Trees Are Lonely Company

Patricia Morley is professor emeritus of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University and the author of Margaret Laurence: The Long
Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

In these 20 stories, Howard O’Hagan (1902–1982) writes about
Canada’s western wilderness landscape and the characters who inhabited
it in the first six decades of this century. As a native-born westerner,
O’Hagan knew the wilderness well and celebrated the great mountain
terrain in lyrical and highly evocative prose.

This collection contains two earlier volumes, The Woman Who Got on at
Jasper Station (1963) and Wilderness Men (1958). Stories from the latter
are biographies of western heroes, Native and white, including Grey Owl,
Almighty Voice, and a legendary fugitive, Gun-An-Noot. In a foreword,
the author notes that these men “met life alone in the sombre forests
of the Pacific slope, in the uptilted land of Rockies, on the northern
prairies, or in the wastes of the Arctic.” The stories catch the
hard-bitten courage and loneliness of these lives, their spiritual
depths, their fears and moral crises.

O’Hagan is best known for his one novel, Tay John (1939), but his
stories are beautifully shaped, stark, and often profound.