73 pages • 2 hours read
Richard WagameseMedicine Walk
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
Frank wakes and thinks of the contrast between the old man (Bunky) who raised him and the biological father (Eldon) who abandoned him. Frank pities Eldon living with a whore in a derelict flat in a seedy town. Bunky, in teaching Frank how to farm and hunt, “had given him the land from the time he could remember and showed him how to approach it, honour it” (27). Frank had imbibed Bunky’s “teachings and learned to listen and mimic well” (27). Eldon, on the other hand, provided Frank with occasional gifts of money that he sent to Bunky.
Chapter 6 Summary
When Frank was growing up, Bunky taught him how to use a rifle to hunt and about the ethics of hunting: One should aim to kill so that the animal does not suffer, and one should thank the animal for its sacrifice. Bunky is not religious, but he thinks everything in nature is holy and deserves respect: “There’s worse ways to live,” Bunky says, “than stopping to thank the mystery for the mystery” (38). As Frank gets older, he studies how to track animals, reading and interpreting the signs they leave behind. It’s like learning “to walk again” (37) because Frank must learn how to step carefully in rough terrain without the animals noticing him. Frank learns how “to slip between trees like a shadow” (33). This lifestyle separates him from the kids at school, and he becomes a loner.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
Frank learns about his Indigenous culture from a white man, which suggests that the attitudes and values embodied in both Bunky and Frank are universal and not limited to any one tribe or people. Frank studies how to enter nature as a part of nature himself: he becomes an “animal” who tracks fellow animals. This requires knowledge that differs from what is taught in schools or in books; it is a way of living and acting, of being, as Bunky puts it, “a good person. A good man” (36). Bunky teaches Frank to express gratitude to the animals for providing him with sustenance. Frank begins to experience a spiritual immersion in nature as he realizes that nature is a being of its own, something that merits respect and admiration. Frank prays before going out to hunt and after he returns: “Framed like that, a hunt became a ceremony” (38).
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