The Red Hawk by Edgar Rice Burroughs

"You are a strange people," she said, "that you could be so brave and generous to one you hate, and yet refuse the simpler kindness of forgiveness--forgiveness of a sin that we did not commit."

For the last few weeks an unexpected road trip to Lincoln, Nebraska, biographies and analyses of T. S. Eliot, and the work of Rumiko Takahashi have come between me and ERB, but now the time has come to read the third and final installment of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Moon sequence, The Red Hawk.  The Red Hawk first appeared in Argosy in 1925, serialized across three issues.  As you no doubt recall, my brother acquired a copy of the 95¢ Ace edition of The Moon Men in an unspecified place in the unspecified past, and it is now in my possession; I will be reading the version of The Red Hawk included in that volume.

(I'm not going to explain who Julian and the Kalkars are again; please refer to my blog posts about The Moon Maid and The Moon Men if necessary!)

The protagonists depicted on the cover of the 1992 Del Rey edition of The Moon Men (the work of  Laurence Schwinger), and on the title page of my 1974 copy (drawn by Roy Krenkel), have a sort of Plains Indian look to them, and sure enough, as The Red Hawk begins, we find the twentieth incarnation of our narrator Julian, known as "The Red Hawk," leading an army of unarmored horsemen armed with lances and bows and adorned with warpaint and bird feathers.  The Red Hawk's horde of one hundred clans, lead by people with names like "The Wolf," "Rain Cloud," "The Vulture" and "The Rattlesnake," crosses a desert and attacks an army of armor-clad Kalkars near Cajon Pass.  After a tremendous hand-to-hand battle (over the last three centuries the Kalkars have run out of ammunition for the guns they had in The Moon Men) our narrator is taken captive and brought before the Kalkar leader, a half-breed descendant of the treacherous Orthis we met in The Moon Maid.  This Kalkar ruler makes peace overtures towards the Red Hawk, but our narrator rejects them out of hand--he hates the Kalkars and the descendants of Orthis with a passion and feels peace between them is impossible.

In his prison atop an ancient skyscraper, the Red Hawk meets another descendant of Orthis, one who is a pure-blooded Earthman.  At the top of the Kalkar hierarchy there has been conflict between those Or-tis who are pure strain Earthlings and those who are biracial (part Earthling and part Lunarian)--the current occupant of the throne ascended to power by murdering the previous leader, this prisoner's father, who was planning to negotiate with the Yanks.  In a speech that will perhaps surprise and dismay today's readers, this Or-tis invokes the one-drop rule and makes a sharp distinction between pure-blooded Earthmen and irredeemable half-breeds.

"Our blood strain is as clear as yours--we are American.  There is no Kalkar or half-breed blood in our veins.  There are perhaps a thousand others among us who have brought down their birthright unsullied....He [the current leader] is the son of a Kalkar woman by a renegade uncle of mine.  There is Or-tis blood in his veins, but a drop of Kalkar makes one all Kalkar, therefore he is no Or-tis."

Julian the Red Hawk finds talk of making peace more persuasive coming from this pure-blooded Or-tis, and they work together to escape the skyscraper.  During the succeeding horseback chase they are separated.  The Red Hawk travels around what I guess is Southern California, seeing the ocean for the first time, meeting a tribe of friendly dwarves (three feet tall) who are descended from Japanese people, and another purebred human Or-tis, a beautiful woman, Bethelda.  Bethelda is the brother of the Or-tis with whom The Red Hawk escaped the skyscraper.  Julian 20th falls in love with Bethelda, rescues her from a band of brigands led by a nine-foot-tall renegade Kalkar named Ragan, and comes to realize that the pure-blooded Or-tis should not be punished for the sins of their ancestors, but welcomed into the Yank community.  The Yanks and purebred Or-tis join forces and defeat the Kalkars and half-breeds, uniting North America under the Stars and Stripes.         

The Red Hawk is short, just shy of 100 pages in this edition, and an entertaining adventure story full of fights and chases and people getting captured and escaping captivity; as in so many ERB tales, our narrator even marries a princess and lives happily ever after.  There are some nice SF touches: at the start of the story the Red Hawk and his advisers speculate about whether the Earth is flat and what the stars are, there are good descriptions of the ruins of high-tech 20th-century civilization and the response to them of Earth's primitive future inhabitants (the narrator opines that the wealth built by 20th-century man did not make him any happier), and then there is the fact that the Kalkars have been bred for size since conquering the Earth centuries ago and many are seven or even eight feet tall--nine-footer Ragan is the ultimate expression of this eugenics program.

Even though it extends only to pure-blooded Earthlings and not to Lunarians, the story's theme of the value of peace, forgiveness and reconciliation and Julian 20th's psychological journey from a seeker of revenge to one who can love an Or-tis give the story an overtone of hope.  However, there is a contrasting theme of the futility of striving, which is linked to Burroughs's common theme (famously seen in the Tarzan books and less famously in The Cave Girl) of the superiority of the primitive over the modern:

How long and at what cost had the ancients striven to the final achievement of their mighty civilization!  And for what?

How long and at what cost had we striven to wrest its wreckage from the hands of their despoilers!  And for what?  There was no answer--only that I knew we should go on and on, and generations after us would go on and on, striving, always striving, for that which was just beyond our grasp--victims of some ancient curse laid upon our first progenitor, perhaps.

Burroughs makes clear that the Yanks and Or-tis are white, but the American West of the future is also inhabited by native Americans, some of whom live free in the wilds, others as slaves of the Yanks and the Kalkars.  Like the Japanese dwarves, these Indians play no role in the war between the Yanks and the Kalkars, refusing to strive, and the Red Hawk muses that they may be wiser than any of the warring factions:

...I thought of the slave woman and her prophesy.  Her people would remain, steadfast, like the hills, aspiring to nothing, achieving nothing, except perhaps that one thing we all crave in common--contentment.  And when the end comes, whatever that end shall be, the world will doubtless be as well off because of them as because of us, for in the end there will be nothing.  

I think related to these two themes--the importance of reconciliation and skepticism of the value of striving--is how Burroughs depicts the major battle at the start of the story; he emphasizes exhaustion and the vast piles of dead bodies, and the way the battle runs out of Julian's control, as much as heroism and swordsmanship and generalship.

As with the other two Moon books, Burroughs in The Red Hawk does the stuff he generally does (fighting man fights and marries a princess) but changes things up a little with some unusual themes.  Here he almost entirely abandons the earlier Moon stories' attacks on communism, big government and revolution to instead muse about the futility of ambition and the importance of reconciliation and forgiveness.  Worth a look for adventure fans, and if there are any scholars out there doing research on portrayals of Native Americans in SF, The Red Hawk should be on their reading lists.