Indian Camp - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

The story begins in the pre-dawn hours as the young Nick Adams, his father, his uncle and their Indian guides row across a lake to a nearby Indian camp. Nick's father, a doctor, has been called out to deliver a baby for a woman who has been in labor for days. At the camp, they find the woman in a cabin lying on a bottom bunkbed; her husband lies above her with an injured foot. Nick's father is forced to perform a caesarian operation on the woman with a jack-knife because the baby is in the breech position; he asks Nick to assist by holding a basin. The woman screams throughout the operation, and when Nick's uncle tries to hold her down, she bites him. After the baby is delivered, Nick's father turns to the woman's husband on the top bunk and finds that he fatally slit his throat with a straight razor during the operation. Nick is sent out of the cabin, and his uncle leaves with two Natives, not to return. The story ends with only Nick and his father on the lake, rowing away from the camp. Nick asks his father why the woman's husband killed himself, and silently tells himself that he will never die.