Author Travis Mulhauser on Fiction’s Best ‘Runaway’ Characters
Delos Harris, the 14-year-old runaway at the center of Fair Chase is a quick-witted, silver-tongued orphan with a heart almost as big as his penchant for trouble.
Delos may or may not be a member of Cutler County’s infamous Sawbrook family—his DNA is a mystery to himself—but he parlays some scant evidence of a Sawbrook gene into a carefully constructed persona that allows him to survive the foster homes and juvenile detention facilities of his youth.
Initially, Delos is concerned solely with self-preservation—people are less likely to harm him if they fear retaliation from the Sawbrooks—but the longer he lives his own stories, the more real his connection to the family begins to feel. And when he comes face-to-face with a gray wolf in the wild—an endangered species gone from northern Michigan for over 120 years—he becomes desperate to protect it from the land developers and poachers who mean to do it harm.
The environmental protections the wolf will require threaten to stall development projects, and stifle tourism and the local economy. The entire world seems aligned against the wolf, but when the Sawbrook family speaks out on its behalf, Delos knows he must seek them out to protect the wolf and to finally face the truth, whatever it may be, about who he really is.
There is no character archetype I love more than the runaway. They are scrappy by necessity, compelling by default, and work across all genres. The runaway is always both escaping and pursuing, and the narrative tension between those two places is the archetype’s secret sauce.
Here are some of my favorite runaways, all of whom helped form the DNA of Delos’s character.
Jimmy Blevins
From Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Jimmy Blevins may be my favorite character of all-time. Played brilliantly in the film adaptation by Lucas Black, Blevins is a young horse thief out of Texas on the run in Mexico. Blevins past is opaque but colorful, and when he crosses paths with the novel’s protagonist, John Grady Cole, and Cole’s friend, Lacey Rawlins, an unforgettable trio is formed.
Jimmy’s oral history of his family’s many battles with lightning is must-read fiction, and there is a rambling soliloquy about the violent, lightning deaths that have plagued the Blevins line that I read out loud several times a year just because I can’t believe it actually exists. Blevins starts that speech with this nugget about lightning’s anxiousness to rid the world of his grandfather.
Victoria Robideaux
Victoria is an unwed, teenage mother who bounces around the small Colorado town of Holt until she is placed with the unforgettable McPherson brothers. A pair of unwed cattle farmers with limited social graces and zero experience with women or young people, the McPherson brothers and Victoria form an unlikely, makeshift famiy. Kent Haruf was a brilliant writer, whose work balanced deeply felt sentiment with hard-earned truths, and the MacPherson brother’s fierce loyalty to Vicotria and her baby, and Victoria’s grace and empathy for the very-rough-around-the-edges brothers, makes for a timeless story of unlikely connections. But just when Victoria settles into farm life, the baby’s father comes rolling into town and she finds herself on the run again.
Ellen Foster
The first line of Ellen Foster is one of my favorite openers of all-time—“When I was little I used to think of ways to kill my daddy.”
Ellen’s voice propels every sentence of Kaye Gibbon’s remarkable novel. In the aftermath of Ellen’s mother’s suicide she is left in the “care” of her alcoholic father and the book becomes a catalog of her attempts to escape her dad. The novel isn’t plotted so much as it is a line-by-line, first-hand account of Ellen’s fight to survive. It is one of the most impactful books I’ve ever read, and Kaye Gibbons ability to render Ellen’s voice and not hit a single false note is a true highwire act of fiction writing. This book was popular when it was released in 1987 and remains firmly in my personal pantheon of classics.
Cora
In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize, The National Book Award, and Carnegie Medal, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad also appears on this list. The novel a masterpiece with one of the single greatest premises you will encounter—what if the Underground Railroad was an actual railroad?
Cora is a runaway slave whose mother, Mabel, escaped the plantation but left Cora behind. Cora’s own journey is brutal and gut-wrenching and puts the abhorrent violence of the institution of slavery on full display. In the process, Whitehead achieves something very, very few writers can—he writes a deeply important, timeless book that is also absolutely impossible to put down.
Cora faces innumerable horrors on her journey north, but what she’s running from is far worse.
Discover the Book
There hasn’t been a gray wolf in Michigan’s lower peninsula in over 100 years, but when one migrates onto the Sawbrook family’s vast acreage, the small community of Cutler finds itself in the throes of a panic. A trail of mutilated chickens and barn cats have peppered the area’s remote outskirts, and concerns about safety are accompanied by the economic and political cost of an endangered species’ uninvited return to northern Michigan. The Sawbrook siblings—Lucy, Buckner, and Jewell—find themselves at odds with locals, property owners, and the state’s department of resources.
When fourteen-year-old runaway, Delos Harris, arrives on the family property claiming to be the siblings’ second cousin, and to have knowledge of the wolf’s exact location, the Sawbrooks are skeptical, but desperate, and can’t deny something about the boy seems oddly familiar. With time running out, they forge ahead together against gathering threats.
The state wants the wolf moved, the locals and the developers want it dead, and the Sawbrooks see its return as a decisive victory in their battle to preserve the natural world in northern Michigan. But when a poacher is hired to settle the matter permanently, the Sawbrooks must fight to protect each other, their land, and the brave child whose mysterious connection to the wolf will either save them all, or deliver the Sawbrooks to their final ruin.
