Animal's Point of View

"The land is so long and the people traveling in it so few, the curious animals barely notice them from one lifetime to the next. The human beings whose name is Tetsot'ine live here with great care, their feet travelling year after year those paths where the animals can easily avoid them if they want to, or follow, or circle back ahead to watch them with little danger. Therefore, when the first one or two Whites appeared in this country.... "the animals did begin to hear strange noises, bits of shriek and hammer above the wavering roar of river rapids or the steady winds. These were strangers, so different, so blatantly loud the caribou could not help hearing them long before they needed to be smelled, and some animals drifted around to see what made the trees in one place scream and smash that way, the rocks clang. They noticed creatures...standing motionless here and there, abruptly pointing and shrieking, pounding! pounding! scuttling about all day and sometimes into the night as well, when tendrils of bush along the river might spring up suddenly into terrifying flame. And the animals understood then that such brutal hiss and clangour must bring on a winter even colder than usual." A Discovery of Stangers, Rudy Wiebe A story based on true events of the settling of the arctic landscape in the early 19th century.