The Outlander

The Outlander (2007) is a western/historical crime novel. Written by Canadian poet Gil Adamson, the novel won multiple awards, including the Hammett Prize, ReLit Award for Best Novel, and the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. The story is about Mary Boulton, a young woman who murders her callous husband and goes on the run in the wilds of Canada, pursued by her ruthless brothers-in-law and tormented by her own unhappy memories and madness. The central theme of the novel is wilderness: physical wilderness, social wilderness, and the wilderness of insanity.

Throughout the novel, Mary remembers her childhood and her marriage. Her father was a grieving widower, a lawyer, and a minister without faith. She had been a disagreeable child, beautiful but lacking the female graces her grandmother wanted her to display. She marries the first man who will have her, John. He takes her out West to where he has acreage, gambles away most of the money, and takes mistresses on the side. Their brief marriage is an unhappy one; she fails to please him, and he alternately ignores her for long periods and berates her for being useless. When their child dies and he tells her that she can just have another one, she goes mad. When he comes home, she shoots him with a rifle and buries him in the mud. Between her memories and her current life, there are brief scenes of the brothers looking for her.

As the novel opens, Mary is already on the run, pursued by massive red-haired twins. She is penniless and owns nothing but the widow’s weeds on her back and a Bible she can barely read, likely because of dyslexia. She stumbles into a church service, alarming the parishioners, but a no-nonsense widow, the old bird lady, takes her home and sees that she has a bath, food, and clothing. Mary is like a wild thing. She rarely speaks, feels no pain, and is plagued by hallucinations. The brothers catch up to her, and she escapes in the dead of night with a stolen horse and some items she can sell for money.



She wanders by herself for more than a week. She has no idea where she is or where she is going, has no survival skills, and is on the edge of starvation. Her horse escapes one night, pursued by wolves. Mary eventually finds the carcass of a deer the wolves killed. A single wolf guards the carcass, but when she approaches, the wolf runs away. Animals, in general, do not like her, and the wolf is no exception. She builds a small fire and roasts some of the meat. William “Ridgerunner” Moreland, a hermit on the run from the Forest Service, finds her. At first, she believes she is hallucinating. He takes her back to his camp, and they eventually become friends and lovers. He teaches her a little about wilderness survival, such as how to set a snare. One day, while she is out checking the snares, he packs up his camp and disappears, leaving only her possessions and a note that says, “Go West.”

Mary meets an Indian named Henry, mainly because he has her escaped horse. She reclaims the horse, and Henry takes her home to his wife before conducting her on to a rough mining town called Frank. On the way to Frank, she is hit in the calf by an arrow, but the injury is not serious. In town, she stays with the Reverend Bonnycastle and cooks for him. One day, a strange man rides into town and turns out to be a friend of Bonny’s. Arthur hears voices, and he used to be one of the Mounted Police until he had a psychotic break. Mary sees herself in this man because similar to her, he is tormented and cannot go home either. Besides Bonny, whose idea of a sermon is to pontificate on shouldering life’s burdens for a few moments before challenging one of the miners to a boxing match he invariably wins, she also meets a dwarf named McEchern who runs the trading post and a giant Italian named Giovanni who makes whiskey.

Mary makes a decent life in Frank, but it all comes crashing down. An explosion in the mine causes an avalanche that destroys the entire town. Mary barely survives, but the Reverend and many other men are killed. She finds another protector in the dwarf, McEchern, as they are both outsiders. She helps with the injured, even though the superstitious miners believe she brought evil on them all. The men below ground are immediately given up for dead, but some survive and dig themselves out. Unfortunately, a reporter arrives to interview survivors and a photograph of Mary ends up in the papers. The brothers had given up on finding her, but now they resume the hunt since they know where she lives.



They track her down, but she sees them coming and fires some warning shots before taking refuge in the woods. She hits one of them, but not fatally. They abduct her, but instead of being terrified, Mary is enraged. They take her to the nearest town where she is placed in jail to await a judge. While she is incarcerated, the sharp-eyed jailor’s wife notices that Mary is pregnant. Everyone assumes it is her late husband’s, but it likely is the Ridgerunner’s. Meanwhile, the Ridgerunner is looking for Mary because he regrets abandoning her. He finds McEchern’s trading post. On the last night before she is due to be shipped out with the brothers, the jailor’s wife leaves her a knife and Mary spends the night digging the bars out of the window. She steals a horse and escapes into the night, back to the remnants of Frank. The brothers decide to cease pursuing her. She goes to McEchern’s and finds the Ridgerunner; the dwarf supplies her with everything she needs to start a life in the wilderness. She leaves the Ridgerunner with a note that simply says, “Find me,” and disappears.