The narrator returns home to the family ranch on foot, hungover and bruised from a fight he cannot fully remember.

Teresa tells the narrator that Agnes left three days earlier and stole his gun and electric razor.

Teresa and Lame Bull return after three days away and announce they have married in Malta.

Ferdinand Horn visits the ranch and reports seeing Agnes in Malta with a white man.

In Malta, the narrator helps Agnes's brother Dougie rob a white man in a bar bathroom.

Dougie cheats the narrator out of the stolen money and refuses to reveal Agnes's whereabouts.

The narrator meets the airplane man at the Pomp Room bar, who tells a story about abandoning his wife at the airport.

The narrator saddles old Bird and rides to visit blind Yellow Calf, who says the deer are upset because the world is cockeyed.

The narrator lies to Malvina at a Harlem bar about having a job in Havre, securing a ride from her.

The airplane man tells the narrator he is fleeing the FBI and offers him a car to keep in exchange for driving him to Canada.

The narrator finds Agnes in Gable's bar in Havre and is sucker-punched by her brother Dougie as he tries to leave.

The narrator watches the airplane man led out of a hotel in handcuffs by police and government agents.

The narrator returns home on foot to find the old woman's rocking chair still and empty.

The narrator rides Bird across the ranch and, overwhelmed by empathy for the horse, breaks down crying over Mose's death.

Bird falls in the mud while pulling the spinster cow free, and the family buries the old woman the following day.

The narrator returns to his Montana reservation ranch to find his girlfriend Agnes has stolen his belongings and disappeared. After his mother Teresa unexpectedly marries a family friend named Lame Bull, a visitor's report of Agnes's whereabouts sends the narrator searching across several towns. His journey leads him to Malta, where Agnes's brother Dougie cheats him, and then to Havre, where he becomes entangled in the mysterious airplane man's flight from the law. He finds Agnes only to be beaten and left without answers, then watches the airplane man arrested before walking home empty-handed. Back at the ranch, he must face the old woman's death, his long-suppressed grief for his dead brother Mose, and a harrowing attempt to rescue a cow from sucking mud. The novel closes with the old woman's burial and the narrator still emotionally adrift, already planning how to win Agnes back.

The core story of loss, searching, and return.

Lame Bull meets the narrator fishing at the river and insists the narrator was too young to remember a flood twelve years earlier.

Teresa tells the narrator the story of Amos the duck and reveals she was the one who killed him for Christmas dinner.

Lame Bull punches Raymond Long Knife in the face after a dispute over wages and Long Knife's refusal to keep working.

The narrator finds a letter from the priest addressed to Teresa in the family's post office box and tears it up.

The narrator wakes up in Malvina's home, lifts her bedsheet, and gropes her naked body while she is still asleep.

Malvina wakes and orders the narrator to stop; he considers assaulting her but decides against it because her young son is nearby.

An old man at a Havre restaurant drops dead face-first into his oatmeal while the narrator waits to speak with the airplane man.

The airplane man wins multiple boxes of chocolate-covered cherries by repeatedly punching a punchboard at the Legion Club bar.

The narrator gives Marlene five dollars to buy drinks after she finds him bleeding on the sidewalk, but she disappears.

After a violent encounter in a hotel room, the narrator leaves Marlene all his remaining cash and walks out.

The narrator and Lame Bull dig the old woman's grave, noting how much harder it was to dig First Raise's in frozen winter ground.

Ferdinand Horn and his wife stop by the ranch to offer condolences and ask whether the narrator found Agnes in Havre.

The narrator discovers the spinster cow trapped in sucking mud near the corral and wants at first to leave her to drown.

The narrator wades into the mud and manages to loop a rope around the cow's head to help Bird pull her free.

After Bird falls in the mud, the narrator lies in the driving rain, finding it pleasant to be distant.

These events fill in the texture of the narrator's everyday life on the ranch and during his travels. At home, the narrator watches Lame Bull establish himself as an enthusiastic if volatile proprietor, punching a lazy farmhand and sharing family stories with Teresa over drink. The narrator's journey to find Agnes brings a series of peculiar secondary encounters — a sleeping woman named Malvina, a man who dies in a restaurant, and the airplane man's obsessive punchboard gambling. After the violence and confusion of Havre, the narrator drifts home, where the practical reality of the old woman's death means arranging a burial and digging a grave beside those of Mose and First Raise. The pool closes with the narrator physically and emotionally spent beside the mud pit, lying in the rain after Bird's fall.

The supporting scenes that fill in the novel's world.

The narrator reflects that he feels nothing for his family or Agnes — only a distance that has grown inside him for years.

Teresa tells the narrator that First Raise froze to death walking home from a bar and was found pointing toward home.

Teresa and the narrator dispute their memories of who found First Raise's frozen body, each insisting the other is mistaken.

Teresa warns the narrator that there is not enough for him at home and he should start looking for a life elsewhere.

The narrator nods when Ferdinand Horn's wife asks if he plans to go after Agnes, committing himself to the search.

The old woman tells the narrator about her teenage marriage to Standing Bear and the brutal starvation winter that killed many tribespeople.

The barmaid whispers to the narrator that the airplane man thinks he knows her because of her dead sister's birthmark on her neck.

The narrator spots Agnes on a Havre street from a distance and feels unexpected warmth he has not experienced in years.

The narrator throws the airplane man's car keys into the gutter and chooses to find Agnes instead of helping him escape.

The narrator walks away from Havre on foot, abandoning the car in town and wanting to erase himself in the open land.

The narrator fully relives the night Mose died — the bolting spinster cow, the car striking Mose's horse, and his own knee injury.

Yellow Calf reveals the tribe blamed the old woman for their misfortunes and ostracized her after her husband Standing Bear was killed.

The narrator concludes that Yellow Calf was the hunter who secretly fed the starving old woman and is likely Teresa's biological father.

The narrator rallies from exhaustion, climbs back onto Bird, and makes a final effort to pull the spinster cow from the mud.

Lame Bull delivers a clumsy, trivial eulogy at the old woman's burial while Teresa falls weeping to her knees beside the grave.

This pool tracks the narrator's inner turning points — the moments of revelation and decision that slowly chip away at his emotional armor. The novel opens with his confession of total apathy, which is complicated by disputed memories of his father's death and by the old woman's stories about her traumatic past. A key decision arrives in Harlem, when the narrator quietly commits to pursuing Agnes, a choice that shapes the rest of his journey. The narrator's emotional arc accelerates when he spots Agnes in Havre, throws away the car keys, and chooses the past over a possible future, only to be beaten and come away with nothing. By the novel's end, Yellow Calf's revelations about the old woman expose a hidden layer of family history, and a desperate effort to rescue a hated cow finally draws out the narrator's long-suppressed grief for his brother Mose.