Wolf was N’pooh-le, a tribe commonly known as Sanpoil. He had been raised on the Colville Indian Reservation in Okanagan County, Washington. His father had gotten into his beaten-up pick-up truck and disappeared when Wolf was eight. Most of his memories before then were of his father beating him and his mother. He remembered the days spent by himself, trying to fill up the vacuum of boredom with both his mother and father passed out cold in whatever part of the house their chronic drunkenness had left them. He never knew where his father went. And his mother never quit drinking.

In most ways, Wolf took up the place in his mother’s life where his father was supposed to be until he was 16 and she died of liver disease. His childhood had birthed a dream within him of reuniting the tribes. He saw the loss of their way of life as the reason for all their suffering. For a couple of years after his mother died, he dedicated himself to this vision, thinking that everyone would be quick to commit to the old way of life of their people if only he led them back into it. But he was wrong. They had given up. They had given in to the fissures that existed between each other and between themselves and that old way of life. So he left, bitter. He lived his life up and down the Pacific coast, looking for some tonic for the anger he felt toward himself, toward the white man and also toward his own people.

It was not uncommon to see Native Americans on the streets. Most of them had thrown their traditions away in favor of alcohol and chew. Equally, they seemed less ruined by life out on the streets. Perhaps because, having been stripped of their culture, they had lost everything already. Or perhaps it was because living nomadically, relying on whatever bounty could be hunted or found, was in their blood already. Their lives did not seem as devastated by lack of possessions. And the sun did not seem to wear them down the same way. The tragedy was in their extraction from the land. It was in the annihilation of their culture. It was in the loss of their tribe. Wolf did not find it as easy as others to accept what had happened to his people. The tragedy of it was heavy upon his back. He felt eaten alive by it. Wolf would vacillate between a modern embodiment of a medicine man and dissolving into suicidal crisis. When Aria watched him, she felt like maybe he helped people so that one day they might just turn around and rescue him from this torment that he seemed to carry with him everywhere he went.