James A. Houston watched through one of the plane's windows as the isolated Arctic village came into view. Searching for adventure, the young man had been fortunate to secure a free ride on the little plane, which was being used to transport a doctor to the village of a boy who had been bitten by dogs. The pilot told Houston to expect a four-day layover before they returned to northern Ontario, a stretch of time that Houston hoped would allow him to explore the area, meet some of the native Inuit Eskimos, and work on his sketches. The plane landed and Houston disembarked. He was, according to his autobiography in Something about the Author Autobiography Series (SAAS), "more excited than I had ever been in all my life. Out on Hudson Bay, long skeins of heavy ice were drifting south from Foxe Basin. Behind me, the treeless tundra...