Fifty years after the events that brought him from the horrors of WW II to a small hut on the edge of Hudson’s Bay near the Arctic Circle, Farley Mowat reexamines the people he met and the places he visited. With understatement and power he describes La Foule, the great torrents of caribou that migrate across the barrenlands and the last days of the Ihalimiut Eskimos, suffering through the disease-ridden transition to modernity. His story telling and descriptions of places I’ll never get to are incomparable. He travels a lot by canoe through dozens of rapids and in a feat of remarkable writing makes each set of cataracts fresh and daunting. His analysis of the half-breed he lives and travels with and his two adopted Eskimo children is riveting. December 2004.