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"...a quest of Homeric dimensions... a riveting reading experience. Downes captures a saga of both everyday travails and the larger sweep of history in an accessible, compelling, and colorful page-turner" – Marquette Monthly
Brimming with adventure, romance and the peaks and valleys of the human spirit, The Wolf and the Willow is an historical novel of first contact between Indigenous peoples and Spanish conquistadors.
The book is the prequel to Windigo Moon, Robert Downes' 2017 novel of the Anishinaabek. Willow, a house slave of Black and Arab descent is swept into the 1528 expedition of conquistador Panfilo de Narvaez, who hoped to colonize Florida and find native cities brimming with gold. After a disastrous journey through the New World, she encounters Wolf, a trader, storyteller and spy for the shamans of the Ojibwe people. Wolf is on a mission down the Mississippi to find a mythical animal for his uncles among the shamans.
Together, Willow and Wolf must overcome their brutal captors during a voyage through the vibrant Indian civilizations along the Mississippi, searching for a golden empire amid the ancient ruins of Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis.
The Wolf and The Willow offers a glimpse into the culture of many tribes, including the Anishinaabek, Tionontati, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Dakota Sioux, Mandans, Caddo, and the Mound Builder civilization of the Mississippi River Valley. Life. Life among the Ojibwe in the Upper Great Lakes is a key element in the story. The story also delves into the pre-Colombian Indian city of Cahokia, home of the largest earthen pyramid in North America. Readers will experience in a very vivid way the spectacular Indian civilizations which existed for thousands of years before European armies and diseases swept them all away.
