Tooth and Claw: A Longmire Story (A Longmire Mystery)
The latest addition to the Walt Longmire canon, this small novel is set shortly after Longmire’s return from Vietnam, and we find him working as head of security at an oil drilling site in the Arctic. Johnson says he patterned the writing style after Alistair MacLean, which he says has been described as, “Hit ’em with everything but the kitchen sink, then give ’em the sink, and when they raise their head drop the plumber on ’em.” Johnson does just that in this page turner.
Longmire accompanies an expedition onto the frozen Arctic Ocean to collect samples for a scientific study, arriving by plane then a vehicle that travels across the ice on tracks. Nothing goes as planned. The expedition is turned upside down (literally, at one point) by extreme weather, and by the tooth and claw of the title: “From seemingly out of the blackness, giant rows of teeth lodged themselves through the two bars of the railing on the other side of the gangway, the creature’s massive head unable to get through,” as Johnson describes the teeth of their nemesis. And the claws, or tracks they have left, as seen by Longmire and his friend Henry Standing Bear: “Stepping around the carcass, I walked over to where he [Henry] stood, his lace-up Sorel dwarfed by the print at least twice as long and three times as wide, the claw marks sticking out like a set of dinner knives.” And later, Longmire says, “I knelt, placing my hand in the hollow that was more than twice as wide as my outstretched fingers, at least eighteen inches, and almost three times as long—with five distinct claw marks the size of paring knives.”
The members of the expedition face repeated, unprovoked, deadly attacks by the teeth and claws of a rogue, deformed polar bear. At first sighting, the bear is described by Longmire as, “Standing over twelve feet tall if he were an inch, his massive arms hung easy, the claws in the giant paws highly noticeable from a hundred yards away, the sloped shoulders leading to the streamlined head and the tiny black spot that was his nose.” And, in a later encounter in closer quarters, “After a few seconds, I opened my eyes to see, on the other side of the main hatches, standing erect on two feet, backlit by the sun and peering down at me, the towering silhouette of the fourteen-foot polar bear.”
Finding refuge is complicated by a severe storm and the 20-hour nights of the Arctic. A ghost ship, abandoned decades earlier to freeze and float in ocean ice and currents, offers some shelter from the storm but not from the bear, which continues to stalk and attack the members of the expedition, even in the confines of the ship. “As far as I knew, this was not normal behavior for any large carnivore,” Longmire says.
As they attempt to elude the bear, Longmire, Henry, and some of the surviving crew members use ingenuity and resourcefulness to call for distant help, utilizing gear salvaged from their wrecked aircraft and with outdated, damaged equipment from the ghost ship. Their every move is complicated by darkness, wind, snow, ice, frigid temperatures well below zero—and tooth and claw.
At less than 200 pages, and with nonstop action that drives the reader through page after page, Tooth and Claw can be read in a sitting or two. And though exhausted at the conclusion, you may well wish it would go on.