God's Country and the Law

In a cathedral of pine and granite, where winter hangs like a cathedral bell that refuses to toll, 'Poleon—part-hermit, part-aboriginal saint—raises his moon-eyed daughter Oachi on fables whispered by wind and wolf. Their Eden is shared, uneasily, with André and Marie Beauvais, whose marital harmony is tuned to the same hush that keeps the snow from screaming. Into this sacrament of silence slithers Doré, a whiskey-priest who traffics not merely in contraband firewater but in a portable pantheon of rattlesnake totems, hissing idols he swears harbor tutelary demons. Hospitality curdles into sacrilege when Doré’s gaze lingers too long on Oachi’s budding womanhood; 'Poleon, brandishing the righteous fury of a patriarch who has already lost a wife to wilderness, banishes the interloper with fists rather than psalms. Unfazed, Doré seeks asylum with the Beauvais, only to have the pious André thrash him anew, stripping him of both dignity and his serpentine scapular. Bereft of his dark communion, Doré retreats into a miasma of superstitious dread, a devil who no longer believes in himself. Fate, however, is an arranger of cruel ironies: when Marie, fevered and frail, is left unattended, Doré kidnaps her beneath a tempest that seems to howl in sympathy. Her escape is cinematic baptism—she hurls herself over a snowy escarpment, cruciform against the night, discovered at dawn by Oachi like a fallen angel made of frost. Wounded and hallucinating, Doré limps back to the scene of his crimes, where a spectral Marie—more mirage than memory—materializes to usher him toward the death he has long courted.