Brown Dog

Ahab, Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield and Brown Dog are arguably the most compelling male protagonists in American lit, though they couldn’t be more different from one another. BD, as he prefers to be called, is a highly spiritual half-Ashinabe. He is a man’s man—an expert hunter, fisherman, logger, builder and salvage diver who attracts women of all social classes (though usually, only for a short time)—and in this collection of five previously released (and one unreleased) novellas from the last 24 years, author Jim Harrison’s character takes shape like never before. BD is constantly getting in minor scrapes with the law. He discovers his father’s corpse on the bottom of Lake Michigan and hotwires an ice cream truck to take him to Milwaukee. He discloses the site of an ancient burial ground “under the spell of anthropological pussy.” He pursues a scurrilous American Indian Movement leader to Los Angeles to recover his sacred bearskin. All this at age 49. A year later he marries a bisexual woman half his age and they are expecting a baby. What a great read!