What the Crow Said

What the Crow Said tells the exuberant ribald, elemental tale of the citizens of a town somewhere on the weather-beaten border between Alberta and Saskatchewan.

After Vera Lang consorts with a swarm of bees, something changes in Big Indian. This prairie municipality-so remote from the rest of the world that its citizens aren't sure which province they live in-becomes somehow locked inside its own world of patience, yearning and willful struggle with nature.

Along the way, Big Indian emerges as a place simultaneously in the past and the present, the real and the imaginary, where a game of cards might last forever and a defeated farmer can freeze on his snowbound plow in June.

With his sun-sharpened imagery, unstoppable language play, and frank intimacy with the landscape, Robert Kroetsch creates in What the Crow Said a quintessentially prairie novel.