[ 10 ]
In the beginning was the forest. God made it and no man knew the end of it. It was not new. It was old; ancient as the hills it covered. Those who entered it saw it had been there since the beginning of habitable time.
—Hervey Allen, The Forest and the Fort, 1943
TERRY O’NEIL MET ME at the old train station in Cochrane, Ontario, on what was a glorious summer day. The air smelled of freshly cut timber from the logging operations that were the mainstay of the local economy. We had breakfast at the station’s restaurant before I drove the two of us out of town on the mining road to the starting point for the expedition.
“You’re going to do this alone?” asked Terry, incredulous.
“Yes,” I said.
“Couldn’t you convince someone to go with you?”
“No such luck.”
Terry shook his head, “Adam, this is a risky thing to be attempting alone. Did I ever tell you about the last people, besides you, I shuttled out to the Kattawagami?”
“Yes, only one came back alive.”
“That’s right,” Terry nodded, “and just this summer I shuttled a guy who was going to attempt the Kesagami River, and he had to call search-and-rescue on his satellite phone.”
“What happened?”
“He was canoeing on James Bay and got stranded on an island. You can’t drink the water in the bay; it’s salty, as you know. And he ran out of fresh water and couldn’t get off the island because of stormy weather. They had to rescue him with a helicopter.”
“Well, no one is coming to rescue me,” I said.
In about two hours’ time we arrived at the bridge over the Kattawagami River, passing several black bears along the way. Unlike in past years, when I had started by exploring Hopper Creek, dry weather dictated that this time I would embark directly from the Kattawagami.
“The water levels are very low,” said Terry, looking down from the bridge. We had parked the car to take a look.
“You’re right,” I replied.
“It’s been a very dry summer. I can’t remember a summer so dry,” said Terry, who had just celebrated his seventy-second birthday the day before I arrived.
“Well, rain has a way of following me,” I said.
I hoped it would rain—the dry conditions made forest fires a lethal hazard, and here, in the southern part of the Lowlands, there was more forest cover to burn, so escaping from any fire would be more difficult than farther north. According to the most recent Ministry of Natural Resources fire report, over a hundred active fires were burning across the North, including one not far from the area I would have to pass through.
“I’ll keep your car safe at my place,” said Terry, as I handed him my keys.
I had about finished carefully packing my canoe—the same vessel, Avalon, that had braved the perils of the nameless river with me. My gear consisted of one outfitter backpack, a watertight plastic barrel, two paddles, and a fishing rod—no shotgun, as the nearest polar bears were over a hundred kilometres north of my route, though I did pick up some bear spray for the black bears.
“Well …” said Terry, looking at me for a while and wondering, it seemed, whether he was going to be the last person to see me alive. “Good luck, Adam. Be smart out there, and don’t take any unnecessary risks.”
“I never do,” I replied.
Terry waved goodbye, and I tipped my brown fedora at him, under which I wore a mesh bug net to keep off the relentless attacks of the blackflies and mosquitoes. Then I stepped into my canoe, pushed off from the shore into the swift current, and launched myself once more into the wilderness. I was keen for the challenge and paddled hard, eager to encounter the first of what would be hundreds of whitewater rapids. I didn’t have long to wait. Soon the first sizable rapid roared ahead. “Here we go,” I said to myself as I zipped up my lifejacket, tossed off my hat, and strapped on my helmet—ready for battle. I had equipped the canoe with a floatation device—an inflated bag made of flexible PVR that was fitted and secured into the stern behind my seat—which hopefully would keep the boat buoyant if raging whitewater rapids submerged it.
These first sets of rapids proved shallow and rocky, but usually with a deep enough passage in the middle that I could squeeze through. Water levels, as Terry had observed, were remarkably low—about a metre and a half lower than the last time I paddled the Kattawagami in 2009. This was worrisome news—low water levels could mean dry creek beds and render the route I was planning on following to reach the Again’s headwaters vastly more difficult, if not impossible.
Some of the rapids were so shallow that I was forced to get out of my canoe and wade rather than risk damaging the hull by scraping over jagged rocks. As I was wading, guiding the canoe down a narrow passage between several boulders, I glanced up and was startled to see a black bear sitting on the grassy riverbank. It was less than thirty metres downriver, munching contently on some aquatic plants. The bear, preoccupied with its food, had its head down and took no notice of me. It was a large black bear, but sitting on its haunches eating, it looked more like Winnie the Pooh than anything threatening, so I felt comfortable photographing and filming it. It was only when I spoke on camera, mentioning that a bear was just downriver, that the bruin finally noticed my presence and slowly shuffled off into the forest, as if my intrusion at breakfast was unpardonably rude.
Later that day I passed through a tranquil stretch of river, where the woods on either bank had been charred by a forest fire. Young jack pines and juniper bushes sprang up from the ground, which suggested that the fire had taken place a few years earlier. The dead spruces and tamaracks, burnt black from the fire, stood like tombstones over the ravaged land. It was a stark reminder of the hazard that hung over my solitary journey—both the Again River itself, and the nameless streams I would follow to reach it, were far too small to offer any escape from a forest fire. Even if I could somehow evade the searing heat, there would be little hope of avoiding the suffocating smoke.
That night I made camp on the riverbank, outside the burnt area. Here, the forest was more cheerful, with whiskey jacks, boreal chickadees, and dark-eyed juncos singing and chirping in the trees, and plenty of wild berries about. I spotted a snowshoe hare, rusty brown in its summer coat, near my camp, and during the course of the day I had seen eagles, geese, ducks, and three river otters. Such wildlife kept me in good company and dispelled any feeling of loneliness.
THE FOLLOWING DAY, hours of long, hard paddling coupled with much wading through shallow boulder fields and rapids brought me to the weedy lake, the same body of water that I had visited years earlier with my father and later with Wes. Beneath a half-moon, I camped on a sandy stretch of shoreline for the night.
At dawn, the sounds of a whimsical birdcall echoing from across the mist-covered waters woke me. Intrigued, I stood at the water’s edge, staring across a lake that was as smooth as glass. I squinted at the far shore, half a kilometre away, thinking I could make out two large animals in the shallows. They were apparently producing the peculiar calls. When I grabbed my binoculars and pressed them to my eyes, I had to do a double take: I saw a pair of giant prehistoric-looking birds. Standing four feet tall and with a seven-and-a-half-foot wingspan, the enormous grey birds could only be sandhill cranes. The cranes’ grey feathers accentuated a blood-red band around their eyes that looked something like a costume ball mask. Here in these austere northern forests, a land of gloom and shadow, the cranes seemed out of place, though in fact they are found across much of North America’s wilderness.
I got underway early, paddling out of the lake and back onto the Kattawagami River, eager to begin the process of leaving its watershed behind and penetrating to the Again River. It was a hot, sunny day; waterfowl were abundant, eagles soared overhead, otters and the occasional beaver swam in the river, and an osprey dove for fish—the only spectators to my attempt at making a modest contribution to exploration history.
Rapids and large boulder fields straddling the river slowed my progress. In these stretches, the canoe had to be carefully towed as I waded ahead and tried to avoid scraping it on the rocks as much as possible. The dry summer had left the river so low that I scarcely recognized it as the same waterway that I had previously paddled. The lack of water also alarmed me because of what it boded about the Again River—knowing as I did that the Again was a smaller river, I had to wonder whether it would be possible to paddle it at all. No matter how careful I was, shallow, rock-infested rivers would be sure to scrape and gouge the canoe terribly. And if the canoe was punctured beyond repair, crossing the seas of James Bay at the end of my journey would be all but impossible. But I had resolved to explore the Again River no matter the obstacles, and so I proceeded, expecting the worst and hoping for the best.
By noon I had reached the tributary that I was seeking—a small river that drains into the Kattawagami. Four years ago, I had explored this then-nameless tributary with my father as the first step in reaching the Again. Lined with tamaracks, I had taken to calling it Tamarack Creek. Its meandering, rock-strewn course led through swamp and forest to a beautiful lake. Paddling and wading up it had been arduous enough with another person. Doing it in low water and alone would make it little short of a nightmare. The lack of water meant that I had to drag and portage the fifty-two-pound canoe and my ninety pounds of gear and provisions for considerable stretches. But I was so impatient to reach the Again that I threw myself into the creek when paddling proved no longer possible, dragging the laden canoe behind me through the rapids that blocked the way forward. The blackflies and mosquitoes swarmed around me as thick as storm clouds, but this only motivated me to move faster. The creek bottom was a treacherous mix of crevices and sharp rocks, where twisting an ankle was all too easy. In other places, the drought had left the creek little more than a trickle, which made dragging the canoe impossible. Here, I had no choice but to carry the canoe over my head, balancing it on my shoulders, and then portage the remainder of my gear up to the next stretch of water deep enough to resume paddling and wading. Luckily, I received help from an unexpected source—beavers. To compensate for the lack of rain, the beavers had built several dams on the creek, which by holding back water, created deep stretches that I could paddle up with comparative ease. The engineers of the wilderness, beavers are extraordinary in their capacity to modify the environment to suit their needs—minutely adjusting water levels on their ponds to just the right amount to keep their lodges safe from predators and allowing themselves to swim under the ice come winter.
By evening, I had left the creek behind and arrived at a large, picturesque lake that was its headwaters. For a few more hours, I paddled along the lake, passing sandy beaches framed by dark woods while listening to the haunting cries of loons echoing from across the blue waters. That night, I sipped herbal tea and feasted on fresh pike, arrowhead roots, and wild berries, mulling over the challenge that awaited me in the morning—the start of the gruelling portages through forbidding swamp forest. The trackless morass of alder swamps that lay beyond the lake’s northern shores was as far as my father and I had reached four years ago. The next summer with Wes, I had sought to avoid the worst of the swamps by striking off farther south, blazing kilometres of trails with the rising sun as our guide to a chain of several lakes before time ran out and forced us to turn around. It was imperative that I find the old blaze marks Wes and I cut in the forest three years ago. Failure to find our old trail would mean a delay of at least several days, in which I would have to laboriously blaze my way through the forest again, navigating across a monotonous landscape clogged with bloodsucking insects.
THE FIRST PORTAGE was approximately two kilometres one way, a trek that would have to be done in three stages: the first with my backpack and fishing rod, the second with the watertight barrel and paddles, and the third with the canoe. So, in total, counting doubling back, I had ten kilometres to cover on foot to reach the next lake, assuming that I managed to maintain the correct course and never lose my way in the forest. Wes, knowing the difficulty of carrying the canoe across the open bogs and almost impenetrable forest, doubted the feasibility of my doing this alone. But the iron law of necessity makes many things possible.
I soon located the spot where Wes and I had camped on the lakeshore three years earlier, and from there scouted the forest until finding a few of our old blaze marks on the straggly tamaracks and spruces. The sap, which had oozed out of the trees when struck with a hatchet, had since hardened on the bark and stained the once white blazes a yellowish hue. There was, properly speaking, no trail to follow, for the ground remained covered in saplings, shrubs, lichens, moss, and swamp pools. But it didn’t matter—the important thing was that I had found the faded blazes and could follow them to the next lake.
In the forest, the blackflies and mosquitoes were appalling—far worse than on the breezy lakeshore, and I was soon sweating heavily from the labour of carrying my gear over the uneven terrain, which made walking exhausting, sinking as I did into the soggy, moss-covered ground. Parts of the portage cut through fairly open forest of stunted tamarack and spruce, but the middle section passed through an alder swamp, where finding the old blazes was difficult and my boots were soaked in the stagnant waters. Frequently, I had to set down my load and scout ahead until I refound a blaze mark and could safely continue. As I staggered forward under the hot sun, I snapped off branches to make a more visible trail and added a few new blazes with my knife. After the first two loads were across, I brought the canoe. I dragged it most of the way over the swampy ground rather than attempting to carry it over my head, which would never work in the thick forest, given how closely spaced the trees were. At any rate, it would be impossible to follow the blazes with a canoe over my head. Panting heavily, I had to continually flip the canoe on its side, slide it between some trees, then readjust it again to avoid the next obstacle blocking the way forward. It felt something like playing a game of Twister, where the challenge was to somehow move my thirteen-foot canoe between ranks of small trees that at times grew so close together they resembled prison bars.
It took six hours to complete the portage—encouraging progress. When I reached the lake on the far side, I quenched my thirst in its waters, then paddled against a strong headwind to its far end, where another gruelling portage awaited. This time, the start of the portage was right in the middle of an alder swamp, and once more I had to search for the old blazes to find the way forward. The alders were nearly impenetrable, entangling me as I attempted to hack a way through with the heavy pack on my back while balancing on little clumps of dry moss in the morass of foul black water. The bugs were as fierce as ever, and if I failed to pay attention for a moment, I would lose my way in the jungle of alders that was so thick it felt almost suffocating. It was impossible to see more than a few feet in any direction.
Eventually, I crossed the alder swamp and emerged in a more pleasant wood on the other side with tall trees festooned in old man’s beard. The ground here was carpeted in green moss with clusters of bright red mushrooms, creating the vague impression of a fairy-tale forest—an effect that was enhanced by the croaking of a wood frog. I halted to eat some wild raspberries and blueberries and satisfy my thirst. Birds sang in the trees above me. Growing in a shadowy patch nearby were some Indian pipes, a type of white herb shaped remarkably like a tobacco pipe. They reminded me of home—Indian pipes grew in the forests that surrounded my family’s house and had been one of my favourite things to search for in the woods as a child. Refreshed from the drink and the berries, I pressed on, passing through more thick brush before finally reaching the shore of a picturesque little lake with shining blue waters enclosed by dark green woods. Near the shore were bright-coloured, carnivorous pitcher plants, a sort of northern Venus flytrap that feeds on insects and frogs, trapping them in its “pitcher,” from which they never emerge.
It was still hot and sunny, so I pressed on further once this portage was completed, heading out onto the lake. Three years ago, this lake had reminded me of Temagami, a rugged region of rolling hills, waterfalls, and beautiful lakes in central Ontario. In my journal I had named it Temagami Lake. The forest surrounding it boasted the biggest trees I had yet seen on my journey: ancient spruce and tamarack that grew to a large size owing to better soil. The ground in this area was less swampy and in places included actual hills, a rarity in the Hudson Bay Lowlands, though I was still somewhere near the southern boundary between the Lowlands and the more rugged Canadian Shield. A short paddle brought me across the lake to its thickly treed eastern shore. A few hundred metres into those woods and over a steep hill lay another nameless lake, which three years ago I had called Last Lake, because it was the last lake before the final forbidding portage to the Again River’s headwaters. Too agitated with anticipation to stop for the night, I decided to keep pushing on, first hacking my way through the thick brush and forest, then dragging my canoe up the steep hill and down to Last Lake on the other side. The sun was setting, but I managed to finish off this third consecutive portage of the day and canoe to the lake’s far shore, where I made camp. It had been a thirteen-hour day of continuous labour, in which I had portaged some sixteen kilometres and paddled several more. And the next day, I would have to do it all over again.
This lake was as far as Wes and I had reached three years ago, and as close as I had ever come to the Again River. When we made the decision to turn back, we had been blazing a trail through swamps beyond the lake’s northeastern shore. This time I decided to pursue a different course to another lake that my map assured me lay several kilometres away—I would head east, into the rising sun, rather than attempt to follow the non-existent course of a stream that appeared on the map but did not in fact exist, which had led Wes and me astray last time.
That night, exhausted as I was, sleep proved difficult—the anticipation of the critical next day kept me awake. I looked upon the portage to the Again’s headwaters as the make-or-break of my entire enterprise. There was simply no way to know in advance if I could locate the headwaters, let alone portage my gear and canoe there. From what I could gather from the satellite images, a vast morass of muskeg barred the way forward. Early explorers had judged the muskeg of the Lowlands as an impassable barrier to overland travel. The woodsman and writer Grey Owl furnished one of the best descriptions of it:
In places the forest dwindles down to small trees, which, giving way to moss and sage brush, thin out and eventually disappear altogether, and the country opens out into one of those immense muskegs or swamps which makes overland travel in whole sections impossible.… These consist mostly of stretches composed of deep, thin mud, covered with slushy moss, and perhaps sparsely dotted with stunted, twisted trees. Bright green, inviting looking fields show up in places, luring the inexperienced into their maw with their deceptive promise of good footing. These last are seemingly bottomless, and constitute a real danger to man or beast.… There are holes between hummocks that are filled with noisome stagnant water, which would engulf a man.
But as I finally drifted off to sleep in my tent, visions of bottomless muskeg on my mind, I told myself that I would find a way, no matter what.
I AWOKE AT the crack of dawn—the day’s labours would require all the daylight I could get. After a hurried breakfast of oatmeal and tea, I struck off into the gloomy, dew-covered forest, carrying only my hatchet and compass. This time, there were no old blazes from three years ago to follow—I was starting from scratch. Therefore, it was impractical to attempt carrying anything across on this first trip, when all my physical energy and mental powers would be devoted to navigation and trailblazing. I was excited and a little nervous. I was really in the unknown now—a place where every sight was new to me, and each step carried me deeper into unexplored territory.
My cargo pants were soaked by the dew on the shrubs and trees as I trudged into the dark woods, but things appeared promising at first. The ground sloped upwards—a welcome sign, as it meant no immediate muskeg, but it quickly led into impenetrable brush, where spruce and tamarack branches clawed at my face as I tried to hack a way through. It felt claustrophobic in the deepest thickets, where the sunlight never penetrated beneath the gloom of the thick, entangling trees. It was vital to blaze a set of marks on both sides of the trees—which, like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumb trail or Theseus’ ball of thread in the labyrinth, would allow me to find the way back. I relied on both my brass surveyor’s compass and the sun—when I could see it—to navigate. Eventually, I emerged from the thicket into more typical Lowlands forest—sparsely treed, swampy moss and lichen covered ground, and plenty of dark pools and little hummocks that turned walking into an exhausting ordeal. Each step would cause me to sink down into the moss, and in a few places, I had to leap across swamp holes, all while swarmed by clouds of blackflies and mosquitoes.
The forest seemed to go on forever. At times my mind wandered—I would begin doubting myself, wondering if I was heading in the right direction and if there was any lake to be found. Maybe, for all I knew, it was just a quagmire. But then I would give my head a shake, banish all such doubts, and trudge deeper into the woods.
In a shady grove, I caught sight of a dash of red moving along the ground—a spruce grouse. The docile bird seemed to hardly notice my presence, pecking and scratching at the ground like a domestic chicken. As much as I hated killing anything unnecessarily, I was awfully hungry. Almost in spite of myself, I unsheathed my belt knife, crept closer to the grouse, then threw the knife at it. The bird gave a cackle and flew into the branches of a big spruce. I sighed—but then I remembered the hatchet gripped in my other hand and tossed it tomahawk-style at the bird in the tree. It narrowly missed the grouse’s head. Lunch would have to wait. I collected my weapons and resumed the portage.
Finally, after four and a half hours of hiking and blazing through what felt like an endless swamp forest, I laid eyes on what to me was the most splendid and thrilling sight—an expanse of dark, misty water in the distance—the lake. Columbus must have felt the same intense excitement when he first glimpsed land in 1492. All my doubts dissipated, all my restless anxiety evaporated, and what was left was the exhilarating satisfaction of a scheme revealed to be possible. The fact that several hundred metres of open muskeg, denuded of nearly all tree cover, separated me from the lakeshore barely put a dent in my enthusiasm. All that mattered at the moment was that the lake appeared to exist, and that I appeared to have found it.
It took nearly an hour to return through the forest to my camp on the other side. I had left my tent up and my gear unpacked in the event that I ran into difficulties blazing a way across, in which case I imagined spending another night in this spot. But that was now unnecessary, so I quickly packed up my gear, strapped on the watertight barrel, and headed back into the gloom of the woods. I did the portage in stages—taking each load halfway across, then returning for the next load. By late afternoon, I had transported my backpack and plastic barrel, as well as the paddles and fishing rod, to the end of my blazes, which was still nearly three hundred metres short of the actual lakeshore—which remained beyond the open muskeg.
I now hiked all the way back to fetch my canoe—the last and most difficult thing to transport. I pulled it behind me, but it constantly wedged between trees, forcing me to push and heave to get it through and slowing my progress to a crawl. Rain began to fall in the evening when I was still only about halfway across. Reluctantly, given the fading light and steady rain, I knew I had to give up my hopes of finishing the portage that day. As things stood, it looked like I was in for a miserable night, not having had the chance to make camp yet or find any dry ground to pitch the tent on. Leaving the canoe behind me in the forest, I headed to where I had left my other gear to rest for the night.
The whole area near the lakeshore was a soggy sea of muskeg. In the rain I searched for a patch of solid ground big enough to pitch my tent on—not finding anything, I settled for rigging up a tarp between a couple of scraggly tamaracks to keep the rain off. Camping as I was in the middle of muskeg in a rainstorm, I assumed that it would be a wet night no matter what I did. But somehow, I managed to stay more or less dry inside my tent beneath the rain tarp, and on the bright side, the muskeg was quite comfortable to sleep on.
IN THE MORNING I put on my wet clothing, skipped breakfast, and resumed my portage in the sodden forest. Just walking a few feet through the rain-soaked brush further drenched my already wet cargo pants, boots, and socks. The sky above me remained grey and overcast, offering little hope of drying anything. But the Again’s headwaters were near at hand, and within a few hours I had completed what I had failed to do three years ago with Wes: I successfully carried the canoe and all my gear across the last terrible portage, which, counting all the doubling back, totalled nearly fifteen kilometres. The final stretch—the remaining three hundred metres or so across the muskeg—was the most difficult of all. I loaded my canoe with everything aside from the plastic barrel, which I strapped onto my back, and began dragging the whole assemblage forward. As I sloshed onward, the ground visibly sank beneath me, causing pools of cold water to form around my feet. But the sight of what lay before me—the mysterious mist-shrouded headwaters of my long-sought river—gave me the strength to finish the task.
When I reached the marshy lakeshore, I pushed the canoe into the water and hopped into the stern. A thick mist made it impossible to see the far shore, or much beyond the canoe’s bow. The water was shallow—that much was plain from the green rushes sprouting up from the lake. It was still a large body of water, though, probably more than a kilometre across, and as such I was wary about venturing too far from land into the mist, for if a storm were to strike, my shallow vessel could easily swamp. By paddling off into the misty lake, I had crossed my Rubicon—there could be no retreat now. The idea of attempting to portage back was unthinkable—no matter what the Again River contained, I was irrevocably committed to continuing.