Lost In The Barrens

“‘You’ve come to meet the north, my lad,’ he said, ‘and I’m thinking you’ll be in love with it before the month is out.’”

Jamie Macnair meets his uncle Angus Macnair on the train platform in The Pas, Manitoba, and is greeted with this positive affirmation. Angus personifies the north as if it is a person Jamie can meet and love. Angus suggests through this statement that nature is both mankind’s natural home and its source of contentment and happiness. This is something that the Cree understand (through Awasin) and that Jamie will come to understand by the novel’s conclusion.

“Not twenty miles away was the settlement of a band of Woodland Cree Indians. These fine and sturdy people had long been Angus Macnair’s best friends and they soon became Jamie’s friends as well.”

This passage assists readers in orienting themselves to the landscape that contains white trappers who live in permanent, fixed structures and the Cree, who live in similar structures in the forests less than 20 miles away. Likewise, the proximity allows for friendships, cooperation, and alliances. Later it is revealed that the Cree wear jeans and T-shirts, hunt only with rifles and ammunition, and have taken many white men’s habits and tools into their camp, including axes and hatchets, pots and pans, and other metal objects. The Cree are unique in their fusion with the white trappers as the Denésuliné and Inuit tribes encountered later in the novel are largely free of outside influence, save for a desire to hunt with rifles over bows.