Callan Wink’s second novel is thrilling

Beartooth, the second novel by the Montana-based writer Callan Wink, opens with two brothers elbow-deep in the viscera of the third black bear they have just shot out of season. Hazan’s hands are “moving around the hot insides of the animal as if he were rummaging through a junk drawer.” He wants the gallbladder, which will fetch around $1,500 — far more than the brothers get for chopping firewood. The skull, claws and skin will swell their illegal bounty by another $500.

Thad and Hazan, aged 27 and 26 respectively, are in serious debt after their father’s recent death, and their roof is leaking. Logging in the Montana backcountry is hard work and poaching pays much better, even if their father would have disapproved. He had always cautioned his sons about the danger of “wearing yourself out.” The important thing was to work in the right way to protect your body and your integrity. Thad, the story’s voice of reason, recalls the message: “Sometimes the man working the hardest, the guy who constantly ‘wears himself out,’ is the laziest, unwilling to take the time on the front end to do things the right way.” But when a potential windfall is too good to ignore — gathering elk “sheds” (antlers) from Yellowstone National Park for someone to turn into chandeliers for the ski lodge crowd — even Thad is tempted, despite the possible consequences.

This is classic heist territory made new and thrilling by the specificity of Wink’s prose. At a trailhead, the headlights on the brothers’ truck do strange things to trees, making them “like skyscrapers, like celestial tent pegs pounded into the earth to hold the black tarp of the sky in place.” Wink is a fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone River by summer. It’s little wonder that Brooklyn-based literary types hungry for adventure lap up his stories, which have appeared in the New Yorker. His debut collection, Dog Run Moon, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.

But there is more than trophy-hunting going on in Beartooth, which takes its title from a mountain range in south-central Montana. This is a novel about exploitation — of the land and the poor — that sets up a reckoning with modern values. I hoped the second half would surprise me, and it did. Where Wink lets himself down is in the way he approaches female characters. The women in his debut novel August (2020), a bildungsroman, were thinly drawn and underdeveloped and the same fault dogs Beartooth.

“We’re in the woods a lot. There’s not women just leaping out from behind trees,” Thad explains when asked whether Hazan has had a girlfriend. But Wink can’t get away with that excuse.