Yellowknife (Sep 10/04) - Sometimes, timing is everything.

For John Seagrave, launching his book The Hudson's Bay Boy: From Cabbagetown to Rupert's Land just as the possible takeover of The Bay by an American discount chain hit the news can be seen as impeccable.

The book recounts his experiences working for the Bay's outposts in Nunavut, the NWT and Northern Ontario from 1979 until 1992, when The Bay stopped buying pelts and converted its remaining shops to Northern Stores.

In a cover blurb, historian Peter C. Newman praises Seagrave's book for chronicling the period "when the Hudson's Bay Company lost its soul."

"I don't see it as still being The Bay," said Seagrave, who now lives in Yellowknife.

Though he knows the interest in The Bay's roots is good for promoting the book, he wishes the circumstances were different.

"I'd gladly have it not sell well, if it meant The Bay stayed Canadian," said Seagrave.

Seagrave was born into a working class family in one of Toronto's rougher neighbourhoods.

He was making hockey pucks in a rubber factory when he answered an ad to join "The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay."

After leaving downtown Toronto he was trained in Northern Ontario and eventually ran Bay posts in Baker Lake, Cambridge Bay, Coppermine (now Kugluktuk), Coral Harbour and Hall Beach.

He quit The Bay in 1992 and moved to Yellowknife where he and his wife Lisa run the Gallery of the Midnight Sun.

Good memory

Seagrave didn't keep journals at the time of his travels. Nor did he do any rough drafts when he was writing the book.

He refined his tales over the years through verbal storytelling. Five publishers turned his memoirs down, including one Toronto-based press that thought they would work better as fiction.

The stories formed the basis for the play The Hudson's Bay Boy produced by Stuck in a Snowbank theatre company which premiered in February 2003 in Yellowknife and then went on tour across Canada.

One of the more lighthearted stories in the book recounts his first morning in Baker Lake, after a snowstorm, watching children spearing the snow. Thinking they were practising harpooning he ran out to introduce himself by joining the game.

As it turned out, they weren't playing. They were looking for their huskies, which were buried under the drifts.

"That was so embarrassing," said Seagrave, still sheepish more than 20 years later.

Seagrave's steep learning curve is what lends humour to the tales, as well as well as the machinations that went on in the back rooms of Hudson's Bay post to, say, sell an extra few hundred pounds of cheese.

But other tales are more poignant portraits of individuals he crossed paths with while criss-crossing through Arctic communities, and his firsthand account of the collapse of the fur trade.