Wilk doesn’t really travel, nor does he visit places. He’s a vagabond who observes carefully, and confronts the familiar with the distant. In this, the latest volume of the Journal du Grand Nord (Far North Diaries) (after La Maison au bord de l’Oniego and Dans les pas du renne (On the Shore of the Oniego and In a Reindeer’s Footsteps), he embraces the infinite spaces that open up as you near the Arctic Circle. This book describes the writer’s interests and days in three distinct parts that are each so full of ideas and questions they could easily have been published as three separate books. First of all, he describes the place where he has chosen to live, a hamlet of wood cabins with no running water or electricity, reflected in the mirror of Lake Oniego. Day after day, Wilk goes to the nearest town, Petrozavodsk, to study for hours in the library there, without ever resorting to Google maps or any of that.
In the second part, he makes a long-cherished dream come true by going to Labrador, inspired by the traveler-writer Kenneth White. The confrontation between the images he had formed from his reading and the contemporary reality – horribly disfigured by tourism and its fakery – inspire nothing in him but a desire to get back to Russia as quickly as he can.
And thus opens the third movement: with the new, and fundamental for his creativity, meaning he brings to the word vagabond from now on. Each page of this final part echoes both with laughter and with the first questions of Marthe, his daughter, whose luminous presence comforts Wilk in his search for a proper way to live.

Not quite either a travel book or a diary, Dans le sillage des oies sauvages plunges readers into life stripped down to the essentials in the Far North, from Karelia, Russia, to Labrador, Canada, inviting them to reconsider contemporary travel habits.