Above the precipice, a lone eagle circled. Two, three, four times, it floated across a half-dozen spots of living flesh, six men ascending painfully up the cliff face, praying for wings like his.
Deep in the winter of 1896, Dan Skinner and his younger brother, André, flee into the icy, windswept mountains of British Columbia, barely ahead of a contingent of Mounties and their Tsimshian tracker, Tom LaCross, once a friend and mentor to Dan. In the brutal, relentless cat and mouse chase that ensues, some of these men will fall, but for the survivors a collision of cultures awaits far ahead in the wilderness.
As history painfully unwinds at a dire time for the Native Peoples, and environmental disaster follows the destruction of their way of life, Black Wing introduces a cast of unforgettable characters: two friends torn apart by racial hatred, a Native shaman with formidable power, a wife determined to reunite with her lost husband, a band of Native people fighting to preserve their ways...and generations later, a descendant who takes on the quest for ecological balance.
In gorgeous, sensory, lyrical prose, author David Campiche has filtered his meticulous research on First Nations history and traditions into a nail-biting thriller that pulses with grief and rage at all that’s been lost. Black Wing is a banquet for the senses, a symphony for the emotions, an elegy for what’s gone, and a clarion call for what needs to be done.