Under Polaris: An Arctic Quest

by Tahoe Talbot Washburn

Washburn made a concerted effort to learn the survival skills of the Inuit women and to understand their lives. The process of making caribou skin clothing for herself and her husband is described with great clarity and humour. Though not sharing their language, she sat with the women while they worked, quietly imitating their actions as they scraped and softened the skins and sewed the pieces with skilled hands. She tells of their patience and gentle amusement as they helped her, their curiosity about her way of life, and their generosity in sharing meager resources.

246 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1999

Reviews

[Peter Tutak · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came across this work in a used book store for about a buck, having skimmed it, and thinking it would make a breezy kind of read. It turned out to be so much more. I enjoyed it to the hilt. The work is comprised of the accounts of Tahoe Washburn as she and her geologist husband spend their winters from 1938 to 1941 in the far north region of Canada's N.W.T., doing research on glacial impact of the last Ice Age on the area. The geology aspect, though, comprises very little of the book. The vast majority of it is a monologue of how life in that desolate and forbidding region was conducted by its inhabitants - the Inuit people, the R.C.M.P., the various adventurers who found their way there in the previous 30 years - and how the author and her husband, Linc, integrated their lives with these people, adapting in the process of conducting their work. The writing style is taut and factual, like a well-written diary (which I suppose is what it is), yet descriptive and flows well. Her observations drew me into that environment in a very compelling way. I found myself reading quite slowly, so as to drink it all in, and dissolved myself into seeing that world as she saw it. An additional factor is that the book is liberally interspersed with many of the author's personal black and white photos of the area taken in the course of their work; landscapes, people, the environment of the sub-Arctic. The book is short, making it a pretty quick read, but one that the reader is tempted to dwell upon. (It wasn't until well into the book that I discovered it had been autographed by the author on the title page.) Excellent.