The Pawnee warn that this is a judgment on the white man, a disapproval of his view of the land and its uses. That same judgment visits the narrator in a surprising way at the end of the story, leaving the reader with an uneasy shock and terror, a feeling that something grave had really happened.
Powerful.
