The idea of living off the land is fascinating to most of us. Could we actually survive in the wilderness? Should we let all that free food go to waste? Shall we sample what the native people ate, for the fun of it or the learning experience? Many wild plants are amazingly high in vitamins compared to garden vegetables, so they are worth eating. Many are bitter and need to be boiled in several waters. The recipes given here are not just for the camper but to be tried at home in your kitchen. Examples are rose-petal honey or potato salad with fireweed.

The contents include descriptions of forty-seven edible plants with drawings, five edible lichens, poisonous plants, over sixty recipes, and an index. The plants are listed by their common names, habitat, description, and use, followed by quotations from historical writings of early explorers. Most of these plants or their near relatives are familiar to southerners as well as to northerners, so the book can be used even if one does not cross the boundary line.

The author of this lay reader's guide, an anthropologist now at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, spent a number of years in the North. The illustrator has specialized in watercolours of Manitoba wild flowers and has one guide to flowers of the Churchill region. The author is training in anthropology is shown in her interesting use of historical material. Quotations from such early explorers as Bishop Bompas and his wife, John Franklin, and Samuel Hearne describe the foods shown to them by the native peoples and add an extra dimension to the observation of wild plants.

The introduction includes short accounts of all the Athapascan peoples, or the Dene as we now know them, something you might not expect to find in a plant guide. The book is a must for the territories and useful over a much wider range of the country. ( )