In the early part of the 20th century, prospectors rushed to Northen Ontario’s Porcupine region in hopes of cashing in on the huge banks of gold, copper, and zinc that lay under the thick blanket of the Canadian Shield. Almost a century later, 1994 Journey Prize winner Melissa Hardy capitalizes on the area with her new collection of short stories, The Uncharted Heart.

It’s fitting that a land so feral on its surface but so rich at its core should provide the setting for stories that are as bleakly realistic as they are fantastic. Steeped in oral narrative traditions, including stories from native sources, Hardy’s writing is often peppered with equal parts history and comic relief, suggesting that her work is as suited to campfire circles as it is to the page. In “Traplines,” a housewife is forced to destroy the Ojibway weendigo, a cannibalistic monster, who violently threatens her; in “The Ice Woman,” a merchant’s apprentice is seduced by the Anishinabe Siren-like nebaunaube.

Elsewhere in the collection, Hardy taps into the lives of Porcupine’s uncelebrated, the wives of the miners, loggers, and prospectors who often go unnoted in history books. “The Heifer” carefully documents a newlywed’s growing isolation while living at the mercy of her husband and the North’s unrelenting weather. But, like other stories in the collection, it takes a sinister turn when she murders her husband to avenge her own misery. The murder isn’t the stuff of thriller novels, though – dispensed with in one sentence, the killing has the quality of an aside, aptly reflecting the woman’s apathy.

Occasionally, Hardy appears to get carried away by her own cleverness. “The Prospector’s Boot,” in which a prospector’s daughter goes looking for her estranged father after the rest of her family has died, is disappointing, in spite of a number of interesting nuances. Hardy uncharacteristically ignores her own cues to further develop the story here, opting instead for a rushed, ultimately nebulous ending. Otherwise, The Uncharted Heart demonstrates Hardy’s talent for capturing a vital moment in Ontario’s history and infusing it with characters and situations that tantalize the imagination.