Kathleen Winter - Boundless

Hours into my silence, the oldest pine shared a fragment of its silent knowledge. I began to experience the connection I’d begun to know in the Arctic, and what Evelyn Eaton called the responses of the natural world — subtle yet unmistakable — audible only if I agreed to remain with the land instead of insisting on passing through.

Eaton was right in saying these messages from the natural world need, for a time, at least, to remain secret. For the first time in my life, I’d begun to ask questions not of human teachers, but of a crow, a white stone, a deer in the night. I cannot say here all that the land began teaching me on that first consultation I undertook after returning from the North: much of it was meant for me to hear and act on alone, and is still only the whisper of a new voyage, just barely beginning.

THANK YOU, Bernadette Dean, Aaju Peter, Sheena Fraser McGoogan, Nathan Rogers, Elisabeth Richard-Moscovitz, and all my kind companions on the journey. Thank you to the teachers on board our vessel, especially Marc St-Onge for your patience and insight regarding the importance of rock. Thank you to Matthew Swan and Adventure Canada for your generous hospitality, and to Noah Richler for the invitation to embark. Thank you, Rebecca Burgum, for your gentle kindness. Thank you, Laila Williamson of the American Museum of Natural History, for showing and describing to me the garments of Shoofly. I thank everyone at House of Anansi, especially Sarah MacLachlan, my dedicated editor Janie Yoon, and the book’s designer Alysia Shewchuk. Thank you, Melanie Little, for your elegant copy-editing. Thank you to my agent, Shaun Bradley, for your unfailing insight, support, and good judgment. Thank you Lois Carson, for reading and commenting on the manuscript. Thank you, Christine Pountney, for your sacred ministrations. Thank you to my family and friends, and to the living land, without whom I would suffer great loneliness. And thank you, dear reader.

Lyrics from “The Turning” written by Nathan Rogers, copyright 2011 Dry Bones Music, Winnipeg, Canada, have been gratefully reproduced with kind permission from the artist.

I am indebted to Elisabeth Richard-Moscovitz for sharing with me her memories of our journey, which helped me remember details I might have missed or forgotten.

The poem quoted in Chapter One is William Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” All other quotations have their sources indicated where they occur throughout the book.

KATHLEEN WINTER is the author of the bestselling novel Annabel , which won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction, and CBC Canada Reads . Her first collection of stories, boYs , won both the Winterset Award and the Metcalf-Rooke Award, and she has just published a second collection titled The Freedom in American Songs . A long-time resident of St. John’s, Newfoundland, she now lives in Montreal.

House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi's commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada's pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”

Annabel

boYs

The Freedom in American Songs

Copyright © 2014 Kathleen Winter

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This edition published in 2014 by

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Winter, Kathleen, author

Boundless : tracing land and dream in a new Northwest Passage / Kathleen Winter.