Review: "Lost at Windy River" by Trina Rathgeber

Lost at Windy River by Trina Rathgeber, illustrated by Alina Pete
Published October 2024 via Orca Book Publishers
★★★★

When Ilse Schweder was a young teenager, she set out by doglsed with her brothers to return home from checking the trapline. What should have taken perhaps a few hours became a nine-day ordeal as a storm blew in, Schweder was separated from her brothers—and she found herself lost in the wilderness, in the winter.

Schweder's story has been told before: Farley Mowat wrote about it in People of the Deer. But Mowat is known to have passed off a great deal of his fiction as nonfiction, and it always bothered Schweder that it was his (fictionalized) version of events that endured. And so Schweder's granddaughter set out to correct the record, with Lost at Windy River as a result.

This is an absolutely fantastic tribute to a beloved grandmother, and it does a brilliant job of encapsulating how smart and resourceful Schweder was, even as a teenager. She'd grown up in the remote wilds of Canada, the daughter of a German trapper and a First Nations mother, and she'd survived Canada's residential schools (one of her sisters hadn't). You never want a child to be lost in a winter storm, but if any child could survive that, it was Schweder—she'd been learning from her family since before she could read. Relying on her knowledge of snow and the skies and animal movements, to say nothing of survival skills like how to make a snow cave and how to protect a wet foot in the bitter cold, she made her way slowly, slowly back to safety.

The art is a slightly simpler style than I prefer, but it is consistently and cleanly done. There are also small informational asides—relevant to the story—that teach the reader a bit about life in the time and place and context. They, and the occasional side stories, add an additional depth to the story. And don't miss the dialogue-poem at the end, sourced from The Barren Ground of Northern Canada.

4.5 stars. I'm afraid I'm guilty of wanting to read Mowat's fictional version now, but if I do I'll at least do so with the knowledge that Mowat's character wouldn't have survived, because he—and thus she—did not have Schweder's skill or lived experience.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.