Friendship between Robert Grainier and Kootenai Bob

Robert Grainier and Kootenai Bob’s friendship is a durable bond between two working men who know one another through the stores, roads, camps, and seasonal labor of the northern interior. Their relationship is not built on grand declarations but on repeated exchanges of practical knowledge and companionship. Kootenai Bob helps Grainier interpret the uncanny border between domestic dogs and wild wolves, while Grainier remains one of the people who encounters Bob during the final, catastrophic episode of his life.

A Long Working Acquaintance

Kootenai Bob is a steady Kootenai man who refuses liquor and frequently works at jobs in town, much as Grainier does. The two men have known each other for many years, and their familiarity is established through ordinary local contact rather than through a single formative meeting. Their shared world is made up of stores, railway towns, roads, animals, and short-term labor, so friendship appears as continuity within a scattered working life.

The relationship also crosses a history of racial violence that Grainier carries uneasily. As a child in Fry, Grainier witnessed the mass deportation of more than a hundred Chinese families; decades later, he nearly helped kill a Chinese railroad laborer. The memory of that earlier violence remains tied to his fear that the laborer’s curse caused the fire that killed Gladys Grainier and Kate Grainier. Kootenai Bob’s presence belongs to a different kind of encounter: he is not an abstract representative of a people but a familiar neighbor whose judgment Grainier seeks and whose death he later witnesses in memory.

The Wolf-Dog Conversation

After the fire, Grainier lives in a clearing with a red-haired female dog, a nanny goat, hens, and a rooster. The dog later bears four pups that look strikingly wolfish. Grainier brings this development to Kootenai Bob at the Meadow Creek store, treating him as someone qualified to explain what the appearance of the litter might mean. Bob answers through Kootenai knowledge: only one pair in a wolf den produces pups, the chief male being the only he-wolf permitted to mate and the chosen she-wolf the only female in heat.

Bob therefore rejects the simple conclusion that the pups are wolves, but he leaves room for a more unsettling possibility. If the wandering dog encountered the wolf pack at precisely the moment she came into heat, the chief wolf might have mounted her because of the novelty. Bob suggests that Grainier may possess a dog-of-wolf and may have begun his own pack. The exchange gives the friendship an interpretive dimension. Grainier observes the animal, but Bob supplies a cultural and ecological framework in which the animal’s mixed nature becomes legible.

The surviving male pup does not answer the wolves that howl from the distant peaks, including packs as far away as the Selkirks on the British Columbia side. Grainier tries to teach it its supposed nature by crouching beside it and howling. The pup remains silent, yet Grainier continues howling whenever the wolves call at dusk. The act eventually becomes useful to Grainier even without producing the response he wants: after joining the distant chorus, he feels that something heavy has been flushed from his heart and becomes warm and buoyant. Bob’s observation gives this behavior its governing proverb. When Grainier reports that he has begun howling, Bob replies, “There’s not a wolf alive that can’t tame a man.” In the friendship, local lore becomes a way of describing Grainier’s own gradual surrender to the valley and its animals.

Bob as a Carrier of Local Legend

Kootenai Bob also helps transmit stories about the wolf-girl. When Peterson’s dog disappears for thirteen days and returns nearly wild, Bob visits Peterson, studies the dog closely, and warns that it has been with the wolves. He claims to see the wolf-girl’s image in the black of the animal’s eyes and advises Peterson to shoot it before the creature calls the wolf-girl into his home. Bob’s account includes the threat that she might speak in Peterson’s own voice to people he has wronged, turning his past conduct into a public accusation.

This episode shows the friendship operating indirectly. Grainier hears Bob’s warnings through Peterson’s retelling, but the story confirms the authority Bob holds in the region’s network of animal lore. Bob is a source of knowledge about wolf behavior, mixed animals, and the wolf-girl’s appearances, yet his knowledge is not presented as detached science. It circulates through stores, roads, and conversations, carrying fear, memory, and an understanding of boundaries between human and animal life.

Death Beneath the Trains

In 1930 Grainier sees Kootenai Bob on the day Bob dies. By then the United States is more than a decade into Prohibition, while liquor remains available across the Canadian border. Ranch hands from British Columbia persuade Bob to drink shandy by claiming that lemonade will neutralize the beer. Bob believes them, but the lemonade disappears from the eight-quart canning pan, leaving him to lap at beer throughout the afternoon. He repeatedly urinates on himself and loses the power of speech.

After dark, Bob wanders about a mile up the tracks and lies unconscious across the ties. A succession of four or five trains runs over him. He is not discovered until the following afternoon, when a gathering multitude of crows prompts someone to investigate. His remains are scattered for a quarter mile along the right-of-way. Over the next several days, members of his people search the bare ground beside the rails for pieces of flesh, bone, and cloth that the crows have missed, placing what they recover in brightly painted leather pouches for burial and ceremony.

The death is both brutally accidental and socially communal. Bob’s final intoxication violates the identity Grainier associates with him as a man who had always refused liquor, while the recovery of his scattered remains restores a collective ritual order after the violence of the trains. Grainier’s connection to Bob gives this event an intimate human weight, but the scene also widens into an image of the railway’s power over bodies, landscapes, and local lives.

Friendship, Grief, and the Changed Valley

About ten years after the region burns, and shortly after Bob is killed, Grainier hears an extraordinary nocturnal chorus. The Great Northern train sounds long blasts from the Meadow Creek crossing while Bob’s tribe searches the tracks, and the whistles set off coyotes, wolves, and perhaps every other vocal animal along the surrounding peaks. Grainier hears hundreds of howlers and interprets the night as a vast pronouncement, possibly an alarm announcing the end of the world. The red dog is somewhere outside, and Grainier has not seen her for days.

The timing makes Bob’s death part of the valley’s larger animal and spiritual disturbance. Grainier later vows to remain at the remote homesite, though he never tells anyone what drew him back. The valley does not recover its former spruce forest: scraggly jack pine replaces the great trees, wolves become less frequent and more distant, coyotes increase, rabbits grow scarce, and trout disappear from long stretches of the Moyea River. Bob’s knowledge helps Grainier recognize the animals as participants in a changing ecology, while Bob’s death helps bind that altered place to memory and obligation.

Their friendship therefore survives less as a domestic attachment than as a pattern of remembrance. Grainier continues returning to the hard-to-reach cabin even when arthritis and rheumatism make daily work difficult. He keeps company with dogs and listens for wolves, but the old voices recede. When he later acquires a large male sled dog, the animal becomes his friend for many years; that companionship extends the cross-species world that Bob helped him understand. Kootenai Bob remains the human counterpart within that world: a trusted worker, interpreter of animal lore, and dead friend whose scattered remains and remembered sayings become part of Grainier’s lifelong bond with the valley.