[ 3 ]
Exploring is delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not to deserve the name.
—Samuel Butler, Erewhon, 1872
FROM THE CO-PILOT’S SEAT of a bush plane, I peered through cloud and rain at a reddish and green patchwork of bog, sphagnum moss, and isolated clusters of stunted spruce and tamarack trees. It was about as gloomy and forbidding a landscape as I could imagine.
The night before, Brent and I had arrived in the small frontier logging town of Hearst, Ontario, which is nestled on the fringes of the great northern wilderness. The thirteen-hour drive north had been complicated by my injured back, which caused me considerable pain to the point where I was literally choking from back spasms as I drove. But the car didn’t let us down, despite my mechanic’s grave prognosis, and we arrived without much difficulty.
Bright and early the next morning, we met our pilot on a lake outside of town. His plane was a 1960s-era single-engine DHC-2 Beaver, the standard bush plane of Canada’s North. We weighed our gear to ensure it was under the limit for the long flight to the Hudson Bay Lowlands: it measured in at 165 pounds. Our canoe, which weighed 52 pounds, we strapped onto one of the plane’s aluminum pontoons.
We would have to fly more than five hundred kilometres due north across vast wilderness to reach our expedition’s starting point, an isolated lake situated some seventy kilometres south as the crow flies from the shore of Hudson Bay. The roar and vibration of the plane’s engine rattled us inside the cockpit; talking was only possible through the headsets. Brent, who was sitting behind me, complained that the noise of the engine was giving him a headache and kept his head down and ears covered for the duration of the flight.
From the co-pilot’s seat, I was taking in the vast wilderness below us. Immense boreal forest, interspersed with meandering black rivers and island-studded blue lakes, dominated the first stretch of the flight. Gradually, as we flew farther north, the landscape began to change: trees became sparser and smaller as the boreal forest thinned out into the open muskeg and innumerable ponds and beaver meadows of the Hudson Bay Lowlands. I knew all too well that every one of those waterways made excellent breeding ground for mosquitoes. Sandy eskers, an elevated ridge of gravel and sand left by retreating glaciers thousands of years ago, occasionally snaked across the landscape. But mostly it was a dreary swampland of stunted trees and countless small ponds, lakes, and rock-strewn creeks. The rainy weather we were flying through served to make the swampland below appear even drearier.
We were headed to Hawley Lake, named after explorer and geologist James Edwin Hawley. From there, Brent and I would veer off into unexplored territory. I had read Hawley’s dry report from the 1920s on the geology of the area, as well as reports by the handful of other Geological Survey explorers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who had been active in the Lowlands. Those explorers had come here in search of mineral wealth. But, until recently, virtually no mineral extraction had been undertaken anywhere in the Lowlands, leaving it a nearly untouched wilderness. That changed in 2006 when De Beers, a South African diamond conglomerate, began mining for diamonds near the Attawapiskat River. The controversial project was vehemently opposed by the few environmentalists who knew of the plans. They argued that it was a travesty to put an open-pit mine in the middle of pristine wilderness. But the project was approved, ostensibly on the grounds that it would generate prosperity for the province and particularly for the community of Attawapiskat, a small, impoverished Cree reserve situated some ninety kilometres downriver from the mine site.
“We’re going to pass near the diamond mine on the Attawapiskat River soon,” mumbled the pilot into his headset a few hours into the flight.
We didn’t pass near enough to see the mine; the thick cloud cover and rain prevented us from spotting it in the distance. That was fine by me: I had no real desire to see another environmental tragedy inflicted on Canada’s wilderness for limited short-term material gain—especially on a river I had once paddled. Wes and I had canoed together on this very river as teenagers after high school. Despite the mine, the vast majority of the Lowlands remained untouched and unexplored by the modern world—a fact amply illustrated by the countless acres of wilderness passing beneath us. The mine, though a travesty for the Attawapiskat area, was but a pinprick in what remained an immense wilderness.
The landscape below us was as flat as a pancake—a poorly drained lowland that seemed more water than land. At times it was impossible to spot a single patch of solid ground. When R.M. Ballantyne, a fur trade clerk, first laid eyes on the desolate Hudson Bay Lowlands from the decks of a nineteenth-century ship, he noted, “Though only at the distance of two miles, so low and flat was the land, that it appeared ten miles off, and scarcely a tree was to be seen.” While almost all of the Lowlands is marshy, like what Ballantyne saw from his ship, near its northern fringe lies a series of spectacular ridges that tower several hundred metres above the surrounding swamp forest. Known as the Sutton Ridges, I had selected this unique area as the drop point for our expedition. One of these towering rock escarpments runs across Hawley Lake, forming a large canyon, or gorge. We would land near there to begin our journey.
To my surprise, the pilot had never previously flown to Hawley Lake and while in mid-air had to cautiously check his fold-out maps on several occasions. He was new, he explained, to the bush pilot business. After about four hours of flying, the grey outlines of the distant Sutton Ridges suddenly loomed into view, rising above the swamps like small mountains. The pilot circled the plane around in a wide arc to land on the long shimmer of navy blue water that was Hawley Lake, just north of the tabletop ridges. From the air, the surrounding country through which we would have to portage appeared fairly promising: it seemed relatively well-drained and elevated, and at places there were sandy hummocks left by glaciers and what looked like ancient beaches from long-vanished shorelines. Beyond the waterways, the country was sparsely treed—forest fires had charred some stretches. On Hawley Lake itself, I could see near its northwestern shore several small cabins, a dock, and some overturned boats on the grassy banks. The pilot brought the small plane down steeply toward the lake, which for a moment made us feel like we were on a roller coaster. We bounced along the water on the pontoons as the plane gradually coasted to a halt near the wooden dock.
“I guess this must be the place,” said the pilot.
“Yes, it is,” I replied, recognizing it from my research.
“It’s cold,” complained Brent.
The three of us sprang from the plane onto the bobbing dock. Brent and I wasted little time in unstrapping the canoe from the pontoon and unloading our assorted gear: two bulky expedition backpacks, a plastic canoe barrel, two watertight buckets placed inside old worn packs, two fishing rods, three wood paddles, and the shotgun. The pilot, meanwhile, was busy refuelling the plane from a steel oil drum and half a dozen red plastic jerry cans—the low fuel light had flashed on as we were flying in.
“Good luck,” mumbled the pilot. He waved a hand, leapt back onto the pontoon, and hopped into the cockpit.
“Hmm, he seems eager to leave,” Brent observed. “I wonder why … Fuck!” Brent slapped at his ears and waved his arms furiously. “Fuck! I’m getting eaten alive!”
“Put your bug net on,” I said, as I swiftly donned my own. Unlike Brent, I had grown up in swampy forests, so I never much minded mosquitoes, though blackflies are a torment to anyone.
“This is horrible,” groaned Brent as he pulled the mesh net over his short black hair.
“Don’t worry, once we get paddling out on the lake, the breeze should keep the bugs away,” I said. “Let’s quickly check out the cabins, then head out.”
The lake appeared much the same as it had a hundred years earlier when D.B. Dowling of the Geological Survey had arrived in the area. Dowling had explored the lakes—then known as the Sutton Mills Lakes, since renamed Sutton and Hawley Lakes—in 1901. However, unlike in Dowling’s day, the log cabins were now mostly used by wealthy fishermen who came here to catch brook trout. The more adventurous sorts would occasionally paddle down the Sutton River, where near its mouth they would be airlifted out by float planes. The camp was maintained by a Cree family, the Chookomolins. The closest community, Peawanuck, a tiny Cree reserve of some 237 people, was situated nearly a hundred kilometres to the northeast on the large Winisk River. These northern Cree, or Omushkego as they call themselves, were the descendants of the hunter-trappers of the fur trade, and a few still engaged in trapping. No one was at the cabins, so we returned to the dock and the delicate business of packing our canoe.
I had hoped to acquire a new canoe for the expedition—ideally, one made of either strong, lightweight Kevlar or heavier but virtually indestructible Royalex ABS. But the price tag for such a vessel was beyond our budget, and I was forced to find something for less than eight hundred dollars, second-hand. After weeks of searching, I despaired of ever finding anything adequate and thought we might have to paddle one of the cedar-strip canoes my father and I had crafted. But at last I found an acceptable, though far from perfect, canoe within our limited price range. It was only thirteen feet long and very shallow, which would limit its utility and safety in whitewater or when facing big waves. But, crucially, given the portages we would face, it weighed only fifty-two pounds. While this wasn’t light by the standards of expensive Kevlar canoes, which weigh as little as thirty pounds, it was an improvement over my other canoes.
It had been necessary to make some modifications to the vessel. I replaced the seats with lighter ones that I made myself and fastened nylon rope for lining to both ends. My father carved an ash centre yoke to replace the existing steel one, which would enable us to carry the canoe on our shoulders. I didn’t think much of the oak gunwales the previous owner had added and wished to replace them, but time constraints made it impossible to do so. The canoe’s small size, while an asset for the gruelling overland travel through forest and muskeg, was a drawback on the water. But such compromises were necessary; if explorers insisted on perfect gear, not much would have been explored.
Brent and I set off and began paddling up the lake. Meanwhile, the bush plane droned off into the distance, disappearing from view into cumulus clouds. As the sound of the engine faded away, we were left in the profound silence of the northern wilderness. Hawley Lake was beautiful; its clear blue waters were surrounded by a rocky shoreline and mature forests of cedar, poplar, spruce, and tamarack. Low hills sloped gently up from the lake. If not for the bugs, it seemed like an oasis in a wilderness of swamp.
The great size of the lake, however, made paddling in our heavily laden little canoe rather risky. As it was, the oak gunwales were riding only a few inches above the waterline, and as we paddled toward the distant south end of the lake, the wind whipped up four-foot swells. I steered the canoe from the stern delicately into each wave, riding over them without much difficulty. But eventually some of the bigger waves lapped over the bow, splashing Brent.
“Whoa! These are big waves,” Brent said as he drew a stroke of his paddle.
“At least the wind has taken care of the bugs.”
The situation was actually quite dangerous. If we swamped in the lake, it would be a long and difficult swim to shore. My heart leapt as another big wave plowed into us and increased the water accumulating in the bottom of the canoe. There was no way around it. We had to head to shore and wait for the waves to die down. I cautiously steered the canoe toward the eastern shore.
While we waited onshore for the wind to die down, I taught Brent how to load and fire the twelve-gauge shotgun, which wild edibles were around us, and how to make a fire. The wind, meanwhile, showed little sign of slackening, so we ate a simple lunch and I next showed Brent how to operate our hand-held water purifier. Several hours passed while the waves remained as fierce as ever. Brent, never patient, was growing fidgety and restless to press on. He had the intense look in his dark eyes that I had seen years before when we were hockey teammates. He was “in the zone” and primed for a challenge. Buoyed by his enthusiasm, I agreed to his suggestion that we risk battle with the waves.
“All right,” I said. “I think we can manage it if we can get away from the shore, out of the breaking surf where the waves are the worst.”
Brent nodded, took a moment to tighten the grey bandana wrapped around his head, and then grasped his ash paddle, much as he would his hockey stick before some on-ice heroics. The waves were noisily pounding against the pebble beach we were standing on and a light rain was falling—a reminder of how quickly the weather could change here.
“We’re going to have to get our feet wet,” I said. “We’ll have to wade out a bit, then jump in and paddle as hard as we can away from shore.” Even though we were ready for action, I was under no illusion about how grim the struggle actually would be: as soon as we edged the bow into the water, the waves slammed it sideways and threw the canoe back onto shore.
“We’ll have to be quicker,” I said, “or else the waves will capsize the canoe.”
Brent and I grabbed hold of the shallow vessel like it was a surfboard, wading with it into the cold water, pushing it into the waves. Brent leapt into the bow and swung his paddle into an oncoming wave, while I gave one last push then leapt into the stern. But just as I did so, a wave jarred the canoe sideways, causing my knee to come down hard on my thumb, crushing it against the sharp edge of the oak gunwale as I landed in the stern of the canoe. A surge of pain shot through my hand. I had to ignore it and focus on paddling and steering the canoe; keeping the vessel right-side up as the waves jostled us about. Some water surged over the gunwales, but Brent performed well in the bow, keeping cool as I guided us away from shore. We soon escaped from the breaking surf and continued heading south along the lake, now untroubled by the waves, which we rode over harmlessly.
Meanwhile, my thumb was bleeding profusely and throbbing with pain. There was a gaping cut on the outer side of my thumb, near the nail. Thrilled as I was that we had beaten the waves, I thought little of my hurting thumb at the time—I quickly bandaged it, then resumed paddling. By evening, the rain had ceased and a warm glow of orange sunshine bathed the lake as the sun sank into the horizon.
“Let’s paddle to the end of the lake, where the canyon is. That should be a good place to camp for tonight,” I said. I was eager to see the Sutton Gorge; there was nothing else like it in the Lowlands.
We paddled for another two hours to reach the rock cliffs of the Sutton Ridges, which dominate the end of the lake. D.B. Dowling’s 1902 Geological Survey report of his visit to the area described the scene:
The rocks at the narrows of the lake … are cliffs one hundred and fifty feet in height of trap [igneous rock], capping beds of probably Animikie age.… Those rocks protrude through the clay plain in rounded oval ridges.… In the narrows the cliffs are broken down and the debris has filled the channel.
We made camp for the night in the shadows cast by towering rock cliffs. Beneath the black spruce trees grew a carpet of caribou lichen that resembled delicate ocean coral, thick mats of green sphagnum moss, blueberry shrubs, and Labrador Tea shrubs (whose leaves are traditionally used to make tea). Brent set about making a fire inside a circle of rocks we quickly assembled, while I headed down to the lakeshore to gather water and clean my injured thumb. When I returned to our sheltered camp in the forest, I was surprised not to see any smoke rising. The teepee of carefully arranged dead sticks was sitting as I had left it—nothing was burning. Brent, head down and draped in a mosquito net, was sitting on the ground a few feet away in apparent despair. A cloud of mosquitoes and blackflies swarmed about him.
“Why didn’t you start the fire?” I asked, puzzled.
Brent looked up slowly, “It’s no use. I tried. It won’t burn.”
This surprised me. Despite the brief rain earlier, here in this sheltered patch of thick forest everything was bone dry. Merely tossing a smouldering ember would be enough to start a forest fire. “What do you mean? Did you try lighting the tinder?”
“The sticks won’t burn.”
“You need to light the tinder first and let it catch. Then the smaller sticks will burn,” I explained as I bent down beside our unlit fire. With a match from my pocket, I lit some dead spruce needles, and in less than a minute had a blazing fire—to Brent’s amazement.
“Oh,” he muttered glumly.
“You just need more practice.” I stood up and searched for some bigger sticks to toss on the fire. “Before we reach Hudson Bay, you’ll be making fires in the pouring rain with your eyes closed.” I said this as cheerfully as possible, though inwardly I was a little alarmed by Brent’s inability to start a fire. He probably could have made one if he had merely shown some patience and concentration—but patience and concentration had never been his strong suits, and hordes of biting insects did little to improve this.
That night, I found it impossible to fall asleep, given the pain in my thumb. Painkillers were in the first aid kit stashed in my backpack outside the tent—but I long had an almost superstitious dread of anything, painkillers included, that dulled the mind. Plus it was cold outside. After two hours of lying there, I was still wide awake. Finally, I relented and crawled outside our tent into the cold darkness to fetch some painkillers, on the grounds that I needed a good night’s sleep for the hard journey that awaited us.
THE NEXT DAY DAWNED warm, sunny, and windless, which made the blackflies and mosquitoes doubly atrocious. My mangled thumb felt as if someone had crushed it with a sledgehammer. The mantra “mind over matter” was my only comfort. After a quick breakfast of oatmeal—which I had to convince Brent to eat after he explained that as a rule he never ate breakfast—we set off to explore the towering canyon on foot. The lower slopes were a chaotic jumble of grey boulders and loose rocks that rose steeply to a vertical cliff face—the perfect terrain for twisting an ankle.
Brent stared wide-eyed at the imposing rock cliffs and offered his appraisal: there was no way we could scale those rocks.
I told him it would be easier than it looked. Brent was unconvinced.
“Well, we’ll know soon enough,” I said as we picked our way amid the boulders and loose rocks up the slope toward the rising precipice.
“It looks like Mordor,” said Brent in a low voice, invoking his beloved Lord of the Rings.
I carried the blue flag of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. The summit of the gorge seemed better than any place I could have imagined to be photographed with the Society’s standard. We found an opening in the cliff face that wasn’t quite vertical and managed to cautiously scramble our way up to the tabletop summit of the gorge. Straggly black spruces crowned the windswept summit. We hiked over to the edge of the gorge; far below a tiny stream trickled into Hawley Lake from Sutton Lake, which was on the southern side of the ridge. In all directions, we were surrounded by unbroken wilderness that stretched to the horizon.
Then we made an unexpected discovery. We spotted a huge mass of sticks perched on the interior wall of the gorge. With excitement, I realized that we were looking at a bald eagle’s nest. According to the field guide I had stashed in my backpack, we were north of the bald eagle’s range, but there was no doubt that eagles were around. I soon identified another nest on a ledge in the canyon. Brent thought that climate change might have pushed the eagle’s habitat farther north. What was more likely, though, was that the field guide was simply wrong. That tends to happen with the exact ranges of birds, especially in remote parts of the world.
We photographed the eagles’ nests with the intention of submitting a report to the Society of Canadian Ornithologists. Then we took the obligatory photographs with the Society’s flag—carefully balancing our camera on a spruce branch in order to get one of us together. The blackflies on the summit, however, were extreme, so we soon cautiously climbed back down the cliffs to the forest below.
“Now what?” asked Brent, half out of breath.
“We portage around the gorge to Sutton Lake on the south side. It shouldn’t be too difficult. The portage is only four hundred metres. We’ll have to make three trips: one with our backpacks, then the food barrels, and finally the canoe. So, counting doubling back, we’ve got two kilometres to do.”
“I guess that doesn’t sound too bad,” said Brent.
But the blackflies and mosquitoes were so intense that it proved a miserable ordeal that took the wind out of Brent’s sails. He complained fiercely and, growing impatient with the heavy loads we carried under the hot sun, he carelessly tangled up our fishing rods while ducking under branches, struggling through thick forest. I was left to untangle the fishing lines, which was no pleasant task given that my face, neck, and hands were consumed by biting flies while I did so. As always, the blackflies not only attacked our necks, faces, and behind our ears, but also crawled up our shirts and bit our bodies. In 1743, English fur trader and naturalist James Isham furnished one of the best descriptions of the torments caused by the Lowlands’ clouds of blackflies, which he knew as “flesh flies”:
Flesh flies are still more troublesome and offencive [than mosquitoes], they taking a piece wherever they Bite … these are Very troublesome to the beasts … the poor creatures running as … [if] persu’d by a much more formidable Enemy … into the water, where they Lay themselves Downe, under the Surface of the Water, to Keep these Vermin from Destroying them.
Fortunately, we were soon on the water again, away from the “flesh flies,” paddling south along Sutton Lake.
The little canoe, however, was so tightly packed with our gear that there was little room for us, and none to stretch our legs. Within a few hours of paddling, our legs were sore to the point of numbness. I promised Brent that I would somehow devise a better way to pack our gear in the canoe so that we wouldn’t be so cramped. At any rate, I assured Brent that after today, we wouldn’t have much paddling to do for the next two weeks, as I anticipated mostly overland travel and portaging.
“Two weeks of portaging?” gasped Brent, horrified. In silence he stared off into the dark forest on the distant shore. I kept paddling.
Sutton Lake appeared much the same as Hawley Lake, a gem in a wilderness of gloomy swamp. It was about thirty-five kilometres long and over two kilometres across at the widest point, gouged out by a glacier some ten thousand years ago. Our plan was to hug the eastern shore for a distance of five or six kilometres, at which point we would begin our trek overland, commencing the long and laborious process of blazing our way to the headwaters of the river we had come to explore. We made camp that evening on the lake’s eastern shore.
Once we had pitched the tent, we still had several hours of daylight, so I suggested to Brent that we head back out to scout the way forward and blaze a trail, which would save us time the next day. Brent agreed.
In the recesses of the forest, the mosquitoes and blackflies were twice as bad as in the open near the lakeshore. Therefore, we gave ourselves an extra dousing of bug spray and pulled our mesh bug nets over our heads. I tucked mine in beneath my faded brown fedora. As a rule, when confronted with some looming challenge, I always anticipate the worst, which usually allows me to remain unflappable in the face of any difficulty, since it is never as bad as what I had expected. With map and compass, I led the way into the gloom of the moss-draped woods. The ground near the lakeshore was soggy and uneven, but soon the country began rising and we were heading up a sparsely treed slope where a forest fire had burnt through some years before. Charred black spruces and tamaracks dotted the landscape, while juniper bushes and other emergent shrubbery cloaked the ground.
We had to maintain a course due east in order to find the nameless lake we were seeking. Aided by the setting sun, I navigated with my brass surveyor’s compass. Meanwhile, Brent followed behind, blazing the straggly trees to mark a crude trail. The blazes were critical for when the time came to undertake the actual portage—the backbreaking labour of carrying our heavy backpacks, food barrels, and finally the canoe through the forest. I knew all too well that when struggling under heavy loads, swarmed by hordes of biting insects, staggering through at turns thick brush and open swamp, battling both physical and mental fatigue, only a few missteps would be sufficient to make us lose our way. For that reason, large blazes were essential.
“Remember, Brent, blaze the trees front and back. We have to be able to see them from both directions,” I said, wiping sweat from my brow.
As we plunged onward, Brent began to tire—though more from lack of enthusiasm than physical exhaustion. His blaze marks were feeble and indistinct—we would never be able to spot them. Despite my gentle cautioning that he needed to make them bigger, Brent kept up with his timid hatchet strokes. Reluctantly, I took over with the hatchet, hacking four inch slices of bark off the tamaracks and spruces while still navigating with the compass. Navigating in the monotonous woods demanded considerable concentration, but I found myself having to multitask still further given the low state of Brent’s morale. It was essential to keep his spirits high so that he would stay engaged in the journey—to that end, while swatting flies, hacking trees, and orienting with the compass, I kept up a cheerful banter on Brent’s favourite subjects, trying to buoy his spirits. For a while it seemed as if we were making fine progress; we were on schedule, and the terrain wasn’t as difficult as it had been in the Again River watershed. But as I continued to trudge along, slicing at the trees, I no longer heard Brent behind me. I turned around, and he was nowhere in sight.
“Brent? Where are you?” There was no reply. I retraced my steps and came upon Brent standing statue-like behind a cluster of black spruces, a dumbstruck expression on his face.
“What’s wrong?”
Brent snapped out of his reverie and looked at me. “Adam,” he said slowly and with emphasis, “this is totally insane. There is no way in hell we can portage through this.”
I tried to laugh it off. “Of course we can. It’s not that difficult. Wes and I have done worse.”
“There is no way we can carry the canoe through this. Just portaging around the gorge was hard enough. Doing this would be impossible.”
“Everyone feels like that at the start of any big expedition. It’s natural. It takes a while to get used to the routine. Once you get broken in, you’ll find it much easier,” I said, trying to hide my exasperation.
“Adam, there’s no way I’ll ever find this easy. It’s too far. This is far worse than I imagined.” Brent paused. “I want to go home.”
“Brent, you listened to my stories, saw my pictures, you knew what it was like. And we’re committed now, we can’t quit. We have no choice but to continue.”
“I never imagined it would be this bad. I have to quit. I’m dead serious. I want to go home. This is awful. I’m sorry, but there’s no way I can stay here.” It didn’t help that just then the blackflies were thick as storm clouds around us.
“You can’t quit. It’ll get better, I promise. We can go back to camp and rest, and start again tomorrow. You’ll feel better then.”
“No, I won’t. Even at camp there’s no comfort. Everything about this is terrible.”
“Brent, no matter what, I won’t quit. If you won’t go on, I’ll just leave you here,” I said firmly.
“Adam!”
“I’m serious, Brent. Your only choice is to follow me.”
“Where’s the satellite phone? I want to call a pilot to come back and pick me up.”
“That’ll cost you a fortune; the pilot will charge you an arm and a leg for that.”
“I don’t care. I have to get out of here.”
“Brent, pull yourself together. We’ve barely done anything and you already want to quit,” I said angrily. “Don’t you have any pride? Everyone will think less of you if you quit.”
“I don’t care. They have no idea what it’s actually like. They would all quit too if they were here—any normal person who valued their life would.”
“You’re just freaking out because of how raw this feels to you. It happens to lots of people when they’re exposed to hardship for the first time. Even Wes wanted to quit on our first expedition. It takes time to get used to things, especially since you’ve never done anything like this before.”
“I can’t do this.”
I was now furious at Brent’s poor effort and his obstinate refusal to push on. We returned through the forest to our camp on the lakeshore, where we continued arguing. Brent insisted that I take him back to the cabins on Hawley Lake and leave him there until we could find a pilot to fly him back to civilization. To do so would mean the end of the expedition and the abandonment of my dreams and what I had strived for years to achieve. Tension between us was at the breaking point when out of the corner of my left eye I noticed something lumbering up the lakeshore.
“Look over there,” I said in a hushed whisper of excitement. A large caribou was trotting along the lake in our direction. It had a huge rack of antlers and was the finest specimen I had ever seen. It looked like it could have been the model for a royal coat of arms. The caribou paid no heed to us and nonchalantly wandered right past our camp, no more than ten metres from where we sat.
“It has no fear of us,” said Brent, staring transfixed at the magnificent animal.
Our unexpected visitor seemed to have raised his spirits a little, and it cheered our mood. If I handled the situation adroitly, I figured I could convince Brent to carry on. With that aim in mind, I kept up the conversation on caribou and other wildlife, as Brent loved animals, while building a heartening fire to keep the bugs away and cook supper.
That night, as we ate Kraft Dinner, I did my best to inspire Brent with stirring stories of adventure. The conversation drifted from Greek mythology to The Lord of the Rings, history and legend, great men and great deeds, of “immortal longings” and why we had to find the strength and fortitude to carry on. In other words, I pulled out all the stops. In the flickering light of our campfire, I could see the fire return to Brent’s brown eyes; my words were gradually winning him over. He became steadily more animated as I talked of overcoming whatever dangers and difficulties lay in our path, and how a few weeks of hardship is worth it for a lifetime of proud reflection. Somehow I succeeded in building up his spirits again. We went to bed that night feeling better. Brent said he would sleep on it and decide in the morning whether to quit or continue.
WHEN WE CRAWLED out of our nylon tent into the cool, misty morning, Brent’s spirits were again low. He looked miserable. In the hopes of encouraging him, I quickly made a fire, cooked some oatmeal, and put on a pot of tea. “How did you sleep?” I asked.
“Horrible,” replied Brent.
An awkward silence followed while I finished preparing breakfast for us. It was demoralizing knowing that all the work of building up Brent’s spirits had seemingly come to nothing. He appeared as lacklustre and shaken as ever. When I could bear the silence no longer, I asked him how he felt.
“I still want to quit. I can’t sleep in the tent. The ground is hard and uncomfortable, and it’s freezing at night. Without sleep, I have no energy. The bugs are unreal, worse than I could ever imagine. The work is too hard and dangerous. I want to go home.”
“You’ll get used to it. I promise.”
“I don’t think I could ever get used to this. I’m not made for this sort of thing.”
“You are what you make yourself,” I said. It was my personal motto.
We argued for some time, more gently and reservedly than the night before, but Brent finally broke down and wept.
“I’ll never make it. I’ll die. I know it. I want to go home.”
As angry as I was, it was impossible not to pity Brent—he didn’t have an ounce of pride left. He was afraid and made no secret of it. To push him any further seemed not only cruel but certain to cause him to experience some sort of breakdown. I couldn’t force him to undertake the gruelling portage. There was nothing for it. Reluctantly, I agreed to retrace our route back to the cabins on Hawley Lake, some thirty kilometres away. I hoped that on the journey back I could somehow build up Brent’s confidence and willpower enough to continue. After all, Brent was new to expeditions and needed time to adjust to life in the subarctic Lowlands.
“All right, we’ll head back to Hawley Lake,” I said.
We packed up our camp, loaded the canoe, and then launched it back into the clear blue waters of Sutton Lake. We had to perform the portage around the rocky gorge a second time. Brent, eager to return home, displayed considerably more zeal portaging back than he had the day before when we were headed in the opposite direction. Thinking that some fresh fish might help fortify him, after we had finished the portage I cast a line in the lake. It didn’t take long to land a good-sized northern pike.
“This will make for a great lunch,” I said happily. I set the pike down in the bottom of the canoe, where it flopped about. Unsheathing my old belt knife, which had once belonged to my father, I reached down to fillet the fish.
“Adam—” Brent suddenly spoke up from the bow of the canoe, “look at it. We can’t kill it. Don’t you feel sorry for it? Poor fish. Let it go.”
“Are you serious?”
“Just look at how helpless it looks.” Brent’s eyes were full of pity for the pike. He wasn’t joking.
Not wanting to upset him, given the fragile state of his already deflated spirits, I reluctantly released the pike unharmed back into the lake. It bolted off into the weeds as soon as it touched the water. In all the years I had known Brent, he had never expressed the slightest interest in becoming a vegetarian. His objection to killing the fish was sentimental rather than philosophical. Regardless, we resumed paddling up the lake without the benefit of any fresh protein.
Another wandering caribou trotted along the shore. A pair of loons swam in the blue waters ahead of us, hunting for fish, and making what Theodore Roosevelt, a keen ornithologist, described as “the unholy laughter of a loon.” As a child I had learned how to imitate the loon’s haunting call by whistling through my hands. It was a skill I found useful for impressing tourists in Algonquin Park. Meanwhile, on the sparsely treed eastern shore of Hawley Lake, something was moving up the rising slope. It was too far off to make out clearly.
“Brent, look—do you see something on the far shore there?” I pointed out the dark objects.
Brent squinted. “Yeah I do, what is it?”
I fetched the binoculars from my backpack. “Two black bear cubs,” I said, having focused on them.
“That’s what I thought!” said Brent excitedly.
“I wonder where their mother is,” I replied, still with my eyes pressed against the binoculars. The velvety black cubs looked less than a year old, but they soon disappeared from view into the brush. We continued paddling along Hawley Lake; the abundant wildlife seemed to raise Brent’s spirits. I suggested that if he stuck around, we might even see a wolverine or pack of grey wolves. This seemed to encourage him. When we reached the north shore of Hawley Lake, opposite the squalid little hunt camp, the time came for a decision. Like any explorer worth his salt, I hadn’t come this far without formulating contingency plans. We could still explore the alternative nameless river, which wouldn’t involve much portaging. I told Brent about it.
“We would have to travel upriver, against the current, wading through the water and dragging the canoe behind us for about a hundred and twenty kilometres.”
“Drag a canoe against the current for over a hundred kilometres? That sounds horrible. We’ll die of hypothermia.”
“Well, it’s either that or portage.”
“I can’t portage. Nothing in the world could make me go back into those awful woods.”
There was a third option—but it was so dangerous that I was reluctant to mention it. Still, since Brent wouldn’t consider the other two options, I now sketched it out: “I suppose we could try another way. We could paddle down the Sutton River to Hudson Bay, then try to canoe along the coast of Hudson Bay to the mouth of the Brant River, then work our way on foot up the Brant to the nameless tributary. We can probably walk along the shore, its open tundra, and drag the canoe behind us easily enough. Then we’d canoe the Brant’s tributary back to the coast, before canoeing along Hudson Bay to the mouth of the Sutton to finish.”
Actually, this route wasn’t much easier than my preferred one—but it would entail a relatively simple week while we canoed down the Sutton River. I figured this time might prove ample to build up Brent’s spirits and adjust him to life in the wilderness, after which he could endure the real bushwhacking and exploring.
Brent hesitated for a while, weighing his options. I wasn’t sure whether he understood what the plan I had sketched out involved exactly—and I was in no mood to explain it. It was well after dark when he finally came to a resolution. Sitting by the crackling fire in the quiet of the night, Brent spoke at last. “I’ll see it through. I won’t quit. I’m not entirely useless, you know. If we stick to this new plan, I’ll keep going,” he vowed solemnly.
“Excellent,” I replied. “I knew you wouldn’t quit.”
NAMELESS RIVER EXPEDITION ROUTES
