Empire of Wild

54 pages • 1 hour read

Empire of Wild

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 4

Chapters 5-9

Chapters 10-14

Chapters 15-19

Chapters 20-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 10-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 10 Summary: “Go Home”

Joan drives herself and Zeus back to her home so they can rest. The next morning, she and Zeus immediately go to see Ajean. Ajean takes Joan to an isolated patch of earth, explaining that members of Joan’s family (including her mother and brother) sometimes grow extra bones. When those bones are removed, they are buried.

Ajean and Joan dig up the bundle of bones and take them home, where Ajean scrapes some down into a fine powder that she calls “bone salt.” Ajean gives a pouch of the salt to Joan, explaining that she can encircle the rogarou with the salt if she needs to keep him contained, or she can encircle a place or person with the salt and the rogarou will not be able to get at them: “It’s like Indian Alarm Guard” (147). However, Ajean has no other suggestions as to how Joan should proceed in her quest to save Victor.

Joan drops Zeus off and goes home alone. After falling asleep on the couch, Joan has a nightmare in which she sees Victor back in their home. However, Victor becomes panicked by the sight of something that he can see approaching outside. A violent wind sweeps through the house as Victor screams at Joan to run, and then she wakes up. Joan resolutely says that she is already on her way.

Interlude 4 Summary: “Victor in the Woods: Overheard”

In the alternating narrative, Victor hears Joan say that she is already on her way.

Chapter 11 Summary: “Follow the Signs”

It has now been two days since Joan interrupted Victor’s sermon. Both Cecile and Heiser have been watching Victor closely as they move toward the next stop on their tour. Cecile has been involved with Heiser’s ministry, the New Redemption Ministry, for years after she was initially a hippie who joined a cult and then pursued a number of different religious movements.

Cecile played a key role in developing the ministry, but it only truly became successful when Victor/Reverend Wolff joined them. He has been able to connect powerfully with local Indigenous communities. Once Victor began working with them, “they weren’t just showing up, but were being invited into communities” (162, emphasis added). Cecile is also very attracted to him and decides to try to seduce him after months of waiting.

Cecile follows Victor out into the woods. He usually prefers to sleep in the woods with a sleeping bag, rather than in a motel room like everyone else. She finds where he is lying and climbs on top of him. However, Victor is not aroused and eventually tells Cecile to stop. She goes back to her room hurt and disappointed and avoids seeing anyone for a few days.

When Cecile reemerges, she goes to the regular meeting held by the staff of the ministry. Victor is not there, and Heiser explains that he is not feeling well. Heiser goes on to share more information: When Heiser first encountered Victor, the latter was struggling with drugs and mental health problems. Heiser helped Victor and encouraged him to train to become a minister. Victor explained to Heiser that he first began using drugs after being seduced by a woman. Heiser’s explanation of the timeline reveals that the ministry lied when they told the police that Victor/the Reverend had been with them for three years; in fact, he arrived right about the time Victor disappeared.

Heiser explains that the woman (Joan) who has now appeared at several stops is Victor’s ex and that she is trying to lure Victor away from his life as a good Christian and get him hooked on drugs again. Heiser explains to his followers that, in order to protect Victor, they must be sure to keep Joan away and that they are going to stop their tour of sermons until they move further west.

Chapter 12 Summary: “Soul Collection”

Heiser is having a secret sexual relationship with Ivy, a young woman who works as part of the ministry. Ivy is worried that Cecile knows about the relationship between them because Cecile has been treating her coldly (in reality, Cecile sees Ivy as a rival for Victor’s affections). Heiser is preoccupied with his own ambitions; the ministry exists merely to support his business development work.

Heiser brokers energy projects on Indigenous territories and has found that converting local Indigenous communities to his brand of evangelical Christianity allows him to then broker much more successful and lucrative deals. Heiser is indifferent to religion himself, but he manipulates it in order to gain vast profits for himself by exploiting Indigenous communities and their land. Victor plays a key role in this scheme, and thus Heiser is determined to keep him away from Joan. As Heiser reflects, “Wolff was gold and [he] would not lose him” (176).

Heiser has secretly taken photos of the encounter in which Cecile tried to seduce Victor, and the photos appear as though Victor was willingly involved. Heiser plans to use the photos to hurt Joan.

Heiser thinks back to his past. From childhood, he always had an unusual affinity with dogs. He started his career working as a government advisor working on treaty claims with Indigenous communities. One night, while he was alone in a motel room, he saw a giant and menacing monster resembling a dog or wolf outside the window. At first, Heiser was terrified, but he became intrigued and lured the creature back. The creature began to turn up every night, knocking on Heiser’s door until he let it in. It is implied that Heiser received some sort of power in exchange for collusion with the monster and that his loyal chauffeur, Robe, might in some way be the monster in disguise.

Chapter 13 Summary: “Hide and Seek”

Ever since Joan and Zeus got back from their encounter with the traveling ministry, they have not been able to find any updates on where the ministry might move to next. Zeus has also been preoccupied after a painful meeting with his father and half sister; he feels like his father will never be interested in truly loving and accepting him.

One night, Zeus and Joan go to have dinner with Ajean, and Zeus shows them the research he has done using Facebook. By using location trackers for some of the photos posted by Ivy, he can tell that the ministry is moving steadily northward. Zeus and Joan plan to drive out to intercept them.

After Zeus and Joan leave, Ajean feels frightened and uneasy. To protect herself from the rogarou, she puts 13 small items outside her doorstep. According to traditional mythology, the rogarou’s desire to count these objects would lead to him becoming distracted and unable to enter the house. Ajean is hopeful that Joan will be able to save Victor but also knows that “she had to forget any doubt if she was going to get past that rogarou to get to her man” (191).

Chapter 14 Summary: “All the Possibilities”

Joan decides to stop and see her mother and brothers before she goes in pursuit of Victor. When she tells her family that she is going out of town, they are annoyed and tell her that she needs to stop pursuing Victor. They are unconvinced that the man at the ministry even is Victor, and Joan’s mother suggests that Victor might be feigning amnesia in order to avoid getting back together with Joan.

Joan leaves feeling frustrated and angry. After she goes home, she has a nightmare in which she hears Zeus crying and screaming but is unable to get to him.

Interlude 5 Summary: “Victor in the Woods: Christ in the Clearing”

In his enclosure, Victor can sense Joan’s terror and distress and becomes alarmed. He wonders what happened to lead to him being trapped. As the setting becomes more sinister, Victor finds a menacing figure now sitting in the clearing with him.

Chapters 10-14 Analysis

As Joan becomes more and more involved in her quest to save Victor, it becomes increasingly clear that she is reliant on help and support from Ajean and Zeus, reflecting her close social ties and her Identity Through Community and Connection. While the trope of heroes having helpers or sidekicks is fairly common in many quest narratives, Ajean and Zeus are unusual helpers: As Joan wryly thinks, “all she had on her side was a moody twelve-year old, an old woman and a bag of bone dust” (147-48).

Zeus and Ajean are both fairly vulnerable and limited in how they can help Joan because one is very young and one is very old. For example, Ajean never accompanies Joan as she drives around in pursuit of the traveling ministry, and Zeus adds additional vulnerability. However, the presence of these unusual helpers adds additional complexity to the novel’s insistence on the importance of community. Joan cannot save Victor alone because it was Victor’s individualistic impulses that led to his disappearance in the first place. Only community and interconnection can restore what has been severed.

Significantly, the community that forms around Joan’s project of rescuing Victor is intergenerational and not a traditional nuclear family. The assistance of Ajean and Zeus symbolizes that Joan (and by extension, other individuals) need both the wisdom of older generations and a commitment to making the world a better place for younger generations. Ajean helps her to be wise, while Zeus holds her accountable, even though neither of them are closely related. Joan does not have any biological children, and her biological grandmother dies early in the novel, but she is able to find profound community and connection with individuals because they are all interconnected.

As the plot progresses, the supernatural aspects of the novel become more pronounced. Ajean’s strategy of the bone salt and Joan’s dreams reveal that they are indeed grappling with a supernatural creature and that they will need to embrace traditional wisdom and folklore in order to contend with it. The interludes that depict Victor’s experiences create a parallel narrative that adds suspense and drama to the main plot. These interludes create dramatic irony because readers know something that Joan does not: Somewhere, Victor is held in some sort of captivity, with some sort of sinister force threatening him. This context lends increased urgency to Joan’s quest, as Victor is vulnerable and desperate: “Joan better find him soon. Before the something else did” (104). This narrative structure in which Victor is passively held captive while Joan works to save him also inverts traditional gender stereotypes in many traditional narratives of quest and rescue.

The interludes depicting Victor’s experiences are often somewhat vague or dreamlike, adding to the elements of magical realism within the novel. Especially because readers are aware that Victor’s body is still moving through the world (now home to the identity of the Reverend Wolff), the Victor depicted in these interludes is his essence, mind, or spirit, which is trapped somewhere liminal. Victor still has some contact with the outside world since he can sometimes hear Joan’s voice; it seems that he could be trapped somewhere within the mind of the Reverend.

This possibility reflects how one’s true identity and self can become lost and forgotten under the pressure of external influences but does not vanish entirely. Joan is trying to free the version of Victor who is a proud Indigenous man, a loving husband, and an independent and free-spirited thinker, while he has lost those parts of himself. Whatever sinister and monstrous presence is threatening Victor in the woods is dangerous because if he is destroyed in this space, his past identity will be lost forever, and he truly will be transformed into the Reverend Wolff.

While Victor is experiencing these threats in the interludes, Heiser is also emerging as an increasingly sinister presence. Heiser symbolizes the corruption and manipulation that settlers of European descent have deployed against Indigenous peoples in Canada, particularly through the Damaging Effects of Religious Indoctrination. His own father came to Canada from Germany, symbolizing how European settlers arrived in North America relatively recently in comparison to how long Indigenous peoples have lived on the lands. Heiser is also actually “an atheist” (176), but he manipulates religion in order to achieve his true aim: profit. Heiser shrewdly calculates that “he’d vastly improved his odds by bringing the word of Jesus into the territories he had to sway towards resource projects” (175). Heiser is a particularly detestable character because he is not even a true zealot—he is a hypocrite.

His illicit relationship with Ivy also reveals his hypocrisy because in his role as a religious leader, he should not be having a sexual relationship with a woman to whom he is not married. His cold and disdainful attitude toward Ivy—who, notably, is named after a feature of the natural world—is as exploitative and extractive as his attitude toward the environment and toward Indigenous people, echoing the theme of Exploitation Versus Respect for Land. While Joan and Victor’s sexual connection binds them closer to each other, Heiser’s attitude toward both sexuality and natural resources is completely individualistic and self-serving.

While Heiser is very modern and pragmatic in his business ventures and profit motive, he is also intertwined with supernatural forces. His strange connection to wolves and dogs is “something passed down to him from his grandfathers” (47); like the folklore and traditional practices that Joan and Ajean employ, Heiser is still tied to his ancestry and heritage. However, rather than respecting these traditions, Heiser thinks he can simply exploit them for personal gain. In the episode where Heiser first encounters the rogarou lurking outside his motel room, he willingly opens the door and invites it in. In his arrogance, Heiser thinks he can control the creature, but he is actually setting the stage for his own downfall.