Medicine Walk: Chapter 15 Summary & Analysis

The kid wakes up before dawn, works the kinks out of his back, and washes up at the creek. When he checks on Eldon, he finds his father’s face hot. In his pack, he’s surprised to find some extra supplies that Becka snuck in—beans, bacon, and bread. The kid heats the food over the fire. His father wakes up hungry but grimacing in pain. He’s disappointed to hear that the hooch has been dumped. The kid tells him he didn’t dump all of it.

When the food is ready, Eldon tries to eat some bacon and can’t stomach it. The kid feeds him some beans and makes a cold compress in the creek, pressing the damp shirt to his father’s head. After breaking camp and stamping out the fire, his father weakly remarks that the kid is very careful. The kid says he has to be—when you’re alone in the wilderness, there’s nobody on your back trail. Eldon says he left a lot of back trail in his day, but he wasn’t lonely. He thinks a man makes a choice that he doesn’t need others walking with him. The kid agrees—he thinks that’s why he’s gotten to know the land so well. He feels best when he’s alone.

Eldon watches the kid rolling a cigarette and says that he always preferred holding words in his head to speaking. The words never come out quite right. But he always enjoyed hearing a good story. The kid says he was taught that most talking is a waste of time, but his father says he wishes he’d figured out how to say more about what he’s seen and done—soon, there will be nobody to speak for him. He recalls that his mother used to say, “Stories get told one word at a time.”

After a long silence, the kid helps his father onto the horse. They spend the morning making their way up a ridge, the mare treading gently as Eldon falls unconscious. At noon, they stop in a mossy, shadowed glade. The kid finds his father soaked with sweat. He gives Eldon some medicine, and Eldon says he can’t sleep—he’s in a harder fight now, and he wonders how much farther they have to go. The kid thinks they can get there by evening. After a rest, they pass through one of the kid’s favorite trapping spots, and he tells his father about his adventures here. Once he started coming here alone, he came to know the feel of the place, and he was never afraid.

In reply, Eldon suddenly croaks out, “You’re a good man.” The old man has done a good job, Eldon says, and he asks if the old man knows how good the kid is at surviving in the wilderness. The kid assures him he knows. They continue in silence. By evening, they come to the foot of the ridge his father wanted to reach. Eldon is breathing raggedly, feverish and shivering, and the bright evening is full of birdsong. When they reach the crest of the ridge, they see a turquoise river, full of glacier melt, flowing down into the flood plain. Deer and a black bear move along the river. Snowy peaks line the opposite side of the valley.

The kid helps his father down from the horse and eases him against a saddle so he can look down on the valley. After Eldon is soothed to sleep by the medicine, the kid creeps into the forest to hunt. He listens for a long time before hearing some grouse. When he whistles in their direction, they shelter in the lower branches of the trees, and the kid throws stones and fells two birds. Back at the camp, he builds a fire, then cleans and skewers the birds. As the sun sets, he finds his father clammy. He’s clearly full of pain, so the kid gives him more medicine. He feels afraid of what’s coming.

After Eldon wakes up again, the kid helps him to the fireside and gets him to swallow two pieces of grouse. Following another doze, his father speaks in a monotone. He says that Jimmy used to tell him that human beings are a “Great Mystery” and that the old Indians did everything in order to learn to live with that mystery. They didn’t try to solve it or make sense of it—they just learned to be with it. Eldon wishes he’d learned to do that.

Eldon tells Frank that he’s never belonged anywhere or to anyone. At some point, he accepted that was just his lot in life. He figured he deserved it because of what he’d done, and what he hasn’t done. After a coughing fit, he goes on. When he learned he was dying, he remembered this spot. He came here while working as a logger scout at 15. He spent two days sitting on the cliff overlooking the valley and didn’t think about anything in particular—he just felt a measure of peace. That’s why he chose to come back here to die, it was the only place he ever fit.

Out of the shadows, his father’s voice comes again. He tells Frank he once killed a man. As the kid sits close to him to hand him a cigarette, he explains he’s never spoken of this, but it’s what Frank needs to know about him. He arranges himself as comfortably as he can, breathes, raises his head, and begins to speak.