‘The warrior way’

Medicine Walk
by Richard Wagamese

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2025 
$22.00 / 9780771023521

Reviewed by Ryan Frawley

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Rumi wrote, “a revealer of mystery and that which is revealed are the same.”

In Richard Wagamese’s Medicine Walk, that mystery walks with us through the tenebrous landscape of the Nechako Valley, a landscape haunted by a loss felt but only sometimes identified by the novel’s characters.

First published in 2014, Medicine Walk has been reissued as part of McClelland & Stewart’s Kanata Classics series, and it offers readers a chance to encounter—or rediscover—one of the country’s most distinct voices.

Two men go on a journey. Sixteen-year-old Franklin Starlight is taking his father, Eldon, out into the backcountry to die. Eldon is an alcoholic in the final miserable throb of that condition, and this gives the novel a known end that makes the getting there, the journey itself, the spine of the story.

Franklin knows this world well. The quiet of the forest, marked by the sign of cougars and bears, the sparkling streams he knows how to fish, the food he can find for them both. That’s the knowledge Eldon lacks, cut off from his heritage by trauma and hardship: “White man things was what we needed to learn if we was gonna eat regular. Indian stuff just kinda got left behind on accounta we were busy getting’ by in that world.”

The world he knows less well is his father’s world. The grinding uncertainty of temporary work in logging camps and mills. The dingy bars. The hard-luck women. In Wagamese’s prose, the descriptions of these places are so skilfully rendered that the ugliness becomes beautiful. In the rhythmic, pulsing language, you can smell the empty bottles, the smoke and ashes, the unwashed bodies, the frying bologna.

Franklin himself was raised by “the old man,” who taught him all the resourcefulness he needs to survive in the backcountry, but couldn’t teach in the ancestral and cultural knowledge that ought to go with it.

Eldon, we learn, has been, at best, an intermittent feature of Franklin’s life. A man who might turn up occasionally with a few dollars for the boys’ upkeep, or might invite his son into town for a birthday, only to end up getting drunk and hiring a woman for the night. At sixteen, Franklin already knows all he needs to about that: “not havin’ to pay don’t make it free.” “I need you to bury me facing east,” Eldon tells his son. “Sitting up, in the warrior way.” Franklin’s reply? “You ain’t no warrior.”

Still, despite Frank’s justified rancour and mistrust, he helps his father make the journey. In the woods, the child is father to the man, taking care of an increasingly frail Eldon the way so many children of neglect end up doing. And in that caring, Franklin comes to learn the origins of Eldon’s trauma, and his own.

As dark as a tale like this can get, this is not a story that wallows in misery. The dark moments are deepened and made resonant by Wagamese’s prose, so that even the most harrowing moments grow luminous: “Down the one side was a tangle of lilacs, unpruned and ramshackle… There was only one bloom.… The kid wanted to pluck it and carry it somewhere where it would not feel alone, save it maybe, in a jar in the sunlight.”

Telling the story of Eldon losing his own father, Wagamese writes: “he became the long act of waiting”; “That life can strip you raw, that some holes are never filled, some gaps not chinked, some chill winds relentless in their pitch and yowl.” Or, describing Franklin’s deceased mother: “She was an inch away from beautiful.”

In the chaos of Franklin’s life, the old man acts as a stable centre, the guiding and nurturing force his biological father should have been, but was never able to be. Through Franklin’s memories, we learn about the values this upbringing has instilled in him:

“And what do you know about tools, Frank?”
“They’re only as good as the care you give them,” he’d say proudly.
“Won’t ever learn no better truth than that, Frank. See ya keep it.”

Wagamese’s writing is a fearsome tool, and the care he gives it shows in every scene, every line, every word not said, conveyed instead by the right detail. The way he puts us in every forest clearing, every smoky cabin, every filthy room.

His characters are not given to grand speeches. These are working men, drinking men, men for whom, as Eldon says, “a belly fulla beans beats a head fulla thinkin’.” But the mystery walks with them all the same.

“Even if I’m wrong, there’s worse ways to live than stopping to thank the mystery for the mystery,” as the taciturn old man says at one point to Franklin.

Along their torturous journey, Eldon and Frank stay at one point at the cabin of a First Nations woman with knowledge of the land. Becka is a healer, and her medicine becomes essential to sustain Eldon on his journey. When they eat, she puts out a plate for the spirits. 

There’s that loss again. The world that has been torn away from people like Eldon, leaving them reaching instead for weapons that kill them. The images of this book stay with you like the pictographs the men encounter on the journey, fading slowly with the weather but refusing to fully disappear.

Becka doubts that Eldon “going out the warrior way” will bring him the peace he seeks. Not being raised in the traditional ways, she claims, has divorced him from that kind of resolution. But Eldon, with all his myriad failings, has his intimations of something deeper, too—“Jimmy used to say we’re a Great Mystery. Everything. Said the things they done, those old-time Indians, was all about learnin’ to live with that mystery.”

We know, almost from the first pages, how this journey must end. But the real Medicine Walk takes us through the past, both Eldon’s and Franklin’s, to discover the mystery that lies at the heart of all of us. The same mystery Wagamese, who died in 2017, is part of.

What remains is his understanding of character, his eye for detail, his mastery of scene. “It’s all we are in the end,” Becka says. “Our stories.”

Ryan Frawley is a novelist and essayist whose short fiction has won numerous awards in BC and across Canada. He is the author of a novel, Scar, and a travel writing collection, Towers Temples Palaces: Essays from Europe. He also writes essays on medium.com and can be contacted at ryanfrawley.com. [Editor’s note: Ryan previously reviewed Marilyn Bowering, Marina Sonkina, Dennis E. Bolen, Don McLellan, Vijay Khurana, and Cynthia LeBrun in BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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