Beartooth by Callan Wink review – an expansive drama of survival

Family relationships are explored in this finely executed tale of two brothers drawn into bear poaching in rural Montana

The setting of Callan Wink’s second novel is the American wilderness. Brothers Thad and Hazen struggle to make a living logging and sawing firewood on their rugged, isolated smallholding in Montana’s Beartooth mountains, bordering Yellowstone national park. Their father had laboured at this business until illness took his savings and his life, leaving his sons with a mountain of medical bills, and a lien for unpaid property taxes that brings them to the verge of losing their family home. The brothers are reluctantly drawn into the dirty, risky work of poaching, shooting black bear out of season for their skin, skull and claws, and even more valuable gallbladder. “Hazen could find and excise this organ by feel, his face pointed up and away, his eyes closed with concentration, his hands moving around the hot insides of the animal as if he were rummaging through a junk drawer.”

Sacajawea, the brothers’ “sporadic mother”, returns after many years away, parks her “hippy van” outside their house and gets a job in the health food store in town. Thad is 27 years old& to Hazen’s 26, and has taken on the& role of responsible adult, his brother living a prolonged, chaotic adolescence. Thad is angry at their mother. She left shortly after teaching him how to read: “he remembered for a long time thinking if he had continued to stumble over words, his mother would have never gone”. Hazen is content to have her home, fishes for her and, without his brother realising, the two form a close relationship.