About This Book
A new world materializes over a ship's bow where every inch is unknown, where savage warriors roam, where danger lurks before every footstep, a place where untold richness justifies each step into the unknown. It is a world where myth finds life and moves before the wind. In 1535, French adventurers battered by three months at sea sail up the formidable Saint Lawrence River disturbing a savage way of life and unknowingly rile an ancient god. Upon setting foot on shore, they find ramparts of trees sheltering a shadow shifting, foreboding milieu, tangles where each capricious footstep takes the voyager deeper into an unyielding labyrinth. Armored bodies brush nature's wetness drooling off undergrowths, around which voracious insects bite every bit of exposed skin; behind the insect swarm, the era's most ferocious savages wait to waylay the Frenchmen; beyond the savages, the Most Fearsome Spirit waits to retaliate for the intrusion. The French invaders, marching lockstep with their god, never met the likes of the Iroquois god whose whispered name causes savages, conditioned since childhood to stoically withstand an enemy's most heinous torture, quiver before their night fires. Why?—the interlopers will soon find out. The Most Fearsome Spirit is unlike the ethereal spirits who inhabit the rocks, trees and waters or inhabit wild life or who throw lightning bolts across the sky or cause the sea to churn; he walks among the indigenous people, and they call him, Atotarho. The bizarre aftermath of his prowling dangles before the adventurers. The French newcomers put up a wall around four flimsy dwellings at a place called Quebec. There, they hunker down, isolated from a war distracted homeland, starving and beset by raging internecine wars. Befuddled by unexplainable events, they cannot distinguish fact from myth: is Atotarho the deformed ogre of ancient legend or the debonair youth discovered on a bony island in the frozen northern sea. The mysterious youth's jaunty wit garners him the friendship of the courageous adventurer, Samuel de Champlain commissioned to discover richness. The youth's mysterious past provokes the pursuit of a superstitious Jesuit priest who believes the boy is the most dangerous fiend between Heaven and Hell. Will the Father of Canada save the boy he believes to be preeminently French or will the militant Jesuit, having witnessed a fiendish work, destroy him? The answer lingers in a precarious land where Iroquois attack Algonquin: French attack Iroquois; the English attack the French; Atotarho attacks at will.
