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Plot Summary
Set on the Blackfeet reservation in Montana and spanning a cross-country road trip to Pennsylvania, the novel follows 19-year-old Nate Yellow Tail, a young Blackfeet man still recovering from a gunshot wound suffered five years earlier during the Duck Lake Massacre. Nate and his best friend Sebby Spear Woman, a Blackfeet excluded from tribal rolls due to a bureaucratic dispute, break into a lakeside A-frame cabin during winter. Inside, they find Blackfeet artifacts, a notebook, and a family photo revealing the owners are Indian, seasonal visitors Nate calls "Summer Indians." The two vandalize the cabin and leave. Pulling onto the blacktop, a gravel truck slams into Sebby's car. Nate is flung through the passenger window. Sebby is left on life support, clinically dead.
Four months later, at Blackfeet Community Hospital in Browning, Nurse Seine Plenty Wolf takes an interest in both patients. Seine, about 58, returned to the reservation after two decades of addiction and homelessness in Seattle. She wheels Nate out for cigarette breaks she calls "Crow Guts Anonymous," trading smokes for his stories. One story recurs with particular force: When Nate's father, Victor Yellow Tail, was a boy and his grandfather did not return from a hunt at dusk, Victor's grandmother climbed from the truck and piled brush into a bonfire to guide her son home. This image of fire as a signal threads through the novel.
Seine reads the notebook and discovers it belongs to Benjamin Heavy Runner, a history professor and descendant of Chief Heavy Runner. Benjamin traced the genealogy of a Heavy Runner boy taken to Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a government boarding school for Indigenous children in Pennsylvania, in 1879 at age nine. The boy died there and was buried under what became the superintendent's front yard. Seine tells Nate that Benjamin and his family died in a car wreck before completing the repatriation and argues that Nate's break-in unbalanced the world, causing Sebby's coma. She needs Nate as a fourth member, four being sacred in Blackfeet tradition, to bring the boy's remains home.
After a terrifying night in which Nate cuts his hair in mourning and experiences visions of Sebby's spirit in an inflatable dinosaur costume pulling him through darkness, he agrees. The crew assembles in the Sundancer, an early-1980s RV owned by Mooch Lomas, a Blackfeet woman who lost all three sons and her husband. The RV's rear wall memorializes her youngest son Conrad, whose dirt bike is jammed through the back with his white stuntman jumpsuit stapled around it. Their driver is Christian Two Bulls, Seine's niece's son, a tall, silent figure in a priest's collar who carries a bible bound with a rawhide X and speaks only in garbled fragments.
On the drive through North Dakota, Nate encounters the tiny deer again in a truck stop diorama. In Minnesota, the Sundancer strikes a doe. Mooch dispatches the dying animal with her ice pick, driving its point behind the jaw. During the chaos, Nate glimpses inside Christian's mouth and sees a tongue cut to a stump fitted with silver studs. Seine reveals that Mooch blames her for the death of Mooch's husband, Trace, believing Seine drew him back into drug use.
Near Brainerd, Minnesota, Mooch retrieves Conrad's ashes from the young man she believes was his boyfriend. In Minneapolis, an Ojibwe elder named Arthur Heavy Leg, whose father worked as a groundskeeper at Carlisle, tells them about a figure kitchen workers called "the Mummy" who killed Indian boys by hugging them to death and buried them in front of the superintendent's house.
At Carlisle Barracks, the crew sneaks onto the military base through a creek tunnel and uses a tractor to tip the concrete base of a flagpole erected over the burial site. Nate climbs into the exposed grave and passes up bones. Then Seine hands him her phone. Expecting Sebby, he hears Benjamin Heavy Runner, alive. Benjamin needed someone else to take the fall for the grave robbery. Seine strikes Nate in the temple with a granite clock taken from the cabin, and he falls into the open grave.
A later chapter reveals that Christian is a trans woman named Christiana whose tongue was cut out by truckers who attacked her in a women's restroom. She carries her preserved tongue in a hollowed-out cavity in her bible, fitted with magnets that snap onto the studs in her stump. When she speaks with the tongue installed, she believes her words reshape reality. Through a supernatural rearview mirror salvaged from her wrecked semi, Christiana witnessed Seine striking Nate but could not turn against family.
On the return trip, a centuries-old entity called Father X, released from the Carlisle grave, infiltrates the Sundancer at a travel plaza. It crushes a bone into powder mixed with grave dirt and plants it for Seine to find, discards Christiana's tongue from the bible, and kills a family in a neighboring RV. When Seine snorts the powder, Father X manifests through her body: She crawls on the ceiling, speaks in borrowed voices, and attacks the crew. Benjamin boards the Sundancer in Sturgis, South Dakota. As the possession escalates, Mooch drives her ice pick through Seine's head, killing her. Father X reanimates the corpse, speaking in the voice of Russell Means, an American Indian Movement activist, and offers Benjamin a deal: Trade his family for historical fame. Benjamin tentatively agrees while secretly filling a Raggedy Ann doll with the real bones.
Christiana discovers her tongue adhered to the range hood where Father X flicked it. She places it in her mouth, faces the possessed corpse, and bellows "ENOUGH!" (344). Father X shrieks and retreats. Seine's body goes slack.
The crew splinters entering Montana. They leave Seine's body by the road. Mooch follows a silver-braided cowboy on horseback who evokes Trace and does not return. Christiana walks into Crow territory. Alone in the stalled Sundancer, Nate sees his reflection in the dark window and realizes he is wearing the stuntman suit. His memory after Carlisle contains only blood, screams, and a police officer. He understands that Father X also occupied him, using him as a vessel for roadside killings while intending to ride him to the reservation's children. A call from the hospital confirms Sebby has died.
Nate throws the granite clock into the path of a gravel truck. Benjamin steps out to catch it and is struck and killed. Nate rides Conrad's dirt bike to the Little Bighorn battlefield, carrying the Heavy Runner boy's bones in a Raggedy Andy doll he secretly packed, leaving Benjamin a decoy in the Raggedy Ann. At the cavalry cemetery atop Last Stand Hill, he tries to release Father X by cutting his forearm, but only blood comes. His agonizing, overfull bladder forces the resolution: His urine turns grey, then black, then crumbly, expelling the entity as wet ash into a hole he gouges in the soil. Father X, recognizing the taste of mass death, drains down. Nate embeds the ice pick to pin it. At the bottom of the hill, the inflatable dinosaur appears one last time. Nate says goodbye, letting Sebby go.
Walking the highway for hours, Nate is picked up by Denorah Cross Guns, the other survivor of the Duck Lake Massacre and his former girlfriend. Two whitetail deer blocked her intended route, redirecting her to this road. In the car, Nate coughs up one final thing: not dirt but a bullet, the phantom pain from his shooting five years earlier. He holds it out the window and lets it go. He carries the Heavy Runner boy in the Raggedy Andy doll on his lap, planning to leave the remains at the museum in Browning. Denorah tells him he is not broken, just stupid, and that people care about him. They drive toward Browning together as dawn breaks.
Four months later, at Blackfeet Community Hospital in Browning, Nurse Seine Plenty Wolf takes an interest in both patients. Seine, about 58, returned to the reservation after two decades of addiction and homelessness in Seattle. She wheels Nate out for cigarette breaks she calls "Crow Guts Anonymous," trading smokes for his stories. One story recurs with particular force: When Nate's father, Victor Yellow Tail, was a boy and his grandfather did not return from a hunt at dusk, Victor's grandmother climbed from the truck and piled brush into a bonfire to guide her son home. This image of fire as a signal threads through the novel.
Seine reads the notebook and discovers it belongs to Benjamin Heavy Runner, a history professor and descendant of Chief Heavy Runner. Benjamin traced the genealogy of a Heavy Runner boy taken to Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a government boarding school for Indigenous children in Pennsylvania, in 1879 at age nine. The boy died there and was buried under what became the superintendent's front yard. Seine tells Nate that Benjamin and his family died in a car wreck before completing the repatriation and argues that Nate's break-in unbalanced the world, causing Sebby's coma. She needs Nate as a fourth member, four being sacred in Blackfeet tradition, to bring the boy's remains home.
After a terrifying night in which Nate cuts his hair in mourning and experiences visions of Sebby's spirit in an inflatable dinosaur costume pulling him through darkness, he agrees. The crew assembles in the Sundancer, an early-1980s RV owned by Mooch Lomas, a Blackfeet woman who lost all three sons and her husband. The RV's rear wall memorializes her youngest son Conrad, whose dirt bike is jammed through the back with his white stuntman jumpsuit stapled around it. Their driver is Christian Two Bulls, Seine's niece's son, a tall, silent figure in a priest's collar who carries a bible bound with a rawhide X and speaks only in garbled fragments.
On the drive through North Dakota, Nate encounters the tiny deer again in a truck stop diorama. In Minnesota, the Sundancer strikes a doe. Mooch dispatches the dying animal with her ice pick, driving its point behind the jaw. During the chaos, Nate glimpses inside Christian's mouth and sees a tongue cut to a stump fitted with silver studs. Seine reveals that Mooch blames her for the death of Mooch's husband, Trace, believing Seine drew him back into drug use.
Near Brainerd, Minnesota, Mooch retrieves Conrad's ashes from the young man she believes was his boyfriend. In Minneapolis, an Ojibwe elder named Arthur Heavy Leg, whose father worked as a groundskeeper at Carlisle, tells them about a figure kitchen workers called "the Mummy" who killed Indian boys by hugging them to death and buried them in front of the superintendent's house.
At Carlisle Barracks, the crew sneaks onto the military base through a creek tunnel and uses a tractor to tip the concrete base of a flagpole erected over the burial site. Nate climbs into the exposed grave and passes up bones. Then Seine hands him her phone. Expecting Sebby, he hears Benjamin Heavy Runner, alive. Benjamin needed someone else to take the fall for the grave robbery. Seine strikes Nate in the temple with a granite clock taken from the cabin, and he falls into the open grave.
A later chapter reveals that Christian is a trans woman named Christiana whose tongue was cut out by truckers who attacked her in a women's restroom. She carries her preserved tongue in a hollowed-out cavity in her bible, fitted with magnets that snap onto the studs in her stump. When she speaks with the tongue installed, she believes her words reshape reality. Through a supernatural rearview mirror salvaged from her wrecked semi, Christiana witnessed Seine striking Nate but could not turn against family.
On the return trip, a centuries-old entity called Father X, released from the Carlisle grave, infiltrates the Sundancer at a travel plaza. It crushes a bone into powder mixed with grave dirt and plants it for Seine to find, discards Christiana's tongue from the bible, and kills a family in a neighboring RV. When Seine snorts the powder, Father X manifests through her body: She crawls on the ceiling, speaks in borrowed voices, and attacks the crew. Benjamin boards the Sundancer in Sturgis, South Dakota. As the possession escalates, Mooch drives her ice pick through Seine's head, killing her. Father X reanimates the corpse, speaking in the voice of Russell Means, an American Indian Movement activist, and offers Benjamin a deal: Trade his family for historical fame. Benjamin tentatively agrees while secretly filling a Raggedy Ann doll with the real bones.
Christiana discovers her tongue adhered to the range hood where Father X flicked it. She places it in her mouth, faces the possessed corpse, and bellows "ENOUGH!" (344). Father X shrieks and retreats. Seine's body goes slack.
The crew splinters entering Montana. They leave Seine's body by the road. Mooch follows a silver-braided cowboy on horseback who evokes Trace and does not return. Christiana walks into Crow territory. Alone in the stalled Sundancer, Nate sees his reflection in the dark window and realizes he is wearing the stuntman suit. His memory after Carlisle contains only blood, screams, and a police officer. He understands that Father X also occupied him, using him as a vessel for roadside killings while intending to ride him to the reservation's children. A call from the hospital confirms Sebby has died.
Nate throws the granite clock into the path of a gravel truck. Benjamin steps out to catch it and is struck and killed. Nate rides Conrad's dirt bike to the Little Bighorn battlefield, carrying the Heavy Runner boy's bones in a Raggedy Andy doll he secretly packed, leaving Benjamin a decoy in the Raggedy Ann. At the cavalry cemetery atop Last Stand Hill, he tries to release Father X by cutting his forearm, but only blood comes. His agonizing, overfull bladder forces the resolution: His urine turns grey, then black, then crumbly, expelling the entity as wet ash into a hole he gouges in the soil. Father X, recognizing the taste of mass death, drains down. Nate embeds the ice pick to pin it. At the bottom of the hill, the inflatable dinosaur appears one last time. Nate says goodbye, letting Sebby go.
Walking the highway for hours, Nate is picked up by Denorah Cross Guns, the other survivor of the Duck Lake Massacre and his former girlfriend. Two whitetail deer blocked her intended route, redirecting her to this road. In the car, Nate coughs up one final thing: not dirt but a bullet, the phantom pain from his shooting five years earlier. He holds it out the window and lets it go. He carries the Heavy Runner boy in the Raggedy Andy doll on his lap, planning to leave the remains at the museum in Browning. Denorah tells him he is not broken, just stupid, and that people care about him. They drive toward Browning together as dawn breaks.
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