In the following essay excerpt, Smith suggests that for Munro's female protagonist Almeda the wilderness is less dangerous than the human maledominated garrison.

In a well-known passage in The Empire Writes Back, the authors define one of the central problems in the literature of 'settler colonies' as that of the "relationship between the imported language and the new place." This need to find an appropriate language to deal with the reality of new landscapes in settler colonies (such as those in North America, Australia and New Zealand, where Europeans formed independent societies out of colonies originally subservient to the metropolitan, colonial power) is of a different order from the cultural assertions of colonized societies in Africa and Asia. In those colonies, the differences between the indigenous culture and the imposed colonial culture were always obvious:

Whatever the particular nature of colonial oppression in Africa or India, and...