LEONARD BUDGELL saw the Canadian North like no one else. As a “Servant of the Bay” he ran Hudson’s Bay Company trading posts for decades in isolated communities up the Labrador coast and across the Arctic, and served on the Company’s supply ship Nascopie. He witnessed episodes and heard stories that would have been lost forever—except that he wrote of them in articles and in letters.

Intact for centuries, Northern ways changed with the advent of rifles and motorboats, radios and electric generators, new foods and different medicines. Budgell bridged the aboriginal and southern cultures. In his youth, he took nurses and doctors to distant settlements by dogsled, hunted in the Mealy Mountains. Later, he was one of the earliest to operate radio stations at places like Hebron and Wolstenholme.

In Arctic Twilight, Leonard Budgell chronicles a traditional way of life that was changing forever, through an outpouring of remarkable letters to a much younger friend, Claudia Coutu Radmore. His pen memorably portrays everything from dancing northern lights and the nesting practices of primal birds to astonishing human adventures and predicaments. Now edited and organized by Claudia, this unique memoir sees the light of day for the first time.