Elatsoe: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Ellie finds Jay waiting by the river at sunset. Al appears behind them and surprises them, looking straight out of the 1950s in his leather jacket and slicked hair. He wears sunscreen and sunglasses, and Ellie notices that his teeth don’t look very sharp—yet. She and Al awkwardly shake hands and then discuss Herotonic University, where he and Ronnie are both pre-med—they plan to open a private research facility. But Al suggests they get on with fixing the heart and leads the younger teens onto the bridge. They pause and Al coughs, explaining that somehow, the river’s pollution makes him feel sick now that he’s cursed.

Al begins to climb the bridge up to the heart. He grudgingly paints a zig-zag through the heart and then, when Ellie asks how serious Al is about Ronnie, Al climbs higher. Jay holds Ellie’s hand as she leans back to read the beginnings of “Ronnie will you marry me?” Worried about his parents’ reaction, Jay tries to climb up and stop Al. But both he and Ellie fall 30 feet into the river below. Kirby appears and, given his relaxed demeanor, Ellie figures they’re safe. But she also remembers that Six-Great’s dogs weren’t prepared for the “Kunétai creature” to attack—could that monster have friends?

Resuming Six-Great’s story, the woman reached the Lipan band and asked for a huge net and something that belonged to the teen boy. She found a hair tie near the river; finding it implied that the boy entered the dangerous river willingly. Then, she asked for fresh meat to use as bait. She left the buck’s body in the river and waited nearby with her dogs—and she fell asleep. Six-Great woke up to the boy screaming for help until he was pulled underwater. She scolded the creature and went back to sleep. In the morning, the monster was dead: she put poisoned herbs in the buck. Six-Great buried it in the desert so it couldn’t return to the river.

Ellie snaps back to the present as Al thrusts a branch at her and Jay, towing them to shore. He walks toward town to get towels, while Ellie and Jay discover that their phones are dead. Thinking over how quickly they could’ve died, Ellie asks if she told Jay about the “howl incident” (Kirby gave everyone in Ellie’s sixth-grade class nosebleeds, and Ellie was suspended). Ellie says that afterward, Mom told her the story of Icarus, whose father built him wings and warned him not to fly too high or too low. He, of course, melted his wings on the sun and fell into the sea. The moral, Ellie suggests, is that they need to be careful this summer, as it might be hard to tell which risks are wise until it’s too late.

Jay holds out his hand and shows Ellie what he’s been working on: he can conjure a ball of light (a will-o’-the-wisp) because he’s descended from Lord Oberon. Though, Jay adds, his power is weak, and he might be the last in his line to be able to use it. They discuss Ellie’s family’s secret, which is knowledge rather than a genetic predisposition to magic. It’s traditionally passed from eldest daughter to eldest daughter. Ellie laments that while Six-Great saved their people from murderous invaders at age 12, Ellie just traumatized her classmates—Six-Great must look down on her. Jay insists this certainly isn’t true and leads Ellie to the sidewalk. When Ellie gets home wet and muddy, Dad angrily scolds her, but he reaffirms that they’ll honor Trevor’s last wishes “[t]ogether. As a family.”