Medicine Walk: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

The kid consents to his dad’s plan, but before they go, he has to know “what the deal is.” His father is half-dressed and smoking, sitting in bed beside Deirdre. He finally admits that his liver is failing from drinking. He can feel that he’s dying. The kid looks at Deidre, and she says she’s okay with the plan, too—everybody has a right to die the way they choose. The kid doesn’t know what to say. Finally he leaves, slamming the door, and he goes out for fresh air. Wishing the old man were here to give him advice, he sits on the stairs until his heart stops pounding. Then he reluctantly goes back into the room.

The man lists some things he’ll need for the trip and Deirdre gives the kid a handful of cash to cover it. His father asks for a few bottles for the trip, too—it won’t make much difference anymore. As the kid is getting ready to leave for the errands, he notices his father and Dierdre watching him. His father says that Deirdre thinks the kid resembles him. As the kid turns to go, he sees Deirdre cradling the man’s head. A single tear falls down her face.

Later, the kid leads his horse along the commercial part of town. His father struggles to adjust to the horse’s rhythm, especially when traffic noise unsettles her. People stare at them. His father ignores it, but the kid dislikes attention. He feels ashamed, as if everybody knows his father won’t return alive. As they reach the mountain trail, both the horse and the men begin to relax. His father’s boozy, rotten smell bothers the kid, though, and he sweats with the effort of leading the horse up the ridge.

As they rest at the top, his father looks down at the milltown and remarks that he lived there a long time. The kid reorganizes their pack, and his father observes that they have no food and no gun. The kid says he’ll get what they need and leaves it at that. His father keeps watching the town, his eyes red, as the kid turns the horse. They plunge deeper into the woods, and the sounds of the town fall silent.

By evening, they’ve covered five or six miles, following a stream. His father rides slumped, and the kid occasionally slaps his shin to make sure he’s still alive. When they reach a place where the stream widens into a pool, the kid helps his father down. While his father sits on a rock and smokes, the kid gets a blazing fire going within minutes. He sets a fishing line in the pool and soon catches a fat trout, which he cleans and sticks over the fire, catching a second one soon after. He and his father eat the fish right off the sticks.

Afterward, the kid goes into the woods and gathers saplings and spruce boughs. He builds a lean-to and then piles logs behind the fire so that the heat will go towards the lean-to. He helps his father into the lean-to, settling him on the spruce boughs. The man is weak and groans, asking for his bottle

As the kid sits smoking beside him, his father asks how he learned to do all this. The kid explains that whatever the old man didn’t teach him, he taught himself. His father says he never spent much time out in the woods. He always had to work—scavenging wood and selling it to people, mostly Indians and half-Indians, north of here in the Peace Country. It was difficult to get hired anywhere else.

His father’s parents were both “half-breeds.” Not Métis, like the French Indians—Ojibway, mixed with Scot. Neither whites nor Indians ever wanted his family around. So his family, and others like theirs, followed the work they could find, camping or squatting, never settling in a permanent home.

When they reached the Peace Country, survival was difficult. Some remembered how to survive on the land, but they didn’t have horses, and there wasn’t time to hunt big game. So they mostly forgot what they knew—just waited around the mills for work to open up, although they rarely got any. The kid puts more logs on the fire and adds more hooks to the fishing line. Then he stands on a boulder looking at the shape of the mountain against the sky.

Finally, the kid asks his father why nobody in the family just tried living on the land. His father says he spent all his time learning how to survive in a town. The kid is unsympathetic, though. He asks his father if he thinks he’s the only one who’s ever had it rough—after all, he, too, has been dealt a rough hand. His father doesn’t argue. He just says he had to learn “white man things” if he wanted to live.

If that’s the case, the kid wonders, then what are they doing out here? His father is silent for a while, then finally says, “I owe.” He adds, “I’m tired, Frank.” The kid is startled—he’s never heard his father use his name before. His father sits up awkwardly and reaches out to squeeze the kid’s arm. Then he wraps himself in his coat and quickly falls asleep. The kid watches him and tries to see beyond what he already knows, but he just sees an aged, gaunt man. Finally, he goes back into the woods, looks at the stars, and gathers some wood, thinking of his father’s childhood scavenging to survive.