In the Alaskan Arctic in 1971, culture conflict and love between a young Native shaman woman, a traditional hunter and a draft-dodging bird scientist Buy your copy! Amazon Amazon.co.uk Froogle Barnes & Noble.com Elliott Bay Book Company Far Eastern Press          Excerpt Whatever is already in us at birth, we find again in stories. We see it in the face of the moon, in the face of our lover, in our own death, in the flight of the goose.

Fairbanks Daily News-Miner/Peninsula Clarion:
Web posted Thursday, May 12, 2005
Kenai Peninsula Online
From the bookshelf: Powerful novel portrays cultures'
collision
By SHANA LOSHBAUGH

The theme of star-crossed lovers is as old and universal as any in
the world's storytelling traditions. Lesley Thomas conjures up a
startling new variation in her impressive debut novel, "Flight of
the Goose."
Kayuqtuq, "the red fox," also called Gretchen, narrates the tale
of the man who both destroyed and saved her life. His name was
Leif Trygvesen; he was a field biologist, and he came north to
search for an elusive endangered goose. Instead, he found
Kayuqtuq.
He writes in his diary: "Ran into a strange girl asleep in the
heather. I don't know what goes for normal here but she seems
churlish and unhappy and like some kind of malnourished and
disheveled stray. Who am I to talk ... ?"
The story is set in the early 1970s, on the shores near the Bering Strait and in the fictional
Inupiat village of Itiak. It is a time of sorrow, war, harsh racism and painful change in the
Bush.
Kayuqtuq is an outcast among the villagers. An orphan, neglected and molested, she was
taken in years before by the respected Ugungoraseok family. She has two more strikes against
her: she is not Inupiaq but a despised "itkiliq" (Indian), and she studies the ancient but now
taboo path of shamanism.
In a mean mood, she resolves to take on the white "birdman" as a project, intending to
challenge his scientific worldview with her supernatural powers.
But Trygvesen confounds her expectations and those of the villagers. He, too, is an outcast of
sorts. A hippy, a conscientious objector, the gentle son of a cruel father, he is not like other
white men who have come to the village. Although they initially deride him as a fool for
counting bird droppings, his quiet respectfulness gradually wins people over.
For the first time, the wary Kayuqtuq finds herself ensnared by a greater power than her own.
She and Trygvesen are drawn to each other despite themselves. Alternately mesmerizing,
astonishing and terrifying each other, they are pulled into a tumultuous liaison.
"Someone was skillfully pulling sinews from inside me and joining them with his, lacing and
forming a mysterious cat's cradle that moved and altered each second," Kayuqtuq tells us. "I
was hooked like a minnow by his eyes; I was swimming in him, though I didn't know how to
swim."
Their fears and desires unleash social and spiritual forces beyond their understanding and
control, forces that engulf everyone close to them.
A tale of passion and otherworldly spirits could lead a lesser writer astray, succumbing to the
preposterous or overwrought. But Thomas focuses her story with skill, using understatement
and humble details to keep it on track. With exquisite pacing, she brings the reader into the
storm of her characters' lives.
The author weaves a strong and complex story. She adroitly includes history, sociology,
anthropology, biology and religion, all rendered personal. She addresses relations among the
races, between the genders, between science and mysticism, among others. Without
contrivance or name-dropping, she includes poetry quotations, allusions to other literature and
references to Norse and Native American mythologies. She peels away layers of preconception
and uncovers facets both dark and bright.
Beneath the tale lies a strong description of the living landscape and through it runs an electric
current of eroticism.
The book's only significant weakness is the foreshadowing, which detracts from the element of
surprise. Also, some readers may find Trygvesen's compliant nature effeminate.
On one level, "Flight of the Goose" is reminiscent of "Wuthering Heights," with the Alaska
tundra replacing the British moors.
On another, it begs comparison with last year's notable Bush novel, Seth Kantner's "Ordinary
Wolves." The inner and outer worlds of both books overlap, but they are quite different in plot
and tone, most notably due to the female perspective in "Flight of the Goose." Taken together,
the two novels suggest a great creative inspiration from Northwest Alaska.
It takes a gutsy white writer to try to write sincerely from a Native viewpoint. Thomas conveys
authenticity and sympathy.
She grew up in an Inupiat village, has Native relatives and participated in many traditional
activities described in the book, according to information from the publisher. Her choice to tell
the tale in the paired voices of Kayuqtuq and Trygvesen, each slightly outside their respective
cultures, each revealing misunderstandings and deeper understandings, was a wise one.
Thomas has given us a haunting book, rich with nuance and ambiguity. Beyond the strong
characters, exotic plot and masterful prose, it challenges our worldview and touches the heart.


Saint Andrew literary journal The Twig:
Review of
Flight of the Goose: A Story of the Far North
by Lesley Thomas, Far Eastern Press, 2005

Flight of the Goose is one of those books that is so vibrant and genuine that you don’t want to finish reading it. Turning the last page is like having to get on a plane to fly away from a place and people you’ve grown to love in a short but intense time.
Lesley Thomas sets her story in arctic Alaska where she spent a good portion of her childhood immersed in the native Eskimo culture. Details of landscape, wildlife, language, weather, and indigenous culture sweep the reader into a world where traditional ways of life are colliding with the encroachments of twentieth century “progress,” a world where men use snomobiles and walrus hide boats, girls wear nylon ski jackets and seal skin mukluks, and women bake cakes from mixes and butcher seals with traditional curved knives. Medivac flights, bush planes, modern medical techniques and government subsistence checks are improvements on the old ways of life, but other things have come as well, like alcoholism, the Viet Nam era draft and the Prudhoe Bay oil pipeline.
Leif Trygvesen, a young wildlife biologist with a grant to study the impact of oil development on migratory birds and tundra grasses sets up camp for the summer near the village. The people of Itiak regard “the birdman” with amusement, suspicion and interest. One young woman, Kayuqtuq, is particularly attracted to him.
Kayuqtuq, whose English name is Gretchen, senses a difference in herself which she comes to understand is a spiritual gift, one of the old ways either forgotten or rejected by the native people and now prohibited. Secretly she begins to learn about shamanism and the history of her people, first through books she finds in the school house and later with the help of a native shaman. Kayuqtuq speaks of her gift this way:
Back then the women saw ghosts and could sense when people were in trouble. They knew their thoughts could help the men hunt or a baby to heal. Flo even used me to find the hiding places of her awls or hair clasps. But it was not considered evil, it wasn’t powers, it was normal. This was different, it was from the world that young people had no name for and that no one spoke of anymore. It was buried deep and left alone like the artifacts along the cliffs where the village used to be.

Kayuqtuq’s spiritual gift is both blessing and burden to herself and to the birdman as their lives become entwined. Their love story is a struggle with the ambivalence of clashing cultures and their own personal misunderstandings as events drive them to the bittersweet but satisfying end.
When Kayuqtuq and the birdman are reunited after a long estrangement, she describes the world this way:
There is nothing like the end of an arctic winter back then, when the sea froze for so long and we nearly forgot it was there under the ice. When the ice broke up we thought the earth was fracturing. Our minds broke apart too from its dark, frozen patterns, and things were hopeful and bountiful and life was enough. Everything was new. The birds poured in from all over the world: the geese, swan and sea-diving ducks and marsh ducks, shorebirds, loons, gulls and terns, and songbirds skinny and spent from their long trips but ready to start over, ready for love. . . . There was no real night but we tried to sleep, and on one of those nightless nights, startled awake by cracking and groaning, we looked out to see the rotten pack-ice had broken off and moved somewhere. All that was left were chunks of berg and pans which children made a dangerous game of, hopping floe to floe or punting along the shore until the burning sky turned pale.
Next day the pack had stolen in again.

The rhythm of the arctic winter and spring, ice and thaw, midnight sun and endless night, gives a timeless perspective to the everyday activities of the characters who fish and hunt, prepare and gather food, work and socialize in the tundra landscape. Abe, the Eskimo hunter, (perhaps among the last of his kind) and Flo, his wife, are foster parents to Kayuqtuq. Willy, their son, is troubled by demons to which his native culture never developed immunity; their daughter, Polly, the community health aid, is responsible for the delivery of western-style medicine. The white school teachers, the man who runs the store, the elders who tell the old stories and the teenage kids who watch movies at the community center round out the population of Itiak. Carribou hunters who fly in from the states represent the darker side of humanity but the truth is revealed that abuse and injustice is not perpetrated only by outsiders.
A breathtaking landscape, poignant love story and unforgettable characters delivered with a keen insight into human nature make The Flight of the Goose a marvelously good read.




Sacred Hoop Magazine
What an extraordinary novel. Set in the
far arctic lands of the Bering Straits in the early 1970’s, it tells the story of the meeting and the relationship between a US environmentalist, desperate not to be sent to Vietnam, and a deeply emotionally-damaged, ostracised young
Inuit girl, whose painful history is revealed as the pages turn...
Written with poignant and often amazing insight into the Inuit culture, the book is a love story, it is a tale about Inuit shamanism, a portrayal of the conflict between cultures, and a glimpse at what happens to the smaller of the cultures when a more dominant one collides with it. And, along with the richly-described human characters in the book, is another character; thoughout it all the arctic lands themselves hold the stage, the sunlight and warmth of summer, the darkness and coldness of winter, the crash of the arctic oceans, the spirits of the seals and the cry of birds. Lesley deals with the shamanism and sorcery in a very realistic way so that not once did I feel I had wandered into a fantasy novel where the author was trying to portray ‘ancient magic’ without any real idea what it actually was, or what it smelt like. In fact the whole book is congruent, the storytelling is compelling, and quite frankly I couldn’t put it down - and I bet you won’t be able to either.~ John Patrick