The Chukchi, for their part, adopt MacLennan, caring for him initially as they would a helpless infant. By seventy pages in, the setting has been prepared for MacLennan’s-and largely through him, our own-intimate journey with the Chukchi people. MacLennan’s shipmates have sailed for home, leaving him behind. On returning from their aborted journey, the travelers find that the recent storm has cleared the ice that prevented the ship’s departure. With this striking opening, MacLennan’s misfortune-and, in truth, his transformation-have only begun. The ensuing scene is both brutal and riveting as four men hold down the screaming invalid while the old woman washes his wounds in puppy’s blood and applies her knife. When the travelers are stranded by a blizzard, he becomes so ill with fever and infection that they must call on a local female shaman to amputate portions of his damaged hands. There is a good deal of mistrust and chauvinism on both sides, but the helplessness of the Canadian-his hands have been wounded-creates natural points of contact: He cannot eat or drink on his own or unfasten his own trousers in order to urinate. The ship’s captain appeals to the local Chukchi tribesmen (a people closely related to the Eskimo), who agree to transport MacLennan by dogsled across the tundra to a Russian hospital in exchange for three Winchesters, a box of cartridges, and a two-handed saw. The story unfolds in the far northeastern corner of Siberia, in the village of Emmyn, where a young Canadian explorer, John MacLennan, has been injured after an attempt to blast free his icebound ship. Searching for these will lead down the wrong path in approaching this book, and one is likely to lose sight of the emotional truth and compassionate understanding that lie at its core. Add a dose of historical fiction and the novel lopes briskly along on three legs without the need of a fourth, be it character depth or stylistic complexity. And indeed, while plot is what drives the book forward, local color gives it depth.

If it were just an adventure story, one would not expect A Dream in Polar Fog to have been published by a press with Archipelago’s literary credentials.

A Dream in Polar Fog by Yuri Rytkheu