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THE HUNTER by James Aldridge Kirkus Star

THE HUNTER

By

Publisher: Little, Brown

A wholly new field background manner for the versatile author of The Public and (to bracket two widely different books from his pen). This might almost be as a sophisticated James Oliver Curwood,- the setting the Canadian wilds, the central character, a trapper whose heart and soul are committed to the woods and the bush, but who needs the sense of security that a home on the fringe of civilization given him. Aldridge has created a sense of authenticity in his vigorous background, in his portraits of the trappers, dogged by the knowledge that their territory is rapidly losing the game which is their livelihood, in the ever-present temptation of the profit in illegal trapping and ring, and the accessibility of the game eeming preserve. And the conflict in Roy, his hunter, as he realizes that not only his territory in the wild but his precarous hold on civilization are imperilled. His brother is a shiftless farmer- and the home he cherished, even from afar, eventually goes. And the woman he loves in forced to choose between Roy, her lover of twelve years, and the husband, whose desertion and presumed death are now refuted by his turning up, another Enoch Arden. The story builds to a climax in mounting tensions-and the solution, while an amoral one, seems somehow the only answer....Certainly not ""literature"" but first rate reading.