The author of This House of Sky provides a magnificent evocation of the Pacific Northwest through the diaries of James Gilchrist Swan, a settler of the region. Doig fuses parts of the Swan diaries with his own journal. Ivan Doig (1939-2015) was born in Montana and grew up along the Rocky Mountain Front, the dramatic landscape that has inspired much of his writing. A recipient of a lifetime Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association, he is the author of fifteen novels and four works of nonfiction. Winter Brothers A Season At The Edge Of America By Ivan Doig Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company Copyright © 1980 Ivan Doig All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-15-697215-4 CHAPTER 1 DECEMBER-JANUARY The Boston Bird HOOYEH (The Crow) Day One His name was James Gilchrist Swan, and I have felt my pull toward him ever since some forgotten frontier pursuit or another landed me into the coastal region of history where he presides, meticulous as a usurer's clerk, diarying and diarying that life of his, four generations and seemingly as many light-years from my own. You have met him yourself in some other form — the remembered neighbor or family member, full of years while you just had begun to grow into them, who had been in a war or to a far place and could confide to you how such vanished matters were. The tale-bringer sent to each of us by the past. That day, whenever it was, when I made the side trip into archival box after box of Swan's diaries and began to realize that they held four full decades of his life and at least 2,500,000 handwritten words. And what life, what sketching words. This morning we discovered a large wolf in the brook dead from the effects of some strychnine we had put out. It was a she wolf very large and evidently had five whelps. Maggs and myself shinned her and I boiled the head to get the skull. ... Mr. Fitzgerald of Sequim Prairie better known as "Skip!" walked off the wharf near the Custom House last night and broke his neck. The night was very dark, and he mistook the way. ... Jimmy had the night mare last night and made a great howling. This morning he told me that the memelose were after him and made him crazy. I told him the memelose were dead squid which he ate for supper very heartily. ... Mr Tucker very ill with his eye, his face is badly swelled. This evening got Kichook's Cowitchan squaw to milk her breast into a cup, and I then bathed Mr Tucker's eye with it. ... I recall that soon I gave up jotting notes and simply thumbed and read. At closing hour, Swan got up from the research table with me. I would write of him sometime, I had decided. Do a magazine piece or two, for I was in the business then of making those smooth packets of a few thousand words. Just use this queer indefatigable diarist Swan some rapid way as a figurine of the Pacific Northwest past. Swan refused figurinehood, and rapid was the one word that never visited his pencils and pens. When, eight, ten years ago, I took a segment of his frontier life and tried to lop it into magazine-article length, loose ends hung everywhere. As well write about Samuel Pepys only what he did during office hours at the British admiralty. A later try, I set out carefully to summarize Swan — oyster entrepreneur, schoolteacher, railroad speculator, amateur ethnologist, lawyer, judge, homesteader, linguist, ship's outfitter, explorer, customs collector, author, small-town bureaucrat, artist, clerk — and surrendered in dizziness, none of the spectrum having shown his true and lasting occupation: diarist. This, I at last told myself, wants more time than I ever can grant it. Until now. Here is the winter that will be the season of Swan. Rather, of Swan and me and those constant diaries. Day by day, a logbook of what is uppermost in any of the three of us. It is a venture that I have mulled these past years of my becoming less headlong and more aware that I dwell in a community of time as well as of people. That I should know more than I do about this other mysterious citizenship, how far it goes, where it touches. And the twin whys: why it has me invest my life in one place instead of another, and why for me that place happens to be western. More and more it seems to me that the westernness of my existence in this land is some consequence having to do with that community of time, one of the terms of my particular citizenship in it. America began as West, the direction off the ends of the docks of Europe. Then the firstcomers from the East of this continent to its West, advance parties of the American quest for place (position, too, maybe, but that is a pilgrimage that interests me less), imprinted our many contour lines of frontier. And next, it still is happening, the spread of national civilization absorbed those lines. Except that markings, streaks and whorls of the West and the past are left in some of us. Because, then, of this western pattern so stubbornly within my lif