Depending on one's immediate mood, a lot can be found wrong in the writing of Farley Mowat: all sorts of laughable excesses, from sloppy style, overweening sentimentality, a kind of con brio enthusiasm for windmill tilting, to the sort of verbal keening one associates with a traditional Boston Irish wake, with the whisky flowing so freely one forgets just who is dead and why.

This is not so much a disclaimer as an announcement of fact, and in Mowat's very particular case the fact doesn't matter. Of Farley Mowat's 19 or so books I've read 12, and after a few weeks' mulling over his latest it seems to me that "The Snow Walker" is the best. The precious sniping of the littérateur is simply not relevant here. "The Snow Walker" is a book of tales about the Eskimo, stories ranging from the ancient to the overwhelmingly modern. It is...