In 'Beartooth,' brothers embark on an illicit journey into Yellowstone National Park
10:28 Share

Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. It's easy to be romanced by the American West. You know, I'm an East Coast city person born and raised in New York. And so I've always thought about the West as this mythical, beautiful place with nothing but the sky and your dreams.

But of course, reality is a lot grittier than that. Callan Wink's novel, Beartooth, is committed to showing the real West, the true West, if you will. The book follows these two brothers who are broke living near Yellowstone National Park. And Callan tells here and knows Peter O'Dowd that that part of America has recently been perceived as a playground for rich people. But there are real people there who can be driven to desperate ends. That's coming up.

This message comes from Thuma. Create your oasis with Thuma, a modern design company that specializes in furniture and home goods. By stripping away everything but the essential, Thuma makes elevated beds with premium materials and intentional details. With clean lines, subtle curves, and minimalist style, the Thuma bed collection is available in four signature finishes to match any design aesthetic.

To get $100 towards your first bed purchase, go to thuma.co slash NPR. This message comes from NPR sponsor Shopify. Start selling with Shopify today. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or IPO ready, Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run, and grow your business without the struggle. Go to shopify.com slash NPR.

The new novel, Beartooth, is about two brothers living on the edge of Yellowstone National Park. They're also living on the edge of desperation. Their father has died. The medical bills have piled up. The roof on the family cabin is leaking.

To keep their home, the brothers embark on a journey into the park that will put their lives and their future at even greater risk. The New York Times calls Beartooth impressive and says fans of the hit TV show Yellowstone should skip the screen and check out this book instead. Author Callan Wink joins me now. Callan, welcome and congratulations.

Thank you for having me, Peter. Great to be here. All right. So tell me about the inspiration for this story. It sounds like you may have heard a yarn at a bar one night, and then that led you to write this book. Yeah, I think so. I probably spend more time in bars than I should, and you hear a lot of interesting stories. I heard that some guys, maybe in the 80s, something like that,

packed a raft into the back country of Yellowstone Park and gathered elk antlers and floated out under the cover of darkness, highly illegal. So I always thought it was a great premise for a novel. Although you don't know if it's true or not.

I really have no idea. I never looked it up. I just wanted it to be sort of this mythic tale. Yeah, but I didn't realize how valuable something like that could be. Elk antlers. Yeah, there's a market for them. I mean, many people gather them legally outside of the park and then sell them. People use them for all sorts of things, large kind of ornate chandeliers and things like that.

I'm glad you mentioned that because these two brothers, Thad and Hazen, they're kind of desperate. They're living on the edge. Their father has died of cancer. He's left behind these huge medical bills. There's unpaid taxes on the house. These are not the fantastically wealthy newcomers to Montana with the elk chandeliers that we often hear so much about. Yes, that is something I was pretty interested in writing this book. I mean, I've been in Montana for over 20 years and it's

Seen it change quite a bit. It sometimes feels like it's becoming the playground for the rich. But most of the people I know are living a little closer to the edge, and the characters of my story are kind of like one unforeseen bill away from catastrophe. And yet they live in this spectacular place right on the edge of Yellowstone National Park. Talk about that, the park as a place, and what your relationship with it is like.

Yeah, I mean, Yellowstone Park is, of course, just kind of a otherworldly place of beauty and also harsh. I do live fairly close to it and I've spent a lot of time there over the years. In particular, the Absaroka Beartooth Wilderness, where much of this book is set, is the largest wilderness area above 10,000 feet in the lower 48 states. So it's just a vast stretch of country.

And it's easy to get lost back there and kind of live, as the brothers in this novel do, sort of on the margins of what would be considered more normal civilization. Right. You're a fly fishing guide as well as being an author in this part of the country on the Yellowstone River. How has that experience influenced what you write about?

I have a deep love for the Yellowstone River. It's a really huge dynamic waterway, the longest undammed river in the lower 48 states. So it's an amazing resource, and I'm lucky enough to spend most of my days in the summer on it.

That being said, there's this section of the river in Yellowstone Park where a lot of the action of the novel takes place that is off limits to floating. And as someone who likes boating and running rivers, it's always just had this kind of place in my mind of forbidden area that I would love to go down in a boat someday. But since I can't do it in real life, I explored it in my novel. Oh, that's so interesting. In fact, I think I'd love it if you could read a passage from your book. And I think the one

I'm interested in is when Thad and Hazen are standing near the banks of the river in that area that you're describing that they're not supposed to be in. Could you read us a passage? Oh, sure. There was something about nature that was twice told. The human vascular system resembled the drainages of mountains, resembled the branching prongs of a lightning strike, resembled the xylem and phloem of trees from roots all the way to the lacework veins of the leaves.

It was something Thad had thought about, but had never been able to pin down. In the fall, the red and gold and copper of the streamside alders and cottonwoods and willows were reflected in the spawning colors of the brown trout. It was almost enough to instill some sort of faith in a creator, some sort of guiding hand, an artist with a limited palette. Things were so remarkably similar when it seemed like they should be more different. When stripped of hide and hair, a bare skeleton looked eerily like a human form.

the color of certain sunsets were the colors of fire devouring wood the sparks sent up to the sky perfect replicas of stars maybe it meant something maybe it didn't the human mind was a register of patterns whether or not those patterns existed outside the brain itself was another matter altogether

Wow. I've heard that comparison to that a human skeleton and a bear skeleton look oddly similar when all the flesh has been stripped away. And I know when I've heard that in the past, I'm thinking like, why in the world would that be? Or how could that be? I think you're really revealing some of the mysteries of the natural world. Yeah. I mean, in my college years, I took a lot of science and biology classes and

I think that passage in particular stems from that, just these sort of constant similarities. You know, it seems like there's just always echoes. Everything echoes everything else in the natural world. And Thad, in this case, is sort of wondering, like, you know, could that mean some sort of guiding hand at work? Let's talk about the relationship between these two brothers, Thad and Hazen. Why did you choose to focus—

these siblings. Is that something that you have a personal experience with that you wanted to explore? No, kind of the opposite. In fact, I have two sisters. I think I've always wanted a brother. Some of my friends growing up had brothers that were close in age and I spent a lot of time with them and playing basketball and things like that in the summer and it always seemed like within 10 minutes there was a fistfight going on between the brothers. They

They were always there for each other in a lot of ways. I did. I wanted that and I never had it. Yeah. Yeah.

What kind of trouble does that cause them when they have that narrative about themselves, about their family dynamics? Yeah, I think a lot of the dynamic between the brothers, Thad is the older brother and feels this responsibility to not only get them out of their financial situation, but keep an eye on his younger brother, Hazen, who is

sort of prone to making rash decisions. I never wanted him to be a character who is easily, like you could diagnose with like having something, whatever that means. But he's a character who probably doesn't excel in some of the constraints of modern society. And so Thad feels very much like he needs to take care of Hazen in certain ways. And over the course of the book,

Both of the characters sort of break out of the relationship that they've had for so long and go their own way a little bit. Yeah, and over the course of the book, they make poor decisions that I'm sure you, the author, you know, a naturalist would frown upon in real life. They're hunting bears out of season. They cut their gallbladders for money. They're stealing these natural artifacts from the most beautiful natural park on Earth.

But you don't seem to judge them for that. Is that? And I think that's important. Do you think that's fair? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, their father has recently died, but he is sort of present in the book, especially in Thad's inner kind of life in that he is this sort of moral compass that is no longer there. You know, their father would have severely disapproved of this activity that they're getting up to. But it comes back to that sense of desperation and despair.

the way that can work on your sense of ethics, which you know to be acceptable. It becomes blurred when your house is falling down around you and you can't afford to put gas in your car. Well, and before we let you go, I don't want to give away the ending of this book, but certainly these two characters end up in different places than where they started. What are you trying to leave readers with by the end of this book? On one hand, I wanted this to be an entertaining, kind of quick,

quick read. It's not a very long novel, but if nothing else, sort of maybe a more realistic portrait of Montana as I know it that may differ somewhat from recent portrayals of Montana and in Hollywood. Yeah. Callan Wink is the author of Beartooth. It comes out today. Callan, congratulations and thank you for making some time to talk to us about it. Oh, it was great. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

This message comes from Thrive Market. The food industry is a multi-billion dollar industry, but not everything on the shelf is made with your health in mind.

At Thrive Market, they go beyond the standards, curating the highest quality products for you and your family while focusing on organic first and restricting more than 1,000 harmful ingredients. All shipped to your door. Shop at a grocery store that actually cares for your health at thrivemarket.com slash podcast for 30% off your first order plus a $60 free gift.

This message comes from Capital One. Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank for details. Capital One N.A., member FDIC.

This message comes from Capella University. With Capella's FlexPath learning format, you can set your own deadlines and learn on your schedule. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu.