Stuart Wavell - Trails to Heaven

STUART

WAVELL

TRAILS
TO
HEAVEN

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Praise for Trails to Heaven

Sir Ranulph Fiennes: "A white-knuckle ride to the margins of human endurance."

Doris Lessing: "For those fascinated by...the Arctic, by the extremities of snow and ice - the terror and wonder of it - here is their book...This is a good read. I thoroughly recommend it."

Paul Blezard, presenter of Between The Lines, One Word Radio: "The best first novel I have read in the six years have been presenting this programme."

John Dugdale, The Sunday Times: "...the book's most memorable aspect is its vivid portrayal of the threatened ways of the Inuit, from shamanistic healing to ancestral hunting."

Biography

Stuart Wavell is a British journalist. Previously Arts editor and Media editor of The Guardian, he's now a freelance writer and author of the Profile in The Sunday Times, for which he was also formerly Paris correspondent. Stuart has travelled extensively to write about traditional hunting societies, spending time with the Semai Senoi aborigines in Malaysia, the Bushmen of the Kalahari, Canadian Indians in the Arctic, and a traditional Inuit hunting community on Baffin Island. "Trails To Heaven", an Arctic adventure novel, is his first book.

Trails to Heaven

In the blinding icescape of Baffin Island in the High Arctic slumbers the traditional Inuit community of Snowdrift. Jack Walker, the village's Wildlife Officer, is an environmental policeman in a savage territory where the top predators are 500 local Ekimos and 2,500 polar bears, competitors for seal and other giant marine mammals.

Jack has forsaken his academic career as a young Oxford don to return to his birthplace and a more rooted existence. Besides monitoring local hunting quotas and wildlife populations, he occasionally acts as a tour guide to foreign trophy hunters in search of the greatest prize; the skin of the white bear - a necessary sacrifice to boost the impoverished subsistence economy.

When evidence of a Viking ship repair yard surfaces near Snowdrift, the world of archaeology is stunned by the possibility that the history of the North West Passage could be rewritten. Did the Norse voyage from their settlements in Greenland across the top of North America to Asia? Were the Vikings the first transatlantic traders? Having lit the fuse of controversy, Jack struggles to control the fallout among traditional hunters beguiled by dreams of sudden wealth.

Jack's search for the archaeological truth lays bare his own secrets, compelling him to confront spectres from his brutal upbringing in Snowdrift. His investigation casts doubt on the suicide of his father and the motives of a powerful foreign benefactor. A dark ribbon of malediction unfurls across the Arctic tundra.

An unsparingly authentic and compulsive adventure thriller, Trails to Heaven also provides a fascinating glimpse of a landscape and its community under threat.

Author's note

Trails to Heaven is the result of 10 years of research during a series of visits to an Inuit hamlet of subsistence hunters in Baffin Island. Invited to join their hunting trips for polar bears, narwhal and seals, I gained a privileged insight into a lifestyle that has little changed.

The idea for the book was triggered when I chanced upon the memoirs of a former magistrate who recorded that a group of Inuit in Baffin Island had suffered horrific amputations after eating the meat of a walrus they had shot. Embedded in the creature's hide was a harpoon of ancient Greenland design. Was the harpoon Norse, I wondered? If so, how had it reached Baffin Island? With the help of archaeologists and historians, I set out to unravel the mystery in fiction.

Gratifyingly, my story about a pristine Viking site that would rewrite history has been overtaken by reality. Recent discoveries by Patricia Sutherland, a leading Quebec archaeologist, have overturned assumptions about the Vikings' intentions in North America. Baffin Island plays an important part in the new scenario.

According to conventional wisdom, Leif Ericsson and his band of Norse sailed from their base in Greenland to secure a single foothold on the north American continent - the famous "Vinland" settlement in Newfoundland. But hostile Indians forced them to return home after only a couple of years, never to return.

The latest evidence suggests a different story. The Vikings' prime motivation was expanding their lucrative trade with Norway by supplying luxury goods such as walrus ivory and polar bear fur - of which American Eskimos were preeminent hunters. Vinland was a important resource centre rather than a Norse attempt at permanent settlement, but it proved too far from their Greenland farms. So they looked nearer to home.

Sutherland's findings point to a chain of Norse trading posts stretching hundreds of miles from Baffin Island to Labrador. The latter's coast offered ample supplies of bog iron and timber - commodities prized by the Eskimos on the treeless tundra to the north. Far from being natural enemies, as previously supposed, the two groups found an accomodation in mutual need.

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Email: Diana Colbert, diana@colmacpr.co.uk

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