WINTER

A personal record of a winter spent some years ago in the plateau region of Canada, one of the coldest places on earth, has all ""the lovely loneliness of limitless land and sky"", the scintillant brilliance of its snows, and the desolation of an uncharted territory. An ethnographer, Osgood was unprepared and unequipped for the predicaments he was to face in the process of learning to stay alive. And in that process, he was to handle a team of dogs, with a savage streak, and procure fish for them before and after the lake froze over; to innure himself to a diet of fish- as an appetizer and as a dessert; to insulate himself against the stiff grasp of cold- minus forty; to sled across some 1000 miles, alone save for the presence of Neidja, the woman of the snow; to resist the depression which comes with the long months of darkness; and to quiet the touchy irritability of his two friends, who with their Indian wives, gave him the wisdom of their experience without which he could not have survived.... A sensitive, and occasionally reflective, transcript of an experience which has the fascination of its untouched terrain, of the ordeal- not of hunger or danger, but of fear and fantasy- bred in the solitude and silence of the far north. Effective.