[In the following review, Pemmican is considered an exciting story, although the reading experience is made unpleasant by Fisher's obsessive focus on sexual and bodily functions.]

Not since The Children of God has Vardis Fisher contributed so vital an exploration of a segment of the growth of the American scene as this brutal, violent story of the war between the Hudson's Bay Company and the new North Westers. His central figure [in Pemmican] is David MacDonald, a fictional character whose concern is the welfare of the HBC of which he is a factor, responsible for the securing of the pemmican for the trappers and the traders and for the trade with the Indians at one of the forts. A new interest slashes across his dedicated life. He sees and falls in love with Sunday, a savage white girl brought up from babyhood as an Indian and promised to a Blackfoot chief. These two threads of plot create exaggerated menaces in David's life, as the buffalo hunt and butchering, the terror of a stampede, the eternal threat of storm become magnified by the hatred of the Indian chief, the suspicion of betrayal—and the growing factor of war to the death with the North Westers. Massacre of settlements, systematic creation of unrest between the tribes, bribery and corruption and theft, and finally a bitter march in the teeth of storm, internationally starved by the watching NW plotters, add up to destruction for the HBC. It is an exciting story, but so overlaid by obsessive insistence on sexual and bodily functions, prurient, over realistically detailed, that the process of reading is unpleasant in the extreme. Is this necessary? For this reader it marred the achievement which otherwise might well be significant.