Northern Lights

Seventeen stories, published in 1909, range across the Saskatchewan valley and the far North of the Canadian West. Parker revisited the region in 1905, then spent four years drawing on true tales told to him and the reminiscences of Hudson’s Bay trappers and hunters. The first five look back to the border days before the great railway turned open waste into farmland; the rest belong to the settled era that followed, patrolled by the Royal North-West Mounted Police. The opening tale, “A Lodge in the Wilderness,” turns on Dingan, a white fur trader, and Mitiahwe, the Blackfoot woman who came to his lodge without priest or bond, and what that missing bond costs her when he thinks of going home. Guilt, misjudgment and snowbound winters run through the rest. Parker wrote to hold that life before it was forgotten.