Hammond Innes · 1958 · survival

Hammond Innes's 1958 adventure. A dying radio operator picks up a signal from an expedition long given up for lost in Labrador, and nobody believes him but his son. Ian Ferguson goes north to prove it - up the new iron railway from Sept-Iles into the muskeg and rock of a country the old explorers called the land God gave to Cain.

1. 1
   Sept-Iles

   Convinced his dead father really did hear a survivor calling from the Labrador bush, Ian Ferguson works his passage to the iron port of Sept-Iles on the St Lawrence, where the new ore railway strikes north into empty country.

2. 2
   Menihek

   He rides the construction line to the camps at Menihek, among the graders and the blasting crews at the head of steel, and finds men who knew the lost expedition - and one who would rather the whole thing stayed buried.

3. 3
   Goose Bay

   From Goose Bay the search goes on by float plane over an endless waste of lake, muskeg and burnt spruce, where a downed aircraft could lie for a lifetime and never be seen from a hundred feet up.

4. 4
   The Lake of the Lion

   At the Lake of the Lion, deep in the interior, Ferguson finds the wreck, the truth of what happened there, and the reason a man would kill to keep it - alone in a country that kills without needing a reason.