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GHOSTS OF THE PAST
July brought warmer temperatures, the last of the ice, and fierce winds and storms. Severe winds along the middle stretch of Great Bear’s north shore, where the whole mighty expanse of the lake was facing me, required switching to more nocturnal habits. During the rough winds of the day I’d sleep; at night, when the winds had died, I’d paddle under the glow of the midnight sun with everything I had.
Bolts of lightning across the dark water brought me to a halt in the early evening on July 3. A storm was gathering strength in the distance, and it seemed the wind would be bringing it in my direction. I raced to make camp in time, setting up my tent in a low, sandy area back a ways from the water that seemed the safest bet for a thunderstorm. Fortunately, the storm remained distant, and I listened to it thundering across the lake while warm and dry inside my tent.
I slept only a few hours on that lonely beach. By midnight I was on my way again, paddling hard into a thick fog. Following along the wild, rocky shoreline meant taking numerous detours into bays—one of which proved so surprisingly shallow that I actually switched from my paddle to my pole, and ended up poling right across it. This swampy bay stood in sharp contrast to the almost unfathomable, cold depths of the lake proper. In its sheltered reaches I saw pike, flocks of ducks and geese, and even a great bull moose swimming across the water. It was the first moose I’d seen north of the Arctic Circle, since the ones I’d encountered along the Hare Indian River were just short of that latitude.
Except for one particularly frightful day of wind that kept me on shore for much of it, my daily average distance ranged from fifty to fifty-five kilometres. This was better progress than I’d anticipated making, and I’d managed to make up for time lost in the ice. This was good news in more ways than one—the sands of the hourglass before the inclement weather of late summer weren’t looking as discouraging anymore. Of more immediate concern, it meant that I could increase my daily rations.
Pretty much from day one of my journey, I’d been hungry. The recommend daily calorie intake for an adult male is 2,500 calories. I’d been consuming more than 3,000 calories a day. That still left me ravenously hungry, and I certainly would have consumed more had it been possible—but there’s a limit to how much you can cram into a canoe. And the more I packed, the more I’d have to lug through the trackless swamps, as well as the more deadweight to slow me down when poling up rivers or battling winds.
However, my better than expected progress had yielded me a surplus of food, and I’d now happily increased my allotted daily rations to ten energy/builder/granola bars, a pack of nuts of various kinds, some dried fruit, a bit of low-sodium jerky (some of it goose jerky, a gracious gift from a friend I’d known since grade four), and two freeze-dried meals to be eaten when I stopped for the day. That put my calorie intake at closer to four thousand—enough to keep me going hard all day at distances of up to seventy kilometres—but I was still losing weight—as is virtually inevitable on a journey of this nature.
On the bright side, I figured that as I grew steadily thinner I’d be less appealing to bears, who probably wouldn’t find my skeletal figure very appetizing. At least I hoped so.
After a stretch of about a hundred kilometres of rather uninviting shoreline dominated by low-lying willow swamps, the character of Great Bear’s landscape changed. I’d entered into the part of the lake known as the Dease Arm, another of its five great arms. As I advanced up the north coast here, I found the willow swamps and tundra gave way to dramatic cliffs. I passed two incredible waterfalls tumbling over cliffs that seemed like something out of an ancient legend. In other places there were pinkish granite rocks with a mix of open tundra and clusters of spruce that looked like a Group of Seven painting come to life—well, aside from the thick clouds of bugs, which don’t seem to have made it into any of the Group’s paintings.
These changed landscapes were a tell-tale sign I’d reached the Canadian Shield, that gigantic geologic zone covering almost half of Canada’s landmass—some eight million square kilometres, if one includes parts outside Canada. The Shield, perhaps the country’s most famous landscape, stretches as far south as Muskoka, all the way north to the shores of Ellesmere Island, and east to Labrador. Its western extent is roughly Great Bear Lake itself, right where I’d now arrived. The rocky uplands and millions of lakes within the Shield make it ideal canoeing territory, at least in its more southern reaches.
My last days crossing Great Bear were filled with wildlife. A lone wolf wandered along a marshy section of shoreline as I passed by. When the wolf spotted me she just sat down and stared at me, tilting her head to the side in curiosity as I drifted past in my canoe, staring right back with equal wonder. After a good while she rose and ran off from shore, pausing twice to look back at me, filling me with awe. In the wild, wolves have an average lifespan of about seven years, which means some arctic wolves will likely never encounter humans. This seems to partly explain the differences in how wolves in isolated areas behave compared with ones closer to human settlements. The former react with curiosity; the latter, having learned to fear humans, flee.
Wolves weren’t the only carnivores about. At the other end of the size scale, I spotted a lithe little weasel scurrying along a great slab of granite like a character out of a cartoon. Weasels are striking, tough little animals, often taking down prey as much ten times their own size, principally rodents and birds, but sometimes even hares. Pound for pound, they may just be the toughest carnivores on the planet, exceeding even wolverines in their ability to kill prey larger than themselves. They kill with a bite to the base of their prey’s skull. In the Arctic there are short-tailed weasels and their smaller cousins, least weasels, both of which are hardy and adaptable enough to survive the harsh conditions. In winter their coats are all white to camouflage with the snows, but in summer they change to brown on their heads and backs.
Soon after spotting the weasel, paddling on calm waters I came across an odd little sight bobbing up and down on the lake, a portly brown lemming swimming valiantly but largely ineffectively. It seemed so slow and helpless as to be almost cartoon-like in its frantic paddling. I wondered what it was doing so far from land, and if perhaps a hawk had dropped it from its talons while flying over the lake. On the other hand, lemmings are known to make great migrations, including even the crossing of large water (not always successfully; they sometimes drown). Their populations follow cyclical fluctuations every few years, much like other arctic prey species, notably hares, which trigger famines among “apex” predators, including wolves, lynx, and, at one time, humans.
Birds were plentiful in the eastern waters of Great Bear. I saw hawks, jaegers, gulls, terns, loons, ducks, geese, and bald eagles. One arctic tern dive-bombed a raucous gull in an impressive display of aerobatic manoeuvres. The terns are elegant flyers with long, sharp beaks, which they don’t hesitate to use on any bird, animal, or person getting too close to one of their nests. Gulls will steal and eat other birds’ eggs if given the chance.
Once I’d reached the eastern shores of Great Bear Lake I began working my way southward, to seek the mouth of a river draining in from the east. This river, known as the Dease, formed the next link in the hypothetical chain I’d devised to take me across Canada’s Arctic. Along this rocky eastern shore were many deeply indented bays several kilometres in width, but I was able to cut across most of them without much trouble, saving me from tracing them out.
One of these big open-water crossings surprised me by the unusual landscape on the opposite shore I was heading toward. It looked nothing like anything I’d yet seen on my journey: rolling hills of open tundra dotted with clusters of spruces and framed by dramatic red cliffs. The whole scene reminded me of Prince Edward Island—the Canadian Arctic astonishing me again with its amazing diversity of landscape. The stereotypical view of the Arctic (some might even say all of Canada) is a place of ice and snow and not much else. During winter, that may be so—but when the snows melt during the brief summers, a delightful complexity is revealed.
On the afternoon of July 7, tracing Great Bear’s eastern shores southward, I passed into a channel formed by the mainland and the lee side of an immense island over fifteen kilometres long. It was somewhere up this channel that nearly two centuries ago in 1836, the fur traders Peter Warren Dease and Thomas Simpson and their companions had built a fort to endure the harsh winters, after a long boat journey north from more southern trade posts. Their orders from the Hudson’s Bay Company were to chart the unknown coastline of the Arctic Ocean. Dease had selected a crack team of Dene hunters, Canadian voyageurs, and Scottish sailors and craftsmen for the mission.
They built their isolated post, Fort Confidence, here on Great Bear’s north shore to serve as a base of operations while they pushed on in summer to map the Arctic coast, hoping to solve the riddle of the Northwest Passage. The older Dease’s competence and careful planning, long years of experience in the fur trade, and ability to speak four languages, combined with the younger Simpson’s physical prowess and daring, made for a potent combination. Dease, Simpson, and their party spent nearly three years here, departing in 1839. As for Fort Confidence, over the next century it gradually fell into ruin and was forgotten.
Despite the importance of pushing on, I couldn’t resist the temptation to pause to search for the remnants of Fort Confidence. Knowing it was somewhere on the northeastern shore, I paddled closer in to keep an eye out for any clues to its whereabouts. There wasn’t much to go on, as the shore was screened from view by tall black spruces, willows, and alders, despite being north of the Arctic Circle. (It was precisely the presence of that forest that had attracted the explorers to build Fort Confidence here, as they needed timber for construction and huge quantities of firewood to survive the long winters.) However, I noticed a slight hill where there seemed to be a bit of a clearing, and though nearly two centuries had passed, I figured some scant glade might remain. I also figured the hill would be a logical choice for the establishment of a fort, offering a view of the lake.
There was nowhere to land along the bank, as it was a bit steep and thickly grown over with alders and willows. So instead, with a rope I tied my canoe to a spruce tree, promising the canoe not to worry and that I’d be back soon. Then taking a paddle as a walking stick, I climbed to shore through the thick alder bushes.
Once through the alders, the ground sloped uphill, which was mostly open, grassy land. I scanned around, but couldn’t see any artifacts or ruins. So I went a bit farther, rounding a thick cluster of spruces and pushing through some tall willow bushes to see if anything lay hidden behind them.
Then my eyes caught sight of something odd poking up through the thicket of willows and spruces ahead: the ghostly ruins of two stone chimneys. It was Fort Confidence, or rather what was left of it. I pushed through the willows to take a closer look. All that was left of the fort, it seemed, was the masonry associated with the chimneys and their stone and clay hearths. The buildings themselves had long since burned down, with the spruces and willows swallowing up the site over the ages. The chimneys were made of rocks pulled up from the lakeshore, the hearths neatly shaped in half-moons to reflect the heat out—a vital concern in the long, dark, bone-chilling winters. One of the chimneys had toppled over, but the other was still intact and standing upright. I bent down in the hearth, inspecting it, then lay down on my back and gazed up through the chimney at the clouds passing overhead.
Dease and Simpson proved a remarkably effective exploring duo, far more competent than their more famous contemporary, Sir John Franklin. Dease was a native-born Canadian who’d travelled extensively across the country as a fur trader before coming north. He was universally liked and respected, but was noted as being not overly ambitious and, at fifty years of age, inclined not to push things too hard. Simpson couldn’t have been more different: he was twenty years younger, a brash, impetuous Scottish Highlander. But they worked well together, and with their expert Dene hunters, Canadian woodsmen, and Scottish carpenters and sailors, they’d mapped huge stretches of the Northwest Passage in small boats, without any loss of life from starvation, accidents, or the elements—more than can be said for Franklin with his vastly larger naval expeditions.
However, things later took a decidedly strange turn for Dease and Simpson. Maybe it was the winters spent isolated in their three log dwellings that were rather grandly called Fort Confidence. Certainly they’d endured numerous dangers on the Arctic Ocean and all the hardships associated with continual darkness during brutal winters. Whatever the reason, while on the return journey south, Simpson, always high-strung, had apparently gone insane, murdering two voyageurs and then shooting himself in the head. Others, however, insisted it was murder made to look like suicide, in order to steal the maps and papers he carried. What truly happened will likely never be known.
There wasn’t time, however, to dwell much on the impermanence of things and the ghosts of the past—there’d be time enough for that in the future; for now, I had to be on my way. Turning my back on the crumbled ruins, I returned through the willows to where I’d left my canoe. I was happy to see it, for if by some freak chance my knot had come undone and the canoe had drifted off, my bones might have made a nice addition to the archaeological site.
Once back on the water, I paddled on. Another six kilometres and my journey across North America’s fourth largest lake was complete. I’d reached the eastern end of the lake. It was the evening of July 7, meaning it had taken me eleven days to cross Great Bear. That was much faster than I’d expected. I estimated beforehand that, having to assume the worst with winds and ice, it would take at least two weeks, if not three. When planning a solo expedition, it’s imperative to always plan for worst-case scenarios.
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 specified 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.