2023-04-17
A man and his son live a quiet life hunting and trapping until interlopers bring trouble to their woods in Stewart’s novel.

In an unspecified location in the bitter northern wilderness, an unnamed trapper lives with his son in the secluded woods. The nearest town, reachable only by walking or water plane, is many miles away through the wilds. No one there knows the trapper, but they know of him, remembering how he towed his sick wife to town on a dog sled with his son strapped to his back years ago. She died in the hospital, leaving the trapper to raise their son on his own. In flashbacks, the reader learns that the trapper’s grandfather built the hunting lodge and cabins in the area, which were later lost in a card game by the trapper’s father, leaving only a small parcel of land with a single cabin for the trapper and his son. The book reads like a stream-of-consciousness version of Jack London’s fiction, part White Fang and part “To Build a Fire.” Much of the book follows the trapper teaching his son, also unnamed in the narrative, how to survive off the land, schooling him in hunting, ethics, and mortality. Their secluded paradise, and the slow, plot-light narrative, is interrupted by the new owners of the hunting lodge, arriving to ready the site for their business venture. The dramatic shift in the plot and pacing is effective, but the author’s mastery is in metaphors, which are woven throughout the story seamlessly (“The mute alarm of absent sirens is loud if you’re listening and the tension in the woods can feel like the skin of a snare drum”). Layered over the detailed descriptions of the wilderness, the novel’s contrasting depictions of masculinity—the trapper who lives in harmony with nature versus the city men who mean to tame it—make for a complex take on the survival novel.

This contemplative tale of survival is a unique and poetic excursion.