A Mounted Policeman goes north after a killer and finds a woman who confesses to the murder herself, a river of burning forest, and a family that has been protecting somebody for years. Curwood was expelled from school, sold his first story at sixteen, and was paid by the Canadian government to travel the far north; he later renounced hunting altogether. The forest fire is the best thing in the book. Fifty-five paintings by Munch, Bellows and their contemporaries, from a snowbound Hudson River to the murderess herself, echo the book's long chase through fire, ice and guilt.