The novel opens with a half-page prologue that contextualizes the narrative that follows. It begins, “This is a story a young girl gathers in a car during the early hours of the morning” (1). It’s eventually revealed that the man telling this story to the girl is Patrick, the novel’s protagonist, and that the young girl is Hana. They are driving “four hours to Marmora [a mining town in Ontario] under six stars and a moon” (1).

The first chapter is a pastiche of memories from Patrick Lewis’s childhood (presumably in the early 1910s) in Bellrock, a rural Ontario town in “a region which did not appear on a map until 1910 […] In the school atlas the place is pale green and nameless” (10-11). Narrating variously in present and past tense, Patrick recalls (in the third person) how he grew up among cattle farmers and observed out-of-town workers seasonally infiltrating Bellrock to work in the burgeoning logging industry. He notes that the workers lack connection to the town and seem foreign and rootless—a first introduction to another important theme in the novel, which is the