According to several Inuit myths, Noah (yes that Noah -- the one with the ark and all those paired animals) -- strayed far from his biblical seas and ended up in Hudson Bay.

	"IN FOND REMEMBRANCE OF ME" By Howard Norman North Point Press ($21)

Unlike the benevolent Noah from the Old Testament, this Noah is disoriented in the desolate white landscape of winter. Boorish and angry, he lashes out at those who offer help.

Because he won't kill any of his animals to keep from starving and because he won't use the wood of his gigantic ark to protect his family from the Arctic temperatures, the Inuit find him foolish and ultimately comical.

They lure his wife and children onto land, feed and clothe them and provide them with spouses to help ease the transition into these strange new lands. Alone and despondent, Noah wanders south, never to be heard from again. The planks from his ship float to shore and, Noah excepted, everyone rejoices in the fortunate gift of driftwood.

Ostensibly, this is is Howard Norman's memoir of his time in Churchill, Manitoba, translating oral stories from an Inuit elder for a Toronto museum.

The book offers much more than a retelling of an authorial experience in a foreign place, however; it is a beguiling study of how stories blend and reshape themselves depending on the teller and the listener.

It's also a heartrending celebration of a seminal friendship that forever changes Norman's journey, not only the trips he makes to Hudson Bay, but for the one that he will eventually make as the author of such novels as "The Bird Artist" and "The Museum Guard."

Also known as the polar bear capital of the world, Churchill is unreachable by road. Norman flies in on a plane piloted by a chatty man who leaves him with an enthusiastic salutation: "Good luck every minute from now on."

This is the late 1970s when Norman was an ethnographic linguist with only a slight understanding of the structure of folklore and an even slimmer knowledge of Inuit dialect.

Oddly enough, Norman is not alone in his translation endeavors. Helen Tanizaki has also arrived in Churchill after a 40-hour train trip from Winnipeg. She is also there to translate the myths of the same Inuit elder, although her translations will be in Japanese.

Helen, Norman soon discovers, is everything he is not. London-born, raised in Japan, with a doctorate in linguistics, she is a scholar who has read extensively on the ethnography, linguistics and history of the Hudson Bay region -- in Japanese, French and English.

Erudite, introspective, sensitive and brutally honest, she was working on a treatise titled "Incidents of Choking in Inuit Folklore." She is also, at age 39, dying of cancer.

Norman translates several variations of the Noah saga, but the crux of each tale remains the stubborn Noah, suffering from overwhelming ennui, who refuses to adjust to his new surroundings and remains adrift in this strange land.

Norman relates. He tries harder than Noah, but still feels often out of place. Helen helps at every stage of his interactions in Churchill.

She is open and honest of her feelings, especially of her impending death and her desire for reincarnation, something she considers might be "a bold act of the imagination." But she is never sentimental.

After she returns to Japan to die, she writes to Norman that "I consider our friendship, lovely, hermetic, difficult."

As instructed, Norman takes her ashes to the cliffs near Cape Freels, Newfoundland, and scatters them into the ocean, then does as she asks:

"As long as you are there, you may as well look at birds. Try for a moment to set me apart from the others." Ultimately he fulfills her final wish: "Don't forget me."

In this wonderful book that gives words and stories and friendships real value, Norman does something more than help Helen reincarnate herself -- he shares this wonderful life with those of use who will never make the trek to Churchill, Manitoba.