An old geologist lies in the hospital bed of Toronto General Hospital. He has cancer and is in the midst of remembering that he had omitted the location of a lake in a government survey when he recalls that he has a daughter. He calls her name, Marguerite, and discovers she is sitting next to him, wearily retorting that she has been next to him all morning.  George experiences a flashback to when he was a young adult. George was a geologist who surveyed the New Ontario area in 1910 for the purpose of map-making. He had been engaged to marry Miss Frieda Eckert, the daughter of one of his professors. While surveying the land as a worker for the Bureau of Mines, George was directed to set camp at Golden City. When he later leaves the city to explore the neighboring townships, George sees a large moose up close and takes notes in his canoe. Suddenly his canoe tips over and he sees a small woman giggling. He approaches her and explains that he is a geologist exploring for the Bureau of Mines and she seems confused despite being fluent in English. In a flash she says she must go and disappears.  George frantically takes down his coordinates to remember the first place he encountered the woman.  Later on, he finds the woman again, and she seems distressed while dragging a travois behind her. She tells him her two children and her husband have passed away from a fever and tells George that she has buried them upriver. George offers to camp outside her tent and protect her, or take her to Golden City and provide her a spot at the public house. However, the woman refuses. When George asks her to at least tell him her name she replies that it is Marguerite.  Three days later, George tries to find Marguerite when a thunderstorm brews up. Luckily, Marguerite catches George in the rain and invites him in her cabin. While she dries herself off, George catches himself having intimate thoughts about her until he remembers he is engaged to marry Frieda in a few months. When he invites her again to come to the city with him, Marguerite firmly says that she cannot go beyond the river. However, she begs George not to go and they embrace and kiss. In the meantime, George writes a letter to Frieda, lying about how he wishes to rush back to her and if it would be alright to postpone their wedding by a week. Nonetheless, George and Marguerite part ways and George marries Frieda in the fall of 1910 and they have a child.  Soon after, George goes up north again and visits Marguerite’s cabin. It is empty, but he finds a letter from Marguerite saying that she has gone to look for him. He sets the cabin on fire. Back at home with Frieda, George names their fourth child Marguerite, whom he adores immensely.  Back in the present, George feverishly tells his daughter Marguerite, now an adult, that he had a dream about her as a young girl alongside two other children at a cabin. Marguerite merely brushes his words off saying that the morphine is getting to him.