The Old Hag
“The Old Hag” is recurring term used to describe serious nightmares. The old hag is a particularly vivid and intense kind of nightmare and as imagery it brings a visceral quality of reality to the text informing the reader these are not intended to be taken as merely bad dreams:
"Naught but the Old Hag can shake John Senior out of the state he gets into when he's sleeping.”
"I've heard him come to himself upstairs in the middle of the night, shouting at something or other. My father had the Old Hag a time or two."
A Perfect Day for Hanging
The author describes the day of the first hanging of the year new year. The unfortunate victims of this dubious honor having committed crimes as foul as the weather of the last day of their lives. The imagery is precise and clear enough to almost make a reader want to rub palms together to generate heat:
“The weather appropriately sombre, a morning of fog and freezing drizzle. No real fall of rain but the threat of it in the air all day. That cold winter smell of wet iron. It was the worst sort of weather for a thief, people bundled under layers, their coats buttoned tight and held at the collar.”
The Absence of Life
One of the characters very effectively uses imagery during discourse to put into cosmic context the irrefutability and unknowability of mortality. Upon coming across a corpse another character wonders why anyone would ever be compelled to touch it. The other replies:
"A dead man is an awful thing to look upon. It's the relic of a thing gone forever from the world. And that's as close as most will ever get to touching something holy."
The Disappearance of the Beothuk
The overarching subject of the book is the loss of the Beothuk, the only indigenous tribe of North America known to be victims of a complete cultural genocide. They are gone and the book puts under microcosmic scrutiny the irreconcilable concept of such an abomination through subtle use of imagery suggesting a broad scope of possible interpretations of the answer to this mystery:
“There was no lack of evidence of a Beothuk presence – abandoned mamateeks, recently used firepits, well-marked trails. Twice Buchan and his men approached camps in which fires were burning and birds on wooden skewers were angled over the coals, but the occupants had seen or heard them approach and disappeared into the woods. The marines spoke of it among themselves as otherworldly, the work of fairies or the Old Man himself, their enthusiasm for the search waning as their fear and distrust increased. To Buchan, it seemed almost a deliberate seduction, a teasing game that strengthened his determination to carry on.”
