Andrews knows that he wants something from the wilderness of the West, but he doesn't know what it is, he just knows it's out there and getting it will be hard and change him in the process.
At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he takes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her.
He felt that wherever he lived, and wherever he would live hereafter, he was leaving the city more and more, withdrawing into the wilderness. He felt that that was the central meaning he could find in all his life, and it seemed to him then that all the events of his childhood and his youth had led him unknowingly to this moment upon which he poised, as if before flight. He looked at the river again. On this side is the city, he thought, and on that the wilderness; and though I must return, even that return is only another means I have of leaving it, more and more.Nature doesn't disappoint, just getting to the Buffalo is a near-death experience. Once the hunt begins, Andrews finds himself a small cog in Miller's obsessive killing machine. All caution is thrown to the wind and Miller bathes them all in blood. Reading this section was intense, and incredibly sad. I desperately wanted the deaths of these amazing animals to matter more, be more difficult to achieve, and most of all for Andrews to realise he was forever destroying what he came to find.
While Andrews does feel some remorse:
On the ground, unmoving, it no longer had that kind of wild dignity and power that he had imputed to it only a few minutes before.
It came to him that he had turned away from the buffalo not because of a womanish nausea at blood and stench and spilling gut; it came to him that he had sickened and turned away because of his shock at seeing the buffalo, a few moments before proud and noble and full of the dignity of life, now stark and helpless, a length of inert meat, divested of itself, or his notion of its self, swinging grotesquely, mockingly, before him.it isn't anywhere near enough to force him to stop, or even be a small balance on Miller's wild abandon.
Miller's desperate desire to annihilate the entire herd gets the hunting party into serious trouble, which they barely survive (again). As the struggle to survive continues the interpersonal relationships completely break down and each man retreats into himself.
Small spoilers.
I struggled with the plausibility of them surviving the winter with absolutely no preparations, winter clothes or proper shelter. Many died in those times who were much better prepared, but I still gave it a pass. There was plenty more tragedy left, which was good, I was worried that this was going to turn into "happily ever after".
In fact the ending is far from that, it's crushing, but it doesn't stop Andrews from heading out into the wilderness again to continue seeking something he still can't define.
“Well, there’s nothing,” McDonald said. “You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you’re ready to die, it comes to you—that there’s nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain’t done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you’re the only one that knows the secret; only then it’s too late. You’re too old.”It's a great western, but True Grit and Lonesome Dove remain my all-time favourites.
4.5 stars.
