Noted scientist and kayak adventurer undertakes a journey of spiritual healing Jon Turk has kayaked around Cape Horn and paddled across the Pacific Ocean to retrace the voyages of ancient people. But, the strangest trip he ever took was the journey he made as a man of science into the realm of the spiritual. In a remote Siberian village, Turk met an elderly Koryak shaman named Moolynaut who invoked the help of a Spirit Raven to mend his fractured pelvis. When the healing was complete, he was able to walk without pain. Turk, finding no rational explanation, sought understanding by traversing the frozen tundra where Moolynaut was born, camping with bands of reindeer herders, and recording stories of their lives and spirituality. Framed by high adventure across the vast and forbidding Siberian landscape, The Raven’s Gift creates a vision of natural and spiritual realms interwoven by one man’s awakening. *Starred Review* Turk, a research chemist, gave up lab work decades ago for a life of writing and arduous wilderness expeditions. Not even a near-death experience in an avalanche, which left him with a metal plate holding his pelvis together, slowed him down. By the time he embarks on an Arctic kayaking adventure in 2000, however, he is in serious pain. He and his Russian friend have no intention of visiting the village of Vyvenka on the Siberian peninsula of Kamchatka, home of the Koryak people, but a sudden storm forces them ashore, where they learn that they’ve been expected by Moolynaut, a healer and shaman in her nineties. She not only frees Turk from physical pain but also guides him into the realm of the Arctic spirits. Turk writes with prowess, nerve, and precision, whether he is telling the tragic story of the suffering of the Koryak as Soviet and Russian regimes severed the ancient bond between the tribe and their reindeer or chronicling such perilous exploits as approaching Kutcha, the raven spirit, with the aid of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Balancing between “logic and magic,” Turk attests to the innate powers of body, mind, and soul that are awakened when we immerse ourselves in “Wild Nature.” --Donna Seaman JON TURK is the author of twenty-five environmental and earth science text books and two previous adventure travel books. He is a world-class adventurer whose expeditions are backed by Necky Kayaks, for whom he serves as a national spokesman. He writes frequently for many different magazines and alternates his time between Fernie, British Columbia and Darby, Montana. Raven's Gift Part 1To Vyvenka by Kayak I have seen that in any great undertaking it is not enough for a man to depend simply upon himself.   --Lone Man, Teton SiouxA Walk with My Dog: Spring 1970Forty years ago, I was a research chemist, working at night, in the absence of sunlight, buffered against all vagaries of weather by a precise climate control system. In an effort to probe into the nature of the chemical bond, that much studied but still mysterious collection of forces that holds all matter together, I blasted molecules apart with a beam of high-energy electrons and then accelerated the resultant fragments into a powerful magnetic field.It was intense, stressful work, and one sunny weekend day, in the spring of 1970, I went for a walk with my dog across an alpine meadow in the Colorado Rockies. A few patches of crusty snow lingered in shady and north-facing aspects, but the open spaces were dominated by young, green grasses, the lifesaving nutrition for elk and deer after a long, hungry winter. The earth was moist and spongy underfoot and I knelt down to smell a glacier lily that had opened its petals to the warm, spring sun. My dog suddenly raced off at sprint speed for about fifty yards, leapt into the air like a fox, with his front paws spinning, and landed, digging furiously, clods of sod flying into the air. I felt certain that he was chasing a ground squirrel, futilely trying to dig faster than the rodent could run through its tunnel, the waydogs chase prey, as sport, because they know that a bowl of kibble awaits them back home and failure holds no penalties.I sauntered over, but by the time I arrived, my dog had abandoned that hole, sprinted another fifty yards, and repeated this same odd behavior. There was no evidence of any burrow in the vicinity of the first hole, nor at his second, or his third, or fourth. Had he gone mad? I watched him more closely. Each time, after breaking through the protective sod, he shoved his nose into the earth and sniffed, then dug, and sniffed again. What did he smell down there? I squatted on my hands and knees and tentatively stuck my nose into one of his holes. Even my human senses could detect the sweet aroma of decay as mites and bacteria woke from their winter somnolence and began to munch and crunch, as only mites and bacteria know how, to convert bits of roots and old leaves into soil.I assumed that my dog, with his animal instinct, was rejoicing in the process of spr