Red Knife Valley

by Jack Curtis

These "scribblings" trace Abbey's life as an anarchist, activist, philosopher, & environmentalist, chronicling his travels, his many loves and marriages, and his lifelong struggle to preserve the southwestern wilderness.

Genres: Fiction

94 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1986

Reviews

[Carla Perry]

This brief book (part of the Capra Back-to-Back series Volume VII) is the flip side of Edward Abbey's "Confessions of a Barbarian." Although I read Abbey's excerpt from a longer book first, it was "Red Knife Valley" that took me by surprise. This is a riveting story of a young boy in NYC whose companion is Red Knife, an invisible, but mighty hunter. Red Knife is the boy's teacher in the ways of the wild. The boy (or Red Knife) kills his mom when she is about to have him arrested or institutionalized and the two forge a life in a cave in Central Park. They hunt geese, birds, squirrels, rabbits, and forage the wild greens and berries that abound, amidst and surrounded by a teeming metropolis. They steal an old horse from Central Park's mounted police barn to ward off winter hunger, easily skin the animal, cache the meat and tan the hide. Meanwhile, a young girl grows up in another section of NYC where she feels more at home in the trees than in her home. She calls herself Sycamore. The girl matures into a young woman, but her parents don't know what to do with her. After she kills a neighbor who is trying to destroy her for walking on his land, she escapes into the wilds of Central Park where the boy senses her arrival long before she shows herself to him. She is wise, strong, beautiful, and a mighty warrior too. Red Knife remains invisible to her, but she can sense him and understand him and trusts him because the boy does. They form a band that must escape the park before they are caught and imprisoned. The plan is to steal two horses from the mounted police horse barn and head west. The idea seems ridiculous until Sycamore brings out a white sheet divided in half. She's printed the words "NY TO LA – Riding For Jesus" on the sheets, places the signs on the horses. No one stops them during the months it takes to cross the country. Their destination is the Absarokas mountain range (a real place in the Rocky Mountains that spans the Montana-Wyoming border). Red Knife, aging rapidly into an old Sioux, leads them to his tribe's original land. A lot is packed into this very short book (94 pages). I was riveted by the determination to these outcasts to survive, their cunning, the absurdity of living off the land for years undetected in Central Park, and the plot. A marvelous book. Highly recommended.