From the Library: The Dangerous River (NBR)

 Whether it be an imaginary place or, as in this case, a real one, a good book should draw a reader in to both setting and story line. Not for the first time, I picked up this book (and, now that I think about it, not for the second time either), to relive the authors' adventure. Yes, I have read The Dangerous River at least three times now, and am yet to grow weary of the tales' telling.

It was already the late 1920s; thirty years earlier, gold had brought thousands of fortune seekers to the nearby Klondike, the Yukon and Canada's frozen north. Since then, though, the region had returned to a quieter, slower pace of life. Author R. M. Patterson could take stock of the number of people known to be living in the drainage of the South Nahanni River, needing no more than the five fingers of one hand to tally them off - five people within an area measuring hundreds of square miles (interestingly enough, and though he interacted with them frequently, he did not include the indigenous people in his count). Patterson's trips to the Nahanni over succeeding years were both done, largely, in the name of adventure. Reconnaissance figured into the first trip as well, leading to a second trip, cabin building, and a long, cold winter of hunting, trapping and further exploration.

"All this," Stevens was saying, "is ours. All of it! All!... We do as we please - and who is there to stop us? We go where we please - and others follow in the trails we make, if they can. Mostly they can't. When we're hungry we kill King George's moose or his caribou: we ask no man for anything. Who's like us?" ..."I might have been fat and running a greengrocer's shop in Kennsington. But we had the sense to get out while we were young and now we're monarchs of all we survey.."

Read The Dangerous River for those times when adventure seems far away, when time is short and you need to fill that gap between the now and the time you can get out on your own adventure.

Patterson, R. M.   The Dangerous River   Sidney, B.C., Canada: Gray's Publishing Ltd., 1966