Beyond the Trees Read online

  Most of my route was outside the range of black bears, but here, where the treeline surged northward, black bears reach the northern limit of their natural range, which extends right up to the Arctic Circle. As such, these black bears are the hardiest of their kind in the world, putting up with long, dark, brutally cold winters. However, unlike grizzlies, black bears avoid the open tundra, preferring to remain south of the treeline. My route here partly overlapped with their range, but as I continued east, the black bears would disappear as tundra came to predominate. This little cub was apparently alone. I watched it wander along the bank for several minutes until it disappeared from view. I hoped it wasn’t lost and that its mother was merely hidden somewhere nearby.

  That night I made camp on the riverbank. It wasn’t my most pleasant campsite, as the shoreline was filled with pebbles and rocks, which I hadn’t much choice but to sleep on. That old report had warned that the Hare Indian River was mostly covered with willow thickets along its banks, which made camping difficult. Thus, I felt I couldn’t afford to be too choosy when it came to finding any spots free of willows. At any rate, sleeping on rocks isn’t the worst thing in the world, especially when you’ve got a wild, majestic place all to yourself.

  With my tent set up on the rocks, I dipped my head into the cold, rippling waters of the river. It felt wonderfully refreshing—on the Mackenzie, I hadn’t done anything of the sort. Its waters were so silty and muddy that when I dipped my hands in them, they quite literally came out dirtier than when they went in. But here the water was clear, allowing me to see right down to the pebbly bottom and the vivid green reeds dancing in the current.

  Refreshed, I crawled into my tent and stretched out on the rocks, I felt around with my hands through the tent floor for any particularly troublesome ones and, grasping them through the tent floor, tossed them aside as best as I could. Then I pulled out my maps to study my progress. In total, my route encompassed hundreds of topographic maps. When I reached the end of one map and the start of a new one, I’d set aside the old map to be burned in my fire—thus literally burning through my maps as a measure of my progress. Just then I heard something pass over the tent. It made a kind of swooshing sound, as of wings flapping, and a strange call, like someone knocking. If you’ve ever had a raven fly over your head you’ll know the odd, unnatural noise they make, and how unnerving it can be if you have a superstitious turn of mind.

  Judging from the sound, the raven outside continued to swoop back and forth around my tent, as ravens are wont to do, making other surreal noises, but mostly that odd knocking sound. Although ravens are most famous for their deep croaking calls of the sort featured in horror movies, they have an amazing vocal range that includes not only knocking noises but also shrill cries, raspy chatters, and even mimicry of other birds’ calls.

  In my rambles around the hills of Sudbury ravens would often pass over me, making the same eerie knocking noise I now heard coming from outside my tent. I poked my head out and caught a glimpse of a large, glossy black bird flapping across the river before it vanished over the spruces. I thought to myself, when camped alone in the wilderness one can certainly appreciate why ravens feature prominently in horror stories. I took it as a good sign, then laid back down on my rock bed and fell asleep—dreaming of ravens.

  × 6 ×

  INTO THE SWAMP

  The farther up the river I went, the wilder it became. Each bend I rounded, each rapid I waded through took me farther from the haunts of humans and deeper into a land of wolverines and muskox. The shallow, rocky rapids along the river’s winding course ensured that no motorboats could reach up it, leaving it as an oasis for wildlife. There were bald eagles perched in spruce thrones and in the waters swam green winged teals, mergansers, and goldeneyes. Sandpipers hopped along the pebbly banks while robins and yellow warblers provided music, the robins singing cheerily, cheer up, cheerily, cheer up and the warblers chiming in with their whistling sweet-see-see-swee. Beavers loudly slapped their tales in the water as I passed by, and muskrats were also about. In one spot I heard a moaning cry—a little baby beaver, lost among some reeds, searching for its parents. I hoped it found them; if not it might provide lunch for a fox or passing eagle. There were signs of moose along the banks, as well as caribou. Meanwhile wolves stalked along, hunting the numerous muskox.

  On my third day poling upriver I saw a total of four muskox, each of whom stared curiously at me. One was barely ten feet away, concealed on the riverbank as I poled by; neither of us noticed the other until we were directly opposite each other. The muskox snorted, apparently shocked to see me, and then glared with its enormous eyes, seemingly mystified by my presence. I apologized for the intrusion and poled hurriedly away.

  More interesting perhaps was what I couldn’t see from the river—inland, I knew, stalking like phantoms amid the shadowy gloom of the black spruces, were lynx. These living ghosts are the North’s most elusive creature: beautiful big cats with sphinx-like faces, thick grey coats to endure the harsh winters, and giant, oversized paws that act as snowshoes so that they can move soundlessly, spectre-like, across deep snows.

  The farther up that twisting, windy river I ventured, the more I began to wonder about that old 1970s government canoe report. It had described the river as lined with willows along its entire course and flowing through a “subdued and gentle rolling landscape.” But I kept seeing things that didn’t match that description. In the first place, the willows weren’t as numerous as the report suggested. Perhaps that kind of change might have happened through natural processes like regeneration after a forest fire, though the evidence on hand didn’t seem to support such a theory. But when I started to encounter towering tabletop mountains with sheer cliffs hundreds of feet high, it became hard to reconcile such cliffs and rocky uplands with the report’s description of “subdued and gentle” terrain. I wondered whether the authors had actually explored the river, or if perhaps they’d lost their field notes and couldn’t remember what they’d seen. I found it a landscape to give free reign to the imagination—a place where one could daydream for hours while poling to the point of numbness against the current.

  It was in the midst of one such daydream, of dinosaurs stalking amid the towering limestone crags overlooking the winding river, while poling near the bank that I noticed an odious stench wafting on the wind. Something was dead—very dead, judging by the smell—somewhere nearby. Another pole thrust and I saw what was giving off the stench: a dead muskox lying on shore, half-concealed by willow shrubs. A rapid analysis of the fly-covered carcass suggested that it had most likely been ambushed by a grizzly that had ripped open its neck. Large as they are, muskox are occasionally killed by grizzlies when they’re caught unawares. In this case, the grizzly had apparently eaten its fill, leaving the remains to be picked over by ravens and other scavengers. I doubled my pace, poling hard to get back to pure northern air.

  That night I made camp within sight of a big sandstone outcrop crowned with little spruces. What wood there was I gathered for a fire to make spruce tea. In the last four days I’d made it some hundred kilometres up this mysterious river, the waterway becoming narrower and the trees thinning steadily. Though diminutive in size many of these spruces, I knew, were quite ancient. The harsh conditions and short growing season meant that, despite their size, some were centuries old. Soon they’d disappear entirely and I’d be back on the windswept tundra. In the meantime I enjoyed their shelter, reminding me as they did of a childhood spent wandering woods.

  I slept peacefully that night, until branches snapping around twelve-thirty jolted me awake. I grabbed my bear spray and unzipped the tent’s screen door. Under the midnight sun I could see all too clearly a bear’s face staring right at me. The bear’s body was hidden in willows, with just its head visible, about twenty feet away.

  Camped alone in the wilderness, many miles from any other human, with a bear outside my tent—I thought to myself that’s the very stuff of childhood dreams (if your drea
ms at all resembled mine). It wasn’t a grizzly or polar bear at least—merely a black bear. It’s not that I dismissed black bears as of no particular concern, but they’re familiar animals, and though still big (say about 300 pounds), they don’t have quite the intimidating dimensions of grizzlies and polar bears.

  Still, there was something in this black bear’s face—staring as it was at me—that I found unsettling. It looked uncomfortably like it was sizing me up. I tried talking to it, telling it gruffly to not even think about it. In the meantime I fished out my bear banger and stepped outside the tent. Fortunately, my canoe was lying overturned between the bear and me, forming a psychological barrier separating us, if not an actual one.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ve asked you to leave and you haven’t, so now I’m going to fire a banger and give you the scare of your life.” I pointed the banger toward the sky, then pulled on its end, unleashing a flare that shot up high and exploded with a bang. It was so abrupt and loud, echoing across untold miles of wild, silent country, that it startled even me.

  The bear barely flinched. He remained exactly where he was, staring straight at me with an icy look in his dark eyes. Apparently, bears don’t find bear bangers as frightening as muskox do. So I grabbed my paddle—it was lying beside the tent—and started shouting to scare off the bear. After all, such tactics had worked with the charging grizzly. As I did so I spun the paddle round in my hands, then swung it violently against the overturned canoe, banging against it like a giant drum to add to my intimidating display. Surely, this would work.

  The bear, however, responded by growling in a low, guttural way, his gaze still fixed on me. Apparently, he wasn’t easily frightened. I thought of my bear spray nearby, but I didn’t want to use it if I could help it. So I mustered up an even louder barrage of shouts, deeper and more menacing, and really swung the paddle now, threatening the bear should he try anything. This finally seemed to work: the bear, huffing and puffing, now edged back, and slowly, very slowly, started walking away. He shuffled off along the river, remaining partly concealed in the willows. I kept my eyes on him, gripping my paddle as I did so, until he moved out of sight.

  Then I kindled up a blazing fire nearby on the rock-strewn bank. The fire, I hoped, would keep the bear from returning. I waited a while for any sign of it, but it seemed to have gone. So I crawled back inside my tent and forced myself to fall back to sleep. Difficult as sleeping alone in bear territory might be, particularly after you’ve just had a bear growl at you, I knew that without sleep I wouldn’t have the energy needed to continue. Sleep was a necessity, plain and simple. And thus I slept—with my bear spray handy.

  * * *

  As the days went by, each one taking me farther from the world of emails, phones, screens, laptops, and incessant news cycles, I felt as if I were poling back in time. It felt relaxing to turn my back on those things, even in spite of bears interrupting my sleep. Personally, I think the more we can step away from our society’s deepening addiction to digital screens, to 24/7 connectivity, to unnecessary clutter, the healthier we’ll be. Immersed in nature, one feels alive. Shut up indoors all day, staring transfixed at a screen, one loses something.

  But to return to the peace and tranquillity of nature: as the temperatures warmed, immense, suffocating hordes of blood-sucking insects filled the air. My throat was soon pockmarked with blackfly bites, my beard smeared with bloodstains, and my wrists, waistline, and anywhere else the flies could get at covered in itchy sores. Prior to mid-June, the weather had been cold enough to keep away the bugs, but now they were out with a vengeance. I didn’t suffer alone: thick clouds of insects hovered around the muskox, caribou, and moose, feasting on them mercilessly. One moose I spotted must have had a million mosquitoes and blackflies on it—the poor animal took to the water to escape them, but above the waterline the bugs still swarmed its head and ears. Having grown up on the edge of a swamp I had a particularly high tolerance for mosquitoes, though blackflies are a torment for everyone. I told myself now, as I fetched my mesh bug net out of my backpack to get some relief, to take heart that these storms of bugs were merely temporary—if I could just put up with them for the next two and a half months, the return of cold weather would take care of the matter.

  Three weeks since setting off on my journey, and now fully eight days of travelling up the Hare Indian River, my body was feeling the ache and wear of continual travel. My legs were bruised from stumbling into unseen rocks beneath the water’s surface. The tendons in my fingers were sore from poling for long hours each day. (At night I’d stretch them out gingerly, but I knew there wasn’t much I could do—I was at the mercy of the elements, and so to take any time off was out of the question.) My feet were blistered from the waders, and my big toenail on my left foot had fallen off. But otherwise, I felt fine.

  The river was getting smaller, little more than a creek now. The water continued to alternate between calmer sections I could paddle up and faster, swifter sections that could only be navigated by painstaking wading and dragging the canoe behind me, often for hours on end. This wading, given the rocky bottom, took a toll on my toes, but I made light of it—toenails, after all, grow back.

  The shallow sections were full of arctic graylings, a beautiful fish with a vibrant rainbow hue to their big dorsal fins. I’d happily eaten graylings in the past, but alas on this journey, if I were to reach my goal, there was no time for fishing—food was mere fuel, to be consumed as I marched and trudged along. Even my customary morning oatmeal I’d forsaken in order not to lose time setting off early. To stay healthy though, I did occasionally make spruce tea—since spruce is high in vitamin C, something my dried rations lacked.

  Caribou, wolves, eagles, muskox, and bears were all plentiful in the wild upper reaches of the twisting river. One beautiful arctic wolf, his white coat streaked with black and grey, was particularly curious about me. He was a big, lanky animal, and followed me along the riverbank for over a kilometre as I paddled along, so drawn by curiosity that he almost seemed to wish to speak with me. He’d cock his head to the side, eyeing me up and down. There wasn’t any hint of malice in his look. Indeed, the wolf—a true symbol of wildness in a world with ever less of it—was shy and skittish. The slightest noise by me, such as a simple “hi there,” or my paddle bumping against the canoe, caused him to jump back, startled. But then, as I quietly continued on, he would follow. Finally he vanished into the spruces. Never in my life had I ever seen anything so perfect, so magical, as that great arctic wolf—it filled me with awe and wonder.

  * * *

  It was a rainy morning when I crawled out of my tent at five a.m. on June 22 to get a start on the day. The sound of a caribou swimming across the river had stirred me from a pleasant dream. I’d camped on a sandbank within sight of some cliffs. In the rain I soon had my tent down and rolled up, my barrels carefully loaded into the canoe, and my day’s rations set out so I could grab them as need be from the bottom of the canoe. I was eager to be underway, as I sensed I’d was at last nearing the end of the Hare Indian River. Soon I’d be facing the prospect of travelling on foot across trackless and unknown terrain, transporting in stages my canoe and barrels, in order to reach the coastline of Great Bear Lake.

  Before it came to that though, I knew from my maps that the Hare Indian River flowed through two long lakes, connected by what was left of the river. These lakes I referred to as the Headwater Lakes, since they were the river’s source. Beyond them was one more long narrow lake, after which lay terrain of uncertain character blocking the way to Great Bear’s coastline. Whether it’d be possible to make it all the way to each of the lakes by water, or whether the interconnecting river would dry up before then into a tiny trickle or become clogged with natural debris, I didn’t know. The satellite imagery I’d examined beforehand was insufficient to determine such details, and I’d lost all faith in the reliability of that old 1970s canoe report. At any rate, those authors were canoeing downriver, not up, and they’d only sta
rted at the first of the Headwater Lakes (supposedly), whereas I’d have to go well beyond that to reach Great Bear Lake.

  Poling, wading, and paddling saw me advance another twenty-four kilometres that day. Things were getting much harder, though. The river’s upper section wasn’t much more than a beaver creek now, and increasingly unnavigable. The first hints of change came the next day, when I hit a long, marshy lowland. The grassy marshes were quite unexpected, and reminded me of the tidal marshes along coastal rivers in New Brunswick. The water here was too shallow for poling as the heavily-loaded canoe hit bottom. So I had to get out and wade, listening to shorebirds calling in the marsh as I hauled the canoe with rope behind me.

  In the distance a blue ridge rose high against the clear sky; somewhere beyond that I figured were the Headwater Lakes. I pressed on, sloshing through shallow stretches, forcing the canoe over them. Then I saw something glinting along the marshy stream banks—something that made a shiver go down my spine. It was the remains of river ice, clustered on the shore and melting in the June sun, a reminder of how recently these waterways were still frozen. The remnant ice boded ill for what I might find on Great Bear Lake: if it was still ice-covered, I’d be faced with a delay that might spell the end of my journey’s hope of success. I pushed on to find out.

  The first of the Headwater Lakes, fortunately, I found free of ice. I paddled straight across its five-kilometre expanse in forty minutes—seeing how in nearly eight hundred kilometres of travelling it was the first water I’d paddled on without an opposing current. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to paddle a canoe normally, without battling wind and current—and that such things could be peaceful and pleasant. Alas, it was but a brief respite from the increasingly punishing nature of my journey, now that I’d quite run out of anything resembling a navigable water route. On the far side of the lake the river continued. It widened into a swamp filled with dead spruces and tamaracks protruding from the water at odd angles, after which the remains of the river rapidly diverted into several channels, each thickly grown over with spruces and willows. The day was warm, sunny, and windless, making the clouds of mosquitoes and blackflies extreme.