Always in the background as I wrote this novel was George Whalley’s marvellous biography, The Legend of John Hornby (Macmillan of Canada, 1962), a book that has stayed with me since I first read it thirty years ago. The quotations from it, including “Garden of Desire” and “Country of the Mind,” have been used with the kind permission of his widow, Elizabeth Whalley.
The quotations from George Whalley’s radio drama, Death in the Barren Ground: A Narrative of John Hornby’s Last Journey, broadcast on CBC Radio on April 10, 1966, have been used with the permission of CBC Radio and Elizabeth Whalley. To suit the chronology of my own narrative, in these pages the broadcast occurs five years earlier.
Ken Puley of CBC Radio Archives was unfailingly helpful in finding the material I needed. I thank him most gratefully.
The thought on page 260 that “the robin in the egg doesn’t know that the robin’s egg is blue” comes from Margaret Avison’s A Kind of Perseverance (Lancelot Press, 1993), and is used with her generous permission.
The quotation on page 8 from Alden Nowlan’s “The broadcaster’s poem,” included in his collection I’m a Stranger Here Myself (Clarke, Irwin, 1974) and reprinted in Selected Poems (House of Anansi, 1996), is used with the kind permission of Claudine Nowlan.
Other books that were of great help to me were Knud Rasmussen’s Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921—24 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1930), E.W. Harrold’s The Diary of Our Own Pepys (The Ryerson Press, 1947), and In a Sea of Wind by Yva Momatiuk and John Eastcott (Camden House Publishing, 1991).
I am deeply grateful to Mark Fried, Bella Pomer, and Mick Mallon for reading this manuscript at various stages and for giving me invaluable advice. My editor, Ellen Seligman, has been her usual astute, imaginative, and tireless self; it is impossible to give her enough credit for bringing this book into being. Heartfelt thanks, also, to Anita Chong and Jenny Bradshaw.
In the absence of a good memory, one needs old and good friends. I lived in Yellowknife from 1974 to 1978, I canoed the Thelon River in 1978, but I’ve turned to many others, many of them friends, to add detail and accuracy to my shaky recall. Without their knowledge I couldn’t have built a solid fictional world in which all of the characters, except historical figures, are fictitious. I thank everyone most gratefully who answered my questions. Let me name, in particular, Mick Mallon, John Stephenson, Peter Gorrie, Craig McInnes, Roy Thomas, Stuart and Peter Kinmond, Elizabeth Whalley, Diana Crosbie, Dave Devlin, Doug Ward, Hal Wake, Sheila McCook, Linda Russell, Wendy Robbins, Catherine O’Grady, Eric Friesen, the late Lister Sinclair, Rosemary Cairns, Matthew Crosier, Richie Allen, Huguette Léger, Sheelagh Teitelbaum, Conny Steenman-Marcusse, Marian De Vries, Parker Duchemin, Stewart Chadnick, George Grinnell, Max Finkelstein, and David Kippen.
I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the City of Ottawa.