The Long Portage

Vernon Lisle works the British Columbia bush and carries a debt he cannot set down. The guide blamed for a sporting expedition that ended in death was the son of the neighbor who befriended Lisle’s father, and Lisle is certain the charge is a lie. Along the river with an Englishman named Nasmyth, he opens the caches the party buried and finds that George Gladwyne did not simply die of bad luck after hurting his leg at a portage, and that the cousin who inherited the estate has reason to leave the record alone. The trail runs from the bush to a country house on the English moors. Bindloss farmed in Canada before he wrote, and it shows: the cold, the carries, the counting of provisions are observed rather than invented. Published in 1912, and in Britain as The Pioneer.