Excerpt from Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Is he dying?"

"Can't know," the old man said. "Didn't sound good but then, me, I figure he's been busy dying a long time now."

He turned in the hard yellow light and was gone. The kid stood there a moment, watching, and then he turned and walked back through to the pen and nickered at the horse. It raised its head and shivered, and the kid saddled her quickly and mounted and they walked off slowly across the field.

——

The bush started thin where the grass surrendered at the edge of the field. There were lodgepole pines and firs where the land was flatter, but when it arched up in a swell that grew to mountain there were ponderosa pines, birch, aspen, and larch. The kid rode easily, smoking and guiding the horse with his knees. They edged around blackberry thickets and stepped gingerly over stumps and stones and the sore-looking red of fallen pines. It was late fall. The dark green of fir leaned to a sullen greyness, and the sudden bursts of colour from the last clinging leaves struck him like the flare of lightning bugs in a darkened field. The horse nickered, enjoying the walk, and for a while the kid rode with his eyes closed trying to hear creature movement farther back in the tangle of bush.

He was big for his age, raw-boned and angular, and he had a serious look that seemed culled from sullenness, and he was quiet, so that some called him moody, pensive, and deep. He was none of those. Instead, he'd grown comfortable with aloneness and he bore an economy with words that was blunt, direct, more a man's talk than a kid's. So that people found his silence odd and they avoided him, the obdurate Indian look of him unnerving even for a sixteen-year-old. The old man had taught him the value of work early and he was content to labour, finding his satisfaction in farm work and his joy in horses and the untrammelled open of the high country. He'd left school as soon as he was legal. He had no mind for books and out here where he spent the bulk of his free time there was no need for elevated ideas or theories or talk and if he was taciturn he was content in it, hearing symphonies in wind across a ridge and arias in the screech of hawks and eagles, the huff of grizzlies and the pierce of a wolf call against the unblinking eye of the moon. He was Indian. The old man said it was his way and he'd always taken that for truth. His life had become horseback in solitude, lean-tos cut from spruce, fires in the night, mountain air that tasted sweet and pure as spring water, and trails too dim to see that he learned to follow high to places only cougars, marmots, and eagles knew. The old man had taught him most of what he knew but he was old and too cramped up for saddles now and the kid had come to the land alone for the better part of four years. Days, weeks sometimes. Alone. He'd never known lonely. If he put his head to it at all he couldn't work a definition for the word. It sat in him undefined and unnecessary like algebra; land and moon and water summing up the only equation that lent scope to his world, and he rode through it fleshed out and comfortable with the feel of the land around him like the refrain of an old hymn. It was what he knew. It was what he needed.

The horse stepped up and he let her have her head and she trotted through the trees toward the creek that cut a southwest swath along the belly of a ravine. She was a mountain horse. It was why he'd picked her from the other three they kept. Surefooted, dependable, not prone to spook. When they got to the creek she walked in and bent her head to drink and he sat and rolled a smoke and looked for deer sign. The sun was creeping over the lip of the mountain and it would soon be full morning in the hollow. It was a day's ride to the mill town at Parson's Gap and he figured to cut some time by going directly over the next ridge. There was a deer trail that snaked around it and he'd follow that and let the horse pick her pace. He'd ridden her there a dozen times and she knew the smell of cougar and bear so he was content to let her walk while he sat and smoked and watched the land.

Excerpted from Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese. Copyright © 2015 by Richard Wagamese. Excerpted by permission of Milkweed Editions. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.