This book is a Jacobean bloodbath driven by a supernatural Elk seeking retribution from the Indian community. The light-touch but intimate feel of Native American life, with all its heritage or baggage, brings home the failings and longings of the human characters, as the animal spirit reeks its revenge. A haunting, unusual and brutal novel.
Denorah would never admit it no matter what, but she'd believed Miss Pease that day. Sitting on the second row, she hadn't even had to close her eyes to see the picture of the old-time lodge, inside it all manner of things for sale: beaver pelts, pipes, braids of sweetgrass, hunks of boiled buffalo meat with brown-colored ropy string them (for hanging on pegs), pounded-flat strips of pemmican (yuck), beaded bags like at the trading post for tourists, where the flaps are big to show off the beadwork, and, way back in the corner, a stack of blank ledgers. She knew she just had to put her finger on the fast-forward button of that picture, keep it pressed until that lodge grew shoulders, squared up into a building, a store, one with a school supplies aisle. Now the ledgers are spiral notebooks, just like Miss Pease was saying.
