The Huntress

Bela is twenty when her mother tells her that Charley Whitefish is not her father: her real father was a white man who drove his team through the lake ice before she was born. Her own village already despises her. She refuses women’s work, and when Charley trades her to a chief’s son for a horse she beats the man in a canoe race and tips him into the water. Old Musq’oosis, the hunchback who had been her father’s friend and taught her English, advises her to marry a white man of her own choosing. She picks Sam Gladding, the twenty-four-year-old cook for four land seekers camped across Caribou Lake, and he wants no part of it. Footner had canoed this country himself, and the book leaves every move to the woman. Hollywood filmed it in 1923.