Medicine Walk

“He’d grown comfortable with aloneness and he bore an economy with words that was blunt, direct, more a man’s talk than a kid’s. So that people found his silence odd and they avoided him, the obdurate Indian look of him unnerving even for a sixteen-year old.” 

Frank has learned to survive in the wilderness alone at an early age. He dislikes school and prefers to learn from nature. His teacher, the “old man,” has also imbued in him an ethic of honesty, respect for nature, and self-sufficiency. This training in traditional ways separates Frank from those around him. 

“The old man had taught him the value of work early […] he was content in it, hearing symphonies in wind across a ridge and arias in the screech of hawks and eagles, the huff of grizzlies and the pierce of a wolf call against the unblinking moon. He was Indian. The old man said it was his way and he’d always taken that for truth.” 

Frank is true to his Indigenous roots, even though he was raised by a white man and separated from his Indigenous community. Frank has no Indigenous friends with whom he can share a sense of belonging. Instead, nature itself is his friend and teacher. 

“Life had become horseback in solitude, lean-tos cut from spruce, fires in the night, mountain air that tasted sweet and pure as spring water, and trails too dim to see that he learned to follow high to places only cougars, marmots, and eagles knew.” 

Frank immerses himself in the natural world. Living as he does alone in the wild is a reminder of his own natural condition. For Frank, the theme of belonging to the earth has a cultural meaning. He is most fulfilled when he is behaving in a traditional manner and surviving using his own skills at hunting and trapping in the wilderness.