Northern Canada Book Review.
UNDER FROZEN STARS by George Marsh – Classic Northern Canada Book Review
“I have come, oh Jingwak! Otchig, the shaman from God’s Lake who fears not your magic is here!”
Silence, ominous, foreboding, blanketed black forest and murk-shrouded lake. Then the drunken scream of a loon broke the spell. A shudder, like a wind ripple across still water, swept through the gathered Ojibwa People…
And so George Marsh’s UNDER FROZEN STARS tells its thrilling story of the passions and mysteries of the Canadian Northlands.
Long ago, when I was a boy, I was given the book THE WHELPS OF THE WOLF, written by American author George Marsh. I didn’t know then that George had actually paddled the rivers of the far country. And dogsledded there too. I just knew that he took me to that country and showed me all of its forgotten splendour.
And later I read his FLASH THE LEAD DOG. And slowly, years at a time, I’ve come into other George Marsh titles, one by one.
Here’s my celebration of his UNDER FROZEN STARS.
“SMOKE, OLD CHUM, there’s something adrift out there to the south.”
Ears pricked, the massive black-and-white husky raised slant eyes to the speaker. While his heavy coat and plume of a curved tail fluttered in the driving wind which beat across the great lake.
Shading his eyes with a brown hand, Jim Stuart watched a distant object, which regularly disappeared, to lift again on the white crest of the running seas.
“Acts like a filled canoe, Smoke. I’m going to get the glasses…”
Through his binoculars, Jim saw what seemed to be a boy hanging onto the swamped boat. He called his friend Omar. They needed to get their own canoe and head out in those wind-tossed waters.
The lined face of his mixed-blood partner stiffened in a black frown. “We fail, too, out dere! Tough job — put de cano’ into dat wind!” said Omar.
Stuart laughed as he started for the shore, followed reluctantly by his friend. “What! The best canoe-man I ever saw — afraid of that water?” he taunted. “You sure hate that LeBlond outfit! But we’ll show this fellow some paddling!”
And they pulled out their Peterboro canoe.
“Back, Smoke! Back!” shouted Jim, and the great husky returned to the beach where he yelped out his chagrin.
Out into the welter of wind-driven water the two men went.
UNDER FROZEN STARS by George Marsh – Classic Northern Canada Book Review
And so he rescued Aurore LeBlond, with black hair and dark mischievous eyes. And she was the daughter of the man who was rapidly driving Jim out of the fur trade on the Mitawangagama, the Lake of the Sand Beaches.
Later that night he met Louis LeBlond, who first thanks Jim for rescuing his daughter. But — after LeBlonde’s sly lieutenant Paul Paradis whispers in his ear — the factor from across the big lake turns to anger.
And so the story roars along with high emotion. Love for the beautiful lively Aurore. A Scotsman’s hate for his enemies. The struggle to make his trading post a success.
Jim Stuart would soon need the strength of his three friends. Omar Boisvert, of Scotch, French and Ojibwa ancestry. And Esau Otchig, a full-blooded Ojibwa — old, strong and the son of a shaman. And the love and loyalty of Smoke, his Ungava lead dog.
When Jim heard the story of why the district’s Ojibwa trappers were avoiding his post, he saw it all. “So they are bribing the medicine men, the conjurors, are they, to keep the trade from our Sunset House?”
“Ah-hah!” Esau Otchig muttered.” Dis Jingwak put de devil into Sunset House. Wal, we put de devil into Jingwak.”
“Good!” agreed Stuart, “but how?”
HOW, WHEN HE found him, he was to break the power of the sorcerer, he did not know. But the future of Sunset House depended on it.
At first, when he met groups of Ojibwas, he tried to explain the false stories being told by the treacherous Paul Paradis about him. Some of the older native men and women believed him. They remembered Jim’s free-trader father — who had treated them generously. But the younger natives believed the lies and deceits of Paradis and the sorcerer Jingwak.
There were arguments. Heated threats. And then ambushes and firefights in the forest. It became war.
After one attack, his great Ungava husky was missing. He found dog prints in the mud at the river’s raging edge. But Smoke was gone.
They drew closer to confronting Jingwak.
And George, as always, wrote about the Wilderness and its changing Seasons of our mythic Northern Canada. Like James Oliver Curwood before him and Trygve Lund after, George Marsh knew and loved the vast Northern wilderness. He wrote about places he had been.
IT WAS SEPTEMBER, the Moon of the Mating of the Caribou. September, when through the wild valleys, the lifting sun rolled back curtains of mist, veiling ridges touched here and there with yellow and gold by the magic wand of the frost. September, when the muskegs were blue with ripened berries and the loons, restless with the urge of far journeying, called at sunset across nameless lakes.
North, on the vast marshes of the great bay, the legions of the geese were assembling for their autumn rendezvous — later to ride the first stinging winds south over the green seas of the spruce and the flaming islands of the hardwood ridges.
Paradis had escaped their confrontation with Jingwak.
Was Paradis ahead of them? Had he gathered new men about him to continue his open warfare? Or did he wait hidden and alone in his canoe, rifle at the ready, for ambush?
An interval of mellow days — the early Indian Summer of the far north — would companion the canoe up the Sturgeon to the Pipe-stone Lakes. But before the voyageurs saw Sunset House, the Moon of the Falling Leaves would wane, the first flurries of the long snows whiten the valleys, and the coves of the lakes and the backwaters of the rivers film with ice.
Winter was coming to the Northcountry. First, the time of the Freezing Moon. When forming ice made canoeing impossible. But the rivers weren’t iced enough to hold dog sled teams.
And then Winter was here. And they could mush their excited dogs under frozen stars.
There were questions. Where is Paul Paradis? And then a more harrowing one: Where is Aurore LeBlond?
NIGHT AFTER NIGHT the hurt which tortured his days waked him with the poignancy of the dreams it brought. And, after supper, as Jim Stuart conjured up the face of Aurore in the fire which held his brooding eyes, often, from old habit, his hand instinctively groped for the furry ruff, the pointed ears on the massive skull of Smoke lying beside him, to meet no touch of a moist nose, no lick of a warm tongue. He had lost them both — the two creatures he loved.
And UNDER FROZEN STARS races to its final confrontation…
UNDER FROZEN STARS by George Marsh – Classic Northern Canada Book Review
==>> Take off to the Great White North! SEE SLED TRAILS AND WHITE WATERS – A Collection of Stories by George Marsh – Book Review. Northern story collection by Western writer George Tracy Marsh.
==>> And be sure to read my popular online short story WOLFBLOOD, a Northwestern yarn in the Jack London and George Marsh Tradition at WOLFBLOOD: A Wild Wolf, A Half-Wild Husky, & A Wily Old Trapper. Tag: Dogs – Fiction
NORTHERN STORIES & BOOK REVIEWS – An Exciting Look at the writers and editors – CALL OF THE NORTHWESTERN GENRE: Best Books, Animal Stories & Mountie Fiction…
