I Heard The Owl Call My Name

American journalist and short-story writer Margaret Craven released her debut novel, I Heard the Owl Call My Name, in the U.S. in 1973, where it became a New York Times best-seller. Originally published in Canada in 1967, the novel, like her later works, centers around the native population of British Columbia.

Mark Brian is a 27-year-old Anglican vicar sent by his bishop to the coastal village of Kingcome to live among the Kwakiutl Indians and patrol neighboring villages by boat. Mark has an unnamed terminal illness and no more than three years to live, a fact that the bishop conceals from him. An Indian named Jim Wallace, who is about the same age as Mark, accompanies him on his patrols and helms the boat until Mark passes his licensing exam. Throughout the novel, Mark is exposed to the visceral reality of death, beginning with his first day in the village, when he finds that the body of a drowned boy was being kept in the vicarage awaiting a burial permit. He learns of the “the swimmer,” the Kwakiutl’s name for salmon, which travels to the ocean in its youth and then swims upriver to spawn in the place of its birth before dying.