Summary
A glacier-lacquered valley, unreachable by telegram, shelters Elliot Straive, a humanist don turned hermit, who has traded lecture halls for cedar smoke and the hush of falling snow; his only syllabus is the beat of his son Eric’s heart against the ribcage of the world. When industrial goliath James Heatherton detects magnetite beneath the moss, he dispatches urbane shark Mark Grant to wrench the land from a dying man’s grip. Grant arrives as Elliot exhales his last, a quill still trembling in his fingers over valedictory ink; the predator tears away the signature, grafts it to a forged concession, and scurries back to his master. Heatherton, scenting legal rot, voyages north with his perfumed clan—wife, son, and luminous Floria whose gaze already hungers for frontier authenticity—posing as vacationers while scouting for leverage. They hire the ‘backwoods barbarian’ himself, Eric, a Vulcan in buckskin whose silences crackle louder than their champagne laughter. Between canoe strokes and campfire sparks, Floria’s cosmopolitan varnish blisters, revealing raw wonder; Eric, in turn, tastes the salt of civilization in her hair. Yet deceit is a glacier within: she finally confesses the ruse, and the forest seems to exhale a wolfish sorrow. Grant reappears, pistol in velvet glove, demanding the signature; Eric’s berserker id almost pulpifies the lawyer before Floria’s horror-struck eyes douse the blood-fire. Repentance follows like spring thaw: Eric splints Grant’s shattered ribs, sings lullabies to the fevered man, and awakens in him a dormant conscience. Reborn, Grant testifies to Heatherton’s scheme; Eric, reluctant landlord of a billion tons of ore, signs away the earth for a single promise—a conservatory where Floria’s beloved Schumann can breathe among maples. The ink dries, the lovers clasp, and the wilderness, momentarily outwitted by mercy, watches iron become arpeggios.
Synopsis
Elliot Straive is a college professor who has left the evils of civilization behind to raise his son Eric in the purity of the Canadian wilderness. James Heatherton sends Mark Grant to get the mining rights to Straive's land as vast deposits of iron ore have been discovered there. Grant arrives as the elder Straive lies dying and has written a final note to his absent son. Grant tears off the portion of the letter with Straive's signature and forges a concession to the mining rights above the signature. Heatherton, dissatisfied with the unwitnessed signature of a dead man, decides to to himself to get Eric Straive to sign the concession. He sends his family on ahead on vacation. The family hires Eric as a guide, thinking him to be a mere backwoods barbarian. Eric and Heatherton's daughter Floria fall in love, but the relationship falters when she confesses that she has lied to him about why they are there. Grant returns upon the scene and tries to force Eric to sign. Eric nearly kills Grant with his bare hands before the look of horror on Floria's face brings him back to his senses. Eric nurses Grant back to health. Grant, won over by Eric's goodness, reforms. Eric agrees to sell the land to Heatherton in order to establish the music conservatory that Floria has told him that she always wanted.
