The Cave Girl

Amid crystalline drifts of a nameless frontier winter, Margot Sperry—half feral muse, half reluctant Penelope—skulks between skeletal spruces, pilfering bacon and kerosene from the gilded Bates enclave while her guardian-professor dreams of devolution by candle-glow. Enter Divvy, betrothed to propriety yet allergic to its perfume; one glimpse of Margot’s soot-smudged cheekbones and the engagement ring becomes a manacle he yearns to shatter. Baptiste, a métis outsider whose blood carries both voyageur song and colonial resentment, is exiled for petty larceny; he answers with Promethean fire, turning silk tents into auroras of vengeance and driving the pillared Bates clan toward Margot’s rough-hewn hearth. Elsie, corseted rival, cinches her waist with desperation, then trades crinoline for buckskin in a futile masquerade, hoping to refract Divvy’s obsession through borrowed optics. The triangulation combusts: Baptiste and Elsie bind Margot like a living trophy, paddle her through moon-ribbed rapids toward thundering cataracts, until guilt detonates in Elsie’s breast and Divvy—half Orpheus, half frontiersman—plunges after, fists against flinty water, to wrench his muse from the maw of gravity itself.