Medicine Walk: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

The kid’s first memory is the gun. He was three or four years old and thought it looked like a magical object hanging above the stone fireplace, no doubt filled with stories. Every once in a while, the old man would take the gun down from the mantel and let him touch it. Before he’d allow the kid to hold the gun, the old man would quiz him about the model, the kind of ammunition it uses, and what it shoots (“anything bigger than a bobcat”). The old man, who called him “Frank,” would always be smiling as he asked the questions. After that, he’d let the kid hold the gun.

By the time the kid was five, he could break down, reassemble, and clean the gun by himself. He knew how to oil and polish it just right. The old man taught him that if a man is going to shoot, he needs to know what he’s shooting with. And any tool is only as good as the care it’s given. He always tousled the kid’s hair when he gave advice. But whenever he took the gun down to go hunting, he also let the kid see that he was checking over the kid’s handiwork.

The kid learned to shoot at seven and soon became proficient with a .22 rifle. The old man made sure he could hit cans accurately from many positions, since that might save his life someday. He also taught the kid how to calculate drift—how a bullet drops over distance and how its impact decreases—so that he knew how to hit what he was shooting at no matter the circumstance. He impressed on the kid that it’s not right to let anything suffer. The kid repeats “Gotta drop it” to himself like a mantra.

The kid never liked school. The other kids were noisy and the teacher talked too fast and never repeated himself like the old man did. The kid already knew letters and numbers, weights and measures, how to manage farm chores, and write letters to his father. But none of the lessons at school seemed relevant to farm life, so he soon stopped paying much attention. The only Indian at school, he didn’t make friends easily, especially with the town kids who seemed to only live for play. The kid was used to being spoken to like an adult.

The teachers sent home letters calling the kid “aloof and cold,” but the old man tossed these into the fire. He made sure nobody was mistreating the kid at school, but other than that, he just told Frank to do his best. He said the kid would learn more important things on the land, but for the time being, he just had to learn to withstand certain things. They got out “to where it’s real” as much as they could.

Once the kid mastered both the .22 and the carbine, the old man allowed him to start hunting. They rode horses over the ridge into land that the old man called “real”—quiet and open. In time, the kid learned to call it “predictable and knowable.” It was free of school’s artificial structures. The kid learned to love this land in a deep way he couldn’t articulate.

Before the kid was allowed to hunt, he had to learn to track. The old man explained that he had to learn how an animal thinks. Hunting is really about hunting an animal’s sign, not the animal itself. It was painful—he had to learn to walk in a stealthy half-crouch. He spent many evenings practicing how to walk without making noise, learning how to understand the direction of the wind, and learning to be patient and to blend into the landscape, keeping still for hours.

The old man taught him that tracks are a story. He spent hours learning how to interpret them—not just looking, but touching and smelling them—to learn how an animal moved. From a single coyote print hidden under the leaves, he learned to tell that a female was hurrying back to her den with food for her kits.

By the time he shot his first deer at age nine, the kid understood deer well enough to guess their movements even when signs were dim. After he dropped the first deer instantly with a clean shot, he suddenly cried, which the old man let him do. Then the old man handed him a knife and told him to cut the deer’s throat. After that, the old man marked the kid’s face with the deer’s blood, which the kid understood was “Because I’m Indian.” The old man added, “Because I’m not.” He went on to say that he couldn’t teach Frank anything about who he is—he can just show him how to be a good man. If he does that, then he figures Frank will be a good Indian, too.

He told the kid to give thanks to the buck for helping sustain their lives—just speaking honestly from what he feels. Then he walked off. The kid looked down at the buck for a while, then knelt down and rested his hand on its still-warm body. Beginning to cry again, he said “Thank you” and “I’m sorry,” promising to remember the buck always. When he stood up, he felt better.

When the kid turned 11, the gun became his. By that time, he had successfully hunted moose, elk, and black bear. The old man taught him that hunting depends on a person’s ability to enter the rhythm of the land and follow it. By this time, Hunting has become a ceremony to the kid, framed by prayer on both ends. The old man wasn’t really comfortable speaking of “God,” but he trusted that something was making sense out of the world and felt there was no harm in giving thanks for that. The kid liked that way of looking at it.