In the late 1920's a fur trapper, Jimmie Allen, leaves 'down north' Canada for the first time in his life in order to find a wife. Working at a restaurant in Edmonton, Grasille Jansen dreams of the richer and more exciting lives she has read about in popular magazines as she goes about her work as a waitress. While serving Jimmie, Grasille realizes that Jimmie is a very unusual customer but definitely not a silent man. Words come readily to his tongue and his enthusiastic outpouring of exciting stories of his North (some true, some not) lead to an Othello-like wooing and a speedy marriage...

This is a realistic novel of the Canadian Northwest, situated on Little Bent Tree Lake in Canada's Northwest Territories, in which animals are the chief characters. It describes with humour, drama and pathos a whole community of animals and birds and their unceasing struggle to live. It is neither a fantasy nor a treatise. It is fiction, with creatures of the world playing the main parts in the drama- the beaver, the muskrat, the silver fox, the whiskey-jack, wolverine and many others. Along with all the emotions that make any story worth reading- love, hate, fear, envy- here are such...

Ken Conibear, Northern pioneer, Rhodes Scholar and storyteller of life in Canada's far North, writes of his exciting, dangerous, and humourous experiences taking his boat, the Lady Greenbelly, over 1000 miles from Fort Nelson down the majestic and rugged Mackenzie River to the Arctic Ocean.
He took on this adventure for two reasons. First, he intended to carry freight to the Arctic communities with his newly acquired freight scow, the Lady Greenbelly, and then sell her there for a handsome profit. Second, Bill Sweet, an elderly, retired insurance salesman from Seattle who had read Ken's...