Rides-at-the-door Character Analysis

Father to Fools Crow and Running Fisher, and husband to Double Strike Woman, Striped Face, and Kills-close-to-the-lake. Rides-at-the-door is a respected war chief of the Lone Eaters and has a special relationship with Three Bears, the band’s chief. He is highly intelligent and has been involved in past treaties with the Napikwans. As the only Lone Eater who speaks the English language, Rides-at-the-door is indispensable to his band and the Pikuni tribe as a whole. The Lone Eaters frequently look to Rides-at-the-door for guidance and advice. He is in favor of banishing Fast Horse from the Lone Eaters for his role in Yellow Kidney’s capture by the enemy Crows, and he also supports the capture and killing of Owl Child as punishment for the murder of Malcolm Clark. Rides-at-the-door supports peace with the Napikwans if they don’t expect anymore land, but he is willing to fight for the Pikuni way of life should it come to that. Rides-at-the-door accompanies Heavy Runner and the other chiefs to the Four Horns agency to discuss Owl Child’s fate, but since he is only a war chief, the Napikwan refuse to let him speak. He is devasted when his son, Running Fisher, betrays him and has an affair with Kills-close-to-the-lake, and he banishes him to the lands of their relative Siksikas as punishment; however, he doesn’t punish Kills-close-to-the-lake, his third and youngest wife. Instead, he gives Kills-close-to-the-lake her freedom in the form of a divorce and asks for forgiveness for stealing her youth. Rides-at-the-door told himself he married her as a favor to her father, a poor friend of the Never Laughs People, but he suspects he took the young wife as an outward display of his own wealth and power. He is deeply ashamed by this realization, which he views as his punishment for his selfish actions. In this way, the character of Rides-at-the-door is critical of traditional patriarchal customs of multiple wives as symbols of wealth and power. When Three Bears dies during the white-scabs outbreak, he gives his red-stone pipe to Rides-at-the-door and selects him as the new chief of the Lone Eaters. He lives through the outbreak and is among the procession that leaves the winter camp at the end of the novel.