Book description
Fifteen years before Lewis and Clark, Scotsman Alexander Mackenzie,
looking to open up a trade route, set out from Lake Athabasca in central
Northern Canada in search of the Pacific Ocean. Mackenzie travelled by
bark canoe and had a cache of rum and a crew of Canadian voyageurs,
hard-living backwoodsmen, for company. Two centuries later, Robert
Twigger decides to follow in Mackenzie's wake. He too travels the
traditional way, having painstakingly built a canoe from birchbark sewn
together with pine roots, and assembled a crew made up of fellow
travelers, ex-tree-planters and a former sailor from the US Navy.
Several had tried before them but they were the first people to
successfully complete Mackenzie's diabolical route over the Rockies in a
birchbark canoe since 1793. Their journey takes them to the remotest
parts of the wilderness, through Native American reservations, over
mountains, through rapids and across lakes, meeting descendants of
Mackenzie and unhinged Canadian trappers, running out of food, getting
lost and miraculously found again, disfigured for life (the ex-sailor
loses his thumb), bears brown and black, docile and grizzly. Robert
Twigger won the Somerset Maugham and William Hill Sports Book of the
Year awards for Angry White Pyjamas. Big Snake was filmed for Channel 4.
