In 1822, Edward Harriott, a Hudson’s Bay Company clerk on the North Saskatchewan River, began his greatest adventure in the fur trade, an expedition to the Bow and Missouri Rivers in search of new sources of beaver. A young man, he was full of promise and full of love for his Metis cousin Margaret. But something went wrong. The expedition failed and the new fur trade Governor unfairly blamed Harriort. When the Governor took a fancy to Harriott’s Margaret, misfortune deepened into disaster. Written between the lines of recorded history, The Trade fictionalizes the lives of Harriott and Margaret, of Harriott’s powerful friend Chief Factor One Pound One and of the enigmatic Jimmy Jock Bird, a former-Governor’s Metis son who left the Company orbit to become a war chief with the Missouri Piegan. As the wheel of history turns, they are joined by a Methodist missionary and by an artist from York who hopes to achieve fame through his depictions of fur trade life. Far from British justice, their lives are ruled by the price of beaver and the supply of buffalo meat, by notions of territory guaranteed only by threat and force, and by the Governor’s often vindictive exercise of power.