Opening
Tuesday detonates the story. A paranoid spiral turns Lewis Clarke into a killer, the Elk Head Woman is reborn in flesh, and the narrative pivots to the reservation—where a vengeful force narrows in on the men who started it all and the daughter who may have to finish it.
What Happens
Chapter 11: TUESDAY
Lewis’s paranoia crests when he finds his dog Harley’s grave torn open. He imagines a “long-headed” woman at the site and vomits at the thought. Preparing for a visit from his coworker Shaney Holds, he convinces himself she is the Elk Head Woman in disguise. He unrolls the old elk hide from the hunt, thinking some hides “are born with stories on them,” and discovers the knife he thought he’d lost tucked inside—another “sign” he takes as destiny.
He rigs his living room with a trap: a motorcycle headlight bracket to mark where she should stand and a ladder at the fan, believing that looking through spinning blades will reveal her monster shape. Shaney arrives as he perches on the ladder, pretending to fix a light. She sidesteps his cues, even flicks the fan off, sharpening his suspicion that she knows. His final “proof” lands when she fails to recognize the hero of a fantasy series he has lent her; he decides she never read the books, only used them to get close.
Lewis lures Shaney into the garage to see his bike. He asks her to lean over the seat to plug a “vacuum hose,” then starts the engine with the bike left in gear. The rear wheel spins, the chrome spokes catch her hair, and the torque snaps her neck and scalps her. As Shaney looks at him and collapses, Lewis—calm in the wreckage of his fear—hits the garage door button and seals the scene.
Chapter 12: STILL TUESDAY
Lewis scrubs himself in the shower and rehearses the justification: Shaney wasn’t human; this was a necessary kill. He plots disposal of her body and truck, convinced he can reset his life. Doubt creeps in. He replays the flimsy evidence—her basketball awkwardness, the book mix-up—and tries to conjure one last, undeniable sign.
He decides the proof is in the teeth. The note the Elk Head Woman left in the novel—“(ivory)”—becomes his talisman. He returns to the garage, breaks Shaney’s jaw with a screwdriver, pries out two teeth, and washes them clean. Both are plain human enamel. Horror starts to break through his delusion. He considers checking for a C-section scar—anything to hold the story together—when the front door opens. Peta is home early.
Chapter 13: STILL TUESDAY (Continued)
Peta finds Lewis in a towel, splattered with blood, the ladder open and the knife still jammed in the ceiling. She assumes a home-repair accident and scrambles up the ladder to help. On her way down, she slips. Reaching back to catch herself, she accidentally yanks the knife free; a former pole vaulter, she pushes away from the ladder to avoid entanglement—but the momentum sends her backward, and the back of her head cracks against the sharp brick edge of the hearth.
Lewis freezes as Peta dies on the floor. His mind snaps toward a new fiction: that Peta has been part of the Elk’s long plot and this is still the revenge machine grinding on. To test the lie, he repeats the atrocity—he breaks Peta’s jaw and lines her teeth on the hearth. No ivory. Two innocent women are dead.
A spotlight flickers on and illuminates Peta’s stomach. Something seems to move beneath her shirt. In his broken logic, the image fuses with the Mammoth Rider stories and the promise of fatherhood. In a grotesque inversion of Parenthood, Legacy, and Intergenerational Trauma, he uses the elk knife—the one from the hunt, from Shaney, from the ceiling—to cut open Peta’s abdomen. A tiny, brown elk calf’s leg stabs into the air.
Chapter 14: TWO DAYS LATER
Lewis flees toward the reservation in a snowstorm, cradling the calf he’s wrapped in the decade-old hide and named Po’noka. He calls her his daughter and believes if he brings her “home,” she will breathe. Four armed men corner him. As they fire, Lewis feels the calf kick in his arms—a final hallucination of absolution—before he dies.
A newspaper clipping follows: “THREE DEAD, ONE INJURED IN MANHUNT.” It confirms Lewis’s death and ties him to the murders of his wife and coworker. The lone survivor says that after they loaded Lewis and the calf into the truck, a young Indian girl appeared, “rushed forward over the toolbox,” and attacked them inside the cab. Three men end up dead, and the public is warned to report a hitchhiking Indian teenager—proof the Cycle of Violence keeps rolling.
Chapter 15: FRIDAY, THE GIRL, and DEATH ROW
FRIDAY
The point of view shifts to the reborn Elk Head Woman, wearing the body of a teenage girl. She embodies Revenge and Retribution, narrating how she congeals from herd memory and is “birthed” from Peta after Lewis grooms himself into a perfect doorway. She ages rapidly—twelve to fourteen in hours. A family gives her a ride; the son, who smells like “chemicals,” senses something off. As they drive, she recalls a train massacre—men using a locomotive to funnel and slaughter the herd—transforming her mission from personal vengeance into generational justice. In town, she steals clothes and selects her next targets: the two remaining hunters, Gabriel Cross Guns and Cassidy Sees Elk.
THE GIRL
We meet Denorah Cross Guns, Gabe’s daughter, in eighth-grade geography as the class discusses the news about Lewis. She carries a dim memory of those Thanksgiving hunters gathering at her house a decade ago, but her present is basketball, grades, and a path out via a scholarship. When she looks out the classroom window, she sees a girl in her own workout clothes, standing in the shadows—the first glimpse of a supernatural double.
DEATH ROW
Gabe, at his father’s place on “Death Row,” prepares a sweat for Lewis and steals an old World War I Mauser rifle—an heirloom of violence he can’t quite explain. Restless, he drives by Denorah’s school and spots a teenage girl in gym shorts, bare-legged in the cold. He slows, thinking it might be his daughter, but her stare locks his bones. He floors it, shaken by the entity that has now set its sights on him.
Character Development
The book discards one protagonist and enthrones another, while the monster stops hiding. These chapters complete Lewis’s collapse and redraw the board around Denorah and Gabe on the reservation.
- Lewis Clarke: Falls from jittery guilt to calculated murder, then to delusional desecration. His final flight with the “calf” is a last, pathetic grab at meaning.
- Elk Head Woman: Moves from uncanny presence to embodied hunter, driven by memory, ecology, and collective justice rather than personal spite.
- Denorah Cross Guns: Arrives as a grounded, ambitious point guard whose discipline and promise position her against an older, blood-drenched story.
- Gabriel Cross Guns: A father weighted by estrangement and history; stealing the Mauser signals both fear and an inherited readiness for violence.
Themes & Symbols
The supernatural crosses the threshold into the mundane. What Lewis tries to “prove” with fans, ladders, and teeth only proves his madness; the monster does not need validation to exist. When the Elk Head Woman takes a body, the horror stops being a question and becomes a pursuit. The chapters show how unresolved Guilt and Atonement curdle into violence, and how that violence births more violence—first figuratively, then literally.
The narrative also widens from individual sin to communal memory: the train massacre reframes vengeance as ecological and historical duty, not mere payback. Basketball becomes Denorah’s counter-symbol—discipline, teamwork, and a future aimed beyond the rez—while the stolen Mauser embodies intergenerational harm primed to repeat. Together they set the stage for a collision between a modern path forward and an ancient score still being settled.
Key Quotes
“The long-headed shape of a woman.”
Lewis’s paranoia gives the Elk Head Woman a form before she arrives in flesh. The image externalizes his fear and primes him to mistake Shaney for a monster, turning dread into deadly action.
“Some hides are born with stories on them.”
The elk hide becomes a prophecy Lewis reads incorrectly. It foreshadows the entity’s literal rebirth while exposing how Lewis mythologizes his guilt to excuse violence.
“(ivory)”
This parenthetical becomes Lewis’s compass—and betrays him. His gruesome “test” for ivory teeth dramatizes how far he will go to justify a lie, and how empty that proof is when found wanting.
“THREE DEAD, ONE INJURED IN MANHUNT.”
The clipped, official headline flattens horror into a statistic, even as it confirms a new, active threat. It marks the shift from private madness to public danger.
“Rushed forward over the toolbox.”
The survivor’s detail turns the girl from apparition into force, vaulting the story from rumor into a physical, lethal presence on the reservation’s roads and in its trucks.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters end one story and begin another. Lewis’s downfall climaxes the novel’s first movement, proving that the most immediate monster is human guilt, and the cost is two innocent lives. With the Elk Head Woman reborn, the threat stops haunting a single man and starts hunting a community. The action shifts back to the reservation and toward Denorah, aligning a next-generation future against an inherited debt. The result is a tightened fuse: a living antagonist, two marked men, and a girl whose game may become the ground where history demands its due.