Hawk's Hill Books in Order

The Hawk's Hill books follow a quiet, animal‑loving boy named Ben MacDonald growing up on a prairie farm north of Winnipeg in the 1870s. Ben is small for his age, slow to speak, and far more at ease with wild creatures than with most people in his own family.

In the first novel, Incident at Hawk's Hill, a simple day of exploring turns into a fight for survival when Ben wanders away from the farm and becomes lost on the sweeping Canadian prairie. Separated from everyone he knows, he stumbles into the den of a female badger that has recently lost her own young. Instead of attacking him, she slowly accepts Ben as part of her world, bringing him food, sharing her shelter, and tolerating his clumsy attempts to imitate her movements.

For months, the farm family and neighbors search the fields, convinced they are looking for a body rather than a living child. While they despair, Ben learns to move, eat, and hide like a wild animal, blurring the boundary between human and beast. The book lingers on details of the badger’s life underground, the sounds and scents of the prairie, and the toll of grief and hope on the family left behind.

Eventually Ben is found and brought back to Hawk’s Hill, with the badger trailing close behind. The animal that saved him becomes part of the farm’s uneasy routine, forcing Ben’s father to confront both his own fear of the wild and his distance from his youngest son. The story is as much about a family learning to see their child clearly as it is about a boy living with a badger.

Return to Hawk's Hill picks up about a year later. Ben is still shy and still more attuned to animals than to people, but he is beginning to find his place in the human world. When a cruel trader from the first book reappears, Ben’s attempt to escape sets off a new disaster. He ends up adrift on the wide waters that feed Lake Winnipeg, far from any help.

This time his rescuers are human. Members of a Métis community pull him from danger and bring him into their settlement. Ben must navigate an unfamiliar culture, new languages, and different ways of living on the land, even as his family launches another desperate search. The novel explores respect, misunderstanding, and slow‑building trust between the prairie farm family and their mixed Cree and French neighbors.

Across both books, readers can expect vivid natural history, careful attention to prairie weather and wildlife, and a strong emotional core. The Hawk’s Hill series is less about spectacle than about how one sensitive child bridges worlds: between people and animals, settlers and Indigenous communities, and fear and understanding.