Charles is English, English to the core. That core was, however, exposed to an overwhelming passion in an even more overwhelming landscape when he set out 20 years earlier to find his missing brother in the Blackfoot territory of Montana. Heard it before, you say. Proud man on epic quest, humbled by wilderness, confronts self. But you have not read ''The Last Crossing." And I wish that I could say the same, because every novel since then (except the P. G. Wodehouse canon, of course) has seemed cramped or stale. Toward the end I felt like Charles, wishing that I could start again.
It is not simply the adventure -- the terrifying Civil War flashbacks, the Blackfoot-Cree battle, the grizzly bear attack, the showdowns, the rescues -- or the fine-tuned tension. Vanderhaeghe describes the 1870s frontier with laconic ease in the distinctly individual voices of characters we trust from the outset. Wagon wheels ''crusted thickly with mud, and then unwound in long bandages of greasy clay." A minister's ''fat little hands cuddled up to his waistcoat like hairless kittens."
There is no stylistic showing off, no Cormac McCarthy-like macho mysticism. The suppleness and grace of Vandherhaeghe's imagery will remind you instead of Charles Portis or Annie Proulx; like those craftsmen, Vanderhaeghe makes his writing serve the story. And the story never flags. Jerry Potts, a half-Blackfoot, half-Scot guide, leads Charles and his brother Addington, a syphilitic Royal Lancer, north from Fort Benton to find Charles's twin brother, a religious missionary. Lucy Stoveall tags along hoping to find her sister's murderer, and Custis Straw, a haunted Civil War veteran, follows Lucy.
Quest and revenge, love and loss converge before the novel's satisfying final twist. ''Never mind I'm alone again," Lucy concludes, ''one bird on a bough in a cold wind."
