5★
I don’t know if I can explain how much I enjoyed this book. I postponed reading it, thinking it might be long and slow, but for me, it was completely absorbing and fascinating.

This may be helped because my mother was a Lewis and Clark enthusiast and had a wonderful leather-bound edition of their journals. I didn’t read them, but I did read some of her other mountain men and fur trapper books and about opening up the American West. “Opening up” from a colonial-European standpoint, that is. I imagine the original inhabitants saw it as an invasion. We have the same conversation in Australia, settling vs invading.

Back to the book. This is historical fiction at its best – based on real people, a real expedition, real circumstances, all lifted and carried away on a magic carpet of imagination and inventiveness. That’s a ridiculous metaphor, I guess, but it WAS quite a ride.

Walter Forrester is 70, has no heirs, and is finding a home for his great-uncle’s papers and journals. The great-uncle was Lt. Colonel Allen Forrester, who explored the Alaskan wilderness in 1885 under extremely difficult circumstances, leaving his young wife back in Vancouver at the army barracks. Walt begins corresponding with the curator of a museum in the small mining town of Alpine, Alaska, near where the exploration took place.

We are treated to the diaries of both Allen and Sophie, his wife, their letters, notes on the artefacts the explorers brought back as well as Sophie’s introduction to photography and her work studying birds. There are also many photographs of the area in the 1880s up to today.

Sophie was desperate to accompany her husband, but she is stuck at home, pregnant. And truth be told, tough as she turned out to be, I don’t think she’d have lasted the distance.

On the other hand, along the way, Forrester and his men attract a hanger-on, an Indian woman and her dog. She wears an otter pelt, and her story is typical of a few unbelievable ones (but who knows???) that Forrester includes in his diary.

Samuelson, who can interpret, relates her story to the men. She said a good hunter had come out of the mountains one year and asked her to join him, so she did. But he confined her to a fishy, smelly cave. Forrester writes:

“He warned her to never leave the den. She was lonely, so one day she tracked him through the snow. After a short time, his prints turned to otter tracks. She kept on them until she came to a bank den. That’s when she saw her husband in his true form – a river otter, being welcomed by his otter wife.

Tillman was disbelieving. I had heard similar stories among Indians, but not such a firsthand claim.

-- They believe it is a thin line separates animal & man, Samuelson said. -- They hold that some can walk back & forth over that line, here a man, there a beast.

-- So what happened?

Tillman sat forward. He reminded me of a small boy listening to a tall tale, begging for what happens next.

-- She went back to their own den to wait for him. When he fell asleep beside her, she cut his throat. In the morning light, she skinned him out. That otter pelt on her shoulders – that there is the skin of her husband.

-- Jesus, Pruitt said.

-- But you don’t believe a word of it, do you? Tillman said.

Samuelson shrugged.

-- What did she say at the last, when she was walking away? Tillman asked.

-- She says the Wolverine River is no place for men like us.”

And she was pretty much right. She continues to trek along behind them as they risk their necks, racing across cracking ice to reach the other side of rivers, nearly starving and freezing to death, sick and miserable.

They also see other mysterious examples of 'man or beast or combination thereof'. They begin to wonder if they're hallucinating because they are so removed from the reality they know.

Ivey tells it like it was – desperately treacherous, and that’s without the threat of a witch doctor, who also seems to haunt them, as well as some Indians who would like to do them in.

But it was the helpful Indians along the way that allowed them to visit this spectacular wilderness to map it for the future. Sadly, it also opened up the country for today’s foresters and miners, and that’s a small part of Walt’s discussion with the curator.

The main story belongs to Allen and Sophie Forrester. While home alone, Sophie yearns to do something, not sit still, and has a hankering to capture light. When she discovers photography, she sees a way to look at things differently. She invents a camera hide and longs to catch a hummingbird on film with the light just so.

The story, the writing, the interspersing of old diaries and today’s correspondence are all beautifully done.

I haven’t yet read Ivey’s The Snow Child, but I certainly will.

What a fantastic production this is. Thanks to NetGalley and Hachette Australia for the preview copy from which I've quoted.