THE WHITE WILDERNESS
BORN ON SNOW-SHOES, by Evelyn Berglund Shore; Robert Hale, English price 16/-. VELYN BERGLUND and her two sisters grew up in a cabin north of the Arctic Circle, 280 miles beyond Fort Yukon. Her book is a matter-of-fact account of extraordinary hardships and adventures in fur trapping, the more remarkable for having been met with equanimity by three young girls. A series of family tragedies-the deaths of the three boys of the family, and the father, a trapper, becoming a_ total cripple through arthritis-left the mother and three girls, aged 13, 12 and 10, to fend for themselves. But instead of hurrying from the northern wilderness, the family joined forces with an old trapper. That was in 1929. For the next 12 years the mother, the old man and the girls ran 200 miles of trapline. The laconic style of Born on SnowShoes intensifies the privations and dangers overcome. Each autumn eight cords of wood had to be cut, hauled and stacked; berries picked and_ preserved, caribou and bear shot and put in a natural deep-freeze .for winter meals. Then the long winter of temperatures often 70 degrees below zero, when the girls "ran the line" with their dog teams, setting and baiting traps, loading the frozen bodies of marten, wolf and wolverine on to their toboggans. Spring was (continued on next page)
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(continued from previous page) time for beaver-trapping and wolf-skin-ning; the brief summer for the boats, piled high with furs, to be taken down river to Fort Yukon. Their life followed -an_ implacable seasonal routine, with each year the girls er, over more of the real work. The detail fascinates. But how, one wonders, did the girls really feel about such a life? Feelings hardly enter Born on Snow-Shoes. The author gives a page to an accident in which she lost the sight of one eye, and ends the incident with, "But I got along well enough with ene eye. I still do." This same homespun terseness appears in the captions to the many illustrations: "Elsie with a grizzly"; "Evelyn with the wolves!" It
is obvious why the journalist Ernie Pyle urged Evelyn Berglund Shore to write
this book,
C.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19560831.2.23.4
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 891, 31 August 1956, Page 13
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366THE WHITE WILDERNESS New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 891, 31 August 1956, Page 13
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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