Summary
Beneath a pewter sky that never quite commits to dawn, Robert Holliday—Mountie, emblem of Empire, man carved from glacial rectitude—rides into a moral white-out where love and ledger books bleed the same crimson. Betrothed to Ruth Hardy, novitiate of scripture and snow, he believes virtue is a compass; but Ruth’s father was a contraband courier, gut-shot by Robert’s own carbine in a fray of pelts and panic. On the eve of vows, John Blakeman—sable-eyed, fox-furred, whispering corruption like a warm brandy—unspools this genealogy of guilt, and Ruth, shattered, slips her ring into an envelope, sledding away with the very smuggler who orphaned her. The Northwest Mounted Police reassign Robert to Sampson’s Pass, a frostbitten bazaar of whisky, wolfskins, and whispers, where Blakeman now lords over a cedar counter and Ruth’s pulse. Anitah, métisse, trapper, storm in human hide, covets the Mountie’s austerity; when she buries a blade in a would-be husband, duty shackles Robert to hunt her across drifts that swallow hoofprints whole. Yet the captive woman trades a tuft of blood-matted fur for mercy: proof that Blakeman, not Robert, squeezed the fatal trigger on Papa Hardy. Reeling, Robert straps on snowshoes, pursues the real quarry through cataracts of moonlit powder, and watches the villain sink into a frozen gorge—self-buried, ice-gavelled, no tribunal required. With the murderer nullified by gravity itself, Ruth steps from the trading-post shadows, epistle of renunciation fluttering in her mitten like a white flag, and the couple stand amid the hush of falling crystals, their breaths knitting contrition into covenant.
Synopsis
Robert Holliday, a member of the North West Mounted Police, is betrothed to orphaned seminary student Ruth Hardy. On the eve of her marriage, Ruth learns from John Blakeman that he and her father had been partners in the fur-smuggling business until Hardy was killed by Robert during a shootout. Shaken by this revelation, Ruth sends Robert a goodbye note and leaves with Blakeman for a trading post at Sampson's Pass. Subsequently, Robert is stationed at the pass and seeks Ruth out, but is warned to stay away by Blakeman. Meanwhile, Anitah, a half-breed, falls in love with Robert, but when she kills an unwelcome suitor, the Mountie is ordered to arrest her. After finally overtaking his quarry, Anitah provides Robert with evidence that Blakeman actually killed Ruth's father. Armed with this information, Robert goes in pursuit of Blakeman, who is killed while attempting to escape, thus clearing the way for a reconciliation between Robert and Ruth.
Review Excerpt
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The first time I watched Out of the Snows I was hunched inside a climate-controlled vault at the Library of Congress, the 35 mm nitrate breathing like something half-alive. No score, just the flicker of sprockets and my own heart ricocheting off concrete. Ninety-year-old ice crystals seemed to precipitate from the emulsion itself. When Ruth Hardy—played by Zena Keefe with the porcelain fatalism of a late-Romantic cameo—learns that her fiancé killed her sire, the frame flares white, as though t..."
