The Voice of Bugle Ann

“You call yourself a reader,” someone might say, “and here you’ve reviewed fifty books and not a single one of them adult fiction?”

Hmm. I wonder why.

I think there are two superficial reasons and one substantive one. Superficial #1: many of the novels I might like to review, have already been reviewed more than enough times. With 58 reviews of Prayer for Owen Meany on LibraryThing, why would I want to add another one. OK, it’s one of my favorite American novels. Am I likely to convince someone else? Why would I want to? Superficial #2: Novels that I read years ago—some that I have reread at least once—linger in my mind. I would like to share them with others. The problem is that, though I have a vivid memory of the aura show more of the novel, of my intense pleasure in reading it at the time, I no longer have a good memory for details. Good reviews, in my opinion, depend upon significant details, not generalities and abstractions about aura.

But I must admit that the more substantive reason is that, novel-reader than I am and have been since I was eight or ten years old, the more significant books in my life have usually been nonfiction. Poetry books that I browse in and return to again and again. Books of literary criticism that guided me in my reading. Books on teaching that encouraged me in my profession. Books on religion and spiritual values that have shaped my world view. Books on current affairs that enhance my civic awareness. Books of Americana that I collect and luxuriate in. And, especially, books of history and biography that I read both for their stories, and also for their emphasis on character development, their vision of a world that was, and their sense of values in the world that is.

Novels? A pastime, often. A significant life experience? Seldom.

And then there are Great Expectations (42 reviews) and Wuthering Heights (88 reviews) and Mayor of Casterbridge (16 reviews) and Light in August (10 reviews) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (56 reviews). And, yes, Prayer for Owen Meany.

So I’ll begin simple. The Voice of Bugle Ann (Globe, 1935) is listed by only eight other LibraryThing’ers, and no one has reviewed it yet, but it’s a favorite of mine. So here goes.

It’s a novelette really, only eight short chapters, 115 pages. It’s set in Missouri, one of my home states. It’s an authentic story of local color. It recovers a time in the recent past that is vanishing now. And it speaks to me personally. It deals with old-time fox hunters.

My father was a fox hunter. Oh, not a fox hunter of the fashionable British sort, wearing red coats and fancy hats, riding their horses furiously over the countryside, following the hounds, bringing back a fox’s brush as a trophy. Uh-uh. Not one of those. My father was a fox hunter in Tennessee (I wept to be taken with him when I was four years old) who set their hounds loose in the dark and sat around a campfire, listening, listening. They all recognized their own hounds’ voices. They knew when she caught the scent and began trailing the fox through woods, along streams, over hills, down in gulches, circling and recircling. They knew (and rejoiced, but silently) when she led the pack. They loved the fox too, the wilier the better, never expecting or even wanting to catch him, knowing he would eventually find his hole and disappear—until another night. The joy was in the chase, and in the sound of a good hound’s voice.

Bugle Ann is such a hound. “Her cry soared ahead—high, round, with that queer and brassy resonance which made you think that ghosts were out there somewhere, sounding Taps without any armies to follow them.” She belongs to Springfield Davis. “Waited seventy years to have a dog like that,” he says.

But the voice of Bugle Ann is silenced, at least for a time. An old man is sent to prison, two lovers are separated, a young man gives up fox-hunting and turns all his attention to his crops, and old-time fox-hunters swear they hear the ghost of Bugle Ann one dark night.

A story is a story is a story. The villain is villainous; the fair maiden is more than fair; friends are faithful, a loyal son keeps his father’s vision alive, and the voice of Bugle Ann can still be heard in the foothills of the Ozarks.

This may not be the Great American novel. I’ll still give that honor to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I know, I know. Others would contend it’s Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter or O Pioneers! or The Great Gatsby or Gravity’s Rainbow. In later reviews I’ll probably shout my hosanna for Eudora Welty’s Losing Battles and John Gardner’s Sunlight Dialogues. And there’s always Prayer for Owen Meany. I may even become #59 to have my say about that one.

But in honor of those old-time fox-hunters in Missouri and Tennessee and everywhere else where they have kept their stories alive around campfires, this is my salute to the simplicity and the authenticity and the enchantment of The Voice of Bugle Ann. show less

As I started reading this book, I realized I had read it a long time ago. I had thought I had remembered the ending, but was pleasantly surprised when I found out I had remembered it wrong.
Very nice story.

Pretty quick read. My copy was a little book with big margins. Thick pages, guess that is how they made them in 1935. Give me books over a kindle version any day. (Books in audio form are different if you have a great reader, especially with a nice accent.)

I know I gotta rate the book with stars to let people know how much it worth your time, and should you search out this book versus another book I would recommend maybe you should read some of the other classics first, but when you have the time, include this one in your reading. I show more thoroughly enjoyed it so that it rates 5 stars, but as I would not say it is one of my top favorite books on dogs, so I guess I will rate it lower but only from comparison. In my list in excel I will rate it 4.5, in Goodreads I will give it a 4, but only to distinguish it from books on dogs that are even more so my favorite.

Here is an excerpt from ‘The Voice of Bugle Ann’ that I especially liked:

“And from that night rose the sprout of a legend which spread itself over the whole county, and farther than that. It was the legend of a white dog – lean, like hounds of the Spaulding line – who bugled her way through the brush at night, who ran with her head high, calling and hunting for the master who had been carried away from the hills he loved.

They said she ran at the head of a silent pack in which there were thirty-four dogs, all the great and noble sires who had galloped those ranges before the Civil War. There were the hounds into Missouri when Daniel Boone came, great sword-mouthed brutes who could pull down a deer if they wanted to. But they all ran silently – their feet made not even a whisper in the driest leaves of last year, and their baying was not the kind which ordinary people could hear. Only if you were about to die, you might hear them crying all at once.” - MacKinlay Kantor, "The Voice of Bugle Ann" show less

As I started reading this book, I realized I had read it a long time ago. I had thought I had remembered the ending, but was pleasantly surprised when I found out I had remembered it wrong.
Very nice story.

Pretty quick read. My copy was a little book with big margins. Thick pages, guess that is how they made them in 1935. Give me books over a kindle version any day. (Books in audio form are different if you have a great reader, especially with a nice accent.)

I know I gotta rate the book with stars to let people know how much it worth your time, and should you search out this book versus another book I would recommend maybe you should read some of the other classics first, but when you have the time, include this one in your reading. I show more thoroughly enjoyed it so that it rates 5 stars, but as I would not say it is one of my top favorite books on dogs, so I guess I will rate it lower but only from comparison. In my list in excel I will rate it 4.5, in Goodreads I will give it a 4, but only to distinguish it from books on dogs that are even more so my favorite.

Here is an excerpt from ‘The Voice of Bugle Ann’ that I especially liked:

“And from that night rose the sprout of a legend which spread itself over the whole county, and farther than that. It was the legend of a white dog – lean, like hounds of the Spaulding line – who bugled her way through the brush at night, who ran with her head high, calling and hunting for the master who had been carried away from the hills he loved.

They said she ran at the head of a silent pack in which there were thirty-four dogs, all the great and noble sires who had galloped those ranges before the Civil War. There were the hounds into Missouri when Daniel Boone came, great sword-mouthed brutes who could pull down a deer if they wanted to. But they all ran silently – their feet made not even a whisper in the driest leaves of last year, and their baying was not the kind which ordinary people could hear. Only if you were about to die, you might hear them crying all at once.” - MacKinlay Kantor, "The Voice of Bugle Ann" show less