In 1935 a boy of fifteen looked out of the train window on the line from Winnipeg to Fort Churchill in Hudson's Bay; there, across the track, flowed a great brown river a quarter of a mile wide—not of water, but of caribou: the annual migration which the first French explorers had called la Foule. From that moment he was infected with the Arctic fever; and it was this disease of the imagination that brought him back to the Barren Lands in 1947. He was dropped by aeroplane on a frozen lake near an abandoned trading-post…. That summer Mr. Mowat … made his first contacts with the Eskimos of the Barrens, the Ihalmiut, before canoeing back to Churchill. Next year, with a zoologist companion, he came back to learn the language of the Ihalmiut, study the deer, and follow their migration north to Angkuni Lake.

Such was the plain record...