The Woman from Outside

In the far North, “outside” meant everywhere else: the cities, the railways, the world the traders had left behind. So the whole settlement stares when a young woman comes off the season’s steamboat at Fort Enterprise, a Company post nearly a thousand miles from anywhere. She tells only Sergeant Martin Stonor of the Royal North-West Mounted Police why she has come. She is the wife of Doctor Ernest Imbrie, a recluse living beside the Great Falls of the Swan River, and she means to make amends for a wrong she did him. The man at the shack bolts into the bush before they reach him, and what Stonor finds afterward turns an escort job into a murder inquiry, then a pursuit by canoe and horse through country no map covers. Footner had travelled this country by canoe himself.