THE CROSSING by Cormac McCarthy

Fortunately, I remember some of my college Spanish, as this book contains a lot of it, and the author doesn’t always translate it.  Some of it I ignored, some of it I got the main idea from the context, and some of it I looked up.  The timeframe is not really clear until later in the book when the U.S. enters WWII.  The protagonist, a teenager named Billy, rides off from New Mexico to return an injured wolf to Mexico, leaving behind his parents and younger brother and taking with him the family’s only firearm.  Billy encounters all sorts of people, both good and bad, in the course of his travels.  Without the good people, he never would have survived all three of his forays into Mexico, but, if it weren’t for the bad people, he might not have had to return there at all.  Billy has skills that serve him well most of the time, but luck can be a fickle companion. This book reminded me a bit of Huckleberry Finn without the humor and with a horse as the means of travel instead of a raft.  Since this is a Cormac McCarthy novel, you know it is going to be Dark with a capital D.  The section that I found most riveting is one in which a very competent doctor is patching up a bullet wound, where the bullet went straight through.  In another section that held my attention, a passerby treats a horse’s knife wound with a strange brew and a poultice.  I guess I just liked the healing better than the bloodshed.