Review: "Fire-Hunter" by Jim Kjelgaard

Fire-Hunter
by Jim Kjelgaard
Illustrated by Ralph Ray, Jr.
Holiday House, Sep. 1951

Jim Kjelgaard’s eleventh novel, Fire-Hunter, is a fast-paced pre-historic adventure. Hawk, the Chief Spear-Maker of his tribe, is banished for defying tribal law and using a spear-thrower during a wooly rhinoceros hunt. He, along with a girl called Willow left behind by their hunter-gatherer tribe because of a leg injury, seem doomed as they must survive alone. Their survival depends on their ability to hunt smaller, more agile, game that are inaccessible to their tribe because the larger game—wooly rhinoceros, bison—are too large and deadly for them to hunt alone.
    Their defense is precarious, too, since Hawk can carry only a club and two large spears. Hawk’s desperation and curiosity lead him to adapt his weapons from throwing spears to a catapult-like spear thrower, what I’ve always thought of as an atlatl, to an early form of a bow. Willow does her share, too, helping Hawk understand how animal sinew interacts with wood, and water-proofing a woven-basket with pitch. These technological advancements, which would have taken hundreds of years (probably more), for humans to develop are done in a single generation as way for Kjelgaard to illuminate human inventiveness and our adaptation from a hunter-gatherer society to a settlement-based society. Kjelgaard nicely shapes Hawk and Willow’s physical challenges—finding food, defense against saber-tooth tigers, dire wolves, a cave bear, and their worst enemy, other humans—but the story’s most powerful element is the tension between expanding human knowledge and superstition:

“The customs and beliefs of the tribe were deeply ingrained, a part of him, and it was not for him to question them. Yet, sometimes, he was puzzled by them. The incantations and rituals he himself used in the making of spears—just what connection did they have with the true worth of a spear?”

Fire-Hunter’s pace is relentless. Kjelgaard’s ability for plotting, along with his simple, straight-forward prose, and the epic-like expanse of the tale give it a weight that doesn’t match the book’s size. And even better, Fire-Hunter never lets you forget, at its center, it is an adventure story.