Tous les livres de Fred Bodsworth
The Eskimo curlew, which once made its migration from Patagonia to the Arctic in flocks so dense that they darkened the sky, was brought to the verge of extinction by the wanton slaughter of game-hunters.
Following the doomed search of a solitary curlew for a female of its kind, Fred Bodsworth’s novel is a haunting indictment of man’s destruction of the natural world.
In Toronto, Rory Macdonald, a fiercely ambitious young Scot studying to be a naturalist, wins a summer job banding Canada geese to trace their migrations…
In the bleak muskeg country of James Bay, a Cree Indian girl, Kanina, educated with white people but rejected by the white community when she became a teacher, is returning with bitterness in her heart to rejoin her illiterate family and sink back into the harsh, primitive live of her people…
Caught in the backlash of a hurricane, a wild barnacle goose is blown westward across the Atlantic from the Scottish island of Barra to northern Canada…
The lives of these three are interwoven as the mating of the lost goose is linked to the forbidden love that grows between the naturalist and the uprooted Indian girl who helps him with his work.
Rarely has a novelist woven together a drama of nature and human beings with such singular beauty and depth of understanding. Never has there been a story quite like this one. The reader hangs as breathless on the fate of the barnacle goose - the strange one of Barra - as on the destiny of the two people for whom the great-hearted bird symbolizes their fears and their hope.
Jacob Atook and Niska are Ojibway Indians, living in the taiga forest north of Lake Superior extending up to Hudson Bay. They have been reached by the white man's ministry and economic and recreational wants: Father Webber has preached to them of his God, Manito; there is a trading post in their territory, and white hunters have come to shoot wantonly what the Objibways shoot only in need. Jacob, who has defied his society to marry Niska for love, taking her from an arranged marriage with the more prepossessing hunter Taka, and into a winter of isolated hunting, meets and masters his confusion about the new and old gods, and the taking of life, when he makes a solitary trek in search of the caribou to save his wife and unborn child from starvation. A thoughtful story which depicts the struggle for survival of human and other creatures in cruel country with simplicity and sympathy.
