Touching time

Artefacts were literally tumbling from the earth - line weights, harpoon heads, snare-pins, root-picks, jewellery carved from walrus ivory, dance masks hewn from caribou antler - and archaeologists and volunteers alike were hurrying to clean, sort and catalogue them during the short summer thaw. The irony gives this essay its bittersweet tang, as Jamie nuzzles into a community seeking to preserve its hunter-gatherer inheritance - the old ways of living that give humans meaning and round out history - while at the same time uneasily navigating the present, fighting off the scourges of alcohol, domestic abuse and widespread depression, while embracing sweatpants, hoodies and Netflix. In the years of writing this book, Jamie loses her father and her grown children leave home, and what surfaces next, somewhat to her surprise, is a middle-aged self still in thrall to wanderlust, still finding joy in the sight of a wild flower, or a bird in flight.