TETLIT'ZHEH/FORT MCPHERSON - Six years can fill hundreds of journal pages and film rolls. Keith Billington knows; his chronicles of life as a nurse in Fort McPherson filled a whole book.

Keith Billington worked as a nurse in Fort McPherson for six years and recently wrote a book, House Calls By Dogsled, about his experiences. - Katie May/NNSL photo

Billington and his wife Muriel, a midwife, came north from England in 1964 and started work as the only healthcare providers for McPherson and Tsiigehtchic after receiving their Canadian medical licensing in Edmonton.

"For a lot of people, I think they'd be scared at the responsibilities that were thrust upon us. But we were young, we were newly trained, we felt we knew lots of things," the 68-year-old said over the phone from the Fort McPherson health centre during the first leg of his Northern book tour last week.

"We came to teach the people here, and really, they taught us."

Billington's first book, House Calls By Dogsled: Six Years In An Arctic Medical Outpost, was born out of the diary entries he wrote during the six years he and Muriel spent in McPherson delivering the babies, burying the dead and looking after everything in between.

Before moving back south to Prince George, B.C., Billington would make monthly trips to Tsiigehtchic – then Arctic Red River – to deliver medical supplies and perform checkups in the winter. He often travelled with elders and eventually their storytelling abilities rubbed off on him.

"When I used to listen to old Louie Cardinal in Arctic Red and William Firth, who was an elder in Fort McPherson here, they used to tell me the stories of what had happened in the 1920s and 30s and 40s, and I was just astounded at the way of life of the Gwich'in people. It really appealed to me and I wanted to do as much as I could to experience some of those things that they told me about," Billington said.

The book recounts personal tales in a time before Ski-Doos and satellite TV, when people relied on dogsleds and the RCMP single-sideband radio. There's a lot of joy and a lot of heartbreak, as Billington puts it.

"There's the story of one lady who came. She left her camp on the Husky Channel and she had a sick child and two other children as well, and her husband was out hunting," Billington recalls. "So she started to walk up and she got within sight of the lights of Fort McPherson and the baby died. And then she came in and brought the baby to us. And there was nothing we could do."

Most of the people he knew back then have died, but Billington did meet up with his old friend Abe Koe in McPherson before the author headed to Inuvik for a book signing.

Koe, 68, and Billington are two of the last living members of a 1967 expedition to retrace the RCMP lost patrol in Dawson, Yukon.

During his visit, Koe shared with Billington his own memories of the trip. They were halfway to Dawson sometime in March, Koe remembered, and one of the younger men they were with had mentioned it was his birthday.

"We all spread the word around, we all sang to him 'Happy Birthday'…there was no cake or anything like that, and Keith went and he reached in his bag and he brought out one block of dates…and that was his cake!" Koe laughed. "We cut up the dates into pieces and every one of us ate it."

Billington said it was hard for his family to leave the North, but in 1970 they felt it was time. Muriel had given birth to a daughter and a son at the Inuvik Regional Hospital, with a third to come, and they wanted their children to experience some of their own culture.

"It really was quite heart-rending to leave," Billington said. "We looked after them from birth to death, literally, and we thought, you know, we're getting stale and it's not fair to the people here for us to continue."

He said he's surprised at how many people have read his book.

"I changed some of the names, of course, in the book, because there's some medical experiences in there and you can't use people's names. But they've all been guessing who I've been referring to," he laughed. "What surprises me is, it's the young people that are just thrilled with the book."