ABOUT
THE BOOK

At the turn of the nineteenth century, naval officer David Buchan arrives in the Bay of Exploits with orders to establish contact with the Beothuk or “Red Indians”, the aboriginal inhabitants of Newfoundland who are facing extinction. When Buchan approaches the area’s most influential white settlers, the Peytons, for advice and assistance, he enters a shadowy world of allegiances and old grudges that he can only dimly apprehend. His closest ally, John Peyton Jr., maintains an uneasy balance between duty to his father – a domineering patriarch with a reputation as a ruthless persecutor of the Beothuk – and his troubled conscience.
Cassie, the fiercely self-reliant and secretive woman who keeps the family house, walks a precarious line of her own between the unspoken but obvious hopes of the younger Peyton, her loyalty to John Senior, and a steadfast refusal to compromise her independence. When Buchan’s peace expedition into “Indian country” goes awry, the rift between father and son deepens and begins to divide those closest them.
Years later, when a second expedition to the Beothuks’ winter camp mounted by the Peytons leads to the kidnapping of an Indian woman and the murder of her husband, Buchan returns to investigate. As the officer attempts to uncover what really happened on the Red Indians’ lake, the delicate web of obligation and debt that holds together the Peyton household, and the community of settlers on the north-east shore, slowly unravels.