Beyond the Trees Page 14

  On all that vast expanse of water, I hadn’t seen a soul. Not one soul. In fact, I hadn’t seen another person since I’d briefly stopped in at Fort Good Hope nearly a month ago. What’s it like to go that long without seeing another human being, alone and isolated? Especially in a world where people increasingly can’t go ten minutes without checking their phones?

  Personally, I found it relaxing. Of course, I’d spent weeks alone in the wilderness before this, so solitude wasn’t new to me. As for life in a major city, that’s something I can’t fathom. I ask people how they handle living in such massive, sprawling urban environments like Toronto, and although they try to explain it to me, I still can’t quite wrap my head around it. I find those crowded, noisy places of concrete, glass, and steel stressful and suffocating, and can’t stand to be in them for more than a few hours. But to each their own.

  A few more strokes of my paddle and I’d arrived at a place I recognized: it was an island in the mouth of a river draining into Great Bear Lake from the east, an island I’d been to before. A year ago, with my friend Chuck, I’d come to the eastern end of Great Bear Lake specifically to explore the Dease River and its tributaries (named after the same Dease in charge of Fort Confidence). That expedition had helped me plan this one, and so for the next two weeks I figured, I’d be travelling familiar ground that I’d wandered over previously. Chuck and I had dragged, hauled, and paddled a canoe up the Dease River, and then up one of its tributaries; finally, leaving our canoe behind, we’d hiked for miles across tundra and even a sandy desert until at last reaching the Dismal Lakes. At those wild and forlorn lakes set amid mountains we’d turned back, retracing our steps, then paddling all the way down with the current to Great Bear.

  We’d begun and ended our journey at the only fly-in point available to us, Plummer’s Arctic Lodge, a somewhat rustic fly-in fishing lodge about forty kilometres west of where I was now. At one time, Great Bear’s vast waters were home to as many as five different fishing lodges catering to anglers seeking trophy fish, but with the decline of the sport fishing industry, now the lake was home to just two different lodges separated by nearly three hundred kilometres. Plummer’s, the oldest, had been established back in 1968; in addition to their fly-in only main lodge, they also operated a handful of smaller satellite camps scattered throughout the lake.

  Given that Plummer’s lay more than 530 kilometres north of Yellowknife, getting my barrel of rations and batteries on board one of its already scheduled flights had offered me by far the most economical means of a resupply. The lodge had only just opened up a week ago for the season after the ice melt, and I’d pre- arranged for my barrel of fresh rations to be on one of its scheduled flights.

  It hadn’t been possible to know exactly when I’d reach this point in my journey—if I reached it at all—and so, in order to arrange for the barrel delivery, I needed a satellite phone to communicate. With no cell towers for thousands of kilometres across Canada’s vast wilderness, there’s no reception for ordinary phones or Wi-Fi. But a satellite phone, unlike an ordinary phone, works with a small antenna that allows it to receive signals from a satellite orbiting the earth. I couldn’t afford one, so I’d rented one. The minutes to operate the phone cost extra (without them the phone only works as a paperweight when you need to roll out maps in your tent), and I had to ration out the supply of minutes I figured I’d need to cover my journey.

  I followed the instructions that came with the bulky phone to get it operational, folding out the antenna and pointing it at the sky. After a pause, the phone indicated that it had picked up a signal from a satellite. I dialed up a number—it began to ring. It took three attempts, since it kept losing the signal, but eventually I got through to the fishing lodge manager.

  He told me some surprising news. The barrel, he said, had already been delivered. A fishing guide had taken it on a motorboat the day before and dropped it at the island so that it would be there waiting for me when I arrived.

  This news alarmed me a little, since there was no sign of any barrel. In fact, it was the exact scenario I’d been hoping to avoid. Perhaps, if you’ve ever ordered something important online and then it didn’t show up, only to learn that a courier had simply left it sitting on your porch when you weren’t home, you’ll know the feeling I had. It wasn’t that I thought someone had stolen my package—with no one else around for miles, that seemed unlikely—but in the wilderness there’s a kind of animal that will happily rip open a barrel left lying around and help itself to any food inside. That’s a wolverine.

  Wolverines are wonderful animals. A bit like a cross between a bear and a dog, they’re capable of killing things much larger themselves, including caribou. Their ability to steal food from traps and cabins is legendary, as is their toughness, including literally chewing through their own legs to escape iron traps. They’re elusive, solitary creatures, ranging over vast areas. The males have home ranges that extend over a thousand square kilometres or more. They’re seldom seen by humans, even ones who spend their lives outdoors.

  In fact, the only time I’d ever seen a wolverine was, coincidentally, on this very river my barrel had apparently been left at. I’d seen two wolverines here the year before. Thus it seemed most unfortunate that a barrel crammed with chocolate-coated energy bars, dried fruits, and jerky should have been left here of all places, with wolverines about. The lodge manager had said the guide had left the barrel on the island in a conspicuous spot, easily visible from the water. But I didn’t see any sign of it. The island was close to shore, and a little bit of water is easily swam by a wolverine.

  A search revealed no sign of a barrel anywhere. I paddled twice around the island, searching among the alders, willows, tamaracks, and spruces for any hint of it. But if a wolverine, or a grizzly, for that matter, had happened upon my barrel and devoured its contents, I’d expect to see the mangled remains of my supplies strewn about. There was no sign of this either. Indeed, the island looked as though no one had visited it at all since Chuck and I had been here the previous year.

  Without fresh rations, things would be difficult. I was more than five hundred kilometres from my next resupply point, and the terrain that separated me from it promised to be more physically gruelling than anything I’d yet encountered. What rations I still had wouldn’t last long. I could cut my daily amount to stretch them out, but that would leave me without the calories required to maintain long fourteen- or fifteen-hour days. The other option, to live off the land, was something I’d done before—but time spent procuring food would severely curtail time travelling and would not yield enough calories to sustain me for the route ahead.

  Given there was no sign of it, it seemed likely that my barrel had never been delivered. Taking up the satellite phone, I fiddled with it again to get a signal, putting in another call to figure out what had happened to my barrel. I asked, if perhaps, there might have been some chance the guide had been confused or lost, and had dropped it off at the mouth of a different river. This, the lodge manager assured me, was impossible. The guide had deposited the barrel on the exact island. He suggested that I search for it again.

  Personally, I’ve always enjoyed a good game of hide and seek or capture the flag, but now really didn’t seem like the best time to be playing it. I felt sure the guide had made a mistake, which I knew was the kind of thing that can happen easily on an inland sea riddled with hundreds of bays, inlets, and islands, especially since fishing guides in their motorboats tend not to stray far from a few favourite fishing spots. My worst fears were always of this sort of thing happening, and partly what had drawn me here the year before with Chuck was to ensure things would go smoothly. We were both astonished, though, to find out that the lodge manager, an amiable fellow, had in all his years on Great Bear never been to the Dease River’s mouth. He shrugged and said it was a very large lake. We’d gone there with him that summer specifically to identify a spot for a resupply, and it was this point, with the exact coordinates, that I’d spe
cified for my barrel drop.

  Finally, after a tense fifteen-minute wait, I received a satellite text informing me that there’d been a terrible mistake. My barrel, it’d turned out, had been delivered to the wrong river. The error was attributed to a rookie fishing guide, fresh in from Saskatchewan, who’d apparently been entrusted with the delivery the day before. Upon examining a map with the manager back at the lodge, they realized their mistake. Apparently, my barrel was left on an island at the mouth of some unknown creek. I was instructed to sit tight, and a guide would be dispatched in a motorboat after dinner to retrieve the barrel and get it to me within a few hours. Somewhere right about now, I thought ruefully, a wolverine or grizzly was enjoying my chocolate-almond energy bars.

  Plummer’s Lodge was almost forty kilometres away by boat. Two hours later, just before eleven p.m., the sun still high in the sky, I heard the drone of a boat engine coming from the west. A small boat with an outboard motor materialized, with two men on board. They were powering fast across the bay for the distant shore, about three kilometres from the island I was on. Even with my exact GPS coordinates it wasn’t easy to find the correct island—from a distance, its spruces and tamaracks blended into the mainland shoreline. I watched them from the bank as they zoomed back and forth across the bay, evidently searching for the river mouth. Fifteen or twenty minutes later they figured things out and powered back across the bay in the right direction.

  As they cruised in close to where I stood on shore, I felt slightly shy at the sight of other humans, though curious, like a wild animal. My barrel was on board, safe and sound.

  “Sorry for the mistake. We effed up,” said the man at the motor.

  “It was my fault,” said the younger man at the front of the boat, beside my barrel.

  “He’s a rookie,” resumed the man at the back. “First season on Great Bear and he takes the barrel to the wrong place.”

  “Sorry,” returned the other, looking at me apologetically.

  Such excessive conversation felt overwhelming, the noise and all, and I was kind of hoping they’d just deliver my barrel and be gone. But after almost a month without human company, another part of me felt eager to chat. I mustered some words, “Thanks. I never doubted it would arrive safely.”

  They explained they didn’t regularly come to this part of the lake to fish, and so they weren’t very familiar with the area. But to make up for the confusion and delay they’d thoughtfully added a six-pack of beer to my rations. I thanked them for the beer, but explained that I didn’t drink. I let them keep the beer for themselves, which seemed to make everyone happy.

  The barrel they brought I quickly dumped into my nearly empty barrels. I did this because I wanted to keep my original barrels with me, which were slightly smaller than the resupply one; plus, having journeyed so far together, I’d become attached to them. I handed them the empty barrel back and a bit of sealed-up garbage (the empty freeze-dried wrappers).

  “Thanks again,” I said.

  The man at the back nodded and reversed the boat’s engine, backing up away from the island’s shore as he opened a beer can. They both wished me good luck, then zoomed off across the lake.

  I listened to the engine fade away, leaving me in absolute silence, save only for the drone of millions of mosquitoes swarming me, and then, feeling a little worn out from all the socializing, called it a night.

  × 10 ×

  CROSSING THE DIVIDE

  On the morning of July 8 I dipped my paddle into Great Bear’s clear waters for the last time, bidding farewell to the most majestic of all lakes. Leaving the lake, I began paddling up a waterway that I found had changed little since Simpson and Dease had described it in 1838: a river inhabited by white wolves and lined with tall spruces and tamaracks along its lower reaches, which thinned out farther up, eventually giving way to windswept tundra.

  At its mouth the Dease River is only about two hundred and fifty metres wide, and not far up its twisting, snaking course it narrows to less than sixty. I needed to get over a hundred kilometres up it, against its strong current, to a small tributary flowing in from the north. That little stream would lead me northward, to the spot where I planned to strike overland across the divide separating Great Bear’s drainage basin from the Coppermine River’s watershed.

  The first few kilometres of the river I found I could paddle against the current without too much difficulty, but soon its tortuous course became blocked with rapids. Then I had to wade with the water nearly up to my waist, hauling and dragging the canoe behind or beside me while trying not to lose my footing. The year before, the combined strength of Chuck and me working together had been enough to overcome much of the river’s current. Alone, I had no choice but to do more wading and dragging.

  This part of my journey had a slightly different feel to it than elsewhere, as here I was travelling over territory I’d seen twice before—once going upriver and then again going back downriver. I enjoy returning to old haunts as much as the next person, but they don’t have quite the same magical allure of unknown places, where every bend in the river brings something new. We tend to think of the world as a fast-shrinking place, where modern technology has bridged distances. That’s partly true. But the funny thing is, if you get out on the land in a canoe or on foot, the world remains just as big as it ever was.

  When I arrived at a certain sharp bend in the river, not quite five kilometres up from Great Bear Lake, I beached my canoe at the foot of a small rapid. On the far side of the river was a steep bluff, above which stood ancient spruces. This sharp bend, I knew from the prior summer with Chuck, was the site where a 106 years earlier, a Canadian prospector by the name of George Douglas and his two companions had built a small cabin to endure the brutal cold of the long, harsh arctic winter. Chuck and I had a made cursory investigation of the cabin’s ruins, measuring its dimensions and photographing it. Douglas had sailed across Great Bear Lake that summer of 1911 on a small boat, before coming upriver here and selecting it as a spot to overwinter.

  Perhaps if I were the superstitious sort I probably wouldn’t have bothered to stop now and head off into the shadows of the tall black spruces to once more gaze at decaying ruins. There’s something a little eerie about abandoned, crumbling cabins in the woods. Such an isolated cabin might be charming enough in summer, but in winter it could quickly feel like a prison.

  Here, north of the Arctic Circle, sub-zero temperatures last for nearly nine months. During the worst stretch there are over forty days of unbroken darkness. Shut up inside a tiny, cramped cabin, the walls seem to close in a little tighter, week by week, sometimes driving the occupants mad with “cabin fever.” The North is replete with disturbing stories of lone trappers who, isolated for too long during long, dark winters, committed unspeakable deeds. The case of the Mad Trapper is perhaps the most infamous, but there are many others. Shortly before embarking on their expedition, one of Simpson and Dease’s men, a certain Anderson, went crazy and ran away in the woods. Simpson himself, after exploring the river I was now venturing up, had apparently become strangely withdrawn, erratic, and paranoid, eventually one night at his campsite murdering two Canadians and then shooting himself in the head. Another explorer who passed over this same ground, Dr. Richardson, Sir John Franklin’s trusted companion, once shot a voyageur he suspected of murdering and eating another member of the party (that kind of thing is frowned upon in canoeing circles).

  Before Douglas and his two companions had come to this lonely spot to build their cabin, the ruins of which I was now staring at, they’d stumbled upon another cabin on their way to Great Bear Lake. When they entered it they found a scene of horror. Inside the tiny dwelling were the decomposing remains of two men. One of the corpses, in Douglas’s own words, had “his head a shapeless mass, blown out of all resemblance to anything human.” A note left beside the other body told the tale. Shut up inside the cabin for months in darkness, freezing cold, and increasingly paranoid, one trapper had murdered the othe
r, apparently shooting him in the head while he slept. The murderer, after confessing the deed in writing, had scrawled on the paper, “I am not Crasey” and then ended his own life by drinking poison.

  Among the Algonquian-speaking peoples of the subarctic forests, for generations stories were told of individuals who, during unusually hard winters when game became scarce, turned into “windigos” to survive, which meant they ate human flesh. Windigos were believed to be possessed by an evil spirit that gave them superhuman strength. Many of the fur traders and voyageurs who lived in the “fur country” ended up sharing the Ojibwe and Cree beliefs about the existence of windigos.

  In the spruce woods, I circled the crumbling ruins of Douglas’s cabin. The roof had collapsed and part of the log walls had fallen in. In one corner was an impressively crafted fireplace, made with rocks carefully arranged to shelter the vital heat and chinked with clay taken from the riverbanks. Douglas and his two friends had managed to survive the winter without mishap, departing the area the next summer. They’d come to investigate copper deposits, but nothing ever came of that.

  The forest was gradually swallowing the cabin’s ruins; aside from its stone hearth, in time there would be nothing left. Slowly it would vanish back into the wilderness. I took one last look at it, then headed back to where I’d left my canoe.

  At night as I lay in my tent, the river’s rapids rumbling a short distance away, the air thick with the ceaseless buzz of millions of mosquitoes, and occasionally, echoing across untold miles the howls of arctic wolves, thoughts of solitary trappers and windigos would drift into my mind. Then, curled up in my sleeping bag, I’d eventually drift off.

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