Content Warning: This section of the guide includes descriptions of child abuse, racism, and injustices against Indigenous people. Depictions of substance use disorder, and sexual violence against a child are also present. 

The prologue to Shelterwood focuses on an old man whom the local children in the small town of Ada, Oklahoma have nicknamed “Sergeant Whittles.” He is a colorful character who is infamous for his outlandish stories about his youth as “a miner, a treasure hunter, a Wild West show performer, [and] a horse thief” (3). 

In 1990, two alumni of the local high school are driving through the mountains near Ada and reminiscing about a particularly fascinating story that Sergeant Whittles told them in the 1960s. The story was about a cave. Whittles claimed that he found something in that cave when he was a boy, and that it haunted him for life. The friends debate the veracity of the story and decide to go looking for the cave. They find it. 

Although the prologue does not reveal Sergeant Whittles’s true name or the contents of the cave, the narrative will later reveal that Sergeant Whittles is Dewey Mullins—identifiable by his now-worn, signature pocketknife—and that the cave conceals the bodies of three young Choctaw girls.