In an age when bush planes and the outboard motor were opening up previously inaccessible regions of the Canadian North, Downes chose to travel alone by canoe to explore the Great Barren Lands. Sleeping Island is the sensitively written and moving account of one of his trips, a journey made in 1939 to remote, unmapped, Nueltin Lake, Manitoba, Canada. Downs records a North that was soon to be no more, a landscape and a people barely touched by the white man. He describes the excitement of wilderness canoe travel, the delights of discovering the land, and his deep feeling for people met along the way. His respect for the Indians and the Inuit and their ways of life, and his love of their land, shine through this richly descriptive work.