Beartooth

In a rural Montana valley, brothers Thad, twenty-seven, and Hazen, twenty-six, scrape together a living cutting firewood and poaching wildlife illegally. As the novel opens, Thad has just shot the third black bear of the week deep in a wilderness area twenty miles from their truck. They harvest the animals' gallbladders, worth fifteen hundred dollars apiece on the black market, along with skulls, claws, and skins. The penalties if caught are severe: felonies under the Lacey Act, a federal wildlife protection law, with fines up to one hundred thousand dollars and jail time.

After an exhausting multi-day hike out, the brothers meet their buyer, the Scot, a nearly seven-foot-tall man who wears a highland kilt and shoulder-holstered pistol. Two years earlier, the Scot shot a sixteen-year-old boy four times in the back during an alleged break-in and was cleared of all charges. His young daughter accompanies him, delivering a cash envelope and playing "Amazing Grace" on bagpipes. The Scot proposes a new venture: stealing shed elk antlers from Yellowstone National Park to supply a craftsman making antler chandeliers for wealthy clients. Thad refuses. Yellowstone is federal land with too many rangers and tourists. He declares this was their last hunt.

Driving home, Thad tallies the cash against their debts: a leaking roof, worn truck tires, an empty propane tank, hospital bills. When they arrive, they discover a dusty Econoline van in the yard and a small woman: Sacajawea, their mother. Named by her father after the Shoshone woman of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Sacajawea had been a sporadic presence, leaving seasonally when the boys were young and disappearing entirely when they were teenagers. Thad tells her flatly that their father died the previous year. Her smile does not waver.

Memories of their childhood surface. Sacajawea taught the boys to read before she left. Their father, a carpenter, homeschooled them with rigorous outdoor education: shooting, skiing, fly fishing, and meticulous fly tying. Hazen rebelled by tying messy flies that caught more fish than anyone else's, learning early that his father's way was not the only way. Thad grudgingly allows Sacajawea to stay for a week. Two weeks later, her van has not moved.

Financial pressure intensifies. The brothers' firewood income barely covers expenses. As the hardest winter in decades descends, Sacajawea moves into their father's empty bedroom. The Scot visits, pressing Thad about the antlers and revealing he has already contacted Hazen about working together. Then an accountant calls: Property taxes have been delinquent for years, and an unknown entity has been paying them, creating a tax lien, a legal mechanism by which unpaid taxes can transfer ownership. If Thad cannot pay the full sum by August 15, the house will be lost. Thad does not tell Hazen.

Everything converges when the truck breaks down, leaving them without income. Thad arrives home by tow truck to find the Scot on his porch with Hazen. Defeated, Thad agrees to the antler plan. He devises a method: carry deflated rafts into the park, gather antlers, and float out at night through the river canyons, avoiding trails and the conspicuousness of horses.

The brothers hike deep into the park, crossing a geothermal meadow populated by bison and reaching the brushy valley where elk winter. Over two exhausting days, they amass nearly a hundred antler sheds plus the skulls of a dead bull elk and a young buffalo. A fight erupts when Hazen criticizes how Thad handled their father's illness; Thad pins him and reveals the truth about the tax lien. While scouting the canyon, they spot four armed Park Service officers on horseback tracking their footprints. They rush to the loaded rafts and push off. A grizzly on a nearby hillside diverts the officers' attention, and the brothers slip past.

The canyon descent is harrowing. While lining the rafts down a steep section by rope, Thad slips and suffers a compound fracture of his forearm. Blood loss and shock set in. He drifts in and out of consciousness, hallucinating a conversation with his dead father. He bargains: if he survives, he will fix the roof and stop breaking the law. Hazen navigates the remaining canyon solo.

At the park boundary bridge, officers wait with a spotlight. But Hazen has ditched his own raft, climbed into Thad's, and pushed every antler overboard. When the light hits them, it is just two brothers on an empty raft, one unconscious. The officers rush Thad to the hospital. They receive only a fine for illegal boating. Afterward, Hazen tells Thad he contemplated what he would do if Thad died: dump the body and keep floating down the Yellowstone to the Missouri to the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. He says things are different now. He wants his own truck.

Weeks later, several local men are indicted in a poaching ring. The Scot's name is absent; Thad deduces he informed on others for reduced charges. The Scot reportedly moves to Columbus, Ohio. What follows is a long decline for Thad. His arm heals improperly, requiring a second surgery in which the bone is re-broken and a titanium plate installed. Pain pills become their own problem. Through the winter he barely leaves the house. Roles reverse: Hazen runs the chainsaw while Thad loads. Sacajawea, now working at a local health food store, pays the full tax lien from her savings, resolving the crisis. Hazen takes a job caring for sled dogs in exchange for a 1985 Subaru, his first vehicle, and begins building an independent life.

When Thad's doctor refuses another prescription refill, withdrawal hits hard. Sacajawea tends to him with bone broth and sage smoke. One night she tells her story: at nineteen, after her parents died in a collision with a logging truck, she spent a month searching the wilderness for her father's horse, the one animal that survived the crash. She nearly starved before stumbling into a logging camp, where the man who found her became the brothers' father.

Then the Scot is found dead at his property, his body partially buried and fed upon by animals. An autopsy reveals a .22 round, not a bear, caused the death. Witnesses saw Hazen with the Scot's daughter the day before. Thad leads police to a remote shepherd's cabin, a secret place Sacajawea had shown only Hazen in childhood. The girl, Naomi, is there alone, left with food and a fire. She has no identification and is not listed as the Scot's dependent. Her true identity remains unknown.

A full manhunt unfolds, but Thad searches the backcountry for weeks and finds nothing. He receives a corporate offer for the property, burns the letter, and refuses to sell in case Hazen returns. When Sacajawea brings Naomi to live with them, Thad objects, but Sacajawea overrides him with a sharpness that breaks something open; he cries for the first time in years. Naomi tells Thad she burned her bagpipes and that Hazen told her he loved her. When Sacajawea and Naomi leave on a road trip to New Orleans, the endpoint of the river route Hazen once described, Thad checks the gear shed and discovers the raft is gone, confirming his belief that Hazen took to the river.

In the fall, Thad returns to the canyon and finds the remains of a second raft Hazen had stashed. A rope trails up the wall to a ledge where, beneath a tarp, a massive fossilized skull protrudes from volcanic ash: a Bison antiquus, an extinct Pleistocene species over ten thousand years old that Hazen found and hid during their expedition. Thad sells it for an enormous sum to a wealthy collector in the Shields Valley.

With the money, Thad orders shingles and a lift. He straps on his father's bison-hide tool belt, which fits at the same worn buckle hole. At lunch on the ridgeline, he recalls his father's words: that raising the boys was the best thing he ever did, and that family adds resonance to the passage of time. The first step, Thad decides, is a roof that does not leak. After that, he might put on a clean shirt, head to the Blue Goose, the local bar, and ask a woman to dance.