Medicine Walk

Frank is intimately connected with the world around him. He is constantly aware of the way sky and land connect and mirror each other. Frank’s true home is nature: “His life had become horseback in solitude, lean-tos cut from spruce, fires in the night” (5). Frank’s way of living is honest and courageous. Nature provides Frank with purpose and a sense of completeness, a sharp contrast to Eldon’s broken world—one associated with the industrial and commercial world of white civilization that uses rather than respects nature. Eldon has lost touch with the continuum, and the purpose of his quest with Frank is to reestablish this lost connection. Frank and Eldon leave the industrial world and its associations with personal failure, economic exploitation, and dissolute behavior and travel deeper into the wilderness. Finally, Eldon can spread his arms like an eagle, echoing an earlier moment in the novel when Frank is described as traveling to “places only cougars, marmots, and eagles knew” (6).

On the one hand, the novel includes characters like Bunky—an understanding and accepting white man who seeks to help his Indigenous friends, Angie and Eldon, by giving them money and a truck, even after they have betrayed him.