53 pages • 1 hour read
Scott O'DellThunder Rolling in the Mountains
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapter 21-AfterwordChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 21 Summary
Red Elk allows Swan Necklace and Sound of Running Feet to stay in his tent with his wife Alighting Dove and son Charging Hawk. The tribe gives them clothes and food, and Sound of Running Feet finally allows herself to relax. They leave the next morning. As they walk away, Sound of Running Feet hears a sound behind them. Before she can react, Swan Necklace is on the ground dead from a wound in his neck. Charging Hawk, who has killed him, cleans his knife. Sound of Running Feet feels a noose around her neck, and everything goes black. She wakes in Red Elk’s tent. She does not know why they haven’t killed her. Alighting Dove leads her to the nearby stream and shows her Swan Necklace’s body, so she can bury him. Sound of Running Feet buries her fiancé in their wedding blanket: “I laid him in a shallow grave and chanted a song of mourning. The death of Swan Necklace had taken my heart away. In my breast where my heart once beat was a piece of cold stone” (116).
Chapter 22 Summary
Sound of Running Feet stays on a rawhide tether for seven days. She soon learns some Assiniboin words and discovers that Charging Hawk’s pregnant wife died three years before. He wanted Sound of Running Feet for a wife. Alighting Dove makes new clothes for Sound of Running Feet and teaches her how to cook, sew, and store food in the Assiniboin way. Charging Hawk spends a lot of time staring at Sound of Running Feet. She hates him and feels only grief for her lost love. Charging Hawk shows off his marksmanship to her, and his mother brags of his physical prowess and skills. Sound of Running Feet knows who he really is: “He was also a man without shame, I thought. He had eaten with Swan Necklace and slept in the same tipi. Yet he killed his guest to get a rifle” (121). The tribe pierces Sound of Running Feet’s ears and after they heal a wedding ceremony begins. Charging Hawk gives her a beautiful ermine blanket and a warm ermine cape. The dancing and singing begins and becomes loud and wild. As soon as Sound of Running Feet thinks she can escape, she runs. She grabs a rifle from Red Elk’s tent on her way out of the village and runs as fast as she can.
Chapter 23 Summary
Sound of Running Feet flees and walks for a while. It begins to snow and becomes too hard to walk anymore. She pulls the white blanket over her to hide herself in a gully to wait out the snow. Soon, she hears a sound. She sees Charging Hawk on a horse looking for her. She hides and tries to sleep. Charging Hawk eventually returns on his horse, exhausted and no longer searching. He passes her, and Sound of Running Feet prepares her rifle to shoot him, but she finds she can’t pull the trigger: “Then my eyes filled with the sight of bodies strewn across the ground. I saw the dead people. I saw my mother. I saw Swan Necklace […] Some time the killing had to stop” (126). Sound of Running Feet does not kill Charging Hawk. She walks in the opposite direction, toward Canada.
Afterword Summary
Sound of Running Feet made it to Sitting Bull’s camp and stayed with him for a few years. Afterward, she went to the reservation at Lapwai, where she married another Ne-mee-poo named George Moses. She took the name Sarah. The soldiers took Chief Joseph and the 400 Ne-mee-poo who surrendered that day to Oklahoma, and many died of heat stroke, malaria, bad living conditions, starvation, and more. Their horses, their only source of wealth, were taken from them. Eventually in 1885, some Ne-mee-poo were allowed to go to Lapwai, but only if they agreed to convert to Christianity. Chief Joseph refused and the soldiers sent him to Colville Reservation in Eastern Washington. He did not ever see Wallowa again. He died in Colville in 1904: “The doctor listed the cause of death as a broken heart” (128).
Chapter 21-Afterword Analysis
In the final chapters of the novel and the Afterword, which speaks to the fate of the real characters it follows, O’Dell returns to ideas of homeland, grief, and war. He also solidifies Sound of Running Feet’s power as she fights for her freedom.
The novel ends as Sound of Running Feet faces betrayal once more, when Charging Hawk kills Swan Necklace for his rifle. The rifle is a symbol of pervasive violence brought by the white man but perpetuated by others. Sound of Running Feet is captured and forced to face marriage to the murderer of Swan Necklace, but in a final expression of her power, escapes and wanders toward Canada by herself, with only a gun and a blanket to help her survive. She refuses to surrender herself to any man, be they white or Native.
The end of war, and of the perpetuation of violence, also comes from Sound of Running Feet. When given the opportunity to shoot Charging Hawk, she pauses and imagines all the death she’s seen. The grief of so much loss, and the reality of the violence she has witnessed, forces Sound of Running Feet to put her own pain aside and break the cycle of violence that has come to define her life. In the symbolic act of putting down the gun, she is pushing aside the white’s man violence and searching for another way.
Finally, O’Dell offers a poignant connection to homeland in the Afterword, as he describes life for the Nez Perce who surrendered. Chief Joseph, in particular, is pained by his inability to return home, purportedly dying of a broken heart. O’Dell is clear about the lasting impact of separation from home and family on the Nez Perce and the Native American community as a whole. This pain continues for generations.
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