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We live only when we adventure and give expression to the results of our adventure.
—Lawren Harris, Group of Seven, notebook, 1920s
EXPLORATION BEGINS by figuring out what you don’t know. In the spring of 2008, I was sitting in my cluttered room with a bunch of maps sprawled on the pine floor and draped across the table in front of me, looking for somewhere that I could explore. I had been there all morning sipping green tea, pondering the maps, making notes, and pacing around the room like a caged bobcat. My bookshelves were crammed with explorers’ manuscripts, old adventure novels, and volumes on geography, archaeology, history, and zoology. Well-used Ojibwa snowshoes, a prized Gränsfors Bruk axe, assorted antlers, canoe paddles, waterproof Bushnell binoculars, a brass sextant, a Brazilian machete, and a hickory walking stick occupied whatever available space there was atop the bookshelves and between them. Miscellaneous other expedition gear lay scattered about. My faithful companion, a huge Rottweiler-Shepherd mix named Riley, was sleeping on a rug in the corner, probably dreaming of rabbits.
From the maps stretched out before me, I had compiled a list of rivers in the Hudson Bay watershed—172 rivers in all, which excluded smaller streams and creeks. Then I began crossing rivers off the list if I could find anything published on them. The better known rivers, like the Missinaibi or Albany, could be stricken from the list at once. I would invariably discover—much to my disappointment—that others that seemed to hold brighter prospects had been the subject of some obscure surveying report, canoeing pamphlet, book chapter, blog post, or magazine article. I was beginning to wonder if I would ever find a single river large enough to warrant the name that had not been addressed in some medium or another. What I was after was a mystery—a hidden-away place on earth that I couldn’t learn about simply by picking up a book or looking it up on Wikipedia. I wanted something as obscure as possible—an almost unknown river with no published record of anyone exploring it. If I could find such a river, I planned to go see it for myself—the sort of old-fashioned expedition boyhood dreams are made of.
Most people who canoe rivers select ones that have detailed guide books, specialized canoeing maps, or historic explorers’ journals published about them. Such records make planning a wilderness journey—never the simplest of tasks—infinitely safer and easier. They usually allow canoeists to know what they are getting themselves into: how to access the river, how difficult it is to canoe, where suitable campsites are located, when to portage, and how long the trip should take. But people don’t make a name for themselves by following in the footsteps of others, and the easy path is generally not the most interesting. My thirst for the unknown made me an explorer, and it is the business of an explorer to venture where few if any have gone before, regardless of the difficulties. Besides, things don’t seem that difficult from the comfort of my room, with all my maps and books.
That morning, staring at the maps, I thought I had finally found what I had been looking for: a river that no one knew anything about. My fingers were tracing the vague outlines of dozens of rivers in the James Bay watershed when I hit upon one that was unlabelled on the map. The area appeared promising for an expedition: here were hundreds of waterways draining north into the brackish waters of James Bay, and then into the Arctic Ocean. The region is beyond the reach of roads and the urban sprawl-styled “civilization”: the only settlements to speak of are a few Cree communities scattered around the windswept shores of James Bay. This nameless river that had excited my interest was easily overlooked on the map because it was obscured by the artificial Ontario–Quebec boundary line. However, I soon discovered that the river had an official name by examining some of my more detailed maps and matching them with the large-scale one. Rather curiously, it was labelled the Again River—curious because “Again” is neither an aboriginal word, a surname of an explorer, nor a descriptive term like “Trout River.” How, I wondered, did this river get its name?
I scanned my bookshelf for Bruce Hodgins and Gwyneth Hoyle’s Canoeing North into the Unknown: A Record of River Travel, hoping to find the answer. This indispensable encyclopedia lists every known expedition or canoe trip down Canada’s northern rivers up to 1997, including nearly a thousand such journeys in all. Riffling through its pages, I was surprised to discover that the Again wasn’t listed in the book. Next, I lifted another volume off the shelf, Jonathan Berger and Thomas Terry’s venerable Canoe Atlas of the Little North. Published in 2007, with several dozen contributors, including geography professors, aboriginal elders, and veteran canoeists, I thought that it would surely have some information on the river. But I searched the atlas and found that this obscure Again River wasn’t even mentioned. My curiosity piqued, I went through every likely book in my library on the subject, unable to find any hint of the Again River. Even Google generated nearly nothing on the river. Aside from the Canadian government’s standard issue 1:50,000 and 1:250,000 scale topographic maps (derived largely from mid-twentieth-century black-and-white aerial photos), the only meaningful reference to the river appeared in one sentence on a government website, in a list of geographical names approved in both French and English: “Rivière Again or Again River.” That did nothing to explain the origin of the name or reveal whether an expedition had previously explored the river. When I entered the name in the government’s Geographical Names Data Base, the search results merely indicated that “Again River” had been approved in 1946, but offered no further clues. In contrast, the search results for other geographical names sometimes included an annotation explaining the name’s origin—such as “Mackenzie River, named after the explorer Alexander Mackenzie”—but the entry for the Again was left blank. Promising as this all seemed, I understood that many archival documents had never been digitized and that I might still locate an account of an expedition to the river if I dug deeper.
Over the following days, I did some extensive sleuthing to see if I could uncover anything further. I visited several university libraries and searched through their vast databases. At my disposal were newspaper archives dating back over a century, magazines, geographical journals, Geological Survey files, and explorers’ records. After searching through a multitude of documents, there was still nothing. Expanding my inquiry, I began to comb through tedious mineral exploration reports, which were unlikely to yield much information on the navigability of the Again River, but they might at least provide some clues to whether any expedition had ever ventured there. After a few weeks, I finally located a brief report on file with the provincial department in charge of mining that mentioned, in passing, the Again River. The geologist who had authored it had never been to the river himself. His small party had flown via helicopter to a lake southeast of the Again to do some prospecting work in 1983. But they did no canoeing, and their report contained no description of the river.
In spite of the scarcity of documentary evidence, I could be certain that some people had been to at least a few portions of the river. Fur trappers and occasional canoeists would surely have passed by its outlet on the much larger Harricanaw River. A few of them might even have ventured a short distance up its meandering course, fighting against the presumably swift current. The Harricanaw, while never a major trade route because of its shallow depth and many rapids, served as a minor fur trade river and is still canoed sporadically by wilderness enthusiasts. It would have been paddled by hunter-gatherers for centuries and was first explored by Europeans in the seventeenth century. Even the young Pierre Trudeau had paddled it in the 1940s. But these people had only canoed the Harricanaw and hadn’t wasted their time attempting to fight their way up its rock-strewn, swift-flowing tributaries.
It was also evident that during the surveys of the Ontario– Quebec boundary, a small party of government surveyors must have at least criss-crossed the Again at the two points where the artificial boundary crossed the river. Locating these surveyors’ records would offer me the best (and only) written clues as to what I could expect on the river and the extent to which it had been previously explored. But I couldn’t find their records and neither could the archivists who were assisting me in my search.
So, having exhausted the published record and finding next to nothing, I resolved to explore this mysterious river, of which no one apparently knew much of anything. Whether someone had canoed the river and left no record of their journey was of course no concern of mine. My objective was simple enough: to make the first detailed exploration of and substantial published account on the Again River in history. The idea alone—the first in history—was positively intoxicating.
While there were no written records to assist me in my planned exploration of the river, maps and satellite images were available. These enabled me to plan a provisional route through half-a-dozen lakes, partially down a parallel river, up a nameless creek, and then overland to reach the Again’s isolated headwaters. It was a circuitous and difficult route that would entail upstream travel and nightmarish portages through presumably impenetrable swamp forest. Of course, nothing less could be expected. Topographic maps, however, can still be inaccurate or incomplete. Waterfalls and rapids might be omitted; streams that are drawn on the map might not actually exist. This, I knew, could well prove the case with the Again River.
What I did know about the Again, on the basis of blurry, low-resolution satellite images and old topographic maps derived from black-and-white aerial photographs snapped in the late 1950s, was that it measured some 107 kilometres in length. It wasn’t surprising that the Again had attracted little attention: it’s too small and marginal to be of much interest to most wilderness canoeists, particularly since the Hudson and James Bay watershed contains many dozens of larger, more navigable waterways. For example, the Albany, the longest river in the Hudson Bay Lowlands, extends over a thousand kilometres. I could be certain that the blackflies and other bloodsucking insects would be horrible, since the Again snakes across the southern reaches of the world’s third-largest wetland, the Hudson Bay Lowlands. In terms of political geography, the Again meanders back and forth across the artificial Ontario–Quebec boundary, with a total of approximately 63 kilometres of the river within Ontario and 44 within Quebec. I could tell from the black-and-white aerial photos and topographic maps that I would encounter many rapids. The river might also possibly contain waterfalls, but how big and dangerous they were as well as their precise location were unknown.
My intention was to make the expedition as comprehensive as possible. The primary objective was geographical: I would make the first published description of the river, creating a canoeing guide of the sort that exists for other wilderness waterways. I would also keep a record of the wildlife I encountered and, with luck, photograph them. There was also the mystery of the Eskimo curlew to consider, a rare bird believed to have gone extinct. The last confirmed sighting of this medium-sized brownish shorebird, a member of the sandpiper family, had been in the 1960s. But there had been an unconfirmed sighting in 1976 by an ornithologist in southern James Bay, an area I intended to pass through after exploring the Again. In terms of archaeological exploration, I would keep an eye out for any artifacts that could shed light on the unwritten history of the river. Ancient pictographs and petroglyphs—rock paintings and carvings—were a speciality of my academic research. Finally, I would make what inquiries I could in the Cree communities on James Bay concerning the existence of the Again River to ascertain as far as possible if any individuals there knew anything of it.
Finding this little-known river and exploring it was a chance for adventure and old-fashioned discovery, or so I hoped.
A FEW MONTHS LATER I was in a pickup truck, travelling along a bumpy gravel road, winding through monotonous boreal forest, heading toward the point where I would leave civilization behind and go to seek the Again River. In the passenger seat was clean-shaven Terry O’Neil, a, genial old-timer who made extra cash shuttling canoeists and hunters to various rivers and hunting camps across northern Ontario and Quebec. Driving was my father, who had decided—quite unexpectedly—to come along on my expedition. We were on the fringes of the northern wilderness heading some two hundred kilometres northeast of Cochrane, a small logging town located over six hundred kilometres north of Toronto.
My father, an engineer and woodsman extraordinaire, built canoes, among other things. He had countless camping trips under his belt, but he had never undertaken a true expedition: his preference was for idyllic paddles on picturesque lakes, not the gruelling ordeals through mosquito-infested swamps to unexplored rivers that I favoured. At forty-nine, he felt that this was perhaps his last chance to join me on one of my notorious expeditions. Notorious, because generally anyone who had ever accompanied me on an expedition swiftly arrived at the conclusion that—while proud to have done it—they would not readily subject themselves to such a discomforting experience ever again. While I too enjoyed leisurely canoe trips, they’re not the stuff adventures are made of, the trailblazing expeditions into the unknown that I hungered for.
Back in Cochrane, Terry had taken down our information in the event that we didn’t return from the wilderness. He had been under the impression that our objective was merely to canoe the Kattawagami River, a wild enough waterway, but one easily accessible via a remote unserviced highway that snakes northeast of Cochrane to an old gold mine—the gravel road we were travelling on. The Kattawagami attracts adventurers down its winding, rapid-filled course, but by my standards, it’s well-explored territory.
“To tell you the truth,” said Terry from the front passenger seat, as we drove along the road, “I don’t like shuttling people to the Kattawagami. I prefer going other places.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
Terry stared out the passenger window for a while at the passing spruce forest, then, clearing his throat, he explained, “Well, the last time I shuttled someone to attempt the Kattawagami, it was a young couple. Only one of them came back alive.”
“Their canoe upset in a rapid. The wife drowned. The guy survived. He was delirious when search and rescue found him. You don’t get over something like that. He’s in a mental institution now.”
My father swallowed hard. “Terrible,” he mumbled.
Later I found a newspaper article about it. In 2006 Zanna Marie Cruikshank and her husband Derek attempted to canoe the Kattawagami. Zanna, a nurse, was described as an “avid outdoor enthusiast.” Their canoe capsized in a dangerous rapid; Zanna was killed. Her husband survived and managed to continue downriver for several more days, until he stumbled across a trapper’s cabin. The trapper, according to the story, brought him to the nearest hospital—a considerable distance away in Moosonee, a small Cree community. Zanna’s body was later found in a shallow bay on the river. Nor was this the only recent tragedy in the area—two months earlier, some hundred kilometres to the southeast, there had been a fatal bear attack. A woman had been mauled to death and her corpse partially consumed by a black bear outside an isolated hunting cabin.
“The Kattawagami’s right up here,” Terry pointed to the narrow bridge just up ahead.
“We don’t want the Kattawagami,” I said.
“You don’t want the Katt?” Terry asked, surprised.
“No, we want a different waterway, a small creek. It’s called Hopper Creek on the map. It drains into the Kattawagami. We want to explore it as a different route to reach the Kattawagami. Do you know it?”
“Ah, no. I’ve never heard of it. Where is it?”
“Just a bit farther, roughly another twenty-four kilometres past the Kattawagami.” I knew this because I had measured the distance between the bridge over the Kattawagami and the creek via satellite image ahead of time, and then kept track of the distance on the truck’s odometer once we had passed the bridge.
“Fellas, I don’t know this creek, never heard of it. Not sure you guys should go down it. You should stick to the Kattawagami.” Terry was uneasy.
But I had not come all that way to paddle the Kattawagami, a river plenty of other people had already paddled. The days when paddling something like it would satisfy me were long past. My father, on the other hand, had never canoed any northern river and was starting to become a bit alarmed at the sight of them, as we passed over each bridge on the road north.
“Maybe we should just do the Kattawagami?” he suggested.
I shook my head. “Let’s stick with our plan. We’re heading to the Again River.”
“The what river?”
“The Again. Have you heard of it?”
“No.” Terry shook his head.
As we drove deeper into the seemingly endless spruce forest, a wandering black bear crossed the gravel road in front of us. “This is God’s country, I’ve never been this far down the road before,” muttered Terry.
“Keep going,” I said to my father behind the wheel, “everything will be fine.” Fifteen minutes later, we reached a tiny creek shrouded in alder bushes and clouds of blackflies.
“This must be it,” I said with excitement. My father and Terry looked appalled.
It was raining as Terry drove away in the truck, leaving us by the narrow stream packing a cedar-strip canoe my father and I had made. Shallow and rocky, the creek was only a couple of paddle-widths across, but with a swift current. Amid an onslaught of blackflies, we set off down the dark, swirling waters of the stream into the unknown. It proved barely navigable—choked with rock-strewn rapids that made wading necessary much of the time. Scrubby black spruces and lichen-draped tamaracks hemmed in the waterway, while granite outcrops and boulders as tall as us appeared in places along the banks. It might almost have been called pretty, if not for the swampy muskeg that lay just beyond the fringe of forest skirting the banks and the dismal hum of millions of mosquitoes and blackflies swarming us, enjoying our blood. A gruelling, day-long struggle down the creek brought us to where it joined the swift-flowing Kattawagami River. By nightfall, we reached the shallow waters of a large, weedy lake. On this lake, isolated as it was, stood a lonely, ramshackle hunting cabin that appeared to have been untouched in years.
For the next three days, we hacked, paddled, portaged, and waded through trackless alder swamps to leave the Kattawagami watershed behind. That was enough exploration for my father. He had nothing to prove to anyone—and to him, the Again River was just a meandering blue line on a map—not an ideal. As darkness fell on the third day, my father announced that he was calling it quits and wanted to turn around. I was disappointed but couldn’t force him to continue. So I had to content myself with having explored Hopper Creek and a certain nameless tributary river that we had ventured up, as well as the alder swamps. My father, in contrast, was cheerful enough with a more leisurely form of exploration around our camps at night. He looked at the hardy trees growing in the acidic soil with an engineer’s appreciation: “170 years old—remarkable,” he would say in a sort of reverie, after having meticulously counted the rings on another black spruce that had toppled over. In his notebook, he compiled a list of all the flora he found growing along the riverbanks.
When we eventually returned to the isolated mining road, our legs were scraped and cut from the jagged rocks and fallen trees hidden beneath the swift waters, through which we had laboriously dragged the canoe against the current. Our faces were swollen and cut with blackfly bites. My father resolved not to go on any further expeditions, but my determination to explore the Again River remained as strong as ever.
THE FOLLOWING SUMMER, I returned to the area for a second attempt: this time with a friend, Wesley Crowe. Wes and I had been fast friends since our days on the playground of E.W. Farr elementary school. We had shared in many adventures together—canoeing rivers, braving storms, spearing fish, sleeping under the stars—and the summer after our high school graduation, we had embarked together on a journey as deep into the wilderness as we could go. Sturdy, resolute, and as close to fearless as it is probably prudent to be, he remained my first choice whenever I was in need of an expedition partner. Wes, tied down with a construction job, had been unable to accompany me the prior summer but was now free to join me. He had spent the last seven months living with his girlfriend in Australia, but had just arrived back in Canada and was burning for an adventure. However, his older sister’s upcoming wedding in mid-August meant the expedition had a fixed end date. Naturally, I had presumed that missing his sister’s wedding to explore an obscure river was eminently understandable—but I was made to appreciate that this was not the case.
Wes and I retraced my route from the previous summer down the tortuous course of Hopper Creek, dragging and wading with a canoe through shallow rock-strewn rapids and then paddling down a section of the Kattawagami River. Soaking wet and exhausted, at dusk on the first day we arrived at the decrepit log cabin on the large, weedy lake. The cabin looked like it hadn’t been touched since my father and I had been there the previous year. I was content to set up our tent on the shore and sleep there, but asked Wes if he cared to spare the trouble of unpacking and just sleep in the old, musty cabin.
“This place reminds me of Deliverance,” he replied.
“There are no hillbillies around here,” I said.
“If you say so,” Wes looked suspiciously at the surrounding trees, “let’s sleep in the cabin, then.”
We pulled the canoe onshore—it was an old fibreglass vessel that its previous owner gave me, thinking it was worthless. The battered fourteen-foot canoe was nearly forty years old and had several holes in its hull, which I had repaired as best I could. I would have preferred a sturdier vessel for this kind of expedition, but Wes and I didn’t have the funds for one. We unloaded the canoe, strapped on our backpacks, and headed up the gravelly beach toward the cabin in the fading light.
“Watch your step,” I said, motioning to a bed of nails protruding from the crude porch in front of the cabin. The nails were intended to serve as a bear deterrent. Black bears, adult males of which can weigh over five hundred pounds, sometimes break into cabins if food is stored inside. We gathered some firewood and lit a fire in the cabin’s rusted cast-iron stove to cook soup and make tea. It was dark by the time we finished supper. Exhausted from the struggle along the creek, down the Kattawagami River, and across the large, choppy waters of the lake, we were soon asleep in the cabin’s wooden bunks. But sometime in the night, our slumber was disturbed by a loud crash immediately outside the cabin door.
“What was that?” Wes whispered, sitting upright in his sleeping bag and staring into the darkness toward the door.
“A bear,” I whispered, fumbling for my hatchet, then my flashlight.
We remained silent, straining our ears to detect any sound from outside the thin walls. After a brief silence, we could hear something lumbering through the thick brush.
Wes and I sprang to our feet. Breathing rapidly, we moved as quietly as we could toward the door. Wes seized a rusty old axe that was propped up against the wall. We both peered out the windows toward the lakeshore, but saw no movement.
“Let’s check it out,” I whispered, switching on my flashlight and slowly opening the door.
“Watch out for the nails.” I shone the light toward the bear trap.
“Maybe that’s what we heard—a bear stepped on the nails.” Wes crouched down to inspect them.
“See anything?”
“Hmm … I don’t see any blood or fur,” replied Wes as he looked over the ranks of nails that guarded the cabin’s door. I circled the light around the front of the cabin, looking into the spruces and poplars to see if I could catch sight of anything. It was a cold, starry night.
“Well, I guess if it was a bear, it’s gone now,” I concluded.
“I think it had to be a bear,” said Wes standing up. “What else could have made a noise like that?”
“A lonely hillbilly,” I offered.
Wes laughed. We returned to the bunks, switched off the flashlight, and slept with our axe and hatchet handy, in the event that anything else should disturb us.
OVER THE FOLLOWING WEEK, Wes and I fought our way down the Kattawagami River, dragged our fragile canoe up a nameless tributary that I had explored the previous summer, and then set about the arduous process of trailblazing our way overland to the Again’s isolated headwaters. We had neither a GPS nor satellite phone and relied mostly on the sun for navigation, aided at times by map and compass. The sun, with a bit of practice, can be more easily relied upon to keep a steady course than a compass, especially in dense forest where both hands need be kept free to blaze a trail. We were making good progress until the sixth day of our expedition, when we encountered some difficulty crossing a vast swamp. It was uncertain if we would make it back in time for Wes’ sister’s wedding if we proceeded any further.
“I’d say we have at least a fifty-fifty chance,” I concluded.
Wes stroked his scrubby black beard. “Hmm … that’s not good enough. I’d need a one hundred percent assurance we’d be back in time, or else my family will disown me.”
I sighed, disappointed. After a few moments of silence, I reluctantly said, “Well, in that case, we should turn around. With nothing to guide us, we can’t be certain how long it will take us to reach the Again and then get down it.” It was a bitter pill—so close only to have to turn back. For the second summer in a row, I wouldn’t reach the Again River.
Wes nodded, “All right, so now what?”
I pulled out the crude sketch map from my pocket. “We turn around, retrace the trails that we made, portage back to the Kattawagami, then paddle down it to tidewater at James Bay. Cross James Bay to the Moose River, head up the river until we reach Moosonee, and then catch the Polar Bear Express train south to Cochrane.”
“How long will—” Wes swore and slapped the back of his neck. Several dozen mosquitoes were feasting on him, “that take us?”
“About ten days,” I replied. Of course, stormy weather on James Bay—a body of water with a fearsome reputation for drowning canoeists and boaters—could delay us for days on end. But since the weather was beyond our control, I didn’t mention this detail.
“Okay, sounds like we have nothing to worry about.”
“Right,” I cheerfully replied.
But by the time we fought our way back to the banks of the Kattawagami—through impenetrably thick forest, across mosquito-infested swamps, and over several pristine lakes—we had to concede our canoe had heard its death knell. The old fibreglass vessel was nowhere near as strong as the cedar-strip canoe my father and I had made, which had survived the punishing rapids and jagged rocks without a single leak. But that beautifully hand-crafted canoe was a real work of art, and I was reluctant to subject it to the punishment of another expedition—preferring to save it for gentle trips on calm water. So I had acquired this old fibreglass canoe, which was now leaking like a strainer as we attempted to paddle it. The canoe had sprung numerous leaks on our return journey down the shallow creek, which was filled with sharp rocks. With spruce gum and duct tape, we repaired the leaks well enough to keep the vessel afloat, but not enough to make it withstand the damage that hundreds of whitewater rapids would inflict upon it if we paddled the Kattawagami all the way to the sea. Our only choice was to try to make it back to the remote mining road where we had started out.
“You know, it’s sort of ridiculous that we do these crazy expeditions with the gear we have,” Wes observed.
I shrugged.
“Most people wouldn’t attempt this sort of thing without a satellite phone or GPS, or the best canoes and Gore-Tex clothing,” Wes continued.
“Maybe one day we’ll have sponsors who give us that stuff.”
“It’d be nice to have a canoe that didn’t leak.” Wes bailed a pitcher of water overboard.
“You’re going soft,” I joked while trying to paddle the half-sinking canoe from the stern.
Wes and I could travel at great speed when the occasion called for it—sinking canoe or not—and with only one of us paddling and the other constantly bailing, we made it back to the isolated mining road in four days. Just as we emerged from the shadowy, moss-draped forest onto the narrow roadway—soaking wet from sitting in a canoe full of water—the dark sky above us began to rumble.
“That doesn’t sound good.” Wes glanced skyward.
We headed for the shelter of a big spruce. The next instant, a hail storm of near biblical proportions descended upon us, furiously pelting us with golf-ball-sized ice. We photographed the gigantic hail, thinking no one would believe us otherwise.
Battered from the hailstorm and drenched by pouring rain, Wes and I huddled under the shelter of the thick canopy. We were stranded—after dropping us off at Hopper Creek, Terry O’Neil had driven our vehicle back into Cochrane and parked it at the train station for us—some two hundred kilometres away. We didn’t relish the thought of walking the long, lonely road all the way back into town. I suggested hitchhiking, half as a joke. We had no idea when anyone might pass by.
Wes raised an eyebrow. “But who’d pick us up? A couple of scruffy guys decked out in army camouflage who don’t smell very nice and just appeared out of nowhere. We look like bandits out to rob the gold mine up the road.”
“Right, well let’s try to look charming.”
But no opportunity to use our charm appeared for over an hour as we huddled in the rain as night fell, the steady drip of rain filtering down between the spruce boughs. Finally, we could hear the sound of a truck coming down the narrow road. As we emerged from the woods, a black Chevy pickup came into view. Wes and I stuck out our thumbs, and the truck slowed to a halt. Behind the wheel was a middle-aged aboriginal man who looked rather surprised to see us.
We thanked him for stopping and explained our situation. It turned out that he was hired by the gold mine to keep the road open by trapping beaver. Beavers, when left to their own devices, were inclined to build dams, which would flood out the road. His job was to make sure that didn’t happen. Just now he was coming from Cochrane on his way to the mine. He offered to drive us to the mine, where we could try to find a ride back to town. This arrangement seemed generous to us, and we thanked him profusely.
“You got to ride in the back,” he smiled sheepishly and gestured to the box. “I’ve got a little too much stuff in here.”
“Sure,” I replied happily, though I sensed the real reason was because the trapper believed that two men who appeared out of nowhere around these wild parts might not be people you wanted in your truck.
Wes and I, having left our backpacks, gear, and the canoe concealed in the forest, jumped into the back of the pickup, only to quickly regret it. The driver put his pedal to the metal and we were soon flying along at over a hundred kilometres per hour down a wet gravel road in fading light. Terry, the old-timer who shuttled our vehicle back to Cochrane, was adamant that he wouldn’t drive this road after dark or even at dusk because of the bears and moose (“swamp donkeys,” as he called them) that frequently cross it—a deadly hazard for drivers. A collision with a moose has about the same effect as a collision with a backhoe. Even in daylight, Terry sternly complained when I was driving if he noticed the speedometer creep above sixty. Wes and I held on for dear life in the truck, flying up in the air with every bump on the gravel road and holding on as best as we could when we took turns at terrifying speeds.
“Is this guy trying to kill us?” Wes shouted in my ear as the trees swirled passed us in a blur of dark green.
“I think so,” I said, pressing myself down in the truck. We were quite literally in greater danger now than at any time on our expedition—though Wes had stepped on a nail at the old cabin and busted his middle finger on a bad fall while wading in the treacherous, slippery rocks of Hopper Creek. After a wild fifteen-minute ride in the fading light, the driver suddenly slowed down. An oncoming transport truck was returning from the gold mine. Our driver motioned the trucker to stop.
The trucker peered down suspiciously from his cab at the three of us. Our driver spoke, “These guys here are looking for a ride into Cochrane. Can you take ’em?”
The trucker boasted an Abraham Lincoln–like beard and shoulder-length hair tucked under a grimy old ball cap. After a pause, he said gruffly, “I only got room for one in my truck.”
This was a little bewildering—Wes and I thought both of us could fit in the truck. But the trucker insisted there was only room for one of us. I was curious to see the gold mine, so I suggested to Wes that he take the ride—he could drive back to the mine and get me once he had retrieved our vehicle from town. So I remained in the back of the pickup while Wes climbed up into the rig.
While he rode into town along the winding road that sliced through the vast forest, I was heading in the opposite direction toward the mine.
It took three hours to reach Cochrane, where Wes retrieved our pickup truck from the train station, refuelled it, and then prepared to drive another three hours to meet me back at the mine.
At the gold mine, flood lights illuminated the haul trucks, hydraulic shovels, and grey construction trailers that littered the landscape. Exploratory work was being conducted in the area to see if it was profitable to re-open the mine, as it had lain abandoned for decades. The high price of gold made the prospect of mining here potentially feasible once again.
Beside the construction camp, what greeted my eyes was a deeply unsettling sight: where once had been verdant forests was now a barren moonscape, devastated by strip-mining. It was a bleak, apocalyptic-looking place destroyed by machines and riddled with dark chasms that led deep into the earth. It filled me with dismay that society could permit the wanton destruction of wilderness—earth’s true gem—in the pursuit of shiny stones. But my opinions reflect a life spent seeking untouched, hidden-away places.
The workers were gathered in the common room of a temporary building erected on the site, watching television. I met most of them as well as the man in charge. Only a few dozen people were at the mine because it wasn’t yet fully operational. I was a little concerned, irrationally so, that one of the workers would recognize me as the explorer who penned articles arguing against mining in the Hudson Bay Lowlands. Yet they seemed to regard me as just some sort of eccentric who liked canoeing rivers no one had heard of. I chatted with them and asked if any of them knew of the Again River. None of them had ever heard of it.
My escort in, the aboriginal trapper, with whom I talked the most, had likewise never heard of the river. A thoroughly modern trapper, he was eager to fetch his laptop and have me show him the river on Google Earth. I did so, pointing out to him the blurry little black ribbon that snaked through emerald green forest on the low-resolution images. He nodded and affirmed he knew nothing of that river. As we talked, I learned that he was originally from Moosonee, a Cree community on the mouth of the large Moose River, near James Bay, and the northern terminus of the government-owned Polar Bear Express railroad. He had grown up fishing, hunting, and trapping there, before drifting south to Cochrane. He didn’t much care for Moosonee anymore and told me he wouldn’t move back.
Since he had proved helpful, and I had both enjoyed our conversation and was grateful that Wes and I had not been killed on the ride he generously provided—I decided to pay him as best as I could for the ride. I had little money, but offered him my old canoe, telling him it needed repairs but was his if he wanted it. He happily accepted my offer.
It was getting on near midnight, and all the workers and the trapper soon disappeared off to bed for the night. I had been given a room of my own to sleep in while I waited for Wes to return, as well as a dry pair of wool socks to replace my soaking wet ones. It wasn’t until 3:00 a.m. that Wes finally arrived. I met him outside the makeshift buildings erected on the site.
“What took you so long?” I asked, half asleep.
“I drove slow. It’s pitch dark and there’s moose and bears crossing the road. I was terrified I’d hit one.”
We decided not to stay at the mine—though we had been offered the room for the night—and instead drove back to where we had stowed our canoe and gear beside the creek. We spent the night there; then departed in the late morning for our drive home, so that Wes could make it to his sister’s wedding. Before we left, we hauled the canoe out beside the road, leaving it there for the trapper to pick up.
“Well, we didn’t get to explore your river,” remarked Wes as he drove us south.
“No, but that’s all right,” I said a little ruefully, “the river will still be there next summer.”