Under Northern Lights

A lone Mountie, Douglas MacLeod, glides through the crystalline stillness of the sub-Arctic, his crimson tunic a slash of blood against the permafrost; he carries not only the queen’s law but a private ache for Suzanne Foucharde, the francophone settler whose compassion has braided an orphaned Cree infant into her own life. Rumour, that shape-shifting wraith, arrives in the person of louche fur-runner Louis La Rocque, whispering that the child is Suzanne’s shameful secret. Her brother Henry, aflame with fraternal fury, punctuates La Rocque’s sneer with a single leaden period, thereby unspooling the moral calculus of the tundra: love versus duty, blood versus badge. MacLeod, shackled by oath, escorts Henry toward the timber fort’s gaol, yet in the whiteout of conscience he stages a counterfeit escape, intercepting the musket ball meant for the fugitive and collapsing into scarlet snow. Spring’s thaw exhumes the corpse of Na Fa Kowa, the child’s biological mother, her testament folded beneath her frozen tongue, absolving Suzanne. Convalescent, MacLeod discards the queen’s silver for a ring of boreal gold, and the aurora itself seems to veil the lovers as they speak vows to a horizon that no longer judges.