Last Bus To Wisdom: A Novel

When Donal finds a rare, precolonial obsidian arrowhead in a stream on the Double W Ranch, Gram forces him to turn it over to Wendell. Donal perceives this as an injustice. Passing by the arrowhead’s display in the ranch house after Wendell refuses to keep him on while Gram recuperates from her surgery, Donal snatches the arrowhead. Donal relies on the arrowhead for luck throughout his journey, encouraged by Herman and later, Louie Slewfoot.

The ownership of the item, razor sharp and made from volcanic glass by coastal Indigenous people, becomes an ongoing point of contention in the narrative. From Wendell’s viewpoint, the arrowhead belongs to him since Donal discovers it on property he claims ownership of, similar to the other Indigenous artifacts he displays in his mansion’s “show-off case.” He thus considers Donal a thief for taking it.

In contrast, Donal believes that his claim, based upon his subsistence efforts and his birth in a Montana work camp, supersedes Wendell’s. Doig suggests, via Donal—who does not have Indigenous heritage—that the arrowhead symbolizes Donal’s (and thus, the author’s) connection to the land on which he found it. When Donal shows the arrowhead to Louie—a member of the Blackfoot nation—Louie refers to it as “big medicine” but does not challenge Donal’s possession of it. Louie’s correction of a number of stereotypes about Indigenous people and defense of the sacred nature of Indigenous regalia implies a degree of sensitivity on Doig’s part. However—even though Indigenous land acknowledgments were not commonplace in the novel’s 1950s setting—it is notable that no characters acknowledge Indigenous peoples’ claims to the land on which Wendell’s ranch is situated, nor their ownership rights to ancestral artifacts found on land that was taken from them via colonization. The author also co-opts Indigenous spiritual practices, to a degree, via Donal’s use of the arrowhead to call upon “spirits” to bring him good fortune.

The arrowhead also serves as a reference to another of Doig’s novels, The Whistling Season, in which some youths discover a black-glass arrowhead that becomes a keepsake in their family, school, and community.

On a couple of occasions, Herman—who does not speak English natively—confuses the words “fate” and “faith.” Donal reports looking the words up and learning that their roots are completely different. Despite this, these concepts intertwine for the two travelers as they continually move westward on faith, based solely upon way Donal employs Fingerspitzengefühl—or intuition—as his finger wanders the Greyhound route maps.

The motif of near disasters supports The Capriciousness of Luck, as each crisis the travelers encounter is aided by unforeseen assistance. On his first trip, Donal’s bus abruptly leaves without him in Minneapolis, taking his great-aunt’s contact information, but a Minneapolis newspaper van races Donal’s Greyhound across the Mississippi to get him back aboard. When Aunt Kate catches him invading her coin stash to retrieve the $5 she owes him, she ships him back to Montana disastrously ahead of schedule, but Herman steps in to join him unexpectedly. The second half of the journey proves even more perilous, as Donal and Herman discover they are fugitives; a phony preacher steals all their money; and they end up in the midst of a rough band of migrant workers who are suspicious of them. Ultimately, the migrant workers accept the travelers and protect them from a local sheriff.

In each case, such assistance allows Donal and Herman to prevail. Doig thus implies that going out on faith allows one to embrace one’s fate.