The Still Unknown Country

When it comes to the country we live in, all of us carry maps in our heads: the frigid North, major cities, our disparate regions, our coastlines. Adam Shoalts, a prodigiously talented young man (he is 30 this year), points to their utter inadequacy. The sheer scale of unexplored territory in Canada—indeed, land that has likely never been encountered by humans—is revealed in Alone against the North: An Expedition into the Unknown, his account of his wilderness adventures in the Hudson’s Bay Lowlands.

The Lowlands comprise the largest wetland in North America and the third largest in the world: 373,700 square kilometres of muskeg, tundra and scrub forest. It would be a profoundly unappealing place for ordinary folk—including the sparse numbers of aboriginal people who referred to the Lowlands as “sterile country.” It is boggy and cold, with high-density clouds of mosquitos and blackflies, weather that can turn on a dime, treacherous waterways, unpredictable...