REVIEWS: 'Medicine Walk,' by Richard Wagamese, and 'Raising Wild,' by Michael P. Branch

By Richard Wagamese. (Milkweed Editions, 246 pages, $16, now in paperback.)

This slim, beautiful, heart-wrenching novel by Canadian Ojibwe writer Richard Wagamese is the story of Franklin Starlight, a 16-year-old Indian boy who lives in the mountains of British Columbia toward the end of the last century with "the old man," a benevolent white farmer who has raised him from infancy.

Franklin is content with his quiet life on the farm and in the wilderness, but increasingly curious about where he came from. When his birth father, a wretched alcoholic who lives in a nearby mill town, writes that he is dying and wants to see the boy, Franklin reluctantly travels to his dilapidated boardinghouse. His father, who has bitterly disappointed him many times in the past, asks Franklin to take him on a trek into the nearby mountains and bury him sitting upright "in the warrior way." Franklin reluctantly agrees to do so.

During their brief, excruciating journey, his father tells him several poignant stories about his war experience and the boy's long-dead mother, which are hard to listen to but help the son accept his father, and more profoundly, the mystery of life and death. The descriptions of the father's dying hours are both graphic and poignant, and Franklin's struggle to take in what he learns is simply but beautifully drawn. Wagemese is a marvelous writer, and this is a treasure of a book.

PAMELA MILLER

By Michael P. Branch. (Roost Books, 279 pages, $26.95.)

The conceit of this book is encapsulated in the title. Author Michael Branch moves with his family to a remote ridge in the high plateau of northwestern Nevada. It's wild, and that's where he and his wife raise two daughters.

I blew hot and cold on this book. Branch is a professor of literature and environment, and can write in an entertaining style. His section on the adaptation of antelope as a species hunted by long-dead predators will intrigue any human who runs at a far slower pace. Branch explains why we're physiologically slower.

He entertains while illuminating with sections on his successful warring on the packrats who threaten to undermine his family's equilibrium by invading its house. Ditto for his utter failure to protect from small herbivores the garden he plants with two young daughters, culminating with a disaster featuring coyote urine. He conveys the terror of a freak fire that nearly devours the isolated homestead.

Unfortunately, this book is a collection of previously published essays that should have been more severely pruned. An essay on the enshrinement of the humble stick in the National Toy Hall of Fame seems out of place. So does a riff excoriating "The Sound of Music" that seems to have little to do with the family's daily existence, aside from one daughter's fascination with the musical.

Ultimately what saves the book is Branch's careful observation and response to the two daughters who are being raised in this wild environment. Perhaps in 10 years, we'll get their take on this experiment.

STEVE BRANDT