Tells the exuberant, ribald, elemental tale of the citizens of a town somewhere on the weather-beaten border between Alberta and Saskatchewan. After Vera Lang consorts with a swarm of bees, something changes in Big Indian. This prairie municipality -- so remote from the rest of the world that its citizens aren't sure which province they can live in -- becomes somehow locked inside its own world of patience, yearning and wilful struggle with nature. Along the way, Big Indian emerges as a place simultaneously in the past and in the present, the real and the imaginary, where a game of cards might last forever and a defeated farmer can freeze on his snowbound plough in June. With his sun-sharpened imagery, unstoppable language play, and frank intimacy with the landscape, Robert Kroetsch creates in What the Crow Said a quintessentially prairie novel.