The Prey of the Strongest

A visceral portrait of working-class life in the British Columbia wilderness, where survival depends on brute strength and the will to endure. Pitt River Pete, a half-breed lumberjack, returns to the mill that defines his existence, carrying the weight of a hard past and the hunger to claim his place in the world. But his wife Jenny has not been idle, and the mill manager George Quin has made his intentions clear. As the saws scream and the logs crash, tensions between men flare into something elemental: love, jealousy, and the ancient struggle for dominance. Roberts writes with raw precision about the machinery of industry and the machinery of the heart, where every worker is prey to something stronger than himself. This is early 20th-century naturalist fiction about what men will do when civilization thins to nothing but trees, timber, and testosterone.