The Strange One

Résumé

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.