BLACK WING

In 1890s British Columbia, a scout of Indigenous lineage tracks a White fugitive whom he once mentored in Campiche’s historical novel.

Dan Skinner, 34, finds himself on a cliff in the Canadian wilderness with younger brother, André. The brothers are on the run following the often-drunk André’s killing of a man in a brawl in the frontier town near the farm of Dan and his wife, Rebecca. Dan is more agile than André, having been tutored by Tom LaCross, the very scout guiding the posse of lawmen hunting down the brothers. In an accident, most of the lawmen lose their footing on the rocky terrain and fall to their deaths; the remaining one shoots and kills André. Tom prevents him from killing Dan before the man is crushed to death by a stone. Tom soldiers on to capture Dan, although he takes none of the lawmen’s weapons. Thinking Tom has a gun, Dan lures him into a pit of wood spikes. Tom falls into his former student’s snare; the fates of both men are irrevocably changed when “ten Native men step[ped] wraithlike into the firelight.” Meanwhile, Rebecca launches a search party, resulting first in joyful reunion, then in staggering loss. A parallel narrative, interwoven between the 1890s-set chapters, follows environmentalist Katherine Skinner in the 1990s. The author has crafted a lyrical commentary on and celebration of the Pacific Northwest wilderness and the struggles of the human characters that he places within it. The Dan/Tom tracking sequence is a particular tour de force, as the wilderness melds with the men’s inner dreams and demons (“The dreamworld and the real world coexisted for Tom. There was no sharp delineation. He walked with a foot in both”). While the intercuts to Katherine’s story are at times jarring, Campiche also marvelously subverts expectations several times in his unspooling narrative.

An absorbing, mystical adventure story of intertwining cultures.