Winter Counts is a Bit Obvious, but Holds Fascinations

 

WINTER COUNTS (2021)

By David Heska Wanbli Weiden

Ecco, 336 pages.

★★★ ½ 

 

 

 

The skinny on Winter Counts is that it's a fascinating look at Lakota (Sioux) culture, but an easy-to-crack mystery.

 

The title references a calendar reckoning game common on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, southwest of the more famous/infamous Pine Ridge Reservation. Both, sadly, lie in parts of the state deemed less desirable by whites living in places such as Rapid City, sometimes dubbed “Racist City” by Native Americans.

 

At the center of the story is Virgil Wounded Horse, an “enforcer” on the rez. That's a thing. Reservations are, in theory, autonomous nations onto which outside law enforcement seldom venture unless a serious or federal offense takes place, and even then, they only respond about half the time. Tribal police are notoriously ineffective and reservation governments are too often dens of corruption. If a score needs to be settled, enforcers like Virgil are the ones who take care of it. Virgil does the dirty work that others won't touch and that’s okay in the minds of most, as he’s only half Lakota, an iyeska (roughly, a “half-breed).

 

Virgil is also the guardian of his nephew Nathan. Virgil doesn't have many parenting skills, but what can he do? His sister was killed in a car crash and Nathan has no one else. Nathan seems like a good kid– until he overdoses on heroin. He survives, but when a lot of oxycodone is found in his locker, Nathan is headed off to jail and the Feds are ready to adjudicate him as an adult and send him to a penitentiary, though he's just 14 years old. Nathan swears the pills were not his, but he's caught in the middle of a campaign to get serious drugs off the reservation at a time in which Ben Short Bear hopes to become Council president and won’t pull strings for Nathan.

 

Ben is, however, willing to bargain. He thinks a drug peddler named Rick Crow is smuggling heroin into Rosebud and wants Virgil to nail him. In the interim, Virgil has to try to get Nathan out of jail, which isn’t easy for a guy who drives a Pinto and has no valuable property for collateral. A former girlfriend, Marie, who is Ben's daughter, recommends a good lawyer, Charley Leader, but that's a money issue as well. Small wonder that Virgil is interested in the $5,000 that Ben offers to put Crow out of business.

 

There are side stories involving an indigenous foods guru; disputes between Marie and her supervisor Delilah Kills Water; battles over commodity beef allocations; and deep suspicion that tribal money is being siphoned by graft. Virgil also discovers it’s one thing to think about going after Rick Crow; it's quite another to venture to Denver and into neighborhoods controlled by drug syndicates. It looks as if Nathan's only shot is to cooperate with the Feds, wear a wire, and make a heroin buy on reservation land.

 

Winter Counts could use more red herrings. I sorted out the baddies before halfway through the book and read on to see how it played out. With minor twists, it was just as I had imagined. Again, the primary fascination with the novel is learning more about Lakota life – yuwipi vision quests, contested battles over the Badlands, the long historical memory of indigenous peoples, spirit names, and (sadly) the appalling conditions on the reservation. For those on the rez, life is often a series of compromises and the hope that the right ones have been made.

 

I doubt that the author intended an anthropology lesson, but it is a major takeaway from the novel. Many mystery writers unnecessarily complicate their plots.; this one over simplifies by too starkly sketching good and bad. Nonetheless, I recommend it. You will like Virgil, Nathan, Marie, and their extended network of family and friends. The thing about tough places like Rosebud is that you learn who greases your fry bread.

 

Rob Weir