Zane Grey

I am starting to read the novels of Zane Grey - one of our great western writers. His best known story - "Riders of the Purple Sage" - was made into a TV movie several years ago and is a quite good book.

He was a very good writer! These paragraphs caught my eye - and mind - this morning. This is from "Under the Tonto Rim", the story of a young lady who has volunteered to teach and bring a set of backwoods people into the modern world. He is describing a summer morning in the woods where she is staying:


"It was midsummer. The mornings were pleasant, the days hot and still, the evenings sultry and purple, with massed clouds in the west.

The July rains had left the ridges and open patches and the edges of the clearings colorful and fragrant with flowers. Corn and cane and beans were green and wavy in the fields. A steady line of bees flew by the cabin porch, to and fro from hives to woods. And a drowsy murmuring hum made music down by the shady stream.

At sunrise the home of the Denmeades seemed to be a rendezvous for the frisky chipmunk and chattering red squirrel, for squalling blue jay and whistling hawk and cawing crow, and for the few wild singing birds of the locality. At noon the woods were locked in hot, drowsy stillness; the pine needles did not quiver; heat veils rose smokily from the glades. At evening a melancholy pervaded the wilderness."


Great writing! I read that and I am in the woods!