The setting of Callan Wink’s second novel is the American wilderness. Brothers Thad and Hazen struggle to make a living logging and sawing firewood on their rugged, isolated smallholding in Montana’s Beartooth mountains, bordering Yellowstone national park. Their father had laboured at this business until illness took his savings and his life, leaving his sons with a mountain of medical bills, and a lien for unpaid property taxes that brings them to the verge of losing their family home. The brothers are reluctantly drawn into the dirty, risky work of poaching, shooting black bear out of season for their skin, skull and claws, and even more valuable gallbladder. “Hazen could find and excise this organ by feel, his face pointed up and away, his eyes closed with concentration, his hands moving around the hot insides of the animal as if he were rummaging through a junk drawer.”
Sacajawea, the brothers’ “sporadic mother”, returns after many years away, parks her “hippy van” outside their house and gets a job in the health food store in town. Thad is 27 years old to Hazen’s 26, and has taken on the role of responsible adult, his brother living a prolonged, chaotic adolescence. Thad is angry at their mother. She left shortly after teaching him how to read: “he remembered for a long time thinking if he had continued to stumble over words, his mother would have never gone”. Hazen is content to have her home, fishes for her and, without his brother realising, the two form a close relationship.
The criminal contact for their poaching is the Scot, a man with a reputation for murderous violence; he wears a kilt and plays bagpipes, but his national identity is dubious, as is his status of “father” to a girl in her late teens to whom Hazen is attracted. The Scot has a lucrative and dangerous mission for the men: to gather antler fall in Yellowstone that he can sell on to a maker of expensive chandeliers for people who want to decorate their homes with symbols of the wild. What follows is an atmospheric and superbly executed drama as the brothers journey into the interior, “a land that harboured no people, just rocks and snow and trees and the twisting braids of rivers”.
There is ample whitewater, white-knuckle action, but if this were a conventional adventure story, the ratcheting of tension might have been released predictably in climactic scenes with law enforcement or the Scot. These thriller elements are present, and skilfully realised in the narrative, but Wink proceeds far more interestingly, developing Beartooth into an expansive and convincing novel of family relationships: the difficult and loving one between Hazen and Thad, and between Thad and his mother. Sacajawea, after remaining silent for much of the narrative, gets the novel’s longest monologue, deepening the reader’s understanding of her family story, and her connection with the brothers’ father, which ultimately helps her reconnect with Thad.
The landscape is a powerful presence in the novel, a place of turbulent rivers, ominous canyons and rapidly shifting seasons in which “one day the cottonwoods were fully clad in gold, and the next they were stripped bare”. Wink’s descriptions of nature are superbly precise and vivid, never anthropomorphising the world and its non-human inhabitants.
The western trope of the strong, self-reliant individual contending with a lyrically described environment and its gnarled human inhabitants, driven by violent impulses and private moral codes, is upturned by Wink’s close, convincing and unsentimental observation of people and nature. This realism extends to his understanding of how corporations, banks and federal and local government determine the scope and possibility of ordinary American lives, the power of the individual dwarfed by society and big money, vulnerable to a single turn of bad luck, ill health or simply the travails of ageing. This makes Beartooth an emotionally rich and compelling piece of storytelling, and an almost incidentally political novel.
When Thad fixes the roof of the family house, looking out at the Absaroka mountains “stretching back all the way to the eternal winter of the Beartooth Plateau”, recalling his father in a state of some relief from the intensity of grief, and perhaps of gratitude for his love and labour, it’s a potent symbol of the power of hope and those transformative acts that might remain in the hands of the individual.
• Beartooth by Callan Wink is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
