God's Country—And the Woman

A man comes up the Canadian rivers into country the maps do not cover, and finds a woman running a settlement alone, with a secret and a man coming to collect on it. Curwood was expelled from school, sold his first story at sixteen, and was paid by the Canadian government to travel the far north; this 1915 novel was filmed twice, and the northern spring — ice going out, water rising — is the best thing in it. Fifty-eight plates of river ice, spring floods, and northern water by painters including Winslow Homer and Thomas Moran carry the same thawing current that runs through Curwood's story.