The Great Karoo

Summary: In early 1900, a young cowboy from Alberta's Chief Mountain country joins the Canadian Mountain Rifles and sets out to defend British Empire interests in South Africa. On the march into the rebel republics, Frank Adams crosses the Great Karoo Desert and decides it is like "a moose to a horse" - at once familiar and yet terribly strange. In this land of dangerous and bewildering extremes, he cleaves to friends from back home: Ovide Smith, the most reluctant of soldiers, and Jeff Davis, the nephew of a famous Blood Indian chief, who is driven to prove himself in this white man's war. As the Canadian horse soldiers are made to pay for their own ignorance and the callous indifference of those who have sent them, their ideas of bravery and loyalty are reduced to their most raw, honest, and dangerous forms. The war introduces them to selves they did not know they contained.

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