"The Slope of the High Mountain" tells the seemingly straightforward story of a fox hunt gone awry, and a potential tragedy averted. The story begins with a description of snow: "Snow had fallen in the night and it lay on all the ground above five hundred feet," it begins, "showing brave in the sun and making the sky so blue that it was a pleasure to look at it." (p.38) (Susan has already commented on the unusual usages of some of the words in the opening sentence.)

Next we learn of two men "walking fast up the Nantmor road" to "a meet of foxhounds". Up ahead, they see "a dark figure, dressed in black, incongruous among the rocks, and he was singing passionately. It was a hymn in Welsh and he was a shepherd: presently he vanished at a turning in the road, and although they heard his singing high up among the stunted trees they did not see the man again." (p.38) This is the last we hear of the mysterious shepherd.

Five paragraphs into the story (p.39), we find out the (last) names of the two men: Gonville and Brown. (Note the order they're introduced.) From the shepherd singing in Welsh and the names of the mountains they pass, it's clear by this point they they are in the mountains of Wales. They come at last to Hafod Llan, where they see the Master ("He was of an ancient family, and his people had hunted this country above three hundred years. He had a falcon's nose and eye, and his moustache curled with a magnificent arrogance."), with hounds and other huntsmen lined up (p.40). They head "off towards the Gallt y Wenallt, the mountain behind the wood." (p.40).

They are hunting for a while, when there comes a significant phrase: "Brown talked to the huntsman, a young, tall Welshman who swore in English" (p.41), significant because this is the first indication, on the last paragraph of the fourth page of the 13 page story, that Brown (as opposed to Gonville and Brown) is the story's central character. Then they see the fox: "A dark brown fox was he, big and rangy, a long legged fox. He looked up at the men far above him, and plainly they could see him deliberate as he stood there, looking up and damning their eyes." (p.42) The fox runs away, up towards the mountain, and the huntsmen and hounds chase after him. They climb over a wall, up a "cruel slope" (p.43), through snow.

Brown decides to try a different way than the others. He sees Gonville about to go back and is "secretly rather pleased" (p.44). He goes over the snow-covered slope, at one point, slipping uncontrollably down, but, out of sheer luck, is able to stop his fall before it proves fatal (p.45). He continues to climb, at one point coming across the hounds coming down, who "looked momentarily at Brown and went on." (p.47) They've apparently had no luck catching the fox. Brown comes at last to "a platform with a sheltering slab over it" (p.48), where he stays for a while, exhausted and desparaging. At one point he sees Gonville walking quickly far below. Then he sees two ravens, which make some noise and then fly off. His spirits are somewhat revived by the warming sun. Then he makes his "great discovery" and feels like a fool: the sun has melted the snow, and now he can easily go down the slope. The story ends with him running "down the grassy innocent slope laughing like a boy, down to the thorn trees and down safe and happier than Lazarus to the lovely wood and the lake with the blue sky over them, and in ten minutes the real knowledge of naked fear had left him." (p.50)

There's several interesting things about this story. As with all of the earlier stories, a man (or boy, presumably, in "Not Liking to Pass the Road Again") takes a road into the woods, where he faces some sort of challenge or danger. As with "The Happy Despatch" and "Not Liking", the danger comes from going uphill. (Just as if you're an attractive young lady in a slasher movie, you should never go outside or down into the basement in your underwear, the lesson appears to be that, in an O'Brian short story, never go uphill.)

From the names, it appears that Brown is English and Gonville French, as such they are outsiders in Wales. There may be some significance to Gonville's name (gone back to the ville? a hint of his early retreat), but Brown is obviously the more significant character. As an Englishman in a Celtic country, he much in common with Woolen from "Happy Despatch", and even more in common with Joseph Aubrey Pugh from Testimonies. There are two other significant meanings to Brown's name, which I'll get to in a moment.

First, let's look at the fox. Some of you may know the old Irish song "Maderine Rue" ("The Little Red Fox"), in which the red fox eats a fine fat goose. The fox in the song represents England and the goose Ireland, so if we take the fox in "The Slope" as also representing England, we can see that he has much in common with Brown: both Englishman in danger in a foreign land. But of course the fox in "Slope" is not a red fox at all; he's a BROWN fox. (Thus the second significance of Brown's name.) There is thus an identification of Brown with the fox, and we can see that their stories are much the same: both go up the mountain into danger, and, just as the fox ultimately escapes, so too does Brown. The identification goes further: the fox is personified: he is referred to as "he" (unlike the hound referred to as "it" (p.41); although "her" is used for a female hound, "an English bitch with a noble, judicious head" (p.40)). As for Brown, recall the scene where the hounds see him as they are coming down. They stop for a minute and stare before going on. Why are they looking? Do they see something of the fox in him? (Remember in Post Captain, the dogs weren't fooled at all by Jack's bear costume.)

Now we come to the third significance of Brown's name, and this is the most intriguing of all: if his name is Brown, what are his initials? B is the end, of course, but what are the complete initials? Could it be -- JSB (the protaganist from "The Return")? I've already speculated that JSB is the unnamed man from "The Dawn Flighting", so there's a possibility that the same character has appeared in all three stories. Consider: JSB from "The Return" is "[g]rinning like a boy" (p. 11) when he kills his fish; the man from "Dawn Flighting" stares at the bird he's killed "with an unconcious grin of pleasure" (p.32); and now Brown is "laughing like a boy" (p.50) as he comes down the mountain.

There were two more interesting things I noticed. First, there's a lot of religious words in the final sentence ("innocent", "thorn", "Lazarus"), as well as possibly in the scene with the mysterious shepherd, who is singing a hymn. Finally, O'Brian uses alliternation of the "s" sound in the final paragraph ("slid", "scrambled", "second", "slope", etc.), hearkening back to the sound of "snow", the story's opening word.

John Finneran