The novel was first written as a script. Consequently it has a very strong structure. A beginning, middle and end in a traditional sense. It is a great story, compelling and engaging. Although the story takes place in 1634, it engages in the sale of guns to the Indians, the pushing of both religion and land ownership and use and conflicting style of government that we still see around us today. Now of course the arms trade is so fully embedded in our culture, land ownership central to our sense of wealth and status, and our European intellectual traditions so powerfully believed in that we dismiss the myths and spiritual practises of indigenous peoples as superstitious. All these issues first appeared right when the Europeans began to trade with the Indians in Canada. And all of them unfold before our eyes, stripped clean in the story.

We live in a world now I think that longs for nature, wilderness, the woods, a fire by the lake. It has a spiritual pull to a simpler sense of self. Brulé, the hero of the story, felt it, and never came back to the European way of life. We read the story and live vicariously through him to reconnect to that living presence of the land.