Winter Sign

By Jim dale Huot-Vickery

A journey into the soul of the coldest season.

The locus of Jim dale Huot-Vickery's life is a remote cabin in the northern wilderness of Minnesota's Boundary Waters region. More often than not, it is winter here, a fierce, beautiful season that dominates all living things with its relentless cold grip. This is the inspiration for Winter Sign, the profound story of fifteen years of surviving the seven-month-long odyssey of winter in the far north.

"We know parkas, mukluks, mittens, snowshoes, skis, and sled dogs," Huot-Vickery writes. "Snow sparkles gold on cloudless winter mornings. There are shell-pink sunsets. Stars glimmer among northern lights. . . . For those of us who know this land, however, beauty is only part of the winter story. There are those long nights, those we rarely speak about, that surely and irrevocably shift the soul."

Against this backdrop, Huot-Vickery writes authoritatively on the ecology of the area and philosophically about winter's probing of the human spirit. He explores the world of nature and the constant struggle for survival, including his own interactions with white-tailed deer and wolves.

Huot-Vickery circles around paradoxes and themes that invade the land and his life: nature's beauty and bounty pitted against danger and death; the challenge of self-reliance and the depths of isolation; loss and restoration. And always there is the unrelenting winter, filled with wonder and terror. At turns poignant and harrowing, Winter Sign explores the solitude of the dark night of the soul, and the sustenance and inspiration winter's wild beauty provides.

ISBN 0-8166-2969-2 Paper $15.95

192 pages 5 x 8 November

Translation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816629692
• ISBN13: 9780816629695
• Release Date: November 1998
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Length: 326 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A poignant look at simplicity, solitude, and true wilderness

Huot-Vickery laces his personal experience with the history of Northern Minnesota and the Boundary Waters region of both Original People and Explorers. Drawn into his interaction with the environment: the harshness, the cold, the deer, the wolves, the fox, the snow, the water, the reader can imagine herself or himself walking the trails, building the fires, erecting the cabin all while reading this in the confines of our comfortable, cushy lives. I enjoyed much of this book but would have liked to see more depth in his personal relationships as associated with the environment. Huot-Vickery relays much of his own spiritual journey, yet his writing lacks a connectedness with the women in his life of whom he writes.