Hunter's Horn by Harriette Simpson Arnow

She has no use for doctors and modern medicine. She sees no use for her eldest daughter, Suse, to receive an education beyond the elementary level. Nunn’s wife, Milly, is a capable woman, but she can’t see much past her own homestead. They farm, they cook and clean, they spend hours canning and putting up food for the winter, and they help one another bring new life into the world. While most of the men are off hunting fox and getting liquored up, the womenfolk are the ones keeping it all together. Those who really shine in this story are the women living along the banks of Little Smokey Creek.

The preachers sermonize about hell and eternal damnation, and the need to save one’s self from sin. Superstitions abound, the men drink moonshine, and the women barely have time to rest in between birthing one baby after another. The people here are removed from the progress of the ‘real’ world. World War II seems a faraway cry, something just whispered about and barely touching the folk of the Kentucky hills. It’s a drama about the people of Appalachia in the 1940s. But someday Nunn will conquer King Devil and all his troubles will melt away… or so he believes.Īt its heart, Hunter’s Horn is so much more than a story about clever foxes, spirited foxhounds and the fever of the foxhunt. Nunn’s wife and his children toil and struggle to help out on the farm and in the home, yet poverty rules their little world. The Ballews lack adequate clothing and shoes and often go for weeks on end without meat or milk in their daily diet. Nunn Ballew is a foxhunter and will do anything to catch this fox – including selling off his livestock and sacrificing his land if necessary.

On the surface, this novel is about a man and his obsession to hunt down King Devil, the red fox that has been the bane of the past several years of his existence. 'And his voice, snarling and animal-like, seemed to come from that part of him that lived past his will and his reason, the part that hunted King Devil and left all manhood behind until he was but one beast hunting another.'

Hunter's Horn by Harriette Simpson Arnow