Medicine Walk: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

The kid wakes up in the early morning and goes outside to smoke, seeing coyotes in the moonlight. He watches them scampering in the fog and stopping to stare at him. As the coyotes start nipping and leaping playfully again, the kid can’t help smiling. After they disappear into the trees, the kid sits on the fence and watches the town and thinks of his father. He thinks that letting his father die in such a bleak setting seems terrible.

He knows that if he went home, nothing would change for him. He would farm, something he knows and finds comforting. The old man taught him to farm, and his father merely drifted in and out of his life there, drunk. He always left some money in a jam jar.

When the kid was seven, he learned that his name was Starlight. He remembers repeating both their names to himself and finding the syllables meaningless. His father never stopped feeling like a stranger, and the old man seldom spoke of him. The old man focused on “[giving] him the land,” and the kid had learned well. He started venturing out by himself when he was nine, coming home after four days with fish and deer. The old man had been proud. When the kid thinks of “father,” he thinks of the old man.