Medicine Walk

Eldon summons Frank to Parson’s Gap, a nearby mill town where Eldon works odd jobs. Bunky cautions Frank against the trip due to Eldon’s unreliability. Although Eldon abandoned Frank as a baby, Frank believes he has a duty to Eldon, his biological father. Frank starts his journey on horseback. Although Frank is only 16 years old, he is a capable hunter and trapper who understands how to survive alone in the wild. Frank is a silent and solitary boy who, after learning more from nature than from books, has dropped out of school: “He was Indian. The old man said it was his way and he’d always taken that for truth” (5). Frank camps for the night, smokes a homemade cigarette, and wonders why his father summoned him.

Frank travels from the quiet comfort of Bunky’s farmland to the polluted mill town: “The horse snorted and shook her head at the sulphur smell” (6). When Frank needs to control the frightened horse “when she skittered at the cars or the screeching metallic sounds of town life” (7), he realizes that horses are rarely seen on the road. The town kids swear at Frank and call him names, but Frank ignores them and attempts to find a connection with nature: “The autumn chill was in the air and he could smell the frost coming and the rain that would follow” (8).