Huron Clause
November 1912. On the Bay of Quinte, a Mohawk trapper is beaten nearly to death and left face down in freezing water. The constable does nothing. The Indian Agent offers three dollars toward a doctor's bill and asks him to sign for it.
Huron Clause goes after the four men himself. What he does in the Hastings timber that winter becomes a secret he carries for the rest of his life, and the only record of it is a single photograph hidden at the bottom of a trunk.
Three years later he enlists. France turns a bush scout into a decorated soldier, and for four years the Army is the only place in the world that takes him at his own weight. Then he comes home. Home is a country that will not let him vote unless he signs away who he is, a welcome-home banquet that leaves off every man from the reserve, and an Indian Agent with the legal power to take children from their families.
In October of 1920 they take his nine year old niece.
The letters fail. The lawyers fail. A decorated veteran standing in front of a newspaper fails. So the department moves her two thousand miles west, to a school in the Qu'Appelle Valley where nobody will be watching.
In the worst of the winter, Huron Clause goes and gets her.
What he brings back with him puts him in a Regina cell facing a rope, and the only things standing between him and it are nine girls, one country lawyer, and a photograph in Ontario that the police have not found yet.
Inspired by the life of a real Mohawk soldier of the Bay of Quinte, and by a photograph his family still has.
For readers of historical fiction with hard edges, and for anyone who has ever wondered what the record does not show.
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