Pierre and His People, Tales of the Far North by Gilbert Parker, Fiction, Literary, Action & Adventure 12+

📒 Pretty Pierre is the recurrent figure who links these eighteen stories of Indians, gold- and adventure-seekers and red-coated Mounties in the nineteenth century. Pierre is a young gambler called "pretty" for the red tinge on his cheeks, but Parker adds to the figure: "small and beautiful, silent and deadly." Stories range from the hard realities of "The Patrol of the Cypress Hills," to the ghostly horseman in "The Scarlet Hunter," to the tall-tale bluster of "Shon McGann's Toboggan Ride." (Shon slides down a glacier in a gold-miner's pan.) Thanks to the success of this 1892 collection, Parker became a novelist, a newspaperman in Australia, a traveler through the South Pacific, and a member of the English Parliament. Or as Pierre says, "The higher we go, the faster we live."