Opening
These chapters tighten the noose. As a makeshift sweat takes shape on Cassidy’s remote lot, guilt, superstition, and unresolved history converge: a daughter sharpens her focus, a father tempts fate, and the hunter they wronged watches from the dark, ready to reverse the roles.
What Happens
Chapter 16: Sees Elk
The narrative shifts to Cassidy Sees Elk—“Cashy” now—rigging a sweat lodge beside his camper from tent poles, rebar, and patched blankets. He’s proud of how far he’s come since Jo moved in: steady work, fewer benders, fewer scrapes with the law. He jokes about uranium in the water when he thinks of kids—how among his crew (him, Gabriel Cross Guns, Lewis Clarke, and the late Richard Boss Ribs), only Gabe has a child, the gifted Denorah Cross Guns. His jury-rigged lodge mirrors his pragmatic approach to tradition and his uneasy footing within Cultural Identity and Assimilation.
Before dusk, he exchanges a quick, tender moment with Jo and thinks of the engagement ring hidden in a thermos inside the junked truck he uses as a stash. Then the slope below the camper fills with movement: a herd of eighty to a hundred elk gathers and goes still, every head turned to stare up at him. The sight calls his birth name back to him and sinks his gut—an omen that the The Supernatural and the Unseen presses closer, and that his violation of Respect for Nature is circling back.
Chapter 17: Four the Old Way
Gabe drinks at Ricky Boss Ribs’s grave, pouring beer for Ricky and for Lewis while he wrestles with Guilt and Atonement. He thinks of Denorah’s brilliance and the restraining order that keeps him in the parking lot rather than the bleachers. News that Lewis died with an elk calf nearby knots everything to their illegal hunt ten years ago; he remembers Lewis insisting on taking the pregnant doe’s head to tan—an eerie foreshadowing in hindsight.
Leaving the cemetery, Gabe sees a single large elk track pressed into the road and takes it as a good sign for the sweat. As he drives, a woman in a basketball jersey—Elk Head Woman—lifts herself into the bed of his truck. She thinks, cool and precise: “It’s where hunters carry the animals they shoot, isn’t it? It’s where they put you, ten years ago.” The Cycle of Violence turns; the hunted becomes the hunter.
Chapter 18: Old Indian Tricks
Denorah drills free throws at home until the motion becomes ritual. To steel herself for the road crowd, she recites the slurs she expects—“The only good Indian is a dead Indian”—then vows to become “the worst Indian ever,” meaning the most unstoppable, successful version of herself. Her discipline channels Revenge and Retribution into excellence.
Gabe pulls up, violating the order again. Their exchange is practiced: his sloppy pride and charm, her cool distance. He says he’s going to sweat for her team’s luck. When a “black hank of... hair” lifts from the truck bed, she assumes he’s been poaching. They strike a bet—forty dollars if she sinks ten straight. Her certainty cuts against his instability and underscores Parenthood, Legacy, and Intergenerational Trauma.
Chapter 19: The Sun Came Down
Gabe arrives at Cassidy’s camp; the dogs crowd his truck and one nips him, and he strikes it. They settle by the fire. Gabe dodges talk of the cash he owes and offers his father’s old Mauser as payment instead. They sift through memories of Lewis and their younger days, taking turns at nostalgia and bitterness.
A stray comment about Cassidy hiding things in the junked truck needles Cassidy’s paranoia about his stash—money and the ring—while their banter reveals the cracks in their friendship, and the blame each carries. Headlights slice through the trees: the others for the sweat are here. The air feels thin with the weight of Friendship and Betrayal.
Chapter 20: Shirts and Skins
The story slips fully into Elk Head Woman’s gaze. She watches Tribal cop Victor Yellow Tail arrive with his son, Nathan. She listens to the men joke and fumble through preparations, clocking how casually they treat a ceremony meant for reverence. From the shadows, she measures their strengths, their blind spots, and their carelessness.
Gabe, Cassidy, and Nathan strip down and crawl into the low dark of the lodge. From her vantage, the sweat is not a sanctum but a snare. The door seals. Heat and darkness fold around them while she waits, patient and certain, for the reckoning they earned ten years ago.
Character Development
These chapters draw the survivors together while clarifying who they’ve become: one man trying to live straighter, one spiraling into bravado and regret, a daughter forging a new path, and a patient predator closing in.
- Cassidy Sees Elk: Strives for stability with Jo, stashes a ring, and cobbles a modern sweat that underscores his distance from tradition. The silent herd staring him down reawakens his name and dread.
- Gabriel Cross Guns: Haunted and self-destructive, he toggles between pride in Denorah and denial about his past. He seeks purification via the sweat yet misreads signs, barters a rifle instead of repaying debt, and drives straight toward danger.
- Denorah Cross Guns: Disciplined and forward-looking, she repurposes hostility into fuel, setting herself apart from her father’s generation and its cycles.
- Elk Head Woman: Revealed as calculating, embodied, and relentless. Her presence reframes the haunting as a deliberate hunt.
Themes & Symbols
The sweat lodge, a site of purification, becomes a trap—an inversion that sharpens the gap between ritual and understanding. Cassidy’s patchwork lodge and the men’s crude preparation reveal a hollow attempt at repair; form without reverence turns sacred space into a cage. Meanwhile, Denorah’s basketball routine functions as a counter-ritual: disciplined, future-facing, and genuinely transformative.
The elk manifest nature’s memory and judgment, their silent gaze stitching past to present. The truck bed becomes a symbol of reversal—once the place where men heaved their kills, now the hunter’s perch. Across these chapters, ritual either binds people to responsibility or exposes their failure to shoulder it; identity is either bricolage without roots or a sharpened tool for survival.
- Sweat Lodge: From sanctuary to snare; the cost of performing tradition without respect.
- Basketball: Denorah’s ritual of mastery; a modern path to strength and identity.
- The Elk: Omen, witness, and agent of memory; nature looking back.
- Truck Bed: Role reversal made literal; the hunted claims the hunter’s stage.
Key Quotes
“It’s where hunters carry the animals they shoot, isn’t it? It’s where they put you, ten years ago.”
- Elk Head Woman’s inner voice confirms her identity and motive. By occupying the truck bed, she turns a symbol of conquest into a site of reckoning and signals the full reversal of hunter and prey.
“The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”
- Denorah repeats the slur to inoculate herself against it. The line exposes the hostile environment she competes within and sets up her strategy: confront the language directly, then outperform it.
“the worst Indian ever”
- Denorah’s vow flips the insult. She commits to becoming the most successful, unstoppable version of herself—an act of reclamation that converts stigma into ambition.
“black hank of... hair”
- Denorah’s offhand observation plants a seed of dread the reader understands before she does. The fragment points to the hidden presence in Gabe’s truck and heightens the dramatic irony.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
This stretch escalates the horror from eerie omen to imminent attack. It gathers the remaining men in a closed, ritual space while shifting into the predator’s perspective, confirming that the threat is embodied, intelligent, and methodical. The sweat becomes a stage for the past to return—an attempted cleansing that seals their fate.
Juxtaposing the men’s careless sweat with Denorah’s disciplined practice draws a stark generational contrast. Empty performance of tradition offers no protection; real resilience comes from transforming history into purpose. As Elk Head Woman settles in to wait, the story aligns its moral ledger: disrespect for nature and culture cycles back as violence, while the path forward—Denorah’s path—demands rigor, intention, and a future-facing identity.