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.His ego and hisbody bruised, he meets up with Marlene and spends the night with her in a hotelroom.The narrator is unsatisfied with their sexual encounter, striking her in theface when she seeks intimacy from him, and leaves. I had had enough of Havre, he says as part 2 draws to a close, enough oftown, of walking home, hung over, beaten up, or both.I had had enough of thepeople, the bartenders, the bars, the cars, the hotels, but mostly I had had enoughof myself.I wanted to lose myself. In part 3, he hitches a ride home to the reservation.The ranch is empty, noteven his grandmother is there to greet him.He presumes, correctly, that she hasdied.He has little reaction to her death, helping Lame Bull to dig her grave ontheir property, a common Indian custom.His grandmother s death conjures memories of Mose, his older brother whodied several years earlier.He finally recalls the events leading up to Mose s deathin vivid detail, which Welch describes in a rich style, in sharp contrast to the terse,simple prose that dominates the rest of the narrative.At age twelve, the narratorwas rounding up stray cows with Mose, two years his senior, when his horse, Bird,ran across the highway to catch a stray.Mose followed and was struck by a car andkilled.The narrator has felt at least partly responsible for his brother s death.Byrevisiting the painful event, he is unburdened of the guilt and feels he can moveon with his life.In part 4, the protagonist visits old Yellow Calf again to tell him about thegrandmother s death.The old man relates her story, which the narrator heard onlypart of from the old woman herself.At age twenty, she married an older chief.During an especially trying winter, the Chief died.The rest of the tribe felt thegrandmother was responsible for his death and subsequently shunned her.Onlyone warrior came to her assistance and became her hunter and protector.Thatman, the narrator now realizes, was Yellow Calf.The old man is Teresa s fatherand the narrator s grandfather.The narrator now knows something of his personalstory and is grateful for it.Knowing at last where he came from gives him thecourage to face the future.This renewed spirit is dramatically displayed when the narrator finds a cowtrapped in mud.He ties a rope to the helpless animal and struggles to pull it outastride Bird.The strain kills the old horse, but the cow is freed and reunited withits calf.The narrator has gone from being a passive drifter, wandering aimlesslythrough his existence, to a person who takes an active role in the struggle of life.In the novel s brief epilogue, the narrator joins his mother and Lame Bull athis grandmother s burial service.As Lame Bull delivers a simple eulogy beside hergrave, the narrator resolves to forge ahead on his life s path.His winter has givenway to the expectation and hope of spring. 44 NATIVE AMERICAN WRITERSMajor ThemesWinter in the Blood is a deceptively simple story.Welch has skillfully used a sparse,episodic style to describe the narrator s wintry world of desolation and despair.Only when he describes the stories of his grandmother and Yellow Calf and thedeath of Mose does the author s style become rich and textured, exposing thedepth of feeling the young man is experiencing at these moments.The novel, albeit brief in length, is rich in thematic resonance.Central themesinclude the dislocation and alienation of contemporary Native Americans, re-demption from guilt, disintegration of the family unit, and the difficulty of sus-taining relationships.Breakdown of the FamilyThe disintegration of the narrator s life is closely tied to the lack of connection hefeels with his family.His father and brother, both long dead, are shadowy figuresin his recollections.His mother is cold and unresponsive, and his new stepfather iswrapped up in his own self-importance.Agnes, who has spent three weeks livingin their house, is mistaken for the narrator s wife by his mother and grandmother,a misidentification that he does not bother to correct.Welch equates the narrator slack of family unity with all that is wrong in his life.In a larger sense, the break-down of the family is the breakdown of the generations, of the traditional lifewaysof the Blackfeet nation that produced him. He [the narrator] is ineffective in re-lationships with people and at odds with his environment, observes Kathleen M.Sands in an essay on the novel, not because he is deliberately rebellious, or evenimmaturely selfish, but because he has lost the story of who he is, where he hascome from. The airplane man is a symbol of the limits of modern man s alienation.Heis a solitary figure, fleeing his family, without friends and without direction.Theoutrageous stories he tells the narrator may be true or false, but either way his lifeis a dead end, one that the narrator will hopefully learn from and avoid.The Redemptive Power of StoriesWhile the airplane man s stories are chaotic and incomplete, other narrative voiceslead the protagonist back to discovering and embracing his identity.Yellow Calf stale of tribal life in an earlier age and the role his grandmother played in it givesthe young man the solidity of a definable background and thus adds reason andpurpose to his life.Together the old man and his grandson laugh as they recognizethe significance of the moment: And so we shared this secret in the presence ofghosts, in wind that called for the muttering tepees, the blowing snow, the whiteair of the horses nostrils.The cottonwood behind us, their dead white branchesangling to the threatening clouds, sheltered these ghosts as they had sheltered thecamp that winter. James Welch 45Later, when the narrator meets neighbors who offer their sympathies at hisgrandmother s death, he creates his own story
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