Opening
Chapters 6–10 pivot from a single, searing flashback to a spiraling present, tracing how an illegal hunt plants the seed for a haunting that devours a life. As the past presses in, guilt hardens into paranoia, love curdles into suspicion, and a vengeful presence steps from the edges of perception into the home.
What Happens
Chapter 6: THAT SATURDAY
The chapter unfolds as a story Lewis Clarke tells Shaney Holds: ten years earlier, on the last weekend of hunting season, Lewis and his friends—Gabriel Cross Guns, Cassidy Sees Elk, and Richard Boss Ribs—decide they’re done coming up empty. Gabe, impatient and magnetic, pushes the group to break tribal law and slip into a Duck Lake area reserved for elders, pressing past Lewis’s and Ricky’s doubts until Cass’s truck—and Cass himself—carry the vote. Their trespass marks a clear rupture from tradition and respect, planting the seed of the Respect for Nature theme.
The weather closes in and the truck keeps bogging down until they crest a steep, treacherous ridge during a whiteout. Cass nearly drives them off a ledge, then stops short—revealing a vast herd of elk below, all but blind to the men because of the wind. The group opens fire in a euphoric frenzy Lewis likens to battle. Amid the recoil and “scope-eye,” they kill nine elk and christen the massacre the “Thanksgiving Classic,” a grotesque mockery of tradition and a pivotal link in the Cycle of Violence.
As they start dressing the animals, Lewis reaches a young cow elk he shot through the spine. She still struggles, staring at him with yellow eyes. He shoots her twice to end it, the last bullet into her eye. Then he discovers she’s pregnant; the calf spills from the opened body. Shaken, he buries the fetus in secret and promises the mother he will honor her by using everything. Back in the frame, Lewis tells Shaney they are, yes, caught.
Chapter 7: FRIDAY
At 2 a.m., Lewis wakes to the garage door and an empty bed. He finds his wife, Peta, crying on the driveway. In the garage, their dog, Harley, lies stomped to a pulp. Lewis senses deliberate Revenge and Retribution and suspects the Elk Head Woman, the timing too close to the hunt’s tenth anniversary.
Peta pulls away emotionally. She’s most hurt that Lewis confided the hunt to “another Indian” before her, exposing a painful rift tied to Cultural Identity and Assimilation. Trying to repair the breach, Lewis finishes the story he started with Shaney: game warden Denny Pease finds them and forces a choice—pay a crushing fine or throw the meat back down the slope and accept a lifetime ban from reservation hunting. They choose the ban. As the others toss their kills, Lewis begs to keep the young cow he painstakingly dressed. Denny allows it.
For a moment, confession brings peace. Peta comforts Lewis as he grieves the elk and his dog. After he buries Harley, he returns to find Peta has pulled up the masking-tape elk silhouette from their living room floor, as if trying to peel the haunting out of their house.
Chapter 8: SATURDAY
Lewis tries to occupy his mind by stripping his Harley-Davidson down to its bones. Two officers arrive, following up on a complaint from Silas—the man Harley bit. Suspicious of Lewis’s claim that the dog is dead, they threaten to return with a warrant or dig up the grave themselves. The pressure tightens around Lewis’s already-fraying nerves.
After they leave, he notices Shaney has returned two fantasy novels he loaned her. His mind races: why now? He wonders if the elk spirit waited ten years, letting him build something first so it can be taken away. Then he spots ants swarming the rubber boots by the door—Peta’s boots—feeding on gore caked into the treads. The pattern of the heel prints in the garage flashes in his head. Someone wearing those boots stomped Harley.
Lewis starts to dig up the grave, desperate for proof, but freezes. Either he confirms Peta killed Harley, or he proves the gore is in his head and he’s losing his grip on reality. A train thunders by; framed in the stuttering gaps between cars, he sees her: a woman with an elk’s head standing in the field, a chilling brush with The Supernatural and the Unseen.
Chapter 9: SUNDAY
Lewis’s suspicion narrows to Peta. He assembles a case: she’s a vegetarian—an “herbivore,” like an elk—she entered his life right after the hunt, and she resists having children, maybe because she already lost a calf. He feigns sleep and hears someone creeping up the stairs. When he looks, the doorway is empty. His home turns hostile.
He finds another returned book from Shaney; inside the back cover, she’s written three notes: “What makes this elk so special?”, “Why now?”, and “(ivory?).” The questions spark a new theory. He remembers the last packet of the young cow’s meat—given to an elder on “Death Row”—and the elder’s recent death. If someone finally tossed that meat, then the promise to use all of her is broken. The spirit’s return flows from failed obligation and legacy, tying the haunting to Parenthood, Legacy, and Intergenerational Trauma](/books/the-only-good-indians/parenthood-legacy-and-intergenerational-trauma).
That evening, Peta comes home. They shoot hoops in the driveway, laugh, and, in the tender afterglow, make love on the blankets in the garage. The fear loosens its grip. For a moment, life feels ordinary again. Maybe the terror is all in his head.
Chapter 10: MONDAY
Buoyed by the night with Peta, Lewis decides she can’t be the Elk Head Woman; if she were, she would have let him fall from the ladder instead of saving him. His certainty swings to Shaney. He recasts every interaction: Shaney is the elk spirit in disguise, seducing him into betraying Peta and setting her up as the killer to wreck his life from within.
The ceiling fan becomes his test. He remembers seeing Peta clearly through its flicker, proof she’s human. If he can get Shaney under those blades, the strobing slots will show her true form. He finds another book Shaney left, his dread deepening.
Lewis calls her with a pretext: he has a motorcycle part for Silas—could she pick it up on her way to work tomorrow? Shaney agrees. Peta calls to say she’s working late, leaving the house empty for Lewis’s plan. He drifts to sleep, rehearsing what he’ll do when Shaney’s face turns to an elk’s in the spinning light.
Character Development
Across these chapters, Lewis’s psyche buckles under the weight of memory and fear. The flashback exposes the act that births his guilt; the present shows that guilt metastasizing into suspicion and magical thinking. Love, pride, and secrecy narrow his world until the only way out he sees is violence.
- Lewis Clarke: Doubt and dread dominate him. The “Thanksgiving Classic” shatters his moral compass, and its aftershocks drive him toward an almost ritualistic plan to unmask a monster. He becomes an unreliable narrator—haunted, hypervigilant, and desperate to make meaning from coincidence.
- Peta: Loving but wounded, she becomes both threat and refuge through Lewis’s eyes. Her empathy in the aftermath of Harley’s death and her symbolic act of peeling up the masking-tape elk show a desire to heal, even as Lewis projects menace onto her.
- Shaney Holds: Curious, perceptive, and kind on the surface, she morphs into the epicenter of Lewis’s fear. Her questions—meant as thoughtful engagement—become, in his mind, the spoor of a supernatural antagonist.
- Gabriel Cross Guns, Cassidy Sees Elk, Richard Boss Ribs: The flashback sketches their dynamics—Gabe the reckless instigator, Cass the conformist with the truck, Ricky the reluctant accomplice—tracing a group psychology that feeds risk and complicity, touching the group’s Friendship and Betrayal.
Themes & Symbols
The chapters deepen Guilt and Atonement](/books/the-only-good-indians/guilt-and-atonement) as the engine of the plot. The illegal hunt corrupts a sacred practice; Lewis’s promise to the dead cow—“use all of her”—becomes a vow he cannot keep. Harley’s death feels like penance redirected, and confession offers only temporary relief.
Revenge and Retribution](/books/the-only-good-indians/revenge-and-retribution) drives the horror’s shape. The possible trigger—the discarded final packet of meat—gives the haunting a ritual logic: a broken promise summons a reckoning. The Supernatural and the Unseen](/books/the-only-good-indians/the-supernatural-and-the-unseen) plays through gaps and flickers—the train’s slotted view, the ceiling fan’s strobe—where the ordinary world fails and another reality bleeds in.
Symbols crystallize domestic terror:
- The rubber boots: A household object turned weapon, collapsing the boundary between home and hunter.
- The fantasy novels: Ordinary gifts that become omens—conduits for questions Lewis can’t bear to ask himself.
- The masking-tape elk outline: A DIY memorial peeled away, gesturing at the desire—and impossibility—of moving on.
Key Quotes
“Thanksgiving Classic.”
This flippant nickname reframes a slaughter as sport, capturing how the men commodify tradition and numb themselves to what they’ve done. The casual bravado foreshadows the novel’s argument that jokey bravado can mask, but not cancel, moral injury.
“another Indian”
Peta’s pain at being told second—and to a coworker rather than a partner—exposes fault lines of trust and belonging. The phrase tilts the scene toward questions of identity and intimacy: who gets the story, and what does withholding it say about assimilation and shame?
“What makes this elk so special?” / “Why now?” / “(ivory?)”
Shaney’s marginalia turns the haunting into a solvable riddle. Together, the questions push Lewis past shapeless dread toward a theory of cause and consequence—the broken promise, the ten-year mark, and the charged material value of elk ivory.
“scope-eye”
This vivid term grounds the frenzy of the hunt in bodily risk and thrill. The wound becomes a badge of recklessness and an emblem of how pain and exhilaration fuse in the moment that creates Lewis’s enduring guilt.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters supply the series’ original sin and its price. The flashback cements why a spirit would seek redress; Harley’s death proves the cost will be paid in the present tense, in homes and marriages rather than in legends. By steering suspicion from Peta to Shaney, the narrative tightens suspense while showing how guilt distorts perception, isolating Lewis from allies and shepherding him toward a catastrophic decision.
The section bridges folk memory and modern life, arguing that violations of tradition don’t vanish with time; they compound. As Lewis sets his trap beneath the ceiling fan, the story readies its tragic turn, linking broken promises to broken minds and drawing a direct line from a desecrated hillside to a haunted living room.