WHEN MY Uncle Norman offered to sell me the Gataga trapline, I didn’t hesitate. Located in the far north of British Columbia, the Gataga River is true wilderness, where the tracks of another person rarely mark the winter snow. I craved the wilderness life, and it took only a few days before I was out of the logging business and into trapping. I was a happy man, but my decision certainly involved risk, and it sometimes kept me up at night. When the cheque came back from my first fur auction, I learned that fur prices in the 1980s were near all-time lows.
Money worries were the last thing on my mind as I gripped the handlebars and powered my snow machine around another corner on my first trip down to the thirtymile cabin. The trail along the creek known as Swamp River parallels the much larger Gataga River for twenty miles or more. I was ready for a break when I glanced up and spotted a tall pine stump standing on a small flat above the creek. Curiosity piqued, I turned off the snowmobile and waded up through the waist-deep drifts to the flat above. There I found a few blazes on the lodgepole pines, a hump in the snow that looked to be an axe-cut log, and, beside that, a depression that seemed to indicate an old fire pit. The tall pine-tree stump I had noticed from below had been squared off on four sides. On the blazes I could make out the name, “Egnell,” and the date—1943. I knew my uncle had purchased the trapline from Frank Egnell Junior. Judging by the date, Frank Egnell Senior had passed through here on his trapline rounds, likely many times, including his last.
Looking closer at the tall stump, I could just make out three more words—“Swamp River Post.” I smiled at the pun.
It was hard work finding trail, cutting windfall, and snowshoeing ahead in the rougher sections to pack a path for the snowmobile. The trail along the Swamp River followed curve after curve of the slow-moving tributary. The water in the creek was shallow and the ice thick. As I saw the Swamp River veering to the right and around the cutbank to join up with the main Gataga River, my heart sank. The plan had been to travel along the bank of the big river, but thick stands of spruce, alder, and pine trees choked the shore. I knew that beneath the deep, insulating blanket of snow that concealed the surface of the Gataga, strong currents were eating at the ice, and unseen holes could open anywhere. I paused for a long moment, then gunned the engine and sped out onto the river as fast as the machine could go.
The Egnell family, too, would have had to cross the river here when they came trapping. I could imagine the parents holding the hands of the kids, pausing now and again to tighten a snowshoe thong or adjust a dog pack. It would have been more dangerous for them, as they slowly made their way across the treacherous ice on foot, than it was for me on my machine.
Still, after several heart-stopping crossings, it was a huge relief to be able to steer the machine onto the riverbank and up through the trees. Before long I caught sight of the tiny cabin, almost lost beneath a heavy capping of snow, nestled among thickets of young, vigorous spruce trees jostling for space in what used to be a clearing.
Using a snowshoe as a shovel I cleared away the drifts from the door. At first it wouldn’t open, bound by the great weight of snow pressing down on the roof. I bashed against the door with my shoulder until it broke free. Once my eyes had adjusted to the gloom, I made out a single small room with a pole floor and a roof of axe-split boards. A small rusty wood stove squatted near the centre of the room and a rough pole bed occupied one corner. A low wooden table nailed to the wall under the single window completed the sparse furnishings. Empty corn syrup and baking powder cans sat on a narrow shelf in one corner, and in a blue Player’s tobacco can I found a box of .22 shells and a packet of Gillette razor blades. A few wooden stretchers used for drying hides leaned in one corner, and hanging on a nail from one of the low roof logs was a large metal kettle, possibly used for cooking meat for the pack dogs. The room was spartan, but ready for use.
I lit a fire in the stove, and when I had unpacked my sleeping bag and food and put on a pan of snow for tea, I took a closer look at the walls of the cabin. The scribblings of small children marked the lower logs, and there were many messages as well—“March 16, gone to Rabbit Lake, Frank.” “Gone to Rat Lake to hunt beaver, back on the 5th.” And, prominently, “Built 1938.”
I spotted another note high on one of the logs. Peering to make out the words, I read, “Snow come, get deep. Tough living, oh boy.”
I felt a jolt of recognition. Martha Egnell, Frank Jr.’s wife, had told me the terrible story of the thirty-mile cabin. Did this note refer to those events?
AS THE STORY WENT, in the spring of the year, in the late ’40s or early ’50s, Frank Sr. and his wife, along with some of their children, travelled down to the thirty-mile cabin to trap beaver. Martha didn’t say exactly how many children had come along, but she did say one of them was Frank Jr.’s older brother. All must have been old enough to snowshoe on their own. Frank Jr., who was born in 1926 and would have been in his early twenties at the time, stayed behind at Fort Ware, perhaps because he and Martha were newlyweds.
Martha told me that spring came late that year, and the ice was thick. It snowed day after day, making trapping and hunting impossible. In desperation, Frank Jr.’s older brother waded across the river trying to find and kill a moose, but, chilled by the frigid water, had to turn back. Soon after, he caught pneumonia. With no first aid or medicines, his racking cough could not be treated, and he died in the cabin. It would have been a terrible death, similar to drowning, as his lungs filled with fluid, choking off his breath. The ground was frozen hard as steel and so the family buried him under the floor of a small cabin just upriver from the main building. It was the only place where they could dig.
I had, in fact, noticed the remains of the smaller cabin in the summertime. All that remained were a few rotten logs almost lost in thick grass. There was nothing to indicate that it was a burial site.
Fearing that the rest of his family might starve, Frank Sr. set out to walk to Terminus, sixty miles downriver. Terminus is slightly closer than Ware, and he must have thought that it would be the fastest route to help.
Meanwhile, in Fort Ware, Frank Jr. was getting worried. With no word from the family, and knowing the country as he did, he feared that the deepening spring snows could bring starvation for anyone caught out on the land. He loaded a pack with food and set out for the thirty-mile cabin. It must have been an excruciating trip; as Martha told me, “the snow was over his knees every step.”
Not far from the thirty-mile cabin, Frank Jr. met his mother and the kids. Driven by hunger, she’d decided to strike out for Fort Ware, a route she may have been more familiar with than the trail to Terminus. I could imagine the joyful reunion as Frank Jr. untied his pack and gave them food, dry meat perhaps, or maybe hardtack and lard. There would have been sorrow, too, as Frank learned of his brother’s death, compounded by terrible anxiety, as he heard of his father’s desperate departure.
As it wasn’t far, they snowshoed back to the thirty-mile cabin, and with the food Frank Jr. had brought, the family soon revived. Now Frank had a difficult choice to make. He couldn’t have brought a lot of food with him, so the family would have to go back to Fort Ware. Would he accompany them, or should he go look for his father? If he did strike out downriver, it would mean that his mom would have to set out alone with the kids; in deep snow, that would be a grim task. No doubt he weighed the possibilities, questioning his mother about his father’s condition at the time he set out, wondering how far Frank Sr. might have made it and whether it was worthwhile to set out after him. Finally, he made his choice. Packing up what food was left, he and his mother and the kids set out once again for Fort Ware.
When Martha reached this part of the story, she paused and looked down at the cracked linoleum. After a few moments, she said, “Frank still thinks about that.”
When the family arrived back at Fort Ware without Frank Sr., a ski plane was chartered and Frank Jr., the priest, and an RCMP constable flew north and landed on the far end of the Pike Lakes. They walked down the creek, and in a little camp by the river, they came upon Frank’s father. He had tried to make a fire, cutting alder sticks for fuel. Weakened by hunger, he had been unable to chop through a small, dry tree, something he could have done with one stroke had he been well. He died there, and beside his frozen body they found his axe and the partly chopped stick.
Frank must have known then that had he gone downriver those seven miles instead of taking his mother back home, he might have saved his father’s life.
EVERY FEW DAYS throughout that first winter, I made the snowmobile trip to thirty-mile on the trapline rounds. No sign of the second cabin could be seen under the unmarked snow upriver.
Often, as I sipped my tea or finished up a meal, my eye drifted to the cryptic inscription lit by flickering candlelight, high on the wall behind the stove. Tough living, oh boy. Were they written that tragic spring? And if they were, whose hand had held the pencil? Was it Frank’s mother’s, while she waited, or his brother’s, before he died? Or was it his father’s, before he snowshoed into the silent, snowy forest?
And as the months passed, I began to understand the land in a whole new way, not as a visitor, but as someone to whom it was home. During the long nights at the thirty-mile cabin, stars glittered over the frozen river and above the line of serrated, icy peaks beyond. All was still. The land was wrapped in profound silence. As the hours passed, the temperature plummeted to –40°C, then –50°C, and lower. From time to time a crack rang out in the darkness as another tree exploded under the grip of the cold. The tiny tin wood stove fought a losing battle and the frost line hovered at knee level. I huddled in my sleeping bag on the spruce-pole bunk, the same one the Egnells had used so many years before. I listened to the small pops and whispers from the stove and watched the firelight flicker on the logs. I thought about the life-and-death choice that Frank Jr. had made. I thought about my own life and my choice to take up trapping. It seemed that Frank Jr. had made the best decision he could have, given all the factors he’d had to weigh. And so, I thought, had I.