‘Ridgerunner’ a perfect pandemic escape
Ridgerunner, Gil Adamson, House of Anansi Press, 456 pages, $32.95 hardcover
Hopefully, you’re reading lots of books in this time of shutdown and isolation. Here’s one that tops anything I’ve read in the past year for a full-immersion escape into another era with characters you can get inside of.
Gil Adamson, a Toronto writer, earned high praise and several awards for “The Outlander” in 2007. It hooked readers with the tale of a woman on the run after shooting her husband in 1903, from Ontario to Alberta and away from her brothers-in-law. Mary Boulton is 19 but a feisty survivor. She meets a mountain man, called the Ridgerunner, but their romance is brief. She winds up in Frank, Alberta just before the mining landslide that wipes out the town including at least 76 villagers (an actual event in 1903).
So, this “Ridgerunner” is clearly a sequel, though you don’t have to read “The Outlander” first. Adamson is a skilled ‘dramatist,’ writing scenes that play out in your imagination like the best Western movie. It’s a book that I read slowly both to savour each chapter and to avoid it coming to an end.
Mary and the Ridgerunner, William
Moreland, are living with their 12-year-old son, Jack, in a cabin near Banff during The Great War. Mary and Jack are taken ill to the Banff hospital where Mary dies. Moreland reverts to his itinerant life, leaving Jack in the care of Mary’s friend in town, Emelia Cloud, a former nun. The father is committed to a burglar’s life, wandering from town to village in Alberta and into the Midwest states, stealing enough money that John will be self-sufficient.
Emelia lives in her late father’s mansion and strives to erase Jack’s backcountry ways, first by giving his Morgan horse to a local outfitter. Jack is beaten up by the school bullies and is missing both his parents. One night he sneaks out of the house, wearing his old clothes and carrying a few treasured books, finds the Morgan and lights out for the family cabin. He’s pretty young to cope on his own, but Sampson, a neighbour who knew his parents, makes sure he has enough food, firewood, etc.
Jack’s story is interspersed with Moreland’s life on the run. Before Jack escaped Emelia, his father returned with a bundle of cash and then immediately set off again for more loot. The most memorable scene is when Jack spends two days up a tree, waiting out a grizzly bear who is sitting at the base, on his fallen rifle.
Emelia is a bitter loser: at 58 she had decided against motherhood until Jack came into her life. She posts a $2,000 reward for his return, so now both father and son are (separately) on the run. Sampson arranges for him to work for the outfitter who is guiding a party of boisterous Americans, high in the mountains. But the reward money means someone will be desperate to track him down. You’ll have to read the book to find out how it all unfolds.
The early days of Banff and Lake Louise are the backdrop of “Ridgerunner,” a mix of colourful locals, tourists, immigrants and POWs assigned to build the road between the two towns. The trenches of Europe are far-removed, but Jack is curious about the prisoners and guards living in a camp nearby. He proves adept as the outfitter’s helper, whether wrangling the horse or beating the Americans at cards. But the family cabin will no longer be his secret refuge.
Gil Adamson has again proved her skill at blending a literary Western (Corman McCarthy comes to mind) and an historical mystery (the nun’s tale is particularly gothic).
In these days of COVID-dominated slowdown, you deserve to escape into “Ridgerunner.”