Martin Bishop, a farm boy raised by his father on Northwest Canada in the 60s, was taught all his life to be honest and good. At eighteen and recently orphaned, he has to fend for himself. He finds a job as a timekeeper on the railway crew that is constructing the Great Slave Lake Railway. He lands up in an isolated camp in the middle of nowhere among one hundred drunks, half-wits and criminals recruited to lay track. Prud’homme, the depraved camp’s cook, considers his true calling to be an “oracle of doom”. Fisk, the foreman, is out to make a buck and break backs: the crew must lay 52 miles of track in 52 days and works goes until midnight. He fiddles with the railroaders’ working hours, won’t tolerate opposition and uses his ferocious dog to scare everybody. He also gets rid of anybody he doesn’t like by casting them out in the wild forest. Those men become exiles in a new prison, eating garbage and fleeing the foreman’s posses. —mostra.org
