"There are strange things done ’neath the midnight sun / By the men who moil for gold.” The words danced through my mind, unbidden, in July 2002, as the smallish airplane in which I sat circled over Dawson City, Yukon, waiting for the fog to clear so it could land. “The arctic trails have their secret tales / That would make your blood run cold.”
Those words begin The Cremation of Sam McGee, of course—probably the best-known poem ever written in Canada. I knew that its author, Robert Service, had spent several years in Dawson City, but I was vague on details. I was arriving to spend three months at Berton House, a writers’ retreat established by the late Pierre Berton in his boyhood home.
I had read somewhere that Berton House was situated directly across the street from the log cabin that Service had left for the last time in 1912. I would come to appreciate this soon enough as every afternoon, tour buses arrived and sat idling beside the house...
Ken McGoogan, who has written extensively on the fur trade and Arctic exploration, recently published Celtic Lightning: How the Scots and the Irish Created a Canadian Nation.
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