Not far into Richard Wagamese’s “Medicine Walk” — his ninth novel, and one that, given its earnest embrace of legend and myth, feels less written than painstakingly etched into something more permanent than paper — we learn that its young protagonist, an Indian named Franklin Starlight, is a master outdoorsman. Among other things, Frank knows “the value of ammunition. He never wasted a shot. He tracked and waited and bided his time until the animal offered the best possible target. He never rushed.”

For Frank, a “hunt was a process.” And so is the way Wagamese pursues his story: biding his time, never rushing, calibrating each word so carefully that he too never seems to waste a shot. But he isn’t after the kill. Rather, it’s something more complicated — finding a way to honor or at least acknowledge a life ill-lived as it enters its final bitter days.

Frank’s father, Eldon, escaped a hardscrabble childhood in mountainous western Canada by enlisting to fight in the Korean War. Shattered by what happened there, he spent the subsequent decades falling in and out of work, and in and out of different lovers’ arms, with the help — and relentless harm — of alcohol. Hope briefly flared in the form of a beautiful Indian woman. Frank was the result. But then a tragedy occurred, for which Eldon could never forgive himself. Sixteen years on, however, it’s Frank’s forgiveness Eldon seeks. Ruined by drink, Eldon knows he’s dying, and he wants his son to take him into the wilderness so that he can be buried in the “warrior way.”