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The time is before Columbus. A famine year is upon the forest. Baluk, the tribe's big-muscled hunter, reports to Chetoga, the old chief, that their people should go "many moccasins" north without delay to the crossing place of the caribou. Dagwan, the malicious medicine man, makes it a condition of the plan that if game is not found, Baluk must die. Dagwan's desires are the chieftainship and Chetoga's doe-eyed daughter Neewa.
The north wind and great snows meet the Ojibwas on their march. The Great Canoe (Death) comes for Chetoga. "The land of the little sticks" (Hudson Bay barrens) is reached and Baluk posts sentinels. But the caribou are not seen.
"What shall be the manner of your death?" sneers Dagwan.
"I go not like a dog struck in the ribs," retorts Baluk, "but like a chief of the Ojibwas. Let the squaws prepare the funeral pyre!"
The flames mount. Baluk, his stoic face agonized, lays by his tom-tom and draws his robe over his head in the inferno. But then the sentinels' signal fires flare. Baluk is dragged off the pyre still alive to lead the tribe against the milling, trampling, stampeding, incredible game herd. Dagwan is sent away for "the slow death" (starvation) while the tribe feasts and laughs and toboggans. The silent enemy, Hunger, snarls his defeat from the lowering arctic storm-scud.
Best shots: Chetoga's lonely vigil to appease the Manitou; the fall of a great pine, symbolizing Chetoga's death; un-faked closeups of deer, wolverines, 75,000 caribou; a bear and mountain lion fighting; the wolf pack trying to hamstring, then Baluk spearing, a bull moose.
Temple Tower (Fox). This is an attempted sequel to Bulldog Drummond, a picture hailed by critics as one of the best crook stories ever filmed. Temple Tower is silly, complicated. Kenneth McKenna, a slim and boyish sleuth who dresses in dinner clothes and an opera hat even while staying in a town defined by the local innkeeper as "the loneliest place in England," is engaged in tracking down an elderly emerald thief who lives in a tower equipped with bloodhounds, secret passages, a beautiful girl, and a masked hunchback with a penchant for strangling people with his bare hands. Typical shot: the criminal-in-chief dropping a rebellious henchman through a trapdoor into quicksand.