Hap Wilson's Wilderness 3-Book Bundle. Hap Wilson

      One smooth path led into the meadow, and here the little folk congregated; one swept across the pond, where skaters were darting about like water-bugs; and the third, from the very top of the hill, ended abruptly at a rail fence on the high bank above the road …

      — Louisa May Alcott, Jack and Jill, 1880

      As a kid growing up in rural southern Ontario, I was privy to the numerous trails surrounding the Summit View Golf and Country Club, about forty-eight kilometres north of Toronto. The trails date back to the 1920s, and when my parents bought our house — a heavily treed lot across from the golf course — one of the old ski trails passed through our property. silver birch trail was stamped on a diamond-shaped piece of tin, nailed, of course, to a silver birch tree. The tree had grown considerably since the sign was nailed up and was pushing the tin outwards, like butterfly wings, and the printed name was barely discernable. The trail led away from the driveway, not far from the front door of the house, and up a flight of stone steps built to adjust to the steep slope of land that had been bulldozed away some years past.

      Up until I had moved there from the outskirts of Toronto, my life had been confined to paved suburban streets, sidewalks, and the school tarmac. And there was the monthly walk to the Willow Theatre on Saturdays where we would watch double-feature Buck Rogers films for fifty cents, stopping along the way to explore the numerous housing developments evolving out of what vacant land was left. Luckily, we had our grandmother’s cottage to escape to in the summertime. Here there were trees, at least, beneath which there were acorns scattered on the ground to collect, low-branched maples to climb and build forts in, and pine trees that proffered fallen dead sticks to brandish as swords and provide kindling wood for the cottage stove.

      Across from the cottage road was the dark forest; impenetrable, menacing, glowering, yet strangely beautiful and beckoning. There were no trails to follow so we kids didn’t go there. When my father started producing survival films for the Department of Lands and Forests in the late 1950s, he had hired a Native woodsman from the Curve Lake Reserve to work on the film with him. His name was Charlie, and everything he did was magic. He was the first real “Indian” I had met, and he was not at all like the ones on television. When he wasn’t working with my father on the sets, Charlie would spend time with my brother and me, showing us how to paddle a canoe, light a campfire, boil water in a birchbark bowl, and most importantly, how to blaze a trail where there was none. He told us that most people look but don’t see and that’s how they get lost in the woods. Being lost terrified me.

      Charlie took us across the cottage road and into the woods to look for a stand of birch trees some distance away. He went about marking trees with a small axe. “A blaze,” he would say in quiet commentary “on both sides of the tree so you can find your way back, wassakwaigaso mitig.” He blazed the trees with a deft swipe of the axe, one downward cut, then a right-angled chop to sever the wood chip, revealing the white meat underneath. Sometimes the trees