Native American Meets European Firepower
Exquisite use of imagery transforms the first meeting between indigenous tribesman and the inhuman weaponry of guns into something far more poetic than the subject deserves:
“He holds the shining wood in both hands and peers down its length, a French war-bearer beside him. The war-bearer tells Bird to squeeze. A boom like thunder despite the high blue sky of summer and gulls scream and take wing and Bird stumbles back, his face disappearing in smoke.”
Freezing to Death
The novel opens breathlessly with narration explicating the act of horrendous violence which drives the narrative forth. The narrator is new to the Canadian wilderness which offers a kind of cold almost incomprehensible in comparison to the Europe he knows much better. Violent death is quickly approaching and stimulates his to contemplate the alternative. Although not exactly reaching the peak of brilliant imagery which sustains Jack London’s short story “To Build a Fire” this much shorter description of the misery is powerful nevertheless:
“It’s my second winter in the new world, after all, and my first one I witnessed the brutality of death by freezing. The first ten minutes, as the pack races closer and closer, will certainly be the most excruciating. My skin will at first feel as if it’s on fire, like I’m being boiled in a pot. Only one thing is more painful than these early minutes of freezing, and is the thawing out, every tendril of the body screaming for the agony to stop.
The Epidemic
The narrative powerfully conveys the effects of an epidemic upon a close-knit group of people too busy worrying about living to worry about economics, but not too ignorant of science to benefit from what they could know will one day be termed social distancing:
“This winter of the new illness has pounded us into the ground, but the ground is too frozen to bury out dead who begin to pile up in lifeless longhouses. We are being consumed by an invisible animal, one that slips into our lungs and makes us splatter blood when we cough, one that turns out eyes the color of burning coals and our throats so swollen we can no longer swallow. Every house shutters itself to the winter storms battering it. Each extended family uses this an excuse for no opening our doors and letting our neighbors come inside. What we truly fear is the beast that tracks us.”
Torture
The first reference to torture occurs less than twenty pages into the story. Torture is later discussed in philosophical terms. It is alluded to as metaphor. Eventually, it will become obvious that these references, allusions, metaphors and other examples figurative language are examples of foreshadowing. When the literal torture does finally arrive, it is conveyed through imagery that makes the pain palpable and terror tangible:
“He orders his warriors to squeeze my face until my jaws pop and my mouth unhinges. While one digs in with his dirty fingers, pulling my tongue out as far as he can, the other takes a red hot blade and saws it off at the root. Feeling the blood run down the back of my throat, I wonder if this might drown me. But my persecutors take an iron poker from the blazing hearth and stuff it in my mouth, cauterizing the wound. The burning flesh smells like a cow’s left too long on the fire."
