Charley Kennedy has never been able to sit still. While his sister Kate accepts the quiet life planned for her at the Red River Settlement, Charley stares out at the frozen wilderness beyond their door and feels the wild calling his name. The year is the 1850s, and the Red River Settlement sits like a lonely outpost at the edge of the civilized world, a rough mix of Scottish traders, French-Canadian fur brokers, and Indigenous peoples living in the shadow of the vast, unforgiving North. When Charley's father insists he abandon his boyhood dreams and take up the serious work of adulthood, Charley does the only thing that feels right: he runs. What follows is a sequence of hair-raising adventures across the frozen rivers and endless pine forests of the far north, where Charley must learn to survive not just the brutal cold, but also his own reckless heart. Ballantyne drew on his own years with the Hudson's Bay Company to craft this story, and the result pulses with the kind of raw, early-19th-century energy that made him the father of the boys' adventure genre. This is a book for anyone who has ever looked at the horizon and wanted to disappear into it.
