Freckles

Friendless, penniless, and missing one hand, a young man who knows himself only as Freckles comes down the corduroy road into the Limberlost — a vast, dark, primeval swamp on the edge of civilization — looking for work. Against the advice of his crew, the lumberman McLean takes a chance on him and hands him a job no one else will touch: to patrol the line of a valuable timber lease, alone, and guard its marked trees from thieves.

Out on the line, in fear and solitude, Freckles slowly falls in love. First with the swamp itself, learning its birds and moths and flowers until the Limberlost becomes his cathedral and his school; and then with the luminous girl he names the Swamp Angel, who walks into his life beside the Bird Woman, a wildlife photographer braving the swamp for her work. As he proves his courage against timber thieves and the dangers of the wild, the orphan with no name begins to believe he might be worth something after all.

Beneath its tender romance, Freckles asks whether a person's worth lies in their birth or in their deeds — and the long mystery of Freckles's hidden parentage runs to the very last pages. Steeped in the real natural history Stratton-Porter knew as a pioneering naturalist and photographer, the novel makes the swamp a living teacher and the heart of the story.

One of the best-selling American novels of its era and a companion to A Girl of the Limberlost, Freckles is also an unintended elegy: the great wetland it celebrates was drained away within a generation, and the book preserves it in the affection of the one writer who fought to save it.