The sun was behind them as the chopper lifted. The roar was muted, because Webb, like the others in the chopper, was wearing a headset that let him communicate with George.
Within seconds the small town was below them, just a collection of buildings that looked like driftwood that the mighty Mackenzie had spewed onto its banks.
And then they were above the river, passing the man-made islands in the center that held the oil wells that defined Norman Wells.
The chopper headed south and west, crossing the brown muddy waters of the wide Mackenzie. By this point, the river had already gathered the forces of a dozen other rivers, each of them roiling with sediment carried down from distant mountains.
Webb didn’t expect the chopper to land for a while, so he was surprised when it dipped just after crossing the river and hovered above a clearing in the woods.
George’s voice came over Webb’s headset. “None of you have walked the beginning stages of the Canol Trail, but I understand some of you will be returning to make sure you hike every step.”
The two German tourists gave each other high fives, which told Webb that they understood English. That meant he’d have to be rude to ignore them. Which was fine with Webb.
“However,” George continued, “it’s worth mentioning that below us is Mile One. Here is where the building of the Canol Road and pipeline began and where base camp was established in 1943.”
Webb tuned George out and concentrated on a guitar riff in his head.
One of the things that Webb knew about himself was that, except for music, he didn’t like to learn by listening. Spoken words moved too slowly for him. He preferred to get his information by reading. It was faster, and when he needed to remember the information, all he had to do was visualize the words. When information entered his brain through his ears instead of his eyes, it was a lot harder to remember. He had a lot of information stored on his iPod; to his way of thinking, his brain was as big as the Internet. He didn’t need George to tell him about the Canol Trail. All he needed to do was hold his iPod in the palm of his hand, and in seconds, he could review all the knowledge he’d collected.
The chopper banked forward and headed southwest toward the Mackenzie Mountains, some 24 kilometers away.
The short stunted spruce of the flat plains of the Mackenzie River became a blur beneath them.
The first portion of the Canol Trail would have been easy to walk, Webb thought. Boring because of the flatness, but not so boring since a moose or bear could appear at any second.
If you wanted to walk all 675 kilometers of northwest Arctic from Norman Wells to Whitehorse—the entire length of the Canol Road—you walked a segment of 80 to 130 kilometers every summer. A chopper took you to your starting point and picked you up at the other end. By cutting the trek down to shorter segments, you could carry enough food to last the week it took to go between the mile markers. Or you could choose to walk the Canol Trail, a shorter portion of the original road.
Webb had no intention of walking any of the other segments.
Once he found what he had been sent to find at Mile 112, he was not coming back to hike the rest of the trail. Last thing he wanted was a return trip to Norman Wells and another encounter with Brent Melrose.
Webb wasn’t great at math, but the pilot had told him earlier that they would be traveling at about 160 kilometers an hour. So when the helicopter dipped again about fifteen minutes later, at the approach to the Mackenzie Mountains, it surprised him. They couldn’t already be at their destination.
This time, instead of hovering, the chopper landed on a gravel bar between sheer canyon walls near a shallow, fast-moving river. The water was so pure and clear, you could see flashes of fish.
All the noise and vibration stopped.
George unstrapped himself from his seat and opened the side door to the chopper. He pointed above him.
“Make sure you keep your heads down,” he said. “The blades haven’t stopped moving.”
Two minutes later, all of them were on the ground. Webb looked around, blown away by the view. The canyon walls that rose above him were reddish brown. He’d never felt so puny, not even among the massive skyscrapers of downtown Toronto.
There was the sound of rocks tumbling high above them.
“Sheep!” George called out.
All of them looked up to see a pair of white mountain sheep, with little ones behind, edging their way along a path 50 or 60 meters straight up.
Webb pulled his eyes away from the sheep and looked downriver. Huge rocks rose like zombie giants.
He noticed a small piece of pipe, twisted and rusty, running along the river’s edge. This was all that remained of the work of thousands upon thousands of men: a pipeline meant to send a precious flow of oil from Norman Wells to Whitehorse, 675 kilometers to the west. Webb thought about what it might have been like to be one of the army of workers who built the pipeline, fighting howling winds and lashing snow in temperatures of minus 50 degrees Celsius.
They wouldn’t be going that far though.
Godlin Lakes was at Mile 168. That was near where the chopper was going to leave them. They were going to walk back from there to the old pipeline pump station at Mile 108, just beyond Devil’s Pass, where the chopper would pick them up in a week.
He’d been told that was almost 100 kilometers and that they’d need to average just over 16 kilometers a day.
When the chopper dropped them at Mile 170, they’d be alone in thousands of square miles of the most remote wilderness that Canada had to offer.
If there had been any other way for Webb to get to Devil’s Pass except with a group, he would have done it.
It had been tempting to use some of the money to hire a chopper to bring him in and out. Straight to Devil’s Pass and back to Norman Wells.
Except that’s not what his grandfather had wanted him to do.