NORTH TO YESTERDAY

by Robert Flyan ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 12, 1967

North to Yesterday is a magnificent retrospective--a tumbling saga of a trail drive up from the south of Texas. ""Men that follow the longhorn cow are reckless, resourceful and independent."" Fools too, and just such an indomitable, quixotic fool is Lampassas, who came back from the Civil War to settle down for a few years, and then after losing his wife and his store, determined to take a herd up to Trail's End. With him is his seventeen-year-old youngster, the Kid, and if the old man's obsession is with a dead past, the boy is dreaming of the iron horse, not cows. And so they go, a seruffy shirttail outfit--makeshift survivors of one experience or another, the Preacher, June, Pretty Shadow,-Gattis, and a game, gamine girl, Covina, with a bastard baby. Shambling, loping, limping, they cross endless, inexorable distances. There are some wonderfully funny scenes as the herd goes rocketing through Mustang Springs, unsettling privies and unseating a mature maiden from her perch over ""the unknown""; others more tragic--Gattis and Pretty Shadow are ""stompeded"" to death. Finally they reach Trail's End, terminus of the past, takeoff to the future....Mr. Flynn is a writer with a wide open talent and when the dust settles on his cowpoke epic, there have been fine stretches of sheer storytelling; more important, he gives it an instantaneous sense of life, rowdy, stubborn, spirited, enduring.

Pub Date: June 12, 1967

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1967

Categories: FICTION