Tension simmers among whites, "'breeds," and Indians.
In the absence of doctors, Mike must assist in amputating a man's leg (without anesthesia).
Kathy announces she's pregnant, and shortly afterward a fire levels her town, destroying her home, incinerating her neighbor's son. Yet this is no happily-ever-after trifle: Every tender moment is offset by tragedy, every triumph booby-trapped with loss. She weds Mountie Mike Flannigan after seeing him a mere handful of times and joins him in the wilds of British Columbia. Mike is the real-life tale of Katherine Mary O'Fallon, a turn-of-the-last-century Boston lass who, stricken with pleurisy, (one of those literary wasting diseases about which one no longer hears) is sent to Canada to take in the bracing fresh air at her uncle's cattle ranch. I pick it up about once a year, intending merely to leaf through, and end up as engrossed as the first time I read it the themes of resilience, a woman's indomitable spirit, of living a life of purpose, and doing so with gusto and courage, still hook me.Ī classic girl's adventure yarn, Mrs. After all this time, it's held together with rubber bands and Scotch tape, the pages weathered and dog-eared. Mike has sat at my bedside ever since-traveling with me from Minnesota to Ohio to New York and, finally, to California.
Figuring that if he'd swiped it, it must be juicy, I hightailed it to my room, slid under the covers of my canopy bed, and dug in. I didn't stop to wonder why he would have boosted a love story, first published in 1947, about a plucky 16-year-old girl who married a Mountie. ANTHONY, the Minneapolis junior high my brother had attended. The manila library pocket, its checkout card intact, was stamped SUSAN B. Mike, with its cover illustration of a parka-clad girl on a dogsled, stopped me. I'd snuck in there to snoop for contraband issues of National Lampoon, which my mother insisted he hide from me (already possessed of a journalist's curiosity, I took that as a challenge). Mike when I was in sixth grade it was buried under a stack of tattered comic books in my older brother's room. It taught her about dreams, about love, and-in a remarkable plot twist-about the courage it takes to really live.
For Peggy Orenstein, it was one of those books-the kind you keep forever and read again and again.
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