Farley Mowat · 1956 · survival

Governor General's Award winner, and a Canadian school staple ever since. Two boys go north with a Chipewyan hunting party onto the Barrenlands, break away to look for a stone house they have heard about, and lose their canoe in a whirlpool - which strands them a very long way from anywhere with winter coming.

1. 1
   Reindeer Lake

   Jamie Macnair, orphaned in Toronto, comes north to live with his uncle Angus, a trapper - and meets Awasin Meewasin, the son of the Cree chief, in a country where a boy is expected to be useful or be a burden.

2. 2
   Thanout Lake

   Denikazi's Chipewyan come south starving because the deer have not come - and the two boys go north with the hunting party against the advice of Awasin's mother, who suspects the whole arrangement.

3. 3
   Kasmere Lake

   The Idthen Eldeli band's country on the edge of the Barrenland plains - the last inhabited ground, and the point past which the boys will be entirely on their own without knowing it yet.

4. 4
   The Kazan

   They break away from the party to find the stone house they have been told about, and the canoe goes into a whirlpool - and with it the canoe, most of the food, and any way of getting home before the freeze.

5. 5
   The Stone House

   They find it, and it is a grave - a Norse cairn on the tundra, which is Mowat writing his own Viking-in-the-Arctic theory into a boys' adventure a decade before he published it as history.

6. 6
   Hidden Valley

   A wooded fold in the Barrens where they build a cabin, kill caribou for meat and skins, tame two lost huskies and survive a winter - which is the two hundred pages people remember.

7. 7
   Reindeer Lake

   The walk out in summer, both of them snow-blind on the first attempt - and home, in a book that won the Governor General's Award and has been taught in Canadian schools ever since.