Through Black Spruce

Annie visits Uncle Will at the hospital. Her nurse friend Eva tells her she needs to talk to him, but at first she feels too foolish. Soon she starts visiting every morning to tell him stories about her life. He has a head injury and isn’t expected to wake up from the coma that he has been in for a month already. When her mom, Lisette, arrives, Annie is irritated and desperate to get out of the hospital. Their relationship appears strained. Annie’s sister Suzanne has been missing for two years. Annie is only one who believes Suzanne is still alive: “Everyone in this place, even my mum, believes she is dead. But I hold out and hope” (7).

Leaving the hospital, Annie drives her snowmobile home to an old goose camp. A man named Gordon is sitting outside her cabin without cold weather clothes on as smoke pours out of her house. He doesn’t talk but writes, “You told me to shut if house got too hot” (8). She meant to shut the damper, not the flue. Her friend can’t speak but the reader doesn’t know why.

The next day Annie decides “to run a trapline to teach my city Indian, Gordon, a little bit about the bush” (8) instead of visiting her uncle in the hospital. Their traps are all empty. Despite Lisette’s worry that Annie will have one of her seizures, Annie refuses to live in the city. She’s spent time in Toronto and New York City but prefers the Ontario wilderness.

Will continues speaking to his nieces, and we learn that their father left them when they were young. Will also lost something that drove him to drink. This description implies he lost his house and family in a fire: “Dig through the ash and burnt timber, through the bits of ruined clothing and blackened shards of dinner plates” (12).

According to Will, Annie sees visions and Suzanne’s strengths are beauty and charisma. “It comes with your seizures, the ability to see the future,” he asserts (13). One evening as Will walks home after drinking with his friend Joe, he encounters Marius Netmaker, who beats him up. By this time Suzanne has been missing for a year, having run off with Marius’s brother, and Annie is in Toronto looking for Suzanne.

Will wakes up in the hospital after a vision of his father telling him that he needs to live: “It’s not you that you live for […] It’s the others” (15). Despite his severe injuries, Will recovers. His friends Gregor and Joe Wabano visit him during his recovery, during which time he resolves to start running and become healthy.

Annie visits Will to tell him her side of the story, why she thinks he is in the hospital. She feels that it is mainly Suzanne’s fault, but she also played a role. One day after school when Annie was 15, Marius Netmaker, 20, tried to talk to her and give her flowers. With Suzanne and a group of girls standing nearby, Annie made fun of Marius loud enough for all to hear. With retrospective clarity, she admits, “I regretted hurting him unnecessarily, not knowing then the grudges he could hold” (21).

Annie and Marius’s families have been enemies for as long as she can remember. They are both very different, the Birds being trappers and hunters and the Netmakers being bootleggers and drug dealers. The whole town appears to take sides, fueling the families’ hatred for each other. The youngest Netmaker, Gus, who Annie used to date, ran away with Suzanne. “I let Gus go into Suzanne’s arms, encouraged it even, and ignored the sting,” Annie reflects (24). When Suzanne and Gus ran away to Toronto together, this only made the two families hate each other more.

After Will recovers, he starts running each morning, although with his smoking and drinking it is slow going at first. He also suffers from PTSD from the attack and fears he will encounter Marius whenever he leaves his house. He is followed home one evening by a car he thinks is Marius’s.

Suzanne has been missing for a year at this time. She went south and made it big in the modeling business. She mailed magazines with her pictures in them to her mom. Lisette, the Netmakers, and Suzanne’s agent all have no idea why her cell phone went dead or why she disappeared.

As Will stays home longer and drinks more, he starts to hear his gun, his father’s World War I rifle, speaking to him: “Son of Xavier, it said. Unwrap me. I have a story for you” (29).

Every time Annie goes to the hospital she has the urge to leave, but she feels strong family ties to stay. She ends up enjoying her talks with Will. Eva invites Annie to go to bingo that night; she declines and decides to tell Will the story of how she ended up in Toronto.

It happened after a bad bout of food poisoning leaves Annie resting in her mother’s home. Eva comes to visit with her baby Hughie. After winning $14,000 at bingo, she wants to celebrate and goes shopping with Annie at the local Northern Store “filled with overpriced and unhealthy food” (37), which is a result of white influence.

As Annie returns to her mother’s home to pack for another trip to the bush, she gets a call from Eva inviting her to go to Toronto with her. She was planning on going with her baby’s daddy, Junior, but when she found him looking at porn and chatting with women online again, she kicked him off the trip. Annie initially says no but then changes her mind. She agrees to come to Toronto, but just for week.