Buffalo Hunt is one of two new titles in Penguin’s successful Our Canadian Girl historical fiction series. (Budge Wilson’s Izzie: The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t, set in Second World War Halifax, is the other.)

The novel depicts the Saskatchewan Métis in 1865, when the buffalo herds were beginning to die out. It is 10-year-old Angelique’s first time to play a crucial role in the annual hunt. She must run among the fallen buffalo to find her father’s marker and protect the family’s meat supply until her mother arrives to butcher it. This job is usually reserved for a boy, but Angelique’s six-year-old brother is too young. This year also marks the first hunt for the family’s young pinto, Michif, a horse that Angelique dotes on. The hunt looms large in the family’s life, haunting Angelique’s dreams. She worries about the dwindling number of buffalo, the perils the hunters face, and her own and Michif’s performance.

Cora Taylor, a veteran fiction writer born and raised near the Saskatchewan setting of this novel, creates a vivid world of open skies and sun-bleached grass. Angelique seems authentic to her time and place, yet has enough of any 10-year-old in her to captivate modern readers. She longs to escape her chores to roam the prairies with her friends, and when she’s late, she arms herself with plausible excuses for her parents.

Despite the fine writing and characterization, however, this novel made less of an impact on me than others of the series. Perhaps that’s because focusing on a single dramatic event in Canadian history (as do Dark Spring, set during the 1885 Montreal smallpox epidemic, and Terror in the Harbour, about the 1917 Halifax Explosion) is more successful than summarizing a whole way of life, especially given the fast pace of these books. Nevertheless, this novel is an enticing portal to a world that has vanished forever.