IT’S A HEADY feeling being alone in the bush, leaving everything that smacks of civilization behind. There’s real power out there, and it doesn’t belong to you. There’s nothing finer than sitting on a log for hours and quietly feeling the land around you.
I was twenty-four when I went into the bush for the first time. Oh, I’d camped before, spent time hiking the back country, canoed into the wilderness. But I had never been out on the land with nothing but what I could carry. I’d always followed the Boy Scout credo to be prepared, lugging lots of stuff along with me for security: axes, ground sheets, lanterns, gas stoves, fishing tackle, snare wire, wax-dipped matches, maps, rope, a compass, a space blanket, a hunting knife and a marine horn for scaring off bears.
Being out on the land with only the absolute essentials was daunting. But my friend Walter Charlie had convinced me that I had to break my dependence on things. Walt was an old bush man who’d been raised in an Ojibway trapping family. When he saw how ill at ease I was in the wilderness, how ashamed to know so little about our people’s traditional ways, he invited me to spend a weekend out on the land with him.
When I got to Walt’s place, he looked over the items I’d brought. Laughing a little, he sorted them into two piles. We left all of my usual implements in the car, and he stuffed the rest into a small rucksack. All that was in there was string, fish hooks, fishing line, a knife, a change of clothes and a blanket. That didn’t seem like nearly enough to me for the country we were headed into, but Walt was carrying even less. It was cloudy and threatening rain. I felt trepidatious, but Walt whistled softly as he led the way.
We walked in about twenty-five kilometres. The land seemed to close off behind us, and I found the deep quiet unsettling. Walt was a strong walker, and I struggled to keep up. He rolled over the terrain with a bow-legged gait, while I kept my eyes glued to the rough ground. It was awesome country, though, and Walt stopped often to let me drink it in.
We settled on the shore of a small lake to make camp. Walt asked me to get a fire started, but once I’d gathered kindling he told me he wanted me to light the fire without matches. I laughed out loud.
“Everything you need is here,” he said. “You just have to trust the land.”
He led us on a search, and we came back to camp with a stick of dry birch, a palm-sized chunk of the same wood and a flattish length of maple. We scoured the shore line for cattails, and Walt showed me how to peel off their dried fibres. We gathered thin strips of cedar bark and enough birchbark to create a mat. Then he showed me how to fashion a bow from an arm-length sapling and a piece of twine and to carve a drill from the dry birch stick. The drill was bluntly pointed at one end when I was finished.
Carefully, Walt demonstrated the technique. He showed me how to string the bow and to place the birch wood drill into the palm-sized chunk. Then he taught me how to wrap the bow string around the drill stick. It was taut enough to hold it firm, but loose enough to roll along the drill and spin it when the bow was drawn back and forth. He set the point of the drill into the flat length of maple and began to saw the bow and turn the point of the drill until the friction had burnt a hole into the wood. Then, taking a knife, he cut a notch into the maple almost to the newly burned-in hole. He set the whole apparatus on the birchbark mat and went to serious work with the bow. He put his shoulder into the sawing; the drill spun hard, and it wasn’t long before a fine powder gathered in the notch of maple. Soon there was a mound of it, and he tapped it together with the blade of the knife, blew on it until it glowed and set it in the nest of bark and cattail fibres. He had a flame in no time.
Walt blew out that flame and turned things over to me. I struggled to replicate what I’d watched him do. The drill was wet with my perspiration. Walt was patient. It took me half an hour, but I managed to light that kindling.
Later, as we sat around a blazing fire, Walt told me stories of bush life, how my people had survived in that landscape and built a strong and resilient culture. He told me stories about learning things from his grandfather when he was young. The training he’d gone through had lasted years.
“Everything you need is here,” he said again. “You just have to trust the land.”
Walt and I went out on the land together a few times after that. He passed away when I was thirty. Though it’s been years since I used a bow and drill, I’ve never forgotten the time I spent with him or the central message of his teaching. It’s not the huge things that return us to who we are, it’s the magic of the small. Sitting out alone on the land, I remember.