Summary
In a kingdom of blinding quartz where the sun itself seems refrigerated, civil engineer John Howland—laconic, chalk-dust still clinging to his city boots—rides the iron spine of a nascent Hudson Bay line toward a horizon that swallows sound. The white silence is already stalked by myth: three Franco-Ottawa wood-spirits—Max, Pierre, François—who drink the wind and remember the scent of maternal blood on a courtroom floor. Their vendetta is a glacier, slow, inevitable, carving initials into every mile of track. Meleese Thoreau, flame against snow, is the only dictionary that translates their grief; she meets Howland under a sky the color of pewter, warns him that his name is a death-knell, then proceeds to fall into the very doom she foretells. What follows is a fugue of captures and liberations staged in beryl twilight: Howland is trussed like a Christmas goose above a frozen cataract, dragged by dog-sled through cathedral-pines that drip sapphire stalactites, locked inside a cabin whose stove breathes dragon-orange while the brothers debate whether to flay or merely hang him. Each time the noose tightens, Meleese and the enigmatic half-Cree fur-poet Jean Croisset slip between axe and flesh, rewriting destiny with sleight-of-hand and whispered Innu prayers. When the mistaken-identity reveal arrives—our hero is merely a homonymous cousin to the patricidal heir the brothers crave—it lands less like cheap coincidence than like the cosmos shrugging after a cruel joke. The final reel melts into honeyed dusk: locomotive whistle, wedding bells carved of ice that refuse to thaw, and the sense that the North itself has agreed, grudgingly, to let two mortals leave with their pulses intact.
Synopsis
John Howland travels to the frozen North to build a branch of the Hudson Bay Railroad. There he meets and falls in love with Meleese Thoreau who warns him that her three bloodthirsty brothers--Max, Pierre, and François--have sworn vengeance against a man named John Howland, the son of a man who killed their mother, and that torture and death await him along the route to his station. Just as Meleese said, Howland is pursued by the vengeance starved brothers. Captured and near death several times, Howland manages to escape with the assistance of Meleese and the Jean Croisset, until the brothers discover that they have been pursuing the wrong Howland, and all ends happily with the union of the two lovers.
