WALKS EAR WOMAN

The unlikely adventures, sexual and otherwise, of an Indian woman in the 1870s and '80s, drily told to her grandson and his girlfriend (an artless conceit) more than fifty years later. Walks Far left her Blackfoot tribe at 18 and moved around Montana, always strong, mindful of tradition, able to hold her own. She broke a wild horse, went buffalo hunting on foot, amputated a dead man's finger to get a pretty ring. Liberated, she wouldn't drop her moccasin work when one husband demanded food, subsequently knifed him when he tried to divorce her. Briefly married to Cob Piget, she wondered at the peculiarities of white ways--actually he was half-black. Eventually she returned to Blackfoot territory and settled where the railroad and telegraph had already changed the landscape. More fact than fiction in that the character is a composite of stories Stuart heard, and the regular incidence of customs, jokes, and buffalo smells is dutifully represented. An unusually spirited personality poorly served by a slow-paced, sober text.