The author of the much praised "This House of Sky" achieves a magnificent evocation of the Pacific Northwest through his exploration of the unpublished diaries of James Gilchrist Swan, an early settler of the region who was drawn from Boston in the 1850s. Doig fuses excerpts from the diaries with a journal of this own as he travels in Swan's footsteps one winter along the once wild coastline of Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. What emerges from this interaction of two remarkable minds is a dialogue across time, linking our own generation with the reality of the American frontier.