Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Medicine Walk, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fathers and Sons
Nature and the Land
Identity and Heritage
Memory and Story
Love, Loss, and Grief
Summary
Analysis
By the time they reach the bottom of the cliff, his father is weaker. The kid settles his father against a rock and then rests, taking in the sounds of the land. He senses there’s rain coming, so he needs to get his father to a nearby trapper’s cabin he knows about. They set off again, eventually finding an overgrown trail that leads into a marsh where they see a crumbling cabin with smoke coming out of the chimney. A burly woman steps out, holding a shotgun; she wears men’s clothes and walks heavily. Her face looks Native, though she’s fair-skinned and blue-eyed. She stares at them and gruffly asks about Eldon’s sickness. Since it isn’t something catching, she agrees to let them stay the night. She introduces herself as Becka Charlie.
Frank and Eldon find the trapper’s cabin unexpectedly occupied. Though Becka Charlie is also half Indian, she has a more integrated sense of her Native heritage than either of the men do. Besides offering a respite on their journey, the stay with Becka gives the men a glimpse of someone who’s more at peace with who she is, for whom being Indian is simply part of daily life.
Themes
Becka helps the kid get Eldon into the cabin. The cabin is roughly furnished now, and there are dishes, pots, and clothing. The floor looks well swept. Becka explains that she redid the roof and walls last summer, and she tells them to make themselves at home. The kid goes out to tend the horse and sees a privy and a tangled garden in the back. There’s also a grave marked with a wooden cross. It wasn’t there before.
Seemingly out of nowhere, Becka has reclaimed the abandoned cabin and made it a home. Though the details aren’t given until later in the story, the lovingly rebuilt cabin likely reminds Eldon of Frank’s mother, with whom he lived in a renovated cabin before Frank was born. (This might explain Eldon’s grumpiness around Becka.)
Themes
Back inside, the kid drinks a steaming mug of tea made of pine gum and mint. He smiles to himself—Becka, short and squat, looks like a gnome. They chat about his father’s condition. Becka says her father took to drink as well, and the kid figures that’s who is buried out back. They listen as the rain moves in. Eventually Becka explains that her father was Chilcotin and her mother was Scotch. She was raised knowing the old ways of both parents.
Becka and Frank have much in common. Like Frank, Becka lives off the land; she knows what it’s like to care for an alcoholic parent, and to grow up with a half-Indian identity. Unlike Frank, she was raised with a full awareness of both sides of her ancestry. (The Chilcotin, or Tsilhqot’in, people are an Athabaskan-speaking group from British Columbia)
Themes
After napping in front of the fire, the kid wakes to the smell of biscuits and finds his father sitting at the table. He asks Frank for more hooch. The kid suggests more cedar tea, since his father has done well today, but his father refuses. Becka tells the kid he shouldn’t let a drunk push him around. When Eldon gets defensive, she says he’s in her house. It was her grandfather’s before her, and she brought her father here to die. Eldon apologizes and thanks her for her kindness in letting them stay.
Becka has experience in dealing with an alcoholic parent. Though Eldon objects to Becka’s forthrightness, he also respects her care for her own family as well as her hospitality.
Themes
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The kid and Becka eagerly eat the stew and biscuits, but Eldon barely touches his food. After they’re done, Becka takes the last of the stew and a bit of biscuit outside for the spirits of her ancestors and the trees and the animals. Eldon thinks it’s a waste of food, but Becka says not eating it is wasteful. After she goes outside, Eldon calls her bitter and washed out. The kid just thinks she’s tough and straight-talking. Becka joins them on the porch with a pipe, and the three of them smoke in silence as the rain slows.
Native traditions are an active part of Becka’s daily life in a way that they aren’t for Eldon and Frank. Though Eldon might really think that Becka’s practice of setting aside food for the spirits is foolish and wasteful, it’s also possible that he finds her matter-of-fact practices challenging, making him painfully aware of this lack in his own life.
Themes
After studying Eldon in silence for a long time, Becka says she wouldn’t have expected him to follow “the warrior way”—going West to die and be buried. She can tell he wasn’t taught traditional ways, but it’s also clear that he’s led a sorry life, and she figures he’s trying to exit life in an honorable way. She doubts it will work, though. The kid notices Eldon softening. Eldon decides to move back to the fire. He says he has a story he needs to tell. The kid and Becka settle near him in front of the hot fire.
Because of her background, Becka understands what Eldon is trying to do—make up for the failures in his life by drawing on native practices before it’s too late. But she suspects that it’s indeed too late for this to work out as Eldon hopes it will. Spiritual practices can’t just be adopted as a quick fix.
Themes
