Adrian Payne’s memoir begins in 1940, with his early
childhood in Cow Head and Parson’s Pond, and then Hawke’s Bay, where his family
lived in a company home while his father worked for Bowater’s Pulp and Paper
Company. It has been said that a person’s real education begins after school,
and rightly so. The reader follows Adrian through his early years of hard work
and rich rewards in the lumber woods, hunting moose in the wild north, and
adventures on the Long Range Mountains. Told anecdotally, this charming memoir
illustrates a life will-lived on the Great Northern Peninsula, where women and
men worked hard from season to season and family always came first.
