UNKNOWN CANADA: Twenty-Five Years in the Backwoods — Wolves, Bureaucrats, and Other Wildlife

A man moves to the forest to be left alone. The forest turns out to be fully staffed. Twenty-five years ago Boris Kriger drove north out of Toronto on a nice day, kept going until he got tired, and bought a house on a hill with six and a half acres of impassable bush. He had been in Toronto three days. He was looking for silence. What he found was a bear knocking at the back door, wolves killing a deer in the driveway, a doctor's receptionist with the hide of a mammoth, a school curriculum with clapping in it, a satellite technician who explained that the trees were in the way and had been since 1890, and a government inspector who could not close his file until he had looked inside a poodle. Unknown Canada is a book of comic essays about the country nobody puts in the brochure: the small towns north of the cottages, where the hotel rules once advised guests that revolver shots were not a cause for alarm, and where a century later everybody is much politer and almost nothing has changed. It is very funny. Occasionally, without warning, it isn't.