River Thieves by Michael Crummey
PRAISE FOR
RIVER THIEVES
“This is a splendid novel reflective of a particular place and time. Michael Crummey is a tremendously gifted writer.”
—ALISTAIR MACLEOD
“River Thieves is a novel of exquisite craftsmanship and masterful artistry that should gain the broad attention it so richly deserves: a novel of intricately balanced storytelling and intriguing location but one also where the keen eye of a poet resides within the language. The writing is simple and beautiful, fully textured and gracefully rendered. Crummey has the rare ability to breathe his characters right off the page and into the reader’s mind, where they then lodge, living on well past the final page. River Thieves marks the emergence of a powerful, mature talent.” —JEFFREY LENT, author of In the Fall
“River Thieves is a novel full of poetic metaphor and memorable images. The language and phrases of the time are richly used, and through meticulous detail it manages to breathe life into past ways. Most of all, it creates a vivid portrait of Newfoundland of another era.” —The Globe and Mail
“A little-known historical atrocity—the extinction of the Beothuk (“Red”) Indians of central Newfoundland—becomes an authentic tragedy in this brilliantly constructed, immensely moving debut novel by an award-winning Canadian poet and short-story writer. … There’s a literary renaissance underway just north of us, and Crummey’s quite literally astonishing debut novel is one of the brightest jewels in its crown.” —Kirkus Review
“In the tradition of such contemporary classics as Cold Mountain and In the Fall, this beautifully written novel is both a stunning adventure story and a profound saga of courage and idealism in an imperfect world…. The last of the Beothuks died 175 years ago. But thanks to Michael Crummey, they live on in River Thieves, a novel of great wisdom, great power, and great heart.”
—HOWARD FRANK MOSHER, author of A Stranger in the Kingdom and North Country
“A stunningly polished and powerful book…. Crummey’s craftsmanship is masterful.” —Maclean’s
“Strongly reminiscent of William Faulkner’s writings … River Thieves is a fascinatingly complex piece.”
—The Kingston Whig-Standard
“River Thieves is a wonderful novel and Michael Crummey is a writer of enormous talent…. Michael Crummey writes like an old pro, and, not so incidently, also like an old soul, who has borne witness to tragic tendencies of humans for generations, and views them with awe and sadness and a clear-eyed compassion.”
—Ottawa Citizen
“A rip-roaring adventure tale if ever there was one … An exceptionally accomplished work of historical fiction that revels in the art of storytelling…. River Thieves is an auspicious debut for Crummey. His next novel can’t come soon enough.”
—Calgary Herald
“A haunting novel … An engrossing and complex story that feels as authentic as a contemporary eyewitness account.”
—Elle Canada
Various versions of this event have appeared from time to time in our histories and other publications, but as numerous discrepancies characterize these accounts, I prefer to give the story as I had it from the lips of the late John Peyton, J.P. of Twillingate, himself the actual captor of the Beothuk woman.
— James P. Howley,
The Beothuks or Red Indians,
published 1915
Before all of this happened the country was known by different names. The coves and stark headlands, the sprawling stands of spruce so deeply green they are almost black. The mountain alder, the tuckamore and deer moss. The lakes and ponds of the interior as delicately interconnected as the organs of an animal’s body, the rivers bleeding from their old wounds along the coast into the sea.
A few have survived in the notebooks and journals of the curious, of the scientifically minded who collated skinny vocabularies in the days before the language died altogether. Annoo-ee for tree or woods or forest. Gidyeathuc for the wind, Adenishit for the stars. Mammasheek for each of the ten thousand smaller islands that halo the coastline, Kadimishuite for the countless narrow tickles that run among them. Each word has the odd shape of the ancient, the curiously disturbing heft of a museum artifact. They are like tools centuries old, hewn for specific functions, some of which can only be guessed at now. Kewis to name both the sun and the moon, the full face of pocket watches stolen from European settlers.
Whashwitt, bear; Kosweet, caribou; Dogajavick, fox. Shabathoobet, trap. The vocabularies a kind of taxidermy, words that were once muscle and sinew preserved in these single wooden postures. Three hundred nouns, a handful of unconjugated verbs, to kiss, to run, to fall, to kill. At the edge of a story that circles and circles their own death, they stand dumbly pointing.
Only the land is still there.