Our jeans were damp from the moss when we stood and continued upslope. Luke knelt down, his face nearly on the ground, and called me over to breathe in the intensely sweet fragrance of the twinflower that was finally blooming.

We thought we spotted one and tried to sneak up on it for a closer look, but it turned out to be just a dark fungus on a tree trunk. We hooted to attract barred owls, but none answered. We followed the trail uphill, looking for interesting things. The air was damp and fragrant, the forest floor was soft under our feet and the rocky outcrops and huge fallen trees were blanketed in a brilliant green carpet of moss. I could smell the lake and trees, hear the birds, and feel the spongy moss. The multi-sensory evocation of the setting, a mountain valley in British Columbia, is my favourite thing about this book. Luke, a boy her age, lived with his mother in a nearby cabin, but the nearest town was an hour's drive. It was an idyllic settler Canadian childhood, despite being marked by tragedy: being orphaned at seven. Nature writing, in the form of a novel about the limits of human understanding about our place in this world.Īlternating chapters switch between Sandy Langley's account of her day spent following the tracks of a sasquatch in 2003, with longer flashbacks to the events of her lifetime living in a tiny cabin in the woods, where she was raised by her grandfather.

The Wild Heavens by Sarah Louise Butler