Henri Vaillancourt was in his twenties in Greenville, New Hampshire, building birchbark canoes by hand — no plans, no power tools, bark peeled off standing trees, split spruce root for lashing, pitch for the seams — because almost nobody was still doing it and the men who knew how were dying. McPhee spent time in the shop watching, then went with him and three others on a 150-mile trip through the Maine woods, roughly Thoreau’s route. The canoes are magnificent and the book is revered. On the water McPhee draws him as a superb craftsman and a lousy companion, bad at reading water and worse at admitting it. When we went to excerpt the book in Adventure Journal and I called Vaillancourt about photos, he told me McPhee grossly misrepresented him and wanted nothing to do with it.