to purchase, please visit Gullivers in North Bay or One Sky in Sudbury

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Excerpts:

 

The Dead Man

My memory tends to deceive me, claiming that no time has elapsed since the night of August 15th, 1980, and assuring me that I knew back then what I know now, that I haven't spent twenty years patching it together. This deceiver tells me that on the night of Noble's death I'd witnessed the whole thing in one grand vision, the way the moon does. But of course the moon does not bear witness ..read more

 

The Call

If you were to look down at it from some height of land, you'd see how much this small mining town resembles a drop of ink on blotter paper, spreading raggedly in all directions without design. On the eastern fringe of town a slow black river runs north for three hundred miles, linking up with other waterways until it eventually spills into James Bay at the old trading post the Hudson's Bay Company once called Moose Fort. Traders coming and going from there would portage ..read more

 

Junkshop

Balzac said the history of Cormorant Bay is no more shameful than any other. The town was founded in the first decade of the twentieth century, around the time the government offered free land to veterans of the Fenian raids and the Boer War. These former soldiers were supposed to survive on plots laid out by the railway, barely arable land that the lying government called the ‘banana belt’. Of course none of this would have been possible without there first having been a full-out land grab from the Cree. One family, the Birds, were central to this story. Chief Michel Bird was one of the signatories of Treaty Nine, his son Charlie, who’d tried to talk him out of signing, would go on to name the town, and Jimmy, Michel’s brother, staked the claim that would become the Blackhawk Mine. As the story goes, Jimmy heard a voice one night while working on a TNO railway survey crew...read more