true grit essay

Charles Portis

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True Grit: Introduction

True grit: plot summary, true grit: detailed summary & analysis, true grit: themes, true grit: quotes, true grit: characters, true grit: symbols, true grit: theme wheel, brief biography of charles portis.

Historical Context of True Grit

Other books related to true grit.

Full Title: True Grit
When Published: 1968
Literary Period: Contemporary
Genre: Realism, Western Fiction
Setting: Fort Smith, Arkansas and the “Indian Territory” of the old American West
Climax: After Chaney strikes LaBoeuf with a rock, Mattie grabs her revolver and shoots him in the head.
Antagonist: Tom Chaney
Point of View: First person

Extra Credit for True Grit

The Big Screen. True Grit has been adapted as a film twice. The first was released in 1969, was directed by Henry Hathaway, and starred John Wayne. The second came out in 2010, was directed by Ethan and Joel Coen, and starred Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon.

Serialization. Before its hardcover publication, True Grit was serialized by The Saturday Evening Post in 1968.

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True Grit: an Alternate Perspective

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Donna Tartt on the Singular Voice, and Pungent Humor, of Charles Portis

Portis, who died in February, occupied a unique place in American letters. His novels, written in the vernacular of his native Arkansas, beg to be read aloud.

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By Donna Tartt

It is likely no surprise to readers who love the novels of Charles Portis that everything delightful about his books was delightful about him as a person. The surprise, if anything, was how closely his personality tallied with his work. He was blunt and unpretentious, wholly without conceit. He was polite. He was kind. His puzzlement at the 21st-century world in which he found himself was deep and unfeigned. And yet almost everything out of his mouth was dry, new and pungently funny.

Portis died in February . I’ve loved his work all my life — “The Dog of the South” is a family favorite, as is “Masters of Atlantis” — though the work closest to me is “True Grit,” which I recorded as an audiobook a number of years ago. I’m often asked how I came to record another author’s book; most simply, the answer is voice. I grew up hearing “True Grit” read aloud to me by my mother and my grandmother and even my great-grandmother. This was a tremendous gift, as Portis caught better than any writer then alive the complex and highly inflected regional vernacular I heard spoken as a child — mannered and quaint, old-fashioned and highly constructed but also blunt, roughshod, lawless, inflected by Shakespeare and Tennyson and King James but also by agricultural gazetteers and frilly old Christian pamphlets, by archaic dictionaries of phrase and fable, by the voices of mule drivers and lady newspaper poets and hanging judges and hellfire preachers.

All readers who love Portis have lines they like to swap back and forth.

Then too, the books are so funny that they cry to be read aloud. Pick up any novel by Portis and open it to any page and you will find something so devastatingly strange and fresh and hilarious that you will want to run into the next room and read it aloud to somebody. His language is precise but whimsical, understated but anarchic, and as with Barbara Pym or P.G. Wodehouse, it’s tough to communicate the flavor of it without resorting to long quotes. All readers who love Portis have lines they like to swap back and forth; and a conversation among his admirers will mostly consist of such gems — committed to memory — exchanged and mutually admired. One thinks of Dr. Buddy Casey’s lecture on the Siege of Vicksburg, which Raymond Midge, the narrator of “The Dog of the South,” plays again and again on Sunday drives and at the shaving mirror, an action that, we are given to understand, has helped to drive away his wife, Norma. Ray explains: “I had heard the tape hundreds of times and yet each time I would be surprised and delighted anew by some bit of Casey genius, some description or insight or narrative passage or sound effect. The bird peals, for instance. Dr. Bud gives a couple of unexpected bird calls in the tense scene where Grant and Pemberton are discussing surrender terms under the oak tree. The call is a stylized one — tu-whit , tu-whee — and is not meant to represent that of any particular bird. It has never failed to catch me by surprise. But no one could hope to keep the whole of that lecture in his head at once, such are its riches.”

Such too are the riches of Portis. His characters, who like the characters of Samuel Beckett often find themselves thrown in with one another on long perplexing journeys, are single-minded and completely un-self-conscious innocents (veterans, pedants, failed schoolteachers and salesmen) whose speech startles and delights, on nearly every page. Though it’s often said of Portis that he’s the least known of great American novelists, I cannot think of another 20th-century writer — any writer, American or otherwise — whose works are beloved among quite so many differing age groups and literary tastes, from the most sophisticated to the simplest. Walker Percy was a fan; so was Roald Dahl. As Wells Tower pointed out in The New Yorker : “Portis’s diffident, modestly gallant characters were a world away from the marital bonfires and priapisms of other male writers of his crop — Roth, Updike, Yates. His male heroes practiced a masculinity that by the standards of the day was uniquely (and unfashionably) nontoxic.”

Comedy is the most ephemeral of the arts. There are very few comic novels that do not wither with time, and even fewer novels — comic or otherwise — that can be given to pretty much anyone, from an old person to a small child. Even more rare is a novel one can reliably turn to for cheer when one is sick or sad. But “True Grit” is this rare novel, and Mattie Ross, its narrator, is one of the greatest of Portis’s innocents: a Presbyterian spinster who in old age relates the story of how, as a child, she struck out in the 1870s to avenge her father’s murder. “People do not give it credence that a 14-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.” It’s a serious book by any measure; Mattie’s rage and grief are thunderous (“What a waste! Tom Chaney would pay for this! I would not rest easy until that Louisiana cur was roasting and screaming in hell!”) and yet perhaps the greatest pleasure of the book is Mattie’s speaking voice: rambling, deadpan, didactic, sprinkled with oddball opinions and facts, obstinate in its views and acute in its observations. Of Chaney, the hired man who murdered her father (“He was a short man with cruel features. I will tell more about his face later”), she has this to say: “He had no gun but he carried his rifle slung across his back on a piece of cotton plow line. There is trash for you. He could have taken an old piece of harness and made a nice leather strap for it. That would have been too much trouble.”

It’s hard not to go on with the quotes; suffice it to say that I could hear my grandmother’s voice — and a bit of my own — very clearly in this. But though I knew how wonderful a book it was to read aloud, I also felt there was very little chance of interesting Portis in an audiobook recording. After abruptly quitting his job as London bureau chief of The New York Herald Tribune in the early 1960s, he had gone back to live in his native Arkansas, and no one in New York had seen him for years. People liked to use the word “recluse,” which, I suspected, spoke less to an abnormal way of life than to an ex-newspaperman’s natural distrust of the press. It seemed clear enough in any case that he didn’t enjoy dealing with inquiries about his novels. But I drummed up my courage and asked anyway, and much to my surprise his number was passed along to me with the message: Call him. He wants to talk to you.

How many times in life does one have the chance to speak to a writer revered from childhood?

How many times in life does one have the chance to speak to a writer revered from childhood? In 2004, around noon on a weekday, I found myself standing in my kitchen in Virginia with Portis’s telephone number in hand. I had been informed that he did not like to talk on the telephone and was bad about not picking up. But somewhat to my surprise he answered right away.

A slow, rich Southern voice, reminiscent of the actor Randy Quaid. “Mr. Portis?” I said, but instead of the introduction I was ready to make, there followed instead a leisurely and highly surreal exchange that I am at a loss to replicate — something to do with backfiring cars? and knocks on the door? — which continued at cross-purposes for some moments until, without missing a beat, he said pleasantly: “Oh I beg your pardon. I thought you were my crank caller.”

I held the line, not knowing what to say. There seemed no clear way to move forward. Had I offended him? “I’m sorry —”

“Oh no. It is just that I have a regular crank caller and almost every day he telephones about this time. If I don’t pick up he rings and rings.”

“Do you know who it is?”

“No, it is just some prankster. Local, I think. Many people around here do not seem to have much to do.”

“That must be a big nuisance.”

“No. To tell you the truth I am a little disappointed on the days he does not telephone. I have come to look forward to his calls.”

“I can get off the phone if you want me to,” I offered.

“No. There is no need to do that. He will call me back if he finds the line is busy.” Then: “Where are you calling from?”

“Virginia.”

“You don’t sound like a Virginian.”

“That’s a curious accent. The Virginia accent. A lot of Virginians sound more or less like Canadians to me. You sound like you are from around here.”

I explained that I was from across the river, in Mississippi, and how my family and I knew his books practically by heart and how I hoped he might permit me to make an audio recording of “True Grit” — I had his book beside me at the telephone, a reading prepared — but the actual purpose of my call did not seem to interest him. “Are your people still in Mississippi?” he asked, reverting bewilderingly to the only fact that had caught his attention.

“More or less. The ones not dead, anyway. But the dead ones too.”

“Then what are you doing up there? Whereabouts in Virginia are you?”

I told him. “That is near the town of Charlotte Court House,” he said. “And also along the line of Lee’s Retreat. Did you know that the town of Charlotte Court House was once called Marysville? That is what it must have been called when Patrick Henry gave a version of his ‘Liberty or Death’ speech there. At some point after the war they changed its name to Charlotte Court House. I don’t actually know why they did that. They loved to rename those towns in Virginia. For example, the little town of Courtland was once known as ‘Jerusalem.’”

I was impressed that he was able to pull all this stuff off the top of his head. A long, relaxed conversation ensued, which might as well have been taking place in 1890 between me and a veteran of the Civil War, for its utter lack of any reference whatsoever beyond the Reconstruction South: Appomattox, High Bridge, Gen. William “Billy” Mahone and his lively counterattack in the late-war siege of Petersburg. The cotton trade. Dogs. Guns. Dogs. I noted particularly the fixed hum on his end of the line — the same rotary-phone hum I always heard when I called my grandmother in Mississippi. Although I didn’t want the conversation to end, I still had my copy of “True Grit” by the phone, open to my place, and at some point, by way of Rooster Cogburn’s Civil War service (Charlie’s voice was not unlike what I imagined Rooster Cogburn’s might be), I managed to work back around to it. “Would you like for me to read a line or two from the book?” I asked. “I have it right here.”

“Naw,” he said, “you’re a good Mattie, you’ll do just fine,” and then kept talking, as if we were riding for the sixth hour on horseback together on some country road.

We corresponded after that, and spoke on the telephone — my thought being that if he welcomed annoyance callers so warmly, he might not mind sometimes hearing from me. He was modest about his achievements and uninterested in talking about his life as a novelist or indeed about novels, period; though the diction of his books — effortless as birdsong — pervaded his every spoken sentence, from his conversation one would never suspect that he’d written a novel at all, much less several great ones. His preferred subjects were local history, his boyhood in Arkansas, his time in the military (a postscript to a 2006 letter informs me: “This stamp shows your fellow Virginian and legendary Marine hero Chesty Puller. He was my commanding officer years ago at Camp Lejeune, N.C.”) and above all his life as a newspaperman (somewhat perplexingly to me, he regarded himself mainly as a former newspaperman instead of the major and singular American novelist he was). Thanks to his time on The Memphis Commercial Appeal, he knew very well the Memphis of my childhood, Memphis being the nearest city of any size to my little North Mississippi town. (Regarding Mississippi: “Why do you all like to write so much over there? The Arkansan novelist is a much rarer fowl.”) As a young reporter he had attended the funeral of Elvis’s mother — a story in itself — and we talked about the hysteria in Memphis after Elvis’s death, nearly 20 years later, when weeping businessmen had taken to the airwaves in lieu of their regular commercials, wailing: “Sleep warm, Elvis!”

We established that I was related to the fearsome Memphis judge Beverly Boushé, about whom Charlie had written when in 1958 Judge Beverly presided over a mock trial of a group of Indiana Jaycees, who for some unknown reason had chosen to re-enact a flatboat trip that Abe Lincoln made down the Mississippi River at age 19. (When the Jaycees were removed from the flatboat and hauled before him by other Jaycees costumed as Rebs, Judge Boushé let them off by pronouncing them honorary Confederates and granting them miniature keys to the city.) I told him that my great-grandfather, Judge Beverly’s uncle, had spoken proudly all his life about his meeting in Memphis with the elderly outlaw Frank James, where Mattie herself had met Frank James at likely round about the same time. (Mattie, in the book, was less impressed than my great-grandfather; though she is taken with “the courteous old outlaw” Cole Younger, when James rises to greet her she says: “Keep your seat, trash!”)

Then too there was my Boushé grandmother, who numbered among the many books she’d inherited from her father the works of 19th-century author Ignatius L. Donnelly (“Atlantis: The Antediluvian World”), whose colorful ideas informed those of Mr. Jimmerson and Austin Popper in “Masters of Atlantis.” These, like Mr. Jimmerson, she regarded as sound scientific fact, to the point of suggesting that I build a scale model of Atlantis for a ninth-grade science fair. (It speaks to the academic standards of my school that I got a good grade for this project, my science teacher failing to recognize that even a very carefully constructed scale model of Atlantis in no way constituted Science.) My grandmother was the one who’d given me “True Grit” to read at age 10. Like Mattie herself, she had also been an indefatigable writer of historical articles for our town newspaper.

“And I expect she was a pretty good writer herself, too,” Charlie said generously.

“Well, no,” I said.

“That may not have been her fault. A lot of those old birds got the starch knocked out of them by heavy-handed copy editors.”

“Not her. She would be writing about Grover Cleveland and go off on some rant about the danger of water fluoridization.”

“My point exactly. Those are just the kind of lively asides I enjoy.”

He was right, of course. If there’s a guiding style of Portis’s books, it’s those tangents and lively asides. (When I asked him about the origins of “True Grit,” he told me that after he left The Tribune and “didn’t have much to do” he liked nothing better than to go to the library and read rambling “local color” pieces in the archives of rural newspapers.) Those homely old American voices — by turns formal, tragicomic and haunting — are crystallized on every page of his work, with the immediacy one sometimes sees in a daguerreotype 150 years old. One would have to return to the 19th century, and Twain, to find another author who captured those particular cadences as well as he. More than this, he understood at the highest level those same voices filtered through advertisements and film of the mid-20th century; hence the hilarious, incisive and equally pure diction of “Norwood” and “The Dog of the South” and his other books set in the ’60s and ’70s.

After “True Grit” was reissued in England, with an afterword written by me, Charlie was distressed by the cover the publisher had chosen: a drawing of a handgun that he knew intimately in every historical, cultural and technical specific, down to the feet per second and the grain of bullet it took — a “gangster gat” all wrong for Mattie Ross or any character of the era. He had done the British publisher the favor of writing them an extremely detailed and informative letter setting them straight on American firearms of the period, and was pained when “some youngster in the art department” wrote back reassuring him that no one would know the difference. This cavalier attitude of our British cousins — “playing fast and loose with names, dates, facts, &c.” — he knew all too well from his time in London on The Tribune. “And,” he noted gloomily, “their ideas about America — mostly out of date folklore from movies, which was wrong to start with — are fixed and unchangeable.”

Not long after this, Charlie, true to form, really did stop answering his phone. Had I done something to annoy him? Or had the prankster grown to be too much? The letters, never very many, stopped as well. (The postscript of his final letter, which makes me laugh even though it’s the last line he ever wrote me: “When may we expect another lively Donna Tartt novel?”) He never called me, I always called him, and not until much later did I learn the real reason for the halt in our conversation: He had Alzheimer’s. This is hard to square with Charlie’s minute and highly specific knowledge of (among many other things) firearms, geography and American history, and even harder to square with the deadpan, playful, low-key wit that had seeped into my bloodstream via his novels long before I met him.

I’d give a lot right now to hear what he had to say about the flu epidemic of 1918. The flu epidemic makes a brief appearance in “True Grit,” and it’s exactly the sort of historical subject upon which he could converse with the fluency and anecdote of someone who’d survived it personally. More than that, I wish I’d gone to Arkansas to see him; he’d asked me to and was perplexed to learn I did not drive. (This will be amusing to any reader of his novels, particularly “Gringos” and “The Dog of the South,” in which automobiles and automotive maintenance form the basis of a stern and knightly code.)

His pitch was pure. There was no meanness in him. He understood, and conveyed, the grain of America.

As for the novels, they’ve gotten me through times of bleakness and uncertainty from fifth grade to now, and are a never-ending source of amazement, gratitude and joy. All writers who attempt to convey their magic eventually knock into the problem: How to describe the indescribable? Probably the best description I can give of “True Grit” is that I’ve never given it to any reader — male or female, of any age or sensibility — who didn’t enjoy it. As for the others, which I love just as much, they are if anything weirder and funnier, filled with some of the best and most particular American vernacular ever written, and even amid the scrape of Covid-driven anxiety they’ve convulsed me with laughter and given me some of the few moments of escape that I’ve found.

We never talked about publishing or the literary world; it was of no interest to him. The closest he ever came was a passing mention of “the quality lit game” (dutifully attributing the quote to Terry Southern) as if “quality lit” were a concern in which he himself had no part. But it was a game he played at the highest level, despite the fact that he had no inclination to play it in the conventional chest-beating, ego-driven way. His pitch was pure. There was no meanness in him. He understood, and conveyed, the grain of America, in ways that may prove valuable in future to historians trying to understand what was decent about us as a nation. And I can’t help thinking that the novels he left us will continue to provide refuge and comfort for readers, perhaps in times even darker than our own.

Donna Tartt is the author of three novels, most recently “The Goldfinch.”

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7 True Grit (1969)

Hollywood’s Unique Western: True Grit (1969)

By Sabrina Desha

Henry Hathaway’s movie True Grit (1969), tells a story about teenage girl Mattie Ross’s strong will to find her father’s murderer, Tom Chaney, and bring him to death for her father’s justice. To help with this mission she hires Marshall “Rooster” Cogburn to help her seek her revenge and by default Texas Ranger La Beouf joins in on the manhunt as well. True Grit is significant and should be recognized not only for its incredible cinematography and cast but for its underlying meaning about a young girl struggling to find acceptance and respect within a male dominated society. Within the film young Mattie constantly fights for her word and to be taken seriously in the revenge for her father’s death. It is not till later on that Rooster begins to show her the respect she deserves and becomes a father figure for Mattie. True Grit effectively represents issues of difference, power, and discrimination with many characters that are accurately represented through specific visual and audio techniques.

As a traditional John Wayne movie, True Grit is a classic western. The film was made during a time when westerns were very popular in Hollywood (Benshoff and Griffin 242). Lead male actor John Wayne’s character Rooster is represented as a straight able-bodied white male who has “True Grit” and carries traditional male cowboy traits. Supporting male actor Glen Campbell’s La Boeuf is also represented as a straight able-bodied white male with traditional cowboy traits. Interestingly lead actress Kim Darby, Mattie Ross, does not carry traditional western female traits, which is what makes this film so significant. Her character strays away from the traditional housewife feminine western cowgirl to an independent and strong-willed woman who would do something so manly as kill a man to avenge her father.

Encoded within the film difference is represented by the theme and main character. The theme of the movie is about a young girl seeking revenge for her father’s death, which is unlike any western Hollywood has created. Though there are few westerns that have a strong female as the main character, for example, Cat Ballou (1965) , True Grit is particularly special for having a teenage girl as the main character. Not only is the theme of this film incorporating a lot of difference, but the main character herself represents the difference. Mattie’s character has significance for women in the film industry because she breaks all barriers. She not only avenges her father’s death but makes deals and bargains with multiple men who try to cheat her, along with taking care of the men she is traveling with. There is no doubt that Mattie Ross made an impact on the film industry and was so significant that it is still talked about today.

The movie was rebooted in 2010 with Hailee Steinfeld as our strong-willed lead Mattie Ross and carries her traits into the modern day. In the article, “Teen girls in film Showcase True Grit” published in the Los Angeles Times in 2011, the author elaborates on role shift in our young Mattie Ross. The author states, “She’s the product of a film industry in which young women are infiltrating traditionally male genres like action films; female directors and producers are wielding increasing creative influence, and the culture is moving from a sexed-up, dumbed-down model of female adolescence to one marked by smarts, strength and scrap” (Keegan).

Power could be the ultimate theme for this movie. In this film, the power or authority is centered around only white straight able-bodied men. Mattie, however, doesn’t care. All difference and discrimination aside, Mattie’s number one struggle throughout the movie is for acceptance and power. Since she is not only a teenager but a woman, Mattie is almost always overlooked in every scene with more than just Rooster. From finding out who killed her father, to selling her horses, Mattie is constantly being disrespected and struggling to be heard within a male dominating society. Rooster is the first character that starts to respect her within the film, but she is still struggling for power in the manhunt. The biggest representation of issues with power in the film is between La Boeuf and Mattie. Since Mattie had already hired Marshall, she did not want La Boeuf’s help and he went behind her back to talk to the marshall himself. In the scene where he tries to recruit the marshall, the dialogue is significant. Mattie is overlooked during the entire interaction and struggles to be heard due to the power of the men.

Discrimination is represented within this film directly with the main character Mattie. She is constantly battling discrimination with everyone in the town and the men she works with. Since Mattie is a young woman she is overlooked, sexualized, and discriminated against by many men. When she goes to sell her horses the dealer tries to cheat her and Mattie stands up for herself having a great significance on the film. The most discrimination Mattie receives is from La Boeuf. When they first meet he sexualizes Matties and talks about wanting to kiss her then later treats her like a little kid and spanks her for following them on their ride to find Mr. Chaney. Mattie’s discrimination for being a teenager is great representation as much as her being a woman.

Why did I choose this film? I chose to write about True Grit because it was truly life-changing for me to watch. I love the movies. I love movies that make you laugh, escape reality, and ultimately impact you to be a better version of yourself. Growing up I always felt like “one of the boys” and I always thought that was wrong and I needed to be more feminine. As an adult, I care less about being “one of the boys”, but watching this movie as an adult impacted me on a whole different level. I love this movie so much because it’s badass, and teaches young women to stand up for what you believe in and not let men influence your decisions. Mattie Ross inspired me to be a strong independent woman, and I think this film is important for young women to watch.

Though it might be old, True Grit is a milestone movie in Hollywood. With its incredible cast and cinematography, this film is one of my favorite movies. This movie is important for people to watch because it tells a wonderful story about a young girl struggling for her respect.

Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies , 2nd Edition. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2011.

Keegan, Rebecca. Los Angeles Times, “Teen Girls in Film Showcase True Grit,” Jan 9, 2011. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2011-jan-09-la-et-0109-true-grit-girls-20110109-story.html

Difference, Power, and Discrimination in Film and Media: Student Essays Copyright © by Students at Linn-Benton Community College is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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“True Grit”: Book and Films Comparison Essay

Charles Portis’s True Grit is a transcendent and versatile story that earned its first critical acclaims as a novel before going on to become the source of two of the greatest western films of all time, with 42 years between them. The overriding theme in all the three portrayals is retribution for Mattie Ross, a 14-year-old girl whose father was killed by the cowardly Tom Chaney. She follows him to Texas, where she hired Rooster Cogburn, described as the meanest ranger, but who Mattie believes is the true grit who will help her get payback. The book was published in 1968, and a year later the first film was released starring John Wayne, in 2010, the Coen brothers then did a film remake of the book starring Jeff Bridges.

A notable distinction this particular rendition of the book to film/s is that, for the most part, the films stick closely to the book. This is probably because the books are very rich with material making it unnecessary for the scriptwriters to warder too far afield. Structurally, both the 1969 and 2010 films tried to be as faithful to the book as possible, but there is a limit to how far a film can rely on narration. Consequently, many of the lines and emotions described from the vivid, emotive first person are lost. Nevertheless, in the novel, this first-person narrative curtails Mattie’s growth as a character in that the 14-year and the 80-year-old narrator sounds a lot alike. Both are arrogant and even pushy, which makes her a static character who does not appear to have been improved by her experiences. In the 2010 film, she comes off as a more endearing character, and there are romantic undercurrents between Mattie and LaBoenf, which are, however, not dwelt on and barely implied in the book.

On the other hand, several contrasts can be drawn between the book and film, most notable being the absence of a retrospective narration from the older Mattie reflecting on her adventures. In addition, given the first-person viewpoint, she remains the main character, and the book is largely more about her than anyone else is. However, in the 1969 and 2010 films, the spotlight appears evenly split between her role and the rest of her co-stars.

This is especially so for the lead roles done by John Wayne and Jeff Bridges, whose dominance results in Mattie’s relegation to a supporting role. The change in character roles may be explained by the fact that, when making a western, the emphasis is on the action, violence, and “grit.” Consequently, Mattie finds herself the victim of the Hollywood’s stereotypical depiction of women as damsels in distress taking the secondary place behind male leads. Granted the book was written right into this stereotype depicting a young vulnerable girl being helped and protected by tough cowboy types, the male dominance is hardly surprising.

The 1969 and 2010 films, while adhering to the general plot implications in the book however downplay the biblical tone. In the 2010 film, this is particularly evident and can be attributed to the changes that have occurred to the now mostly secular country. While the bible may have appealed as a source of moral didactics in the 70’s this appeal has significantly reduced and the Coen brothers may have realized they had little to gain by including the undertones. There are also several overt changes to the plot especially the ending, for instance, a rattlesnake bites Mattie after she has killed her nemesis and falls into a snakebite (True Grit (1969).

However, she appears to have come out no worse for it and in the last scenes, her hand is in a sling. However, both the novel and the 2010 version show her having suffered serious injury from the snake attack and has to have her arm amputated (True Grit (2010). Evidently, the Coen’s brothers, willingness to show their audience as much from the book as possible, irrespective, of the negative emotions or anticlimax it might evoke that makes the film more authentic despite the fact that it was done nearly a century after the book.

One of the reasons the True Grit was such a phenomenal story is because it balances the divergent notions of death, revenge and hatred with interesting and humorous characters. In both films, the directors integrate most of the original jokes, which provides much-needed comic relief for a mostly dark film. In one scene, this is evident is when Rooster retells of an experience he had trying to “borrow” money from a New Mexican bank and Mattie retorts it sounds a lot like stealing, his response is, “That’s the position them New Mexicans took,” he brays. “I had to flee for my life!”(Portis 195).

In the 2010 picture, there are several funny scenes most of which capitalize on Jeff Bridge’s drunken and carefree lifestyle. While this does cloud the line between his being a good or bad guy, it allows for a lot of humorous scenes giving the audience a chance both to laugh at or with him. When Rooster and LaBoenf are using corn cakes for target practice, he keeps getting frustrated when he drunkenly misses (True Grit (1969) and his spluttering and hollering make for better laughs than John Wayne’s somewhat superficial laughs. LaBoenf, the part played by Matt Damon in the 2010 movie is without doubt one of the most changed characters from the book.

The novel gives him little attention and he is portrayed as an idiot whom Mattie does not much care for. In the first film, the country singer, Glen Campbell, takes his part and while he does it justice, Matt Damon’s surprising appearance for the role overshadows his retrospective performance. However, he a bit too modern for the 19 th century role and although his acerbic wit and sarcasm may endear him to the audience, it puts to movie’s authenticity to question.

In conclusion, from watching the two films, it is evident that the directors, in their own ways tried as much as possible to animate the words of the original text while at the same time injecting their film making ingenuity. The first film despite appearing to stick to the text is nevertheless not as effective a portal of the book as the second picture. However, given that the films are shot nearly half a century apart, it is not entirely fair to attempt a one on one comparison. Although the Coen brothers’ film is in my opinion the better picture, it is easy to appreciate why John Wayne earned his first and only Oscar in True Grit 1969.

Works Cited

Portis, Charles. True grit: a novel . Penguin, 2007.Print.

True Grit . Dir. Henry Hathaway. Paramount Pictures, 1969. Film

True Grit . Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen. Paramount Pictures, 2010. Film

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‘True Grit’ Film Analysis

The film True Grit, directed by the Coen Brothers in 2010, is a western film that can most certainly be portrayed as a revisionist western in that the general cinematography brings forth a darker feel, with more realistic elements, straying away from the typical romantic feel of classic westerns.

1. The general iconography in True Grit evokes a more realistic, rugged feeling from its audience. A classic western often portrays the protagonists as clean-cut individuals, as in Stagecoach, with all the bells and whistles to convey the nobility of their intentions. Though, the head marshal Rooster Cogburn, played by Jeff Bridges, lies on the opposite side of the spectrum (much like Eastwood in Fistful): his general attire consists of tattered cloths and stained jackets. He wears an eye patch that pronounces his imperfections; his faults. In fact the directors first introduce the marshal in a court room where he appears to be being rightfully convicted of excessive authoritative force. Even in the formality of a court room, Roster wears a wrinkled–poorly assembled–suit and sits in a manner that implies disgust; his hair is contained by the grease that looks as though it has been accrued through weeks of neglect. Everything the marshal wears, implores a feeling of distrust and dishonesty, yet it is him, the audience must rely on to concur the greater evil.

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The main character, Mattie Ross is a figure of nobility–consistently questioning the marshal and his seemingly harsh methods. Though, rather than wearing warm, brightly colored dresses with complex patterns to perhaps suggest spiritual wealth, she is almost always wearing a head-to-toe austere collared dress that is almost disheartening in its blandness. Her hair does not flow lusciously down her back but rather it is always braided, and hangs lifelessly on either shoulder. Whereas her attire does in fact give the viewer the sense that she has an acute moral compass, as well as a “proper” way of pursuing her goals, it does so in a way that casts a more realistic perhaps even pessimistic veil over her heroic nature.

It is not just the costume choices that encompass the films revisionist intentions. It’s everything: The guns in the movie are unpolished and rusted by what seems to be years of overuse. The forests consist of bare trees, spaced out from one another, about as full of life as the desert that is host to the hero’s journey. The buildings are vaguely furnished and creak due to their poor construction. Any given shot is saturated with the reassurance that this is not a pleasant journey by any means.

2. The characters themselves are even more of a backbone to the revisionist aspects to the film. As stated before Rooster Cogburn is presented as someone who–at first glance–seems to be a villain: he is lethargic in manner, slurred speech, has a certain disregard to all things but his own state. Very similar to the style that Eastwood continually displays throughout all of his western movies. The trail itself seems to be a point/counter-point debate as to how justice ought to be served, his stand point being by whatever means necessary according to him.

His first significant encounter with Mattie is him in a bed suited for a small child, him below her, marinating in his own filth in the back of some sort of shaggy market. Everything he says or does begs for moral critique and ridicule. It is not until about a third of the way into the film that he resentfully exposes an element of decency: Texas Ranger Laboeuf, played by Matt Damon is mercilessly beating Mattie. With what has been given to the audience, it is nature to expect the marshal to watch emotionlessly, though their (the audiences) developing understanding as to who Rooster Cogburn is shaken, as he raises his revolver to LaBoeuf, silently demanding he stop.

Mattie Ross is well put together girl who seeks to avenge her father. The ambitious and ruthless manner in which she goes about this seems paradoxical to her precise and canty nature. She makes no mistakes. Her quick-witted responses to all that doubt her for her unintimidating stature seem premeditated; leaving her mouth with a fluidity that is laced with impeccable logic that leaves her confronters dumbfounded and awestruck. She is by no means helpless, and proves herself to be the needed brains for the journey further solidifying the revisionist-like aspects to this almost unorthodox western. Whereas the hero of traditional classic westerns often appears to have all that is needed to defeat injustice, it seems as though Rooster and Mattie together make up the hero.

With the exception of Mattie, all of the characters–both good and bad– in the film appear to be hardly distinguishable from one another. That meaning that although some may be “worse” than other, everyone seems to have some sort of underlying selfish intention. This to me screams out realism as it casts aside the romantics of having a pure character that pursues justice for its intrinsic good.

3.The technical elements of True Grit are most definitely the strongest indicators of a revisionist western. The high-key lighting is of the highest contrast whenever the opportunity presents itself. Every night when the heroes camp, the screen is almost black (low-key) with a vastness that leaves the audience lost in the midst of hopelessness and doubt with nothing in sight but the vague campfire glow casted on the fatigued faces of Roster Mattie and Laboeuf. The days are musty with soft pale colors that beg for a life-filled tree to present itself, though it never does leaving Rooster to fill the immense emptiness with contempt and cheap whiskey. Classic westerns fill the screen with light and unprecedented hope, letting the audience feel as if salvation is underway and that even in the darkness of night, the hero perseverance is present. As in Stagecoach, everyone always knew John Wayne would walk away unscathed.

The shots for the most part are at a straight-on angle, perhaps a sign of equality in that no single character is by any means greater than another. A low-angled shot on the protagonist characters may surface a feeling of nobility and power, though as mentioned before, everyone has their own selfish intentions. The music–if even present– is minimal and simplistic, as if to say that what there is to see on screen brings forth all the feelings that are supposed to be experienced by the viewer. The non-diegetic sounds added, in my opinion, either very little or very much varying from scene to scene. In short, rather than having consistent high-key lighting with low angle shots that look up at Rooster accompanied by triumphant stringed instruments as he defeats injustice, True Grit captures the journey from the standpoint of those who walk it, and the journey is dark, quiet and exhausting.

4.Rooster and Mattie are a team. Not a team in the sense of a quarterback and a wide receiver; both needed for the ultimate goal with one often depicted as “more essential”. But a team in the sense of Yin and Yang: two conflicting energies that seem to bash heads though could not make do without the other. Throughout the entire film, Mattie is questioning and often protesting Roosters methods. Rooster, resentful to acknowledge the undeniable benefit of having Mattie, lives by his own rules, and will not be governed by anything or anyone but himself. Though, Mattie insists that their ultimate goal be met not in the manner that she sees appropriate, but in a manner that can be deemed morally permissible. In addition, there are multiple instances where Rooster would not have been able to progress in his journey had it not been for Mattie. Likewise Mattie would not achieve anything had it not been for Rooster and yet both seem to be unappreciative, resentful even of the others presence. That being said, it is quite unorthodox to have the demise of a single foe to be contingent on the balance of two protagonist characters as opposed to the all-knowing, all powerful and noble hero.

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True Grit Essay - Seeking Justice

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Judith Fletcher

This paper argues that the Coen Brothers’ 2010 version of True Grit makes innovations to the original novel by Charles Por- tis that evoke the Greek myth of the descent to the underworld, or catabasis.

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Joel and Ethan Coen’s film version of Charles Portis’s 1968 novel, True Grit (2010), has many of the hallmarks of a traditional Hollywood Western: a demand for retribution, a manhunt, and law enforcement officers who typically exceed the boundaries of their authority for the purpose of implementing their own notion of ‘justice’. While invoking such familiar tropes, however, the film also uses the theme of law to portray the American West in a state of transition. The fourteen-year old heroine, Mattie Ross, seeks justice for the murder of her father, but the way in which she sets about her goal alters the way in which retribution once typified the enforcement of frontier justice. Throughout the film Mattie uses law (including the promise or threat of legal proceedings) as a weapon and a means of placing herself on equal footing with members of the adult world: she becomes the employer of a US Marshall (and hence acquires the right to direct his actions), negotiates sales contracts, suggests the possibility of plea bargains to outlaws, and regularly sends instructions to her (unseen) legal advisor, J. Noble Daggett. The narrative of the film is set in the late nineteenth century. Yet in its depiction of the settling of differences, the story is also profoundly of our time. The Coen brothers portray the West’s transition to a modern society as a process by which legally enforceable contracts and bargains are used to structure personal relations. Epitomized by the figure of Mattie Ross as the ‘bookkeeper’ and recorder of transactions, True Grit depicts a process by which law seeps into everyday language, and the structures of social organization are renegotiated by those ready to invoke the power of the courtroom.

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True Grit Charles Portis

True Grit essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of True Grit by Charles Portis.

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True grit: an alternate perspective ishu nandwani 9th grade.

What is true grit? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines grit as “perseverance and passion for long term goals.” While the Merriam-Webster dictionary does provide an appreciable explanation of grit, no such definition exists for "true grit." True...

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When a storm surge swept dozens of wild horses and cattle from the coast of north carolina, no one expected there to be survivors. then hoofprints appeared in the sand..

By J.B. MacKinnon

The Atavist Magazine, No. 132

J.B. MacKinnon is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, and The Atlantic, as well as the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthologies. He is the author or coauthor of five books of nonfiction, and an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches feature writing. Editor: Jonah Ogles Art Director: Ed Johnson Copy Editor: Sean Cooper Fact Checker: J. Patrick Patterson Illustrator: Luis Mazón Published in October 2022.

The wild horses all have names. Ronald, for example, and Becky and Clyde. The names sound mundane, even for horses, but each is something like a badge of honor. For years now, the people of Cedar Island, North Carolina, have named each foal born to the local herd of mustangs after the oldest living resident who hasn’t already had a horse named for them. Every island family of long standing has this connection to the herd.

Cedar Island, located in a pocket of North Carolina known as Down East, is what passes for remote in the continental United States these days. Though it’s only 40 miles as the gull flies from the Cape Hatteras area, with its tourists and mortgage brokers, its restaurants with names like Dirty Dick’s Crab House, Cedar Island remains a place with only a scattering of people and businesses, where you can’t be certain of finding a restaurant meal—not so much as a plate of hush puppies—on a Sunday evening. Upon arrival you might not notice that Cedar Island is an island at all. Crossing the soaring Monroe Gaskill Memorial Bridge, which connects it to the mainland, what you pass over is easily mistaken for another of the region’s sleepy, curlicue rivers. In fact, this is the Thorofare, a skinny saltwater channel connecting the Pamlico Sound to the north and the Core Sound to the south. The Pamlico is one of the largest embayments on the U.S. coastline, while the Core is narrow and compact. Cedar Island stands between them, and all three are hemmed in by the Outer Banks.

I’ve just written that Cedar Island separates two sounds, and on maps this is true. Reality is less decisive. Swaths of the small island are sometimes underwater, depending on wind, tide, and season—in particular, hurricane season.

The shifting, amphibious nature of Cedar Island was never more apparent than on the morning of September 6, 2019. Under the whirling violence of Hurricane Dorian, maps lost all meaning. The Pamlico and Core Sounds joined to become a single, angry body of water, shrinking Cedar Island to a fraction of its acreage. It was no longer separated from the mainland by the thin blue line of the Thorofare, but by nearly six miles of ocean.

Most of the 250 or so people living on the island were safe, their homes built on a strip of not-very-high high ground precisely to weather the wrath of hurricanes. The wild horses—49 in all—were in much deeper trouble.

There were also some cows. The cows did not have names.

Few cows in America live longer than six years; many are slaughtered much younger. A Cedar Island cow, on the other hand, stands a good chance of living into its teens, and might even see its 30th birthday.

There is no such thing as a truly wild cow. While Cedar Island’s cattle range more or less freely, the technical term for them is feral —they are the descendants of escapees from domestication. The island’s mustangs are feral, too, but while visitors often come to Cedar Island solely in hopes of seeing the Banker horses, as the area’s herds are known, next to no one makes a special trip to photograph the “sea cows.”

The cows are striking to look at, though. While they vary in color, many have a bleached-blonde coat, blending in with the pale sand and the glare of the sun on Cedar Island’s hammerhead northern cape, where both cattle and horses roam. Tourists are happy to see the cows, just not as happy as they are to see the horses. Here and across America, a mustang—mane flowing, hooves pounding the earth—is an embodiment of beauty and freedom. Cows are not.

For Cedar Islanders, the cows are part of what makes their home distinctive, a fond and familiar part of the community and its history. In fact, the cattle have been on the island far longer than the mustangs, who were transferred from the more famous Shackleford Banks herd three decades ago. But the relationship people on the island have with horses is different than the one they have with cows, in much the same way it is for people nearly everywhere.

“This used to be horse country,” said Priscilla Styron, who has lived on or near Cedar Island for 30 years and works at its ferry terminal. “Everybody rode, they had pony pennings, they had all kinds of stuff. Everybody was always riding horses.” As for the cows, there was a time not so long ago when an islander might round one up from the beach, take it home to graze and fatten up, then butcher it for meat.

As Hurricane Dorian approached Cedar Island, no one troubled themselves about either kind of animal. One islander, who called himself a “simple country boy” and asked not to be named, scoffed at the idea that wild creatures would brook being corralled and taken off-island to wait out the storm. Not that anyone thought that was needed, according to Styron. “They usually protect themselves. You don’t have to worry about them,” she said. “They can sense more than we can.” Cedar Island had never lost more than one or two members of its wild herds to a storm—and Down East sees more than its fair share of those.

In 2019, there were perhaps a couple dozen cattle on the island—no one knew for sure, because no one was keeping count, not even residents who were fond of their bovine neighbors. For at least some of the cows, Dorian was nothing new. Few cows in America live longer than six years; many are slaughtered much younger. A Cedar Island cow, on the other hand, stands a good chance of living into its teens, and might even see its 30th birthday. A cow that was 20 years old in 2019 would have had close encounters with at least ten hurricanes: Dennis, Floyd, Isabel, Alex, Ophelia, Arthur, Matthew, Florence, and two named Irene. The herd could look to its elders for guidance.

Biologists only recently recognized that cows have complex social behaviors, involving depths of comprehension that we might not expect of animals stereotyped as grungy, placid, and dull-witted. A feral herd, for example, will organize nurseries by dividing calves into age groups, each usually overseen by one adult cow while the rest go out to graze. For this to work, the sitters need to understand that their role is to look after calves that are not their own, even if it means settling for low-grade fodder while others enjoy greener pastures. The calves have to grasp that they are under vigilance despite their mothers being out of sight.

No one documented how the cows responded as Dorian approached, but Mónica Padilla de la Torre, an evolutionary biologist, can give us a good idea. “They usually are not afraid of storms. They like storms,” Padilla said. “They like to be cool. They like shade. They appreciate when the rain comes.”

Even before the hurricane loomed on the southern horizon, the herd likely began to move—with that usual cattle slowness, that walking-on-the-moon gait—toward shelter. In the era before hurricanes were tracked by satellites and weather radar, cows were a useful predictor that one was coming. The migration, Padilla said, would have been initiated by the herd’s leaders. Cattle violently clash to establish a pecking order, and once that’s settled a benign dictatorship ensues. Leaders are granted the best places to eat and the best shade to lie in, and they make important decisions—like when to retreat to high ground in the face of a storm.

For Cedar Island’s cattle, high ground was a berm of brush-covered dunes between beach and marshland. There the cows grazed, chewed cud, and literally ruminated, passing rough forage through a digestive organ, the rumen, that humans lack. Far from appearing panicked, the herd was probably a bucolic sight, from the Greek word boukolos, meaning “cowherd.”

A close observer, Padilla said, might have noticed subtle differences among the animals: mothers that were watchful or unworried, calves that were playful or lazy, obvious loners or pairs licking or grooming each other. Padilla once spent several months studying cow communication—I found the urge to describe this as “cow-moo-nication” surprisingly strong—by memorizing the free-ranging animals she observed via nicknames like Dark Face and Black Udder. (She didn’t realize at the time that the latter was a perfect punning reference to the classic British TV comedy Blackadder. What is it about cows and puns?) On Cedar Island, Padilla said, there wasn’t simply a herd that was facing a storm. There was a group of individuals, each with its own relationships, including what Padilla doesn’t hesitate to call friendships.

Dorian arrived in the purest darkness of the first hours of September 6. Three days prior, it had ravaged the Bahamas with 185-mile-per-hour winds, tying the all-time landfall wind-speed record for an Atlantic cyclone. Some observers suggested giving it a rating of Category 6 on the five-point scale of hurricane strength. It had weakened by the time it reached North Carolina, but it was still a hurricane. Thick clouds blacked out the moon and stars; Cedar Island’s scattered lights hardly pierced the rain. Passing just offshore on its way to making true landfall at Cape Hatteras, the hurricane lashed the Pamlico and Core Sounds into froth and spray and sent sheets of sand screaming up the dunes. The scrubby canopy under which the cows likely took shelter, already permanently bowed by landward breezes, bent and shook in the teeth of the storm. A 110-mile-per hour gust on Cedar Island was the strongest measured anywhere in the state during Dorian’s passage.

When the eerie calm of Hurricane Dorian’s eye passed over the island, dropping wind speeds to only a strong breeze, there seemed to be little more to fear. There was still the back half of the storm to come, but Cedar Island residents, both human and not, had seen worse. Even in the off season, the North Carolina shore has hurricanes on its mind. If you see footage of a beach house collapsing in pounding surf, chances are it was shot on the Outer Banks. Drive around Down East and you’ll see many houses raised onto 12-foot stilts; in some homes, you reach the first floor by elevator. Maps show that much of the Outer Banks, including most of Cedar Island and huge swaths of mainland, will be underwater with a sea-level rise of just over a foot. Residents aren’t rushing to leave, though. A hardened sense of rolling with the punches prevails.

Yet with Dorian, something unusual happened as the center of the storm moved northward. At around 5:30 a.m., Sherman Goodwin, owner of Island’s Choice, the lone general store and gas station on Cedar Island, got a call from a friend who lived near the store. A storm surge was rising in the area, the friend said. Fifteen minutes later, as Goodwin drove through the dim first light of morning, the water was deep enough to splash over the hood of his Chevy truck, which was elevated by off-road suspension and mud-terrain tires. “It came in just like a tidal wave,” Goodwin said. “It came in fast .”

By the time Sherman and Velvet, his wife—“My mother really liked that movie National Velvet ,” she told me—reached their shop, they had to shelter in the building. Velvet saw a frog blow past a window in the gale. A turtle washed up to the top of the entryway stairs. “It came to within one step of getting in the store,” Sherman said, referring to the water. A photograph shows the gas pumps flooded up to the price tickers.

To understand what happened on Cedar Island that morning, imagine blowing across the surface of hot soup, how the liquid ripples and then sloshes against the far side of the bowl. Dorian did the same thing to the Pamlico Sound, but with a steady, powerful wind that lasted hours.

The hurricane pushed water toward the mainland coast, which in the words of Chris Sherwood, an oceanographer with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), is “absolutely perfect” for taking in wind-driven water. The Bay, Neuse, Pamlico, and Pungo Rivers all flow into the Pamlico Sound through wide mouths that inhale water as readily as they exhale it. Much of the rest of the shoreline is an enormous sponge of marshes. What accumulated in this series of reservoirs was, in effect, a pile of water held in place by the wind.

People who know North Carolina’s sounds are aware of the tricks fierce wind can play. Coastal historian David Stick once noted that, during a hurricane, half a mile of seafloor in the lee of the Outer Banks can be left exposed as sound water is pushed westward. When that happens, a bizarre phenomenon can occur: A storm surge can come from the landward side, striking offshore islands in what’s sometimes called sound-side flooding. Scientists know it as a seiche (pronounced saysh ).

When Dorian’s eye passed the Pamlico Sound, the seiche the storm had created began to collapse. Then winds from the southern half of the hurricane, which blow in the opposite direction from the storm’s leading edge, drove the water back the way it came. In a sense, the seiche was also running downhill; the ocean tide was falling in the predawn hours, while the hurricane, still pressing down on the Atlantic, forced water eastward, leaving behind a depression. These forces combined to send the seiche pouring out of the Pamlico Sound east toward the Atlantic, nine feet above the water level in the ocean.

The avalanche of seawater was truly vast, equal to about one-third of the average flow of the Amazon River, by far the highest-volume river on earth. The Amazon, however, meets the sea through a gaping river mouth. Dorian’s sound-side surge was trying to reach the open Atlantic past what amounted to a levee of Outer Banks islands with just a handful of bottleneck channels between them. At the southern end of the Pamlico Sound, there was an added obstacle: Cedar Island.

The water didn’t go around the island. It washed right over it.

The surge left nearly as quickly as it arrived, carrying on to the Outer Banks, where it hit the island of Ocracoke with a wall of water higher than anyone there had ever seen before. Once Dorian passed, floodwaters began receding. On Cedar Island they left thick, greasy muck in buildings and debris on the roads, but no serious injuries were reported. More than a third of the buildings on Ocracoke were damaged, but there were no known deaths.

The first news of losses from Cedar Island’s herds of horses and cattle came as soon as the ocean had calmed enough for islanders to go back to sea in their boats. “That’s when they saw a lot of them,” Styron said. “You know—floating.” That Cedar Islanders do not wear their hearts on their sleeves about such things is strongly conveyed by an anonymous source’s reaction when I asked how people felt about the dead animals. After an uncomfortable pause, he said, “You can pretty much guess that.” Then he added, “Mother Nature allowed them to be here, and I guess Mother Nature can also take them away.”

If anyone witnessed what transpired with Cedar Island’s feral herds, they haven’t said so publicly. Most likely, though, no one saw it, since the surge came without warning in the darkness, and the horses and cows often roamed far from people’s homes. The animals would not have been sound asleep in the predawn—feral creatures, like wild ones, are more vigilant through the night than human beings tucked tight in their homes. Still, they may have dropped their guard, sensing that they’d survived another hurricane.

Then suddenly, the sea moved onto the land. Nine feet of water covered the beaches. It drowned the marshes where the cattle fed on sea oats and seagrass, and flowed over the lower dunes. We know from Padilla’s research what the scene must have sounded like: high-pitched, staccato mooing—cows’ alarm calls—ringing out in the humid air, the bawling of calves competing with the howl of wind and surf. In waters rising at startling speed, mother cattle would have raced to find their young, as bovine friends struggled not to be separated.

Twenty-eight horses were swept away. No one knows exactly how many cows were carried off—four of them managed to remain on land, and locals would later estimate that between 15 and 20 were taken by the flood. The water likely lifted the animals off their hooves one by one, first the foals and calves, then the adults. They disappeared into the tempest.

The islands known collectively as the Core Banks, located southeast of Cedar Island, are nearly 40 miles long and rarely a mile wide. On maps they look like a skeletal finger pointing ruefully toward the North Atlantic. Like most barrier islands they’re low—about eight feet above sea level on average, with the highest dunes cresting 25 feet—and the whole of them are protected as the Cape Lookout National Seashore. Hurricanes always roughhouse barrier islands, but on the morning of September 7, 2019, the day after Hurricane Dorian hit, it was clear that this storm had been a beast of a different order.

Ahead of the cyclone, North and South Core Banks was broken by a single passage, Ophelia Inlet. After the storm, there were 99 additional channels through the islands—the banks had been sliced into 101 pieces. It didn’t seem right to call these cut-throughs inlets. They formed as outlets: The seiche that poured over Cedar Island then collided with the barrier islands, and when it did, it bored right through them. “We had never in the collective memory of the park seen a sound-side event like we saw after Hurricane Dorian,” said Jeff West, superintendent of Cape Lookout National Seashore. “I did take quite a ribbing about the fact that I lost 20 percent of the park.”

West was on the first maintenance boat to sail from Cedar Island for the Outer Banks. Docking at a Park Service site a few miles up North Core Banks, he began driving an ATV along the beach. Fifty feet later he reached the first cut-through and, wading into it up to his neck, found an animal carcass. He didn’t take the time to determine whether it was horse or cow. “Sometimes large fish find them tasty,” he told me.

Cape Lookout staff would eventually locate the bodies of nearly two dozen dead horses and cattle, along with deer and seabirds. Most were arrayed along the open-ocean side of South Core Banks, likely having passed through Ophelia Inlet before washing up on the beach. The most far-flung horse and cattle carcasses were found near Cape Lookout Lighthouse, about 30 miles from where the animals first washed into the sea.

Cape Lookout workers buried the bodies that the tides didn’t take away.

Most of the media coverage of Dorian’s aftermath focused on the damage on Ocracoke Island. The first report about Cedar Island’s lost herds mentioned only that horses had drowned; the cows had to wait for follow-up articles. It was a blip in the news cycle, soon forgotten as Democrats in Congress sought to impeach Donald Trump.

A pressing question: Can cows swim? Yes, they can. Think of the Wild West, where cowboys guided their herds across deep rivers to fresh pasture or to market. The Cedar Island cattle had been seen swimming, too. One regular visitor described “little bitty calves” lining up to make a crossing to Hog Island, just southeast of Cedar Island in the Core Sound. “I’m like, ‘Don’t go. You’re not gonna make it. It’s a quarter-mile swim,’ ” he said. The calves made the trip with ease.

But it’s one thing to cross a narrow channel in calm seas, and quite another to swim through a hurricane. Only the sunniest optimist could have hoped for survivors from Cedar Island’s herds. “I’m thinking the way the wind was blowing, it was extremely hard to keep your head above water, swimming when you have waves crashing over,” said Pam Flynn, a retired kindergarten teacher and a Down Easter since 1972, who went looking for surviving animals. “I feel like their last few moments were torture and pain and fear. It was heartbreaking.”

A month passed. Wind and waves quickly filled in the channels created by the storm, but what was formerly the southern end of North Core Banks lingered on as a separate island: Middle Core Banks, which would stand alone for two years. One day in early October, members of a Cape Lookout resource-management team hopped on their all-terrain vehicles for a routine sweep up Middle Core Banks—almost daily, they’d search for sea turtle and bird nests in need of protection from the fond American pastime of driving on beaches. This time they spotted something else: the tracks of some large animal or other. They were too big to belong to a deer, and, with two toes instead of a hoof, could not have been made by a horse. They had to be the prints of a cow. A Cedar Island cow.

“Initially,” West said of being informed about the prints, “I did not believe it.”

Then the resource team sent him photos of the tracks, and West knew he had to see this survivor cow with his own eyes.

“It just renewed my faith that there are good things in life, something at the end of the rainbow,” Flynn said. “You know, a little sign that we’ll be OK, we’ll get through this and go on.”

West grew up on a ranch near Temple, Texas, and had experience tracking cattle. It seemed like he might need it. In the days after the prints were discovered, the cow that left them proved elusive; to West’s knowledge, no one from the National Park Service had yet seen it. Cedar Island cattle are often active at night, moving swiftly like pale apparitions, and although Middle and North Core Banks are so narrow in spots that you can walk from the sound side to the open Atlantic in three minutes, much of the land is a labyrinth of ponds, marshes, and fly-infested thickets. Additionally, resource crews had spotted hoofprints on small adjacent islands—despite the recent seagoing drama, it appeared that the cow was now making short water crossings too. “No fear of swimming, none at all,” West said, with admiration in his voice.

In the end, he found the animal by accident. West had taken a boat out to Long Point on North Core Banks, home to a cluster of rustic wooden cabins that, in more ordinary times, the Park Service rented to visitors. Dorian’s storm surge had razed two heavily fortified structures that provided electricity and treated water to the wind-battered huts. And there it stood, chewing grass—a dune-colored cow among the dunes, with a coat like gold sand blown onto white sand. It was well muscled, a little heavy, basically an ordinary cow.

“ ‘I’ll be damned. There is a cow here,’ ” West recalled saying aloud. “Nothing like your own eyes seeing it.”

At the sight of West, the cow’s eyes got big. Then it ran away.

West knew that he would need to relocate the cow, both for its own sake and to preserve the wild habitat of the park. For the moment, though, the Cape Lookout staff were too busy assessing and repairing Dorian’s damage to deal with a wayward bovine. Meanwhile, rumors of the survivor began to trickle out as visitors returned to the Core Banks and saw tracks. Pam Flynn and her friend Mike Carroll were among them. “We kept going back and back,” said Flynn, until they lucked into a sighting. “We were so excited to see those cows.”

Not one cow, then, but cows : three in all. There was the classic bleached-blonde that West had seen; another one with large, light-brown spots, like a map of the ancient continents; and a pale young adult, possibly the spotted cow’s calf. Somehow they had survived, found each other, and formed a compact herd. “It just renewed my faith that there are good things in life, something at the end of the rainbow,” Flynn said. “You know, a little sign that we’ll be OK, we’ll get through this and go on.”

On November 12, the Charlotte Observer broke the story of the survivor cows, and a media circus ensued on Cedar Island. One unfortunate local figure, wrongly described in the press as the cattle’s owner or caretaker (they have neither), had reporters knocking on his doors and chasing him up his driveway. On television especially, the tale of survival was presented as a quirky good-news story. The Virginian-Pilot would go on to call the cows “the cattle that enraptured a nation.”

The hook of the story was its element of surprise: We see cows as stupid, physically awkward, mildly comical brutes, not heroic fighters. The media made heavy use of puns, of course, giving the life-and-death story a chuckling, children’s-book quality. Hurricane Dorian had come ashore “like a cattle rustler in the night” and “corralled” the animals. The cows’ survival was an “udder miracle.” An awestruck Raleigh News and Observer tweeted, “Four miles on the moooooove? Who knew cows could swim that well?”

To estimate how far the cows had paddled during their ordeal, journalists seemed to have measured the shortest distance between Cedar Island and the Core Banks using digital tools like Google Maps. Most put the swim at four miles; NBC preferred the precision of 3.39 miles. But when Alfredo Aretxabaleta, an oceanographer working with the USGS, saw one of these straight-line measures, he spied a problem. “During a storm, I just don’t think that’s the path they would take,” Aretxabaleta said. He suspected their journey was longer—much longer.

Aretxabaleta studies the trajectories of objects adrift, using computer models of wind, tides, and currents. He sometimes throws trackable equipment into the sea to float where it will; the science has been jokingly called driftology, but it has repercussions for our understanding of how climate change could affect coastal erosion, where oil spills and other contaminants might flow, and where to carry out maritime search and rescue work. “In a way,” Aretxabaleta said, “the case of the cows is a kind of search and rescue.”

Coincidentally, Aretxabaleta grew up in Spain’s Basque Country, on a farm where the cattle took dips in an irrigation pond. (His assessment: “They are not good swimmers.”) After Hurricane Dorian, Aretxabaleta in his spare time began to model the probable trajectory of the Cedar Island survivor cows once they were swept out to sea. What emerged was far different from the image of cows taking the shortest route across the Core Sound.

In the context of Aretxabaleta’s model, the sea, in the gray pall of first light as the cows are carried away, is a chaos of riptides, breakers, and blowing spray. With the cows’ eyes only inches above water, land is quickly lost from sight among swells as high as ten feet; from the perspective of a single cow, it’s nearly impossible to keep eyes on the rest of the bobbing herd. Each is fighting not so much to swim as to remain afloat. The currents and tides, made stronger by the force of the storm, are in charge.

The animals are first pushed rapidly southeast along the coast of Cedar Island, then into the center of the Core Sound, where they’re gradually drawn close to the powerful outflow at Ophelia Inlet. But as the tide changes from ebb to flood, Ophelia no longer sucks the animals toward it, but pushes them away. With the ocean now flowing into the sound, the herd are swept back to the north. At last the tide switches again, and Core Sound has many dozen new channels through which to send water back to the Atlantic. Like in a tub with many holes, though, it’s the large ones that have the most pull. Any animals still alive are drawn again toward Ophelia Inlet.

The prospect of passing through any channel would be a fearful one. Surfers sometimes dig cut-throughs between the sea and fresh water that has pooled behind dunes; the flow generated in such canals can resemble a river rapid, with waves large enough to surf. The Core Sound is not much calmer. After the cattle are washed off Cedar Island, the wind doesn’t drop below gale-force for seven hours, and white-capped waves linger much longer. Though the Core Sound has shallow areas such as sandbars, Aretxabaleta accounted for them in his simulations and says it’s unlikely that any cow found footing for long, if at all, during its journey.

His model explains how the cows and horses that were found dead on South Core Banks ended up where they did, flushed through Ophelia Inlet and then strewn to the south by the open Atlantic. By his estimation, none of the survivor cows swam four miles on a straight-line path. In fact, Aretxabaleta said, the probable routes taken by the cows, whether living or dead, range from 28.5 to nearly 40 miles. At the low end, that’s considerably greater than the distance across the English Channel. It’s more than ten times what swimmers complete in an Ironman triathlon. By Aretxabaleta’s measure, the absolute shortest period a cow would have been in the water is 7.5 hours; the longest is 25 hours.

“If it had been humans, it would have been incredible—I mean, like Robinson Crusoe,” he said. “The fact that those three cows survived is something close to a miracle.”

Suppose we didn’t settle for miracles, much less the “udderly miraculous.” Suppose we refused to consign the three cows’ survival to fate and chance. There are other factors we might consider, each of which drifts toward reckonings with how humans interact with bovines.

The first possibility is that the Cedar Island cows were able to endure their ordeal because they were a breed apart, not metaphorically but literally. Blood type and DNA tests suggest the feral horses that live on Cedar Island are likely descendants of Spanish colonial horses, which first came ashore in the United States with Juan Ponce de León in 1521. The cows may have Spanish colonial blood too; no one knows, though, because their genetic makeup has yet to be studied. What’s certain is that cattle have been abandoned or shipwrecked along North Carolina’s coastline since at least 1584. The Cedar Island cattle could have more than four centuries of heritage.

Spanish colonial cattle are different from the commercial breeds that predominate today. “They’re long-lived, they’re good mothers, they’ll eat things other cattle won’t,” said Jeannette Beranger, senior program manager at the Livestock Conservancy in Pittsboro, North Carolina. “And they’re smart. The locals will tell you, ‘Be careful. They’ll eat your lunch!’ ”

They are also notoriously tough. In the days before the Civil War, Spanish-descended Pineywoods cattle, for example, were known for heat tolerance, disease resistance, and a capacity to live in landscapes too harsh for commercial breeds. The rugged nature of the Pineywoods cows resulted in a markedly different relationship between them and their owners than we see in today’s industrial agriculture. Some ranchers had so much respect for their cattle that they would not tolerate the use of dogs to harass the animals during roundup. Others felt it unfair and demeaning to confine the cows with fences. It was only in the 1950s, with commercial feed and motorized equipment used to clear and mow pastures, that the Pineywoods herds began to fade, though a small number of farmers in the Deep South breed them to this day.

Phillip Sponenberg, a veterinary scientist who has spent 50 years searching for the purest-blood remnants of Spanish livestock in the United States, sees signs that the Cedar Island cows share at least a trace of that ancestry. “Some of them are basically white, but they have dark ears, eyes, noses, and feet. That’s a fairly unique color pattern and, in North America, often of Spanish origin,” he said. Some of the Cedar Island cattle also have horns that twist like a Spanish colonial cow’s.

Several experts I spoke to suggested that the fact that any cows at all survived the Dorian surge is clear evidence that they aren’t ordinary cattle. Most agreed that no modern breed would have made it through such a disaster. In this there is recognition of how we’ve degraded cattle as animals, turning them weak and needy. It also feels too convenient. It allows us to duck a more uncomfortable possibility, which is that these animals that most of us readily eat may have made it through the storm by drawing on the same internal resources that humans do in extreme circumstances. Not just a hard-wired survival instinct, that is, but a fierce desire to live—one strong enough to sustain hour upon hour of mortal struggle.

Pain and stress, and especially their severity, may be more challenging to recognize in cows, since as prey animals they evolved to avoid outward signs of weakness, which can attract predators. Cows are stoics; they tough it out.

I should pause here to say that I eat beef. I put cows’ milk on my cereal. I have leather shoes and belts in my wardrobe. Still, like many other people, I recognize that rearing and slaughtering cattle raises issues that are ethically complicated, contradictory, and sometimes deeply weird. None of this, however, is what led me into the terrain of cow psychology. Instead, I simply wanted to know why one cow might survive swimming through a hurricane while another might not.

Remarkably for an animal domesticated thousands of years before the dawn of civilization, the scientific study of cows distinct from their roles as livestock is mostly a recent pursuit. When Mónica Padilla de la Torre reviewed existing research on cow communication more than a decade ago, she was surprised to discover that almost nothing had been done on the subject—which is why she started from scratch, watching cattle through field binoculars like a Dian Fossey of the rangelands. “I think we have a moral responsibility to know these animals that we have lived with for so long,” she said.

For a 2017 paper, Lori Marino, a biopsychologist, reviewed every study she could find on cow psychology. Again, the trove was not impressive. “ There’s a lot to learn about these animals,” said Marino. “There is resistance to coming to terms with who they actually are, their cognitive and social and emotional complexities.”

The problem, of course, is that those complexities could upend our relationship with the species. Marino describes the prevailing way we think about cows as an ideology, one that frames them as dull creatures that are fine with their lot in life, even if that life includes crowding, untreated lameness, being burned with a red-hot iron, and having their calves taken away—practices common in modern industrial farming.

In Marino’s review of the available research, however, she found that cows are “very sensitive to touch,” and that they respond to injury or the threat of it in ways similar to dogs, cats, and humans: by avoiding causes of pain, by limping, groaning, and grinding their teeth, and by evidencing higher levels of stress hormones in their blood. On the other hand, pain and stress, and especially their severity, may be more challenging to recognize in cows, since they evolved to avoid showing signs of weakness, which can attract predators. Cows are stoics; they tough it out.

Though data on cow psychology is limited, I still found it surprising. It was somehow troubling to learn that cows readily recognize one another and are able to distinguish cattle of any breed from other sorts of animals. Cattle are able to navigate and memorize physical mazes with flying colors, outperforming hens, rats, and even cats, and leading researchers to conclude in the study that “the problems were too simple.” When cows were tested in more complex mazes, one in five succeeded at the toughest challenges, and could recall how to navigate the maze when retested six weeks later.

Here we enter territory more meaningful to the question of how those three cows might have survived swimming through a hurricane, since mastering mazes involves not just intelligence but also motivation. It’s true that only one in five cows solved the difficult mazes, but that may be because they dislike being alone and are fearful of places with many potential hiding places for predators, such as a maze. Throughout the tests, some of the cattle, despite a food reward for completion, appeared to resist, give up, or become fearful. Others were bolder and more curious. “This may,” the researchers reported, “suggest the possibility of the involvement of personality.”

With cows, some of the clearest expressions of apparent personal motivation are found in near-death escapes from slaughterhouses. In one of the most famous examples, a 1,050-pound cow broke loose from a Cincinnati facility in 2002. After jumping a six-foot fence, the cream-colored bovine was seen on a nearby side street, was subsequently spotted on a major parkway, then finally escaped into a wooded city park. Over the next 11 days, it evaded the SPCA, traps, tranquilizer darts, even thermal imaging from a police helicopter, before finally being captured.

The animals we eat are nameless, yet escaped cattle that make the news are often rewarded with names. Once that happens, they are unlikely to be returned to industrial production. In this instance, the cow was dubbed Cincinnati Freedom, and lived out her days at a rescue shelter where she was standoffish with people but bonded with three other slaughterhouse escapees. When “Cinci” was dying in 2008, her cohorts attacked the car of an attending veterinarian.

The prevailing ideology, to borrow Marino’s term, has been to explain away cattle’s responses to the world around them as exclusively innate or instinctive. By this standard, when the herd of cows was swept off Cedar Island into a violent ocean, survival would have been determined by luck and physical strength.

If individual cows have personalities, perhaps not as complex as our own, but no less singular, then that assessment may need to change. Once the storm had washed the herd into the ocean, some of the cattle, stricken by panic, would have quickly succumbed to water inhalation or exhaustion. Others, dragged farther and farther from land by the powerful currents of the seiche, might gradually have lost the spirit to fight on. But is it conceivable that three would keep going, drawing on exceptional mental toughness to push their bodies far beyond anything they’d endured before, in order to survive?

“I would use ‘willpower,’ ” Marino said. “I wouldn’t hesitate to use that term.”

No one will ever be certain exactly what the cows went through. Did the two that were later seen ashore together also make the swim that way? We don’t know. But we can hypothesize that the cows in the water would have tried to stay together. Studies show that even being able to see another cow reduces their stress. Together, they may have faced calamity with less fear. Perhaps that alone made the difference.

We can picture the three cows desperately blinking their eyes against the waves and the wind-driven spray, enduring the creeping cold in their bodies, the gradual ache and depletion in their muscles, the thirst and hunger after what may have been hours at sea, the maddening whine of the wind. Then finally seeing, or perhaps first smelling, land once again. Hearing the roar of the fearsome inlets and fighting to avoid being sucked into one.

Their hooves making contact with the sand.

Scrabbling to gain footing.

Surging onto the land as the water rushed between their legs, then dragged back toward the violent ocean.

Finally walking free, with a feeling like profound relief to be alive.

The question of what happened next can perhaps be told through another tale of animal survival. When Hurricane Fran struck in 1996, the storm surge that hit New Bern, North Carolina, flooded the offices of an auto salvage business to a depth of 16 inches. Inside was a junkyard dog named Petey, who stood ten inches tall. After the flood retreated, Petey’s owner found his dog alive but exhausted. When he saw that Petey was soaked with muddy, oily water up to its neck, he surmised that his pet had dog-paddled inside the building for as long as eight hours to survive. Here’s what animals do after such an ordeal: Petey slept for two days straight.

Though little used this way today, we do have a word for bovines that roam free like mustangs. They are mavericks. The term has roots in one Samuel A. Maverick of Texas, whose unbranded cattle got loose into the landscape around 1850. In one version of the story, the force that scattered his cows was a hurricane.

It’s fitting, then, that on November 21, 2019, it was the duty of six cowhands—complete with lassos, chaps, and spurs—to track down the three mavericks on North Core Banks. One of the men carried a rifle loaded with tranquilizer darts and Jeff West drove a Park Service ATV next to the cowhands astride their horses. The plan had always been to get the cows home, said West. That fact had not prevented fierce debate from breaking out online.

“Some people thought we should just kill them, be done with it,” West said. “Some people complained, ‘Why are we spending taxpayer dollars on this?’ Heard that more than once. Some people said we ought to just leave them alone, let them exist out there on the banks.”

Many assumed that the cows had survived only to be sent back to owners who would fatten them for slaughter. On the Cape Lookout National Seashore’s Facebook page, a theme emerged that the cows deserved to live; through baptism by flood, they had transcended their place in the scheme of things. “If they have to be removed then take them to a sanctuary. They deserve life. Do not turn those babies into meat after what they’ve survived!” wrote Misty Romano. Don Riggs of Asbury, New Jersey, wrote, “Really? Why not just bypass the farm and go straight to the slaughterhouse?” Judy Cook of Oak Island, North Carolina, simply declared the cows “as cool as the horses.”

Modern views about cows are messy. Many of us, if not most, seem capable of holding somewhere in our heads the idea that cows are sentient beings that we should have compassion for, but also of suppressing that idea enough that we allow them to suffer cruel conditions along the way to being killed for our benefit. Jessica Due, senior director of rescue and animal care for Farm Sanctuary, an organization devoted to ending the agricultural exploitation of livestock, tells a story that exemplifies the ways this can play out. The sanctuary has been called more than once by the same man to come and rescue an animal from a slaughterhouse. The man is the owner of the slaughterhouse. He calls on those rare occasions when a cow gives birth while being processed. This is where he draws the line; he strongly prefers not to kill these mother cows. Otherwise, he oversees the deaths of cattle on an almost daily basis.

Curiously, just as research is emerging in support of the idea that cows are something more than most of us thought they were, they are also under scrutiny as environmental polluters. Cattle are blamed for producing 9 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, including their famously methane-heavy belching and flatulence. Cows swimming in a hurricane: It could be a Hokusai print for our times. As a result, progressives and vegans look forward to a future with far fewer cows—to save the planet, to protect the animals from our cruelty, or both at once. Many in the industrial beef industry, meanwhile, remain reluctant even to concede that cows are meaningfully sentient. In the 10,000 years of human-cow relations, it’s possible that cattle have never had as few supporters as they have today.

Stephen Broadwell, the leader of the cowhands trotting down North Core Banks nearly three months after Hurricane Dorian, is one of those supporters. Broadwell is russet tanned and often wears a cowboy hat, but that is where the stereotypes end. He was raised in corn, tobacco, and soybean country, where North Carolina’s Piedmont Plateau meets the Coastal Plain. Yet he dreamed of being a rancher. “It’s one of those things—I guess it’s born into you,” he said. At the age of 13, he took a summer job on an 80,000-acre ranch in southern Colorado, and that was that. He was a cowboy.

After graduating early from high school, he earned a veterinary assistant’s degree and soon hired on at 3R Ranch Outfitters in the foothills of the Wet Mountains southwest of Pueblo. It was his immersion in an approach to ranching that attempts to mimic natural systems. “Our neighbors were thinking that we had this magical paradise for a ranch around them, and it was just the management practices they’d put in place years ago,” Broadwell told me. “That really got my motor going.”

The company he runs today, Ranch Solutions, might best be described as a holistic ranching consultancy. Broadwell will come to your property and do pretty much anything you need, including building a house from scratch and putting your first cows out to pasture. He has one rule, however: He will not help you raise more cattle than your land can sustain. He has photos of his team riding through the lush, knee-high grass of a client’s property. It’s a field that had already been grazed, but with the cattle moved off before it was eaten to the ground. The pasture was fertilized by manure and supplemented by cover crops that rebuilt nitrogen in the soil during winter, leading to grassland that sequestered more carbon. A cattle ranch, as Broadwell would have it, is an ecosystem.

The claim that holistic management can achieve this state is hotly contested, but research has lately suggested that yes, cattle can live and die without contributing to climate change. (And let it be noted that there is a strong pot-calling-out-the-kettle factor here, given that the average American human’s carbon footprint is twice that of the average American cow’s.) But we need to raise fewer of them, graze them in ways that mimic natural systems, and keep them off land better suited to food crops.

The future of cattle farming, in other words, may look a lot like the Cedar Island herd. Here are cows that can survive heat that would wither modern breeds, in a landscape where nothing we farm will grow. Here are cows adapted to eat what almost nothing else can. “It’s what a billy goat would not want to eat,” Broadwell said. Here are cows that are disease resistant, drink brackish water, defend themselves from predators, and generally require very little in the way of carbon-intensive coochie-cooing. They are the kind of cows that in the past demanded our respect, and one day might again.

“I grew up with stories from my older relatives about working cows in the river breaks”—steep cliff and canyon country—“and how they were more like deer than cows,” said Jeff West, remembering his youth in Texas. “We ran some cows out in North Fort Hood military reservation, and we only messed with them one time of year, during the roundup. Some of those cows were pretty feisty. But not like these Cedar Island cows. I’ve never run across any cows like these cows.”

When Ranch Solutions and West arrived on North Core Banks for the roundup, they had a plan to haze the survivor cows out of the marsh grass, which grows in muck that’s sometimes deep enough to swallow a horse to its belly. Then there was the chaparral. “Thick is a poor word to describe it,” West said. “It is intolerable of somebody passing through.” It took a long time to locate the cows, and then to work them out into the open so that each could be shot with a dart. Sedated, two of the three became pliant enough to be led back to a trailer that had been ferried to the island.

The final cow, the first to be found after the hurricane—alone—did not become pliant. She fled north, managing to hole up in especially dense and convoluted terrain. The team could just see where she was hiding, and managed to hit her with another dart. Then they waited, sure she would gradually go to sleep. She did not. At last the cowhands tried approaching her.

“And she took off,” West said.

Just up the coast was the Long Point camp where West had first spotted the cow a few weeks after the storm. The buildings still stood empty. Wind sucked and blew between weathered wooden walls. Screen doors creaked on rusty hinges. Hooves squeaked in the sand. It was in every way like the setting for a Spaghetti Western shootout. When one of the riders saw a clean line of fire, the crack from his gun echoed among the shacks, then faded into the roar of the tumbling surf.

With three darts’ worth of sedation flooding her system and blood trickling down her pale coat, the cow somehow ran again. She ran out of the camp. She ran up the beach. After half a mile, she couldn’t run anymore. Then she walked. “It was O.J. Simpson all over again. It was the slow-speed chase,” West said. “It was me and all the cowboys at a walking pace, going along until that cow stopped.”

When she finally did, she stared them down. “Like, ‘Try me,’ ” West said. The cowhands closed in, and one last time she managed to run. Then they got ropes on her and brought her down.

From there the job got easier. With the sun on the horizon, they worked a tarp under her prone body and sledded her down the beach. She came to while walled in by the trailer, her fellow survivor cows beside her. Given hay and fresh water, all three refused it.

The next morning, Ranch Solutions ferried the cows back across the Core Sound, drove to Cedar Island’s northern cape, and backed onto the beach. It was Broadwell who did the honors of swinging open the trailer’s gate. The cows stared at the sudden possibility of escape. They made cautious steps toward the opening. Then they burst from their confines. They ran— galloped —down the sand. Heads up, ears forward, they seemed instantly to sense that they were home and free.

On Cedar Island, the return of the cattle brought a sense of normalcy. When I asked one shopkeeper how islanders felt about the cattle now, she responded instantly. “Fiercely protective,” she said. No one I spoke to on Cedar Island knew of anyone who’d witnessed the three cows’ reunion with the remaining herd—the four animals that hadn’t been swept away by the storm in the first place. But according to Padilla, it likely involved muzzling, low and gentle moos, and gamboling. It might also, finally, have involved grief.

People who’ve looked closely at this issue, such as Barbara J. King, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary and the author of How Animals Grieve , think the blow would have struck hardest when the survivors came home to find the herd decimated. They might have searched the range for missing herd mates and bellowed in an effort to make contact. King, choosing her words carefully, said, “The potential is incredibly strong for the awareness of loss and feeling of distress that would meet my criteria for grief.”

Yet home also brought a different kind of surprise. The cow that had fought so hard to avoid capture by the cowhands turned out to be pregnant. Could that have played a role in her survival? If a cow has a will to fight for its life, might it also fight for the life of its unborn calf? “Biologically, it wouldn’t be strange to assume that,” Padilla said. “She wants the calf to survive.”

Two months after being returned to Cedar Island, the pregnant cow gave birth to a healthy calf, as blond as the dunes. It was born, as if to mark what it went through in utero, with one brown eye and one blue. The calf was not given a name, but the mother was: Dori. The name is not an allusion to the character in Finding Nemo who sings of how, in hard times, we must keep swimming, swimming, swimming. No: She is named after Hurricane Dorian.

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True Grit Study Guide
True Grit has been adapted as a film twice. The first was released in 1969, was directed by Henry Hathaway, and starred John Wayne. The second came out in 2010, was directed by Ethan and Joel Coen, and starred Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon. Serialization. Before its hardcover publication, True Grit was serialized by The Saturday Evening Post in 1968.
True Grit Essay
True Grit Essay. Good Essays. 1285 Words. 6 Pages. 4 Works Cited. Open Document. The American western frontier, still arguably existent today, has presented a standard of living and characteristics which, for a time, where all its own. Several authors of various works regarding these characteristics and the obvious border set up along the ...
True Grit: An Alternate Perspective: [Essay Example], 768 words
What is true grit? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines grit as "perseverance and passion for long term goals.". While the Merriam-Webster dictionary does provide an appreciable explanation of grit, no such definition exists for "true grit." True grit is far more challenging to place words upon; such a prowess is almost unheard of on this ...
The "True Grit" Novel by Charles Portis
In his classical novel published in 1968 and titled True Grit, Charles Portis posits that true resolve and valor are critical factors for attaining desired goals.Justice and vengeance remain a dominant theme in the novel. Portis narrates the story of Mattie Ross, a teenage girl, who is determined to avenge Tom Chaney, her father's murderer (Dirda Para 2).
Donna Tartt on the Singular Voice, and Pungent Humor, of Charles Portis
By Donna Tartt. June 9, 2020. It is likely no surprise to readers who love the novels of Charles Portis that everything delightful about his books was delightful about him as a person. The ...
True Grit Summary
True Grit is a first-person narrative that exploits the tradition of the "innocent eye"—a story seen through the eyes of an unsophisticated adolescent—a tradition going back at least to ...
True Grit Critical Essays
Critical Context. That True Grit is Portis's masterpiece is the result at least in part of its celebratory scope and its thematic depth. It surpassed his exceptionally well-received first novel ...
True Grit Themes
Discussion of themes and motifs in Charles Portis' True Grit. eNotes critical analyses help you gain a deeper understanding of True Grit so you can excel on your essay or test.
True Grit Essay Questions
The Question and Answer section for True Grit is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. True Grit. Mattie is a family girl. Although the theme of the family is a secondary theme in the book, this is a good opportunity for readers to debate it after reading. The family is the dearest treasure for Mattie.
True Grit Summary
The True Grit Community Note includes chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quizzes written by community members like you. ... Essays for True Grit. True Grit essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical ...
Essay On True Grit
Essay On True Grit. "Grit is staring down the barrel of the difficult and the unknown, rejecting the voices that say I'm not enough, and pushing through anyway," (Josh Collins thejoshcollins.com). True grit is defined as having perseverance, courage, endurance, and bravery through a difficult trial or hardship that may seem daunting.
7 True Grit (1969)
7 True Grit (1969) . Hollywood's Unique Western: True Grit (1969) By Sabrina Desha . Henry Hathaway's movie True Grit (1969), tells a story about teenage girl Mattie Ross's strong will to find her father's murderer, Tom Chaney, and bring him to death for her father's justice. To help with this mission she hires Marshall "Rooster" Cogburn to help her seek her revenge and by ...
"True Grit": Book and Films Comparison
Charles Portis's True Grit is a transcendent and versatile story that earned its first critical acclaims as a novel before going on to become the source of two of the greatest western films of all time, with 42 years between them. The overriding theme in all the three portrayals is retribution for Mattie Ross, a 14-year-old girl whose father was killed by the cowardly Tom Chaney.
True Grit Literary Elements
The True Grit Community Note includes chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quizzes written by community members like you. ... Essays for True Grit. True Grit essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical ...
⇉'True Grit' Film Analysis Essay Example
The film True Grit, directed by the Coen Brothers in 2010, is a western film that can most certainly be portrayed as a revisionist western in that the general cinematography brings forth a darker feel, with more realistic elements, straying away from the typical romantic feel of classic westerns. 1. The general iconography in True Grit evokes a ...
(DOC) True Grit Essay
The novel True Grit, by Charles Portis, is about a fourteen-year-old girl who is intent to requite her father's murderer. In the course of adventure, in True Grit, the central theme is justice, however, there can be different reasons for obtaining justice: revenge, duty, or doing the right thing. No matter what the motivation is for ...
True Grit Questions and Answers
Compare and contrast the novel True Grit with the 2010 movie adaptation. Why, in comparison to Jo March from Little Women, does Mattie Ross from True Grit end up alone and lonely?
Grit Essay Examples
Essay On True Grit 1604 Words | 7 Pages. Rooster Cogburn, Frank Ross and Mattie Ross all show true grit in many diverse ways. In some cases, however, the lack of grit is shown through their actions. The definition of grit is different according to peoples opinions and views. The way I view it is, Rooster is truly the grittiest when he is ...
True Grit Essays
True grit is defined as having perseverance, courage, endurance, and bravery through a difficult trial or hardship that may seem daunting. In the novel True Grit by Charles Portis, the characters Rooster Cogburn, Frank and Mattie Ross are portrayed as having the presence or the lack of grit. This book mainly describes Mattie.
True Grit Essays
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True Grit
J.B. MacKinnon is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, and The Atlantic, as well as the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthologies. He is the author or coauthor of five books of nonfiction, and an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches feature writing.