Summary

The story begins with the speaker explaining that his uncle Hector disappeared forty-one years ago. He had told his family he was hitchhiking to Spokane and left the Coeur d'Alene reservation, but nobody ever saw or heard from him again. The speaker says that he was only seven years old when his uncle left and that he had been his favorite relative. He describes Hector as a "randomly employed blue-collar reservation alcoholic," but thinks that he would have eventually gotten sober and become an influential tribal elder (1). "Indian men live wild-horse lives," he says, "running beautiful and dangerous, until some outside force – some metaphorical cowboy – breaks them" (1). The speaker thinks that he and his uncle would probably look like now, in that they would both be fat "like overfed chickens" (1).

The speaker explains that he has lost a number of family members – two uncles...