This cast moves between the Blackfeet Reservation and borderland towns, where a long-ago illegal elk hunt haunts four friends into adulthood. A vengeful spirit—part mother, part elk—hunts them with patient precision, fracturing families and friendships. The novel ultimately passes the torch to a new generation, asking whether empathy can break cycles of violence the older men could not escape.
Main Characters
Lewis Clarke
Lewis anchors the novel’s first act as a man who has tried to outrun his past—and his culture—by building a quiet, assimilated life off-reservation with his wife, Peta. Guilt and paranoia worm into that life, leaving him susceptible to The Supernatural and the Unseen as Elk Head Woman exploits his worst fears. His loneliness away from Ricky, Gabe, and Cass leaves him unmoored, and a fixation on his Crow coworker Shaney leads to two horrific misidentifications and murders. In a final, deranged attempt to reverse the desecration of a pregnant elk, he reenacts the violence on his own household before being killed by police—completing the first turn of the spirit’s Revenge and Retribution. See Chapter 2 and Chapter 3.
Richard "Ricky" Boss Ribs
Ricky opens the book with a brutal, isolating death that sets the tone for what follows. Restless after his brother’s overdose, he drifts from the reservation to North Dakota, where an encounter staged by Elk Head Woman leads to a fatal beating by white locals—a death neatly written off as a bar fight. His thoughts circle his old crew, especially Gabe’s bravado, underscoring how the “Thanksgiving Classic” binds the men even as distance and time separate them. His end marks the spirit’s first kill and a warning for the others; see the Full Book Summary.
Gabriel "Gabe" Cross Guns
Gabe embodies swaggering charisma and a stubborn loyalty to a romanticized, warrior ethos—qualities that made him the hunt’s instigator and the group’s centrifugal force. He’s a poacher, a joker, and a loving father who calls his daughter Denorah his “Finals Girl,” clinging to her excellence as proof of his own. During the sweat, he confronts the ghosts of his choices, but it’s Elk Head Woman’s manipulations—pitting him against his best friend Cass—that bring him to tragedy. In grief and error, he kills Cass and is then killed himself, a man undone by pride and love as much as by the spirit’s cunning. His arc unfolds across Chapter 4 and Chapter 5.
Cassidy "Cass" Sees Elk
Cass is the group’s pragmatist, a man cautiously building a quieter future with his girlfriend, Jo, while still tethered to Gabe and the past they share. He navigates the pull between tradition and stability with a thoughtful steadiness that neither Lewis nor Gabe can manage. When Elk Head Woman turns accidents into weapons—Jo’s death, a case of mistaken identity that leaves a teenager gravely wounded—Cass is swept into a fatal confrontation with Gabe. His death seals the collapse of the old friendship and clears the path for the spirit’s final hunt.
Elk Head Woman
Elk Head Woman is the novel’s relentless antagonist: a shape-shifting spirit formed from the slaughter of a pregnant elk and the desecration of her body. Patient and exacting, she targets not only the four hunters but the bonds and futures that give their lives meaning, turning friendship, love, and fatherhood into sites of punishment. Her campaign literalizes the novel’s Cycle of Violence and tests whether human empathy can interrupt it. After the last scrap of her butchered flesh is discarded, she moves from haunting to wholesale destruction—until a final act of compassion offers an unexpected exit from vengeance. Her perspective appears in Chapter 4.
Denorah Cross Guns
Denorah steps forward in the novel’s final act as the “final girl,” a gifted basketball player whose focus and resilience become survival tools. She loves her father, Gabe, without illusions about his flaws, and she represents a different inheritance: one that blends competence, heart, and community ties rather than bravado. Pursued as the “calf” of a killer, she recognizes in Elk Head Woman the pain of a mother and refuses to answer violence with violence, embodying Parenthood, Legacy, and Intergenerational Trauma. By protecting the spirit at the last moment, she breaks the pattern that doomed the men, allowing the elk to birth her calf and depart in peace. See Chapter 6 and Chapter 7.
Supporting Characters
Peta
Peta is Lewis’s white wife, a former college athlete whose steadiness and love embody the assimilated life he’s tried to craft off-reservation and the pull of Cultural Identity and Assimilation. She tries to anchor him through his unraveling, but Lewis’s paranoia recasts her as a threat, and a tragic fall turns into murder under the spirit’s influence. Her loss marks the point where guilt and haunting become irreversible.
Shaney Holds
Shaney is Lewis’s Crow coworker—wry, self-possessed, and an object of his spiraling suspicions. When he convinces himself she is the spirit in human form, he kills her in his garage, a crime that collapses his world and confirms Elk Head Woman’s power to weaponize fear. Shaney’s death is the moment Lewis crosses from haunted to monstrous.
Denny Pease
Denny is the game warden who catches the four men and offers a lifetime hunting ban in lieu of harsh legal penalties—an attempt to restore balance that cannot undo the deeper trespass. A decade later, he is married to Denorah’s mother, Trina, and becomes Denorah’s stepfather, arriving at the final confrontation as the human face of law and protection. Denorah stops him from killing the spirit, choosing empathy over enforcement.
Minor Characters
- Jo: Cass’s Crow girlfriend and his vision of a calmer future; her accidental death—engineered by Elk Head Woman—triggers the final rupture between Cass and Gabe.
- Victor Yellow Tail: Tribal police officer and Nathan’s father; he arranges the sweat to steady his son and is killed by the spirit while investigating the carnage at Cass’s camp.
- Nathan Yellow Tail: A troubled teen from the sweat who is mistaken for Denorah and shot by Cass; he rides for help despite his wound, alerting Denny to Denorah’s peril.
- Harley: Lewis’s malamute mix; his brutal, seemingly hoof-stomped death becomes Lewis’s first undeniable proof that something supernatural is hunting him.
Character Relationships & Dynamics
The four hunters—Lewis, Ricky, Gabe, and Cass—form the story’s original bond, a knot tied by the illegal elk slaughter and tightened by time, distance, and secrecy. Each man manifests a different response to guilt: assimilation and self-denial for Lewis, flight for Ricky, bravado and deflection for Gabe, and cautious balance for Cass. Elk Head Woman cracks that bond by turning their strengths into vulnerabilities—pride into recklessness, loyalty into targets, and love into leverage.
Romantic partnerships—Peta with Lewis, Jo with Cass—represent imagined safe harbors, the promise of normalcy beyond the hunt. The spirit strikes those harbors first, forcing the men to watch their hopes destroyed and making private love into public punishment. These losses intensify the rift between Gabe and Cass, transforming old camaraderie into fatal misunderstanding.
Fathers and daughters are the story’s emotional axis. Gabe’s pride in Denorah is his most human trait, the counterweight to his recklessness. Elk Head Woman seeks to answer her own stolen motherhood by hunting Denorah as a calf, but Denorah refuses the script, seeing the spirit’s grief and choosing mercy. In that choice—supported, but not dictated, by Denny’s late arrival—the novel pivots from retaliation to release, allowing a younger generation to imagine a future the older one could not.