GHOST FOX - Book review

 James Houston’s historical novel Ghost Fox was published in 1977 and takes place during the French and Indian Wars of 1756 between England and France and their respective native allies.

Seventeen-year-old Sarah Wells lives with her mother, father and siblings. Her brother Josh has been recruited, taking the king’s shilling, and now he has to leave his home. ‘His raw recruits tried to line up after him, bumping into each other like farmer’s geese that scent a fox’ (p25). The family own a bondsman, a Scot called Peleg, who secretly meets Sarah in the barn’s loft.

While the parents are away at the market, an Abnaki war party descends on their homestead and abducts both Sarah and Peleg with the intention of selling them into slavery. They travel north into cold inhospitable Canada. ‘The clouds grew heavy, hanging low like blue-grey boulders frozen along the far horizon of the lake. By the evening, the first big flakes came floating down, each one slowly turning like a falling star’ (p191).

‘Taliwan spat into the air, and his spit fell frozen on to the hard-packed snow and rolled noisily, like a pellet of buckshot’ (p110).

Eventually, while in captivity with the Abnaki Sarah acquired a new name, Ghost Fox – Tsibai Wagwise; Tsibili was a word they used to describe the whites, and it meant ‘ghost’. She preferred the simple Wagwise – ‘Fox’. (p181). Sarah befriends another captive white woman, known as Hawk, and they plot to escape, knowing that if caught they will be tortured and killed...

The trials and tribulations of these women are sometimes painful to read. Their world is violent and male-dominated. And yet there is humour and tenderness too.

Eventually, Sarah is wed to a brave and gives birth. She is all-but abandoned to the birthing tent, lying with a knife under her blanket – ‘it will help to cut the pains that come to strike at you’ (pp200-201). All the village women go to a similar tent for their regular monthly cycle.

There’s suspense, action, torture and raw violence aplenty. While often the violence is graphic, the sex is not. Houston clearly completed a great deal of research for this novel and indeed was honoured with the American Indian and Eskimo Cultural Foundation Award.

Houston’s descriptions put you in the scene. ‘She heard the tree frogs croaking, and watched the fireflies flashing, their luminescent bodies moving in random patterns like the souls of long-lost children’ (p26).

A memorable tale about ‘the indomitable strength of the human spirit endlessly in search of freedom’ (Prologue).

Houston died in 2005, aged 83.