Two brothers are attempting to navigate a river foaming through the back country of Yellowstone National Park. The river is icy, the raft handles like a rodeo steed, and this is no bourgeois leisure weekend in a curated wilderness: these two are desperate for money, and have been commissioned to hunt elk antlers for their patron, who will sell them at a hefty profit.
But one brother falls on the rocks, and seems set to drown – and as he struggles in the water, his thoughts run as rapidly as the river as he contemplates mortality: “Thad had a general idea, and it came down to particles. No matter on earth could ever be truly destroyed or created, only changed ... Where consciousness came from he wasn’t sure except that it in the end it was nothing more than a byproduct of the unique arrangement of molecules.”
This dual consciousness – of the sublime and exalted nature of the universe, and of its utter dispassion – flows through Beartooth, Callan Wink’s spare and remarkable new novel.
If Wink’s previous title, August, was a coming-of-age story – the arrival in Montana of a Michigan teenager, and his reorientation in the world until he finds a place there in Big Sky country – then Beartooth can be seen as something of a corrective to possible complacency, and a reminder that finding one’s place and building a home are only the beginning of another and equally challenging story.
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Thad and his brother Hazen have recently lost their father; their mother has been long absent; they owe back taxes; and their house in the woods – deploying a recurrent image in the book – is in urgent need of a new roof. All of which makes them fair game for the “Scot” to dispatch them to Yellowstone, to engage in illegal activity.
[ Dog Run Moon by Callan Wink review: a gracefully written, moving debutOpens in new window ]
A journey, then – but Beartooth has a much larger quest in its sights, to do with redemption and its possibilities: the extent to which these brothers can repair their shattered lives, and to reconstruct their damaged home and their sense of a possible better.
False comforts appear, only to disappear: and it is to the credit of this remarkable novel that hope for the future is offered – though only for some, and in realistic measure.
