Nettie Bridger is looking for her son, Caleb. His preacher father took the boy to the Klondike, ostensibly to spread the Scriptures, and came back on the sly, a drunk, broken wreck, their son left behind. So Nettie takes the money she'd earned in the interim, books passage on a steamship, finds a ragged, tattered scrap of a man named "Moonpeace Thyme", or M.P., to act as bodyguard, and goes into the Yukon, ending up at a place called Brokehoof.
Brokehoof is a bad place to be. Winter holds onto the region with an unnatural strength, and the drive for gold is under everyone's skin. Both of those statements are literal, by the way, as the only gold prospectors bring in is what they dig out from underneath their skin. Which they find on a regular basis, then immediately spend in town, before heading out for more. The exception appears to be the local Mountie, Inspector Lapointe, who is prohibited from pursuing a mining claims or things of that nature.
And there are monsters in the woods. A man called the Pale, wearing a bowler hat and suit, carrying a sawed-off shotgun and riding a giant spider. His face is a vortex, and there are scarce few he allows to leave. Another, who eventually earns the nickname "The Carrion Kid," is a dark thing with sharp teeth and wings that seem to be perpetually molting. The gold-crying moose you're already acquainted with.
Nettie cares not a bit about any of it. Which both protects her, and endangers her. She's not prey to the same demons as the prospectors, who Gooden draws as scraggly, sunken cheeked, wild-eyed men. One good cough would seem likely to break their backs, but they'd still head out the next morning to dig through the snow and chip away at the rock beneath. But that makes her an affront to those same men, and Nettie's not always careful of her words.
Spurrier gives her a sharp tongue, one she hides at times behind an air of culture she's trying to affect, but the dance hall girl comes out almost as easily as the irate mother. She tears into M.P. more than once, who, despite being maybe a half-step above the locals, is at least trying his hardest to help Nettie. A few moments of insight aside, he's not very good at it, but that serves to both make him not entirely credible to the reader, and make Nettie's harsh words feel a bit like she's kicking a dog trying to apologize for piddling on the carpet.
But that's obsession, which is what has its hooks in every person in Brokehoof, whatever form it takes. It makes them blind to anything other than the pursuit of their goal. Even if they recognize the truth on some level, they make themselves turn a blind eye. Much of the narration in each issue is letters Nettie composes to Caleb. As we eventually learn, she hasn't actually written any of them out. She won't admit that she's lost him, just as the prospectors won't admit they're locked in a cycle that's going nowhere.
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