Samuel Hearne in Wintertime

John Newlove
From:   Apology for Absence: Selected Poems 1962-1992. Erin, Ontario: Porcupine's Quill, 1993. p.79.

1.	In this cold room I remember the smell of manure on men's heavy clothes as good, the smell of horses. It is a romantic world to readers of journeys to the Northern Ocean- especially if their houses are heated to some degree, Samuel. Hearne, your camp must have smelled like hell whenever you settled down for a few days of rest and journal-work: hell smeared with human manure, hell half-full of raw hides, hell of sweat, Indians, stale fat, meat-hell, fear-hell, hell of cold.
2.	One child is back from the doctor's while the other one wanders about in dirty pants and I think of Samuel Hearne and the land - puffy children coughing as I think, crying, sick-faced, vomit stirring in grey blankets from room to room. It is Christmastime the cold flesh shines. No praise in merely enduring.
3.	Samuel Hearne did more in the land (like all the rest full of rocks and hilly country, many very extensive tracts of land, tittimeg, pike and barble, and the islands: the islands, many of them abound as well as the main land does with dwarf woods, chiefly pine in some parts intermixed with latch and birch) than endure. The Indians killed twelve deer. It was impossible to describe the intenseness of the cold.
4.	And, Samuel Hearne, I have almost begun to talk as if you wanted to be gallant, as if you went through that land for a book - as if you were not SAM, wanting to know, to do a job.
5.	There was that Eskimo girl at Bloody Fall, at your feet, Samuel Hearne, with two spears in her, you helpless before your helpers, and she twisted about them like an eel, dying, never to know.

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