Galloping heart

Thirteen Moons
By Charles Frazier
Random House, 422 pp., $26.95

Poker players will tell you that bluff and staying power are two essentials of the game; it's only when you lay down your hand that the numbers really matter. Fiction writers understand these rules instinctively, since much of what they do involves lying, carrying on, and pulling their punches until the right moment. Certainly Charles Frazier has the earmarks of a natural, what with his debut novel, ``Cold Mountain," having gone home with winnings most players never even consider. More germane, he has imbued the narrator of his second novel, old Will Cooper, with the hallmarks of a lifelong man of the cards. And Frazier starts off his grandiloquent tale with three surefire ingredients: a boy's coming-of-age journey, a high -stakes card game, and a girl.

Named after the lunar cycles that dictate the Native American calendar, ``Thirteen Moons" is a boisterous, confident novel that draws from the epic tradition: It tips its hat to ``Don Quixote" as well as Twain and Melville, and it boldly sets out to capture a broad swatch of America's story in the mid-19th century, from the years just before the Indian Removal Act of 1830 through and beyond the Civil War. But as Will tells us, ``almost nothing in life is epic or tragic at the moment of its enactment," and so his is an account, full of love and disappointment and uproariously shady deals, told from the vantage point of old age and not a little wisdom. Much of Will's story mirrors the events of history: the eviction of the Western Band of the Cherokee Nation out of the Southeast onto the infamous Trail of Tears, the Indian purchase of land in the Alleghenies. This is all scaffolding for a personal story full of sensory detail: the early-morning mist and quiet of pristine mountains, and the equally magical state of a young man finding and following his life's desire.

There's also a horse called Waverley, almost as important to us by the end of the novel as he is to Will, and an early talisman for how things will turn out. Will is only 12 when his forced odyssey begins; an orphan begrudgingly taken in by relatives, he is sent packing one morning, Waverley his only companion, to serve as a bound boy running an outpost in Indian Nation. Two men will figure in his life, one a nemesis and the other a salvation, and the first is a pale mixed-blood Cherokee called Featherstone -- a liar and power monger who tries to steal Will's horse, wager away his pride, and trick him out of everything he owns. The grandiose Featherstone is an even bigger bluffer than Will, but he has a mysterious relationship with a young woman named Claire that will nearly be Will's undoing. Featherstone's redemptive counterpart is a Cherokee chief named Bear; and his begrudging embrace of Will, once the boy has made it to his outpost, will become the emotional mainstay of the novel.

Because Will has the pluck and gumption of the classic boy-hero on the road, he makes a lot of good moves at the right time: When he wins Claire in a card game with Featherstone, he has the good sense to adore her rather than claim her before she disappears into the night. When his employer at the outpost dies, Will collects his back wages in a set of old law books. Thus self-educated as a ``dirt lawyer" who understands the ever-shifting terrain of property law, he goes to Washington City to represent Bear and his people; he also starts buying up every piece of land in sight. When the mass relocation of eastern tribes begins, Will is recruited, horribly, to help the government ``bring in the runners"; he makes this deal with the devil by ensuring that Bear and his holdings will be left alone.

Frazier is a natural storyteller, and throughout his picaresque tale are grand themes and eulogies: the plowing under of a continent by progress and raw power, the disappearance of a wilderness whose sovereignty could be measured by elk and passenger pigeon. Because Will is the charming and melancholy witness to this changing world, we are afforded glimpses rendered poignant by their specificity: Chasing down a Cherokee renegade during government ``removal," the man's pursuers greet him with a respectful bow and a piece of beef jerky before arresting him. When an old woman is forcibly removed from her lifelong home, she makes the soldiers wait while she feeds the chickens and wild mourning doves, then walks into exile. As a white man who has spent his life on the fringes of Bear's tribe, Will's marginalized existence is self-imposed, but we know from his long backward glance that it is marked by the sorrows of having outlasted what he loved.

Only yearning trumps time, he repeatedly tells us, and Will's for the elusive Claire will be the braid of intrigue throughout ``Thirteen Moons" -- as with the high-drama love story of ``Cold Mountain," this romance is as tenuous, tested, and ongoing as those land claims of Bear's. Frazier is in love, too, with the wild and twisting path of his story, which is told with embroidery rather than restraint -- another signature of the epic novel, though often here more wearying than illuminating. Acknowledging in an author's note his debt to history, including the real-life character of William Holland Thomas, Frazier draws a massive canvas of historical fiction in ``Thirteen Moons," remaining true to the heartbreak of a land and its indigenous culture nearly torn asunder. ``It's generally the victors who get to make up the stories," Will reminds us, having conceded some time earlier that ``writers can tell any lie that leaps into their heads." And yet old Will Cooper -- a fellow who could outfox an entire government by bluff and promises and kited checks -- turns out to be the most trustworthy word slinger of them all.

Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com.