In this second novel from author and fly-fishing guide Callan Wink, twenty-something brothers Thad and Hazen are hanging on, barely, in their rustic log house on the banks of the Yellowstone River, just outside the national park. They’re saddled with debt from their deceased father’s medical bills, the roof leaks, they share an ancient pickup truck, and earning money chopping firewood for locals isn’t cutting it. Outdoorsmen from birth, they’ve turned to poaching bears and selling the gall bladders and other body parts to a sketchy, menacing character called the Scot. The Scot wants, and offers, a poaching run in the park. Bigger payday, bigger crime. Hazen wants it, Thad doesn’t, and their tension drives a fascinating study of sibling relationships and hardscrabble life at the edge of “America’s best idea.”
Thad had just shot a black bear out of season. It was a small yearling sow, and the rancid stink of it settled like a fog over the clearing where it died. The smell of a bear, Thad thought, had the flavor of nightmare about it. Putrefying flesh, fresh shit, all held together with something cloying and sweet, like smashed huckleberries just starting to ferment. This was the third one they’d killed this week, and Thad figured they could start heading home. Three heads attached to three pelts, twelve paws, three gallbladders, on top of all their other gear—it was going to be a backbreaking hump over the mountain.
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Be comfortable, he’d say. People who are comfortable in their own skin can never get lost. He’d stand and wave his arms around as if gathering the peaks and ponderosas and the great leaning chunks of sheared-off granite boulders to him. All of this can be your home if you’re comfortable in here. He’d make his arms move in slowly so it was just his hand encompassing a little circle in the middle of his chest. Right here is where you control your world. So, in that way, he saw to their religious education.
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“‘I was out walking and I found something.’ In Spanish, I believe it’s caminar es atesorar. It means ‘to walk is to gather treasure.’ It’s a perfect phrase. It contains the history of humankind. What else is there, really?”
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