Summary
Frank and Eldon arrive at a dingy bar called Charlie’s, and the voices of those inside the bar lower as Eldon enters. It is clear that Eldon is a regular at the bar. Frank can feel the eyes of the bar-goers follow them as Eldon walks to the back of the bar, and a bartender comes to their table and stares at Eldon. The bartender finally says to Eldon, “You still owe,” and Eldon assures the bartender that he can pay. The bartender is skeptical, and Frank asks the bartender how much his father owes. After Frank pays Eldon’s tab and orders food with the money the old man gave him, Frank sarcastically says to Eldon “Your treat, huh?” Frank is angry and impatient with his father, and what few words the two exchange quickly become somber. Frank asks his father “You fixin’ to die?” as Eldon continues to drink.
Eldon tells Frank that he needs a favor. Eldon asks Frank to go to the backcountry with him, to the territory that Frank has hunted all his life. Eldon asks Frank to bring him to a ridge 40 miles away, sitting above a narrow valley facing east. Frank knows where the ridge is, but doesn’t understand why Eldon needs to go there. Eldon replies that he needs Frank to bury him there. Eldon wants to be buried facing east and sitting up, “the warrior way.” Frank replies “You ain’t no warrior.” Eldon raises his bottle to his lips and replies that once, he was a warrior. Eldon informs Frank that there are many things he needs to tell Frank, as it’s all he is able to give Frank before he passes away. Frank tells Eldon that Eldon’s stories “Ain’t never gonna be enough” to make up for Eldon’s absence. Eldon looks at Frank, finishes his drink, and leaves the bar.
At the beginning of Chapter 5, Frank awakens in the night to coyotes “dancing” and yapping. He is still in town, in the barn where the mare is kept, and goes to watch the coyotes in the moonlight. The coyotes weave in and out, and then begin to play before loping back into the woods. Frank imagines the woods the coyotes enter to be an impermeable chrysalis, wound of the fibers of time. Frank begins to walk out into the night from the barn, towards a rail fence at the end of the field. He looks out at the mountains that lead to the valley where Eldon asked to be buried, and reflects on his father. Frank thinks of his father’s life, with the ragged room and the prostitute, and concludes that it is a sorrowful life. Frank weighs the realities before him; if he wanted, he could simply let his father die and go back to the farm with the old man.
Frank reflects that life with the old man is what he knows, what is home to him. The only real father Frank has ever known is the old man. The old man taught Frank the rhythms of farm life, how to milk and plow and seed. Although Frank remembers Eldon coming to visit him and the old man when Frank was younger, Frank never understood Eldon as his father. For the longest time, as the old man said “your pap” while doling Frank money from a jar, Frank thought the old man meant the jar was his pap. It was the old man who taught him about the land, not Eldon. Frank recalls his first time going out into the land on his own, when he was nine, for four days. He came back to the farm with smoked fish and a small deer, and the old man showed him how to tan the hide. The old man was the one to impart those teachings, not Eldon. Frank rolls another smoke. The spirit of the coyotes still clings to the gap in the trees, and Frank wonders about journeys, endings, and questions that remain forever unspoken and unanswered. Frank crushes the cigarette and walks back to the barn in the weak light of dawn.
Chapter 6 takes place in the past, composed of memories Frank has of life with the old man. The first thing Frank remembers is the gun. Frank stares at the gun for hours, wondering, and finally asks the old man if he can hold it. He learns the feel of the gun in his hands, and the old man quizzes Frank on the gun’s characteristics: what kind of ammunition the gun takes, what kind of animals it can shoot at, the names of the gun parts. The old man tells Frank this knowledge is important, because the gun is a tool, and tools are “only as good as the care you give them.” The old man teaches Frank to shoot when Frank is 7 years old, and teaches Frank that it isn’t right to let any animal suffer in death. “Gotta drop it,” the old man tells Frank, and this also becomes a mantra for Frank in school.
Frank never takes to school. While he knows how to read, write, and count better than the other children, the lessons Frank learns in school seem meaningless because they can’t be transferred to life on the farm. Frank goes to a predominantly white school where he is the only Indigenous student, and both the teachers and the other students don’t trust Frank. Frank doesn’t get along with the children because he is used to being talked to and treated like a man at home, and so Frank leaves school as soon as he legally can, at age sixteen.
Once Frank can shoot dependably, the old man brings Frank out to the land to learn to hunt. Past the farmland, the land becomes “real.” To say that Frank loves the land doesn't adequately describe what he feels for it. The old man first teaches Frank to track animals before killing them. Frank learns patience and guile, and learns to follow an animal for miles in a half-crouch. Frank learns to be furtive. When Frank is nine, he shoots his first deer. Frank weeps quietly over the deer remains, and the old man takes a smear of blood from the deer on his fingertips. The old man marks Frank’s face with the blood. The old man says to Frank “Them’s your marks,” and Frank nods, saying “Because I’m Indian.” The old man replies “Cuz I’m not.” The old man tells Frank that he can’t teach Frank anything about being Indigenous, but he can teach Frank to be a good person.
The old man then instructs Frank to give thanks to the buck he killed. The old man tells Frank that the buck is going to feed the two of them for a while, and give them a hide, and so it is important to thank the buck for taking care of their lives now. The old man instructs Frank in feeling whatever he feels, and speaking from that in his prayer for the buck. Frank thanks the buck, and tears come to his eyes once more. The act of praying makes Frank feel hollow and serene simultaneously, but he feels better for it. At eleven, Frank inherits the gun. By this time he has tracked and dropped moose, elk, black bear. Frank is a sure and deliberate hunter, one who learned to pray before he went out hunting and pray once more when he returned with game. A hunt became a ceremony. In the process of tracking game, Frank can let himself “slip out of the bounds of what he knew of earth” into something larger, more complex yet simpler at the same time.
Analysis
Chapter 4 includes an instance of verbal irony, whereby Frank sarcastically says “Your treat, huh?” to Eldon. Frank’s sarcasm refers to Eldon’s promise to take Frank out for a meal in the previous chapter, only for Frank to discover that Eldon actually owes the bar money. There is a contrast here between Frank’s spoken words and the meaning beneath them, as Frank in fact “treats” Eldon. The verbal irony in this chapter is important because it expresses Frank’s anger that Eldon has, once again, lied to him.
From Frank’s point of view, Eldon is not a warrior and never has been. Eldon has long been an absent and neglectful father, and so it makes no sense to Frank why Eldon would want to be buried in the traditional warrior way. Eldon’s promise of telling Frank stories foreshadows a disclosure of Eldon’s past where Eldon may have in fact been a warrior. The Eldon that Frank knows, however, has always been a drunk. In Frank’s eyes, Eldon’s stories can never make up for what Eldon owes Frank—Eldon owes Frank a father-son relationship, something Eldon can now never make up because he is dying.
In Chapter 5, as Frank watches the coyotes before dawn, there exists a kind of anthropomorphizing as the coyotes “dance” in the moonlight. The verb “dance” makes the coyotes’ movements somewhat human, and gestures towards the connection Frank has to the land and its beings. Frank sees the land and its beings on equal terms, on human terms. Such anthropomorphizing is significant because it reminds Frank of all the knowledge the old man has passed down to him, all that the old man has given Frank. This thought prompts Frank to reflect on a relationship he shares with the old man that Frank has never shared with Eldon. Eldon has never given Frank the kind of knowledge the old man has. Frank “wondering what shape” the coyotes would have when they emerge from the woods is also symbolic of the journey Frank will make with his father. Frank does not know who he will be after he hears Eldon’s stories and buries Eldon.
In Chapter 6, Frank’s relationship with the old man seemingly foils the relationship Frank has with his father. Frank and the old man have shared a father-son relationship, contrasting with Eldon’s absence and inability to care for himself and Frank. Wagamese demonstrates the father-son relationship between Frank and the old man by describing the knowledge and skills that the old man has passed down to Frank, specifically knowledge about the land. The old man instructs Frank to give thanks and pray when he kills an animal, thereby instructing Frank to feel when he prays. There exists a spoken emotional connection between the old man and Frank, unlike that between Frank and Eldon. The old man marking Frank’s face with the blood marks the racial difference between them, but it also functions as a symbolic promise: the old man will teach Frank all that he knows, despite not being Indigenous himself.
There is situational irony in the old man’s passing down knowledge about the land because the old man is white, yet the respect and honor that he teaches Frank to practice towards the land seem to come from Indigenous epistemology. This is situational irony because one expects Frank to learn Indigenous teachings from his Indigenous father, but it is in fact his white foster father-figure that teaches Frank this knowledge. Moreover, respect for the land and its beings is thematically important throughout the entirety of the novel.
