Jim Kjelgaard will always have a place in the halls of Children’s Literature, with his many animal novels including Big Red (1945). But the author had to start somewhere and wrote for the Western Pulps as well as four stories for Weird Tales. It is these four tales we will look at now. Kjelgaard could have played it safe and wrote about vampires or ghosts but his interests weren’t really there. He liked animals and the country life and that’s what he chose to focus on.
The first story was “The Thing From the Barrens” (Weird Tales, September 1945). George Malory dwells in North City so he can stay close to the woman he loves, Marcia Davenport. Marcia’s father, Pug, is a trapper who has come back from the Barrens, haunted by a strange creature. The monster is invisible but as Pug tells George there are two signs it is near, a stick and a duckprint. George sees these for real when the creature comes to the city. Those who touch the stick seem to float into the air as if they were being drawn up by a giant invisible hand. In the snow there are footprints, shaped like a duck’s but hugely out of proportion. When Marcia is taken, George and Pug go after the invisible monster. Outside of the city they find the creature’s camp, where it has skinned three victims and discarded their corpses. The monster is a trapper, like the men who work from North City, using the stick to trap its prey. Pug faces off with the monster, shooting it to death with his 30-06. The bleeding beast kills Pug then crashes into the river to die. The trapper dies, saving his child, who finally becomes George’s girl. George theorizes the monster is invisible because it is a color humans can not see. Pug is the only man who could have shot the thing, for he is completely color-blind. Kjelgaard wrote about Arctic settings in other stories including Kalak of the Ice (1949) the story of a polar bear, and “Meeting on the Ice” (Adventure, May 1949) in which a criminal on the lam has a run-in with same.
If you’d like to read the rest, please check out Monster 2: From the Pages of Dark Worlds Quarterly.