A native of rural Michigan, Callan Wink moved, 20-odd years ago, to more rural country still: Montana’s Yellowstone River valley. The trout-rich river passes by the small town of Livingston, a place where you can’t cast a line without snagging a writer: it’s been home to literary luminaries such as (once upon a befuddled time) Richard Brautigan, Thomas McGuane, Doug Peacock, Russ Chatham, and—especially and everlastingly—Jim Harrison.

Wink found work as a river guide, taking wealthy clients from all over the world down the Yellowstone to catch their quota of cutthroat trout. At night, he hunkered down with fellow outdoors folk in a local watering hole and spun yarns of the people they’d met and the fish that they’d caught or not. (Every fishing tale, as anglers know, comes with a shaker and not just a grain of salt.)

On one such bibulous evening, Callan tells Kirkus by Zoom from his winter hideout in Costa Rica, a friend spun up a yarn of a different sort. “You know, it may be one of those local legends that’s true or not, but it’s a good story all the same, about a guy who floated into Yellowstone National Park on a raft and floated out with a pile of elk and deer antlers. That would be quite the caper—but also very illegal, because you’re not allowed to take anything out of the park. People get busted pretty regularly. But I got to thinking: What if it were true, if it really happened?”

The story stuck with Wink, and it grew. “First came the antler poaching element,” he says. “Then I got the idea to build the story around two brothers. That was about as far as I got when I tried it as a short story, but it didn’t really work. Then I wrote a novel that I thought was really long and boring. I put it away for a couple of years, then came back to it and cut and cut until it was a novella. Of course, novellas are pretty hard to sell, as my agent reminded me, so I made it into a novel again.”

That novel is Beartooth (Spiegel & Grau, Feb. 11), which earned a Kirkus star for what our reviewer called “impeccable control and unflinching darkness.” The two brothers are Thad and Hazen, 27 and 26, respectively, when we meet them. They live off the grid, with barely two nickels to rub together, and mostly way on the other side of the law: At the start of the novel, they’re hunting black bears out of season—quite illegally—to pack out both meat and “additional bear parts,” commissioned to do so by a shady entrepreneur who sells those parts in turn to the Asian aphrodisiac market.

Bear parts are good for such uses, or so the ultimate purchasers hope. Antlers are better, and before long the middleman comes to Thad and Hazen with an audacious order: They’re to go into Yellowstone National Park, pack out as many antlers as they can carry, and make everyone concerned a pile of money.

Hazen is all in. Thad, slightly older but very much wiser, has his doubts. It’s hard to say no to their buyer, though, a gigantic and violent fellow whom they call the Scot, and for good reason: When he’s not cracking skulls and frightening the townsfolk down below their forest homes, he’s marching about in a kilt and playing the bagpipe, a skill he’s taught a skittish young woman who may or may not be his daughter. The Scot may be a terror, but he’s a philosophical and eloquent one, reminiscent of and nearly as evil as Judge Holden, the villain of Cormac McCarthy’s high-body-count novel Blood Meridian. Recognizing Thad’s reluctance, the Scot tells him, “I’ve noticed a strange thing in those who serve as caretakers. They tend to underestimate the abilities of their charges. The more someone needs your care, the more important your own existence becomes.” The unspoken implication being, one supposes, that existence can be revoked at any moment.

“The Scot is out of place and out of time,” says Wink. “I mean, not many people wear kilts in Montana—it’s too damn cold. He was wilder in earlier drafts, but I toned it down a little. I toned down some of Hazen’s wildness, too. He was a little out there.”

Things go awry, as they will, and by the end of Wink’s mystery, as twisting and turning as the river itself, people are dead, and Thad’s world is overturned, even as he nurses a secret or two of his own.

The central mystery in Wink’s novel turns on Hazen, though, and he’s quite the character, likable if awfully damn dumb sometimes, with trouble drawn to him like wolves to a fawn. Thad—smarter and more centered—and Hazen are utterly unalike except in their connection to one another, a connection broken for reasons that Wink expertly reveals, one small detail after another. In one of the most memorable passages in Beartooth, Wink imagines Thad putting his hand into the Yellowstone and somehow finding his now wayward sibling through its magical water: “Maybe, if your brother happened to be sticking his hand in that water at the same time, wherever he might be, there’s a chance he might know that it was you, feel you giving him a riverine handshake, telling him he was a crazy son of a bitch.”

The Yellowstone country is having its moment now, thanks to the television series of the same name and a swarm of newcomers to Montana from around the world, and especially California. “It might be a little silver lining for my book,” Wink says, “but it won’t make up for all the bad things that are happening to the place.”

Meanwhile, Wink is pondering his next project—once he returns from Costa Rica, where he’s taken up surfing, and before the next fishing season begins. “I’m trying to write another novel,” he says. “It’s a slow process. I have a couple of other novellas that I like, and they might become novels of their own, like Beartooth. But I really like the characters of this one.” Does that mean he’d consider a sequel that might tell us whatever happened to the wayward Hazen? “It’d be tricky,” Wink replies, “but it might be cool to revisit them at some point.”

As it happens, one of Callan Wink’s river-guide customers was none other than Jim Harrison, who never missed the opportunity to go fishing and then tell barroom stories about the experience. Asked if Harrison had given him any useful pointers out on the water, Wink thinks for a moment and then replies, “Yes. I told him that my book of short stories [Dog Run Moon, 2016] was about to be published. He said, ‘Well, don’t expect them to throw a parade for you in New York City.’”

Parade or not, Beartooth is a book that would do Harrison proud, and Jim Crumley, for that matter, and Norman Maclean, and all the other laureates of the Big Sky country.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing writer.