Sleeping Island: A Journey to the Edge of the Barrens

by P.G. Downes

In an age when bush planes and outboard motors were opening up previously inaccessible regions of the Canadian North, Prentice G. Downes, a graduate of Harvard who worked as a schoolteacher just outside Boston, chose to travel alone by canoe to explore the Great Barren Lands.Sleeping Island is the sensitively written and moving account of one of his trips, a journey made in 1939 to remote, and at that time unmapped, Nueltin Lake.

In Sleeping Island, Downes records a North that was soon to be no more, a landscape and a people barely touched by white men. Downes describes the excitement of wilderness canoe travel, the delights of discovering the land, and his deep feeling for people met along the way. His respect for the native peoples and their ways of life, as well as his love of their land, shine through this richly descriptive work.

Downes loved freedom, loved roaming, loved learning. He experienced life in a deep way.

Sleeping Island is a recipient of a National Outdoor Book Award, and is used by a number of outdoor and experiential education programs, including that of McMaster University.
With the kind permission of the Downes family Heron Dance has republished this classic.

324 pages, softcover.

Previous Price: $19.95