into production just last fall and is already becoming a serious rival to the famous mines of South Africa is the climax of a success story that combines a long series of improbables.

And the most improbable element of all is Charles Fipke, an eccentric Canadian exploration geologist, whose expertise, luck and almost self-destructive perseverance led to the discovery of the diamond fields in the sub-Arctic barren lands near Lac de Gras.

Author Vernon Frolick, whose appreciation for the northern wilderness and the vagaries of the human psyche led to his first successful non-fiction work, Descent Into Madness (about a modern mad trapper character), has now told the story of Fipke and diamonds in Fire Into Ice.

It is a masterpiece of biography which dares to go as far afield and take as many chances as its peripatetic subject.

One can approach Fire Into Ice from many angles, from many areas of interest - business, geology, geography, history, natural history, biography and psychology - and come away thoroughly satisfied.

And this true tale can keep pace with any adventure novel when it comes to generating suspense.

The structure of the Fipke saga is one of the reasons for the book's success. The story begins, not with a long series of vignettes from Fipke's childhood, but with accounts of the young geologist's many near-death adventures in Papua New Guinea.

For instance, there's an especially riveting episode in which a helicopter pilot attempts to rescue the lone geologist from a war party of natives:

"The sound of the helicopter had stirred them up, and its near landing had brought them out to investigate.

"They were moving quickly up the creek bed. Primed for an attack. As Riley flew over them, some arrows bounced off the helicopter?"

At 23, Fipke's career almost ended in that jungle. But he went on to survive many other encounters with warriors, wild animals, and diseases - he is one of the few people to have lived through an attack of cerebral malaria.

Had Fire Into Ice begun with a long description of the childhood of a man few people have heard of, reader interest would not yet be fully-primed for a barrage of early-life details.

To postpone Fipke's childhood until the second of the book's five parts was inspired - by then, one is eager to know about an upbringing that could yield such a daring, reckless, driven explorer.

Fipke, who was born in 1946, grew up in Western Canada and he grew up tough. He was a scrapper, a bootlegger, and a wannabe horse racer who took some serious spills, collided with the police and came very close to not lasting out the confining demands of a high school education.

His temperamental, often distant father, Ed, lost out on a future fortune when he sold the family's small holding in northern Alberta.

Oil later found beneath the property could have made the Fipke family rich. As it is, young Charles endured frequent bouts of poverty.

His father, who certainly wished he had understood petroleum science himself, suggested his wayward son take up the study of geology.

Charles did, for lack of any better direction, and was quickly hooked.

The lure of minerals took him to university, then into northern B.C. and the Yukon. Then he was off to the South Seas, Africa, and South America.

Time and again he survived parasites, wild animals, and encounters with yet more warriors (including the blood-thirsty minions of Uganda's former dictator Idi Amin).

Through it all, the geologist kept learning - as do the readers of his life story: There are many intellectual adventures in this book.

Most of us can tell the story of a grizzly charge and recapture some of the event's inherent excitement.

However Frolick, a criminal prospector in the Okanagan, is able to describe the complex, secretive and sometimes quasi-legal world of high finance and mining stocks with the same emphatic clarity and suspense.

Attempting to arrange for his exploration company's stocks to trade on the Vancouver Stock Exchange, Fipke encountered mistrust on the part of brokers, who knew that many mining ventures sluice for suckers rather than minerals:

"Most commonly, those companies raised capital to acquire or develop absolutely worthless properties from silent partners who later secretly share the wealth with the company's executive."

When it comes time to describe Fipke's assault on the VSE jungle, Frolick's story remains as disturbingly enthralling as it is when it was describing deadly bilharzia, or rhino charges.

Throughout Fire Into Ice, we also learn plenty of basic geology. Knowing how minerals came to lie beneath rainforests or deserts or muskeg is essential to understanding Fipke's wandering while seeking copper, opals, gold and diamonds.

His circuitous path to the NWT - his geophysical education - was determined by events which took place hundreds of millions of years before he was born:

"Diamonds were extremely rare - and so incredibly old. To hold one was to touch time before life.

"The creation-time of diamonds predated the ancient age of the phylum Arthropoda, the invertebrate trilobites which first began to move on the ocean floors 550 million years ago.

"Beyond the Cambrian and deep into the Precambrian, diamonds reached back nearly to the time of the earth's own boiling creation."

Frolick has captured the poetry of science.

The writer is also comfortable with a historian's responsibilities. For instance, to understand what young Fipke was up against while working as a low-level manager in South Africa, we must understand Canada's complicity in Britain's vicious business-motivated campaign against the Boers.

And on it goes: Vernon Frolick obviously realizes that a person's life story cannot be appreciated if removed from context of family, neighbors, colleagues, enemies, chance acquaintances, predecessors and landscape.

We have a lucrative diamond mine in northern Canada because of a daring geologist.

And he became who he is because of warriors in Papua New Guinea, a devoted wife, racial conflict in South Africa, parasites in the Amazon, pygmies, a stubborn high school English teacher in Kelowna, slow horses, a dead dog, bold helicopter pilots, wise cops, glaciers and continental drift? among many other things.

It took a writer with rare skill, patience and daring to bring it all together.

Bryson Burke Diamond Corporation
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