Some of Orrie Hitt’s earliest published writings were in the pages of outdoors magazines like Fur-Fish-Game, Hunter-Trader-Trapper, and National Sportsman, where he would write articles and submit letters that reflected the young man’s naturalistic knowledge and experience.
In addition to his nonfiction contributions, the young Hitt also wrote a short story, “Cabin Fever” (under the name Edwin Hitt, as he signed his work at that time), serialized in the January, February, and March 1935 issues of Hunter-Trader-Trapper. Frequent H-T-F artist Edwin Bolenbaugh provided illustrations for the story.
After his parents died, Jerry Judson was entrusted to the care of his uncle, who cheated the young boy out of his Ozark property inheritance. Fed up, the teen fled to the North of Canada, where he built a cabin and lived as a hermetic trapper, with only his two dogs as companions, one a Collie and the other a St. Bernard named Loyal. His three closest neighbors are fellow trappers, Carter Blake, Dave Soles, and Alex Winter. But their idyllic Northern life is threatened by Alex’s increasingly erratic and violent behavior, and the others fear that he has been stricken with “cabin fever”:
“They knew what was wrong with him; he had gone mad from living alone—the silence of the Arctic wastes had been too much for him. Many men are driven out of their minds by the silence and the loneliness of this vast wilderness, and Alex Wilson was a victim of that which those who live in the land of solitude know as ‘cabin fever.’ It makes men want to kill without any reason for so doing; to murder at random either friend or foe.”
While “Cabin Fever” seems more indebted to Jack London and other writers of frontier and wilderness fiction, there’s an elemental sensibility to the characters that foreshadows Hitt’s later novels. Instead of base passions, his characters here express other primal characteristics: life, death, greed, murder. There’s also a cynical view of the world that would pervade Hitt’s later suburban novels: Jerry flees an exploitative family member who lied and stole his nephew’s inheritance, and find himself in an Eden tainted by treachery and murder. There's also a timeless quality to “Cabin Fever,” and it is so devoid of modernity and its ephemera that it is hard to tell whether the story is set in 1935 or 1835.
“They knew what was wrong with him; he had gone mad from living alone—the silence of the Arctic wastes had been too much for him. Many men are driven out of their minds by the silence and the loneliness of this vast wilderness, and Alex Wilson was a victim of that which those who live in the land of solitude know as ‘cabin fever.’ It makes men want to kill without any reason for so doing; to murder at random either friend or foe.”
While “Cabin Fever” seems more indebted to Jack London and other writers of frontier and wilderness fiction, there’s an elemental sensibility to the characters that foreshadows Hitt’s later novels. Instead of base passions, his characters here express other primal characteristics: life, death, greed, murder. There’s also a cynical view of the world that would pervade Hitt’s later suburban novels: Jerry flees an exploitative family member who lied and stole his nephew’s inheritance, and find himself in an Eden tainted by treachery and murder. There's also a timeless quality to “Cabin Fever,” and it is so devoid of modernity and its ephemera that it is hard to tell whether the story is set in 1935 or 1835.
Nearly two decades later, Hitt would publish a novel called Cabin Fever (Uni-Books, 1954), however it is unrelated to the earlier short story, and only shares the title.
Sources:
Edwin HItt, “Cabin Fever [Part I],” Hunter-Trader-Trapper, vol. LXX, no. 1, January 1935, pp. 8–10, 32–33.
Edwin HItt, “Cabin Fever, [Part II],” Hunter-Trader-Trapper, vol. LXX, no. 2, February 1935, pp. 13–15, 41.
Edwin HItt, “Cabin Fever, [Part III],” Hunter-Trader-Trapper, vol. LXX, no. 3, March 1935, pp. 17–19, 47.
Sources:
Edwin HItt, “Cabin Fever [Part I],” Hunter-Trader-Trapper, vol. LXX, no. 1, January 1935, pp. 8–10, 32–33.
Edwin HItt, “Cabin Fever, [Part II],” Hunter-Trader-Trapper, vol. LXX, no. 2, February 1935, pp. 13–15, 41.
Edwin HItt, “Cabin Fever, [Part III],” Hunter-Trader-Trapper, vol. LXX, no. 3, March 1935, pp. 17–19, 47.
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