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The Canada that lies back of your civilization, the wild, fierce, land of desperate struggle and untold hardship … is … the heritage of the born adventurer. In this austere and savage land men are sometimes broken, or aged beyond their years.
—Grey Owl, The Men of the Last Frontier, 1931
MUCH WEIGHED ON MY MIND as I paddled back to the old goose hunting shack in the fading light. Pitting oneself alone against the northern wilderness wasn’t a challenge to be entered into lightly. Virtually none of history’s great explorers operated alone—many in fact did comparatively little of the hard labour involved in exploring. Henry Morton Stanley, like most explorers of Africa, always had porters and servants to carry his baggage and equipment, cook his meals, make his fires, and pitch his tents. On his journey through the Canadian subarctic, John Franklin required voyageurs to paddle his canoes, start fires, and take care of the hunting and fishing. Samuel Hearne, strong and resourceful as he was, relied on his native guides to provision him with food, shelter, and fire. Rare was the explorer who did an expedition single-handedly, and even aboriginal people as a rule travelled in groups. Huddled by my campfire that night, I racked my brain to think of a solitary explorer for encouragement.
I remembered what Bill Mason, a veteran wilderness canoeist, had said of solo travel:
I would be irresponsible in encouraging people to canoe and camp alone if I didn’t also point out the dangers. I have always been aware that any mishap that renders me immobile will almost certainly lead to my death unless I am on a well-travelled route.
Here in the blackfly-infested Lowlands, I definitely wasn’t on any well-travelled route. Mason had admonished those who would risk a solo trip to:
Think about the possibility of injury even from routine actions, such as picking up and carrying the canoe over a muddy trail, chopping wood or running rock-studded rapids. Close your eyes and imagine yourself pinned helplessly between your canoe and a rock in the middle of a rapid.… When you are chopping or splitting your firewood, imagine sinking the axe into your foot.”
I did what Mason suggested and envisioned these scenarios—none of which seemed terribly encouraging. Mason had concluded: “Six is just about the right number of people.… It is also considered the safest number for travelling on a remote wilderness river.”
Those who dared to take on the North Country alone usually did so only after months of careful planning and preparation—psyching themselves up for the rigours of an absolute and all-encompassing solitude. I had no such luxury—I was thrown into the situation. Regardless, I had made up my mind to press on for the sake of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and more than that—my keen sense of curiosity to know what was out there inexorably led me on.
THE MORNING OF MY FIRST DAY ALONE dawned with a thick fog engulfing the river. It was impossible to see more than a few feet ahead. Having spent another unpleasant night in the shack, I was eager to be off. Before me lay 153 kilometres of upriver travel, most of which would have to be done by wading through the water against the swift current, dragging the canoe behind me with rope. The river bottom would be treacherous, full of rocks and crevices. To slip and hit my head would be a death sentence. As it was, it would be a race against time upriver; my only hope of avoiding hypothermia was to travel as fast as possible, without interruption. I put on my warmest sweater and replaced my fedora with a toque. As for polar bears, there was little to be done except to sleep with one eye open and keep the gun close. My thumb still ached terribly, but despite feeling sick and knowing that I now had to do alone what was supposed to be done with a partner, I remained confident.
What buoyed my spirits partially was the knowledge that other explorers had overcome greater odds. As far as impossible odds went, nothing could rival what legendary mountain man Hugh Glass endured in the American West. Described by a contemporary who had travelled with him as “bold, daring, reckless and eccentric to a high degree,” Glass was, he went on to say, “a man of great talents and intellectual as well as bodily power. But his bravery was conspicuous beyond all his other qualities.” In 1822 Glass, then a hardened woodsman in his forties, joined an expedition ascending the Missouri River. Scouting ahead of the main party one day in late summer, he was attacked by a grizzly bear. Glass managed to get off a rifle shot before the bear pinned him down and began mauling him. Not one to surrender, the mountain man repeatedly stabbed the enraged grizzly with his knife. Two of his companions arrived just in time to finish off the wounded bear with their guns. Glass lay unconscious on the ground with injuries that were so severe—his rib cage was exposed through a gaping wound in his back, he had a deep gash on his head, and his leg was broken—that any hope of his survival was given up. Two men volunteered to remain behind until he died. They wrapped Glass’ body in a makeshift shroud then divided his gun, knife, and other possessions between themselves, leaving him for dead.
But incredibly Glass came to, finding himself alone, unarmed, without provisions, and suffering from a broken leg and festering wounds. The nearest outpost of civilization—Fort Kiowa—was well over three hundred kilometres away. A lesser man would have given up. Not Glass—furious that he had been abandoned, he set his own leg, patched up his wounds as best he could and—unable to walk—began to crawl. For six weeks, he dragged himself onward, living off roots and berries, until he reached the Cheyenne River. Glass then cobbled together a crude raft to drift with the current, eventually reaching the fort. There he vowed vengeance on the men who had abandoned him. After a lengthy recovery, Glass succeeded in tracking them down, but in the end he proved as magnanimous as he was indefatigable. He spared their lives and took no action against them.
I TOOK MY FIRST solo wilderness trip at thirteen. After some pleading, I had succeeded in convincing an uncle I was staying with to take me to the nearest wilderness and allow me to strike off alone. I didn’t sleep a wink that night, thinking a bear was going to devour me. As I grew older, I moved on to solo trips canoeing rivers and snowshoeing across frozen lakes. One night on a wintery sojourn north of Lake Huron, a pack of wolves followed my trail over an ice-covered lake. Despite the minus-thirty-degree-Celsius temperatures, I was soundly asleep, buried under several layers of blankets in my sled when howling shattered the silence. Thrilled and excited, if a little alarmed, I grabbed my axe and built up my fire. Then with a birchbark torch, I struck out onto the lake, catching a spellbinding glimpse of the wolves as they disappeared into the night like phantoms. But none of these adventures could compare with what I reckoned would be at least another three weeks of not seeing another human being. I had always been a bit of the solitary sort, but this was pushing it.
I set off from the alder-covered island into the thick mist, paddling as hard as I could upriver. Within about twenty minutes of my departure, the swift current grew too strong for paddling. So, reluctantly, I wedged my paddle inside the canoe and plunged over the side to begin towing the vessel. Leaning on the canoe for balance, I splashed my way up to the bow in knee-deep water and took hold of the rope fastened to the canoe. Every step was precarious—the river bottom was lined with slippery rocks. To maintain warmth, I dared not stop once started, pushing onward as best I could. Fortunately, the sun, which we had seen little of over the past few days, began to peek through the clouds, warming my chilled frame. A short distance upriver, on an eroded bank I noticed a large burrow in the soil—the home of a wolverine or possibly an arctic fox.
My plan was to penetrate some forty-four kilometres up the Sutton River until I reached a fork where a tributary stream, the obscure and little-known Aquatuk River, joined the Sutton. Then I would branch off up the Aquatuk, following its meandering course some thirteen kilometres until coming upon the mouth of a nameless tributary that drained into it. This nameless tributary was the river I was seeking—the plan was to explore its hundred-kilometre-long course, dragging my canoe if necessary the whole way to its headwaters. Once there, I’d turn around and paddle with the current back to the Aquatuk, then onto the Sutton, and finally out to Hudson Bay again, where a pilot could land. Aside from near the mouth of the Sutton, the rivers themselves were too shallow and rocky for any float plane to land on.
The first day travelling upriver progressed slowly. At times, the current slackened enough to allow for hard paddling or “poling”—that is, jabbing my paddle along the river bottom to propel the canoe forward. At a few straight sections of river, I experimented with hiking onshore while dragging the canoe with rope through the water. None of this proved practical for very long—only wading in the river and dragging the canoe behind me could make substantial headway. The worst was when rapids had to be navigated—several times I nearly lost my balance, dangerously stumbling in the rushing torrent.
Early on, when rounding a bend, I caught sight of something white moving off in the distance. Thinking I was about to glimpse a polar bear, the binoculars revealed only a couple of tundra swans swimming in the shallow waters. But soon I encountered the real thing: passing some islands, which had obstructed my view of the eastern shore, a large white mass out on a vast expanse of tundra suddenly loomed into view. Instinctively, I froze as a rush of adrenaline surged through me. It was a polar bear, luckily a long way off, lumbering along the tundra. The distance between us made me feel reasonably secure. But not secure enough that I wanted to wait around and take pictures, so I pressed on hard against the river, hoping to reach the treeline before nightfall.
Mercifully, I escaped the open tundra and made it back into the forest just as the sun began to set. At least here there was ample wood for a fire, shelter from the chilling winds, and no polar bears—or so I hoped. I set up my tent in a patch of reindeer moss beside some tamaracks and, overcome with millions of blackflies and mosquitoes, dove into my little nylon sanctuary for the night just as the sky unleashed more rain.
BY THE END of the first day of my upriver battle, I had covered sixteen kilometres. Fearing the onset of hypothermia again, I realized that wading through the river all day—sometimes in water deeper than my waist—was too dangerous. The early mornings were too cold for it—I had no choice but to wait until the sun warmed things up a little before plunging back into the frigid water.
Despite the shortened schedule, I covered another sixteen kilometres on my second day—pushing as hard as I could and not taking any time to stop for lunch—instead, I just consumed beef jerky, granola bars, and dried fruit on the march. That night, I made camp beneath an ancient black spruce, around which I found a multitude of wild edibles: delicious blueberries, tiny strawberries, rather tasteless crowberries, red bearberries, orange cloudberries, and pin-striped gooseberries. I snacked gratefully on all of them—though the thought did occur to me that the abundant berries would make the area a pretty attractive buffet for black bears, which rely on berries for most of their diet. But now that I was in polar bear country, I regarded black bears with something approaching disdain—not much more than a nuisance. Even the largest black bears are usually less than half the size of a male polar bear, and not nearly as aggressive.
At any rate, I had more immediate concerns—my injured thumb. It still hurt horribly whenever I brushed it up against anything. Wearily, I sat down on some sphagnum moss and slowly began to peel off the duct tape and the bandages. It looked worse than ever: the flesh was still hanging out near the nail, and now the skin around it had turned a sickly green. I concluded that if the cost of exploring the nameless river was a lost thumb, I would accept it. With my other hand, I rooted around in my backpack for the first aid kit, dug out some alcohol pads, and gingerly cleaned the wound. If I ran out of alcohol pads, I could rely on the Lowlands’ abundant sphagnum moss; absorbent and highly acidic, it was long used as a traditional treatment for wounds in both Europe and North America.
The next task was to start a fire: grey clouds were rolling in from the west, threatening more rain. The search for dry land had led me some way inland, making it a chore to hike back down to the river’s banks and fetch water. My hiking boots sank into the muck as I filled a pot in the swirling waters. Nearby were some large caribou tracks. It was comforting to know that benign animal companions were at hand. It made the isolation seem less intense.
The smoke from the fire helped keep the bugs away, letting me remove my mesh bug net. My face, neck, and the area behind my ears were covered in red sores from blackfly bites. Blood smeared my beard from swatting flies and mosquitoes all day, squishing their blood-filled bodies against my face. As I waited for the water to boil, I changed into dry clothes and hung my wet ones on the crooked branches of the spruce. I didn’t have the benefit of any Gore-Tex clothing, which costs a small fortune. “But,” I told myself, “I’m fine without it. Explorers and fur traders did without it.” Having fallen into the habit of talking to myself, I gazed out on the stunted, windswept boreal forest all around me and muttered, “People are getting soft these days.”
The sky continued to look ominous, but there was no rain. A northern flicker, a type of large woodpecker, sat above me in the old spruce, keeping me company as I ate rice and drank blueberry tea. After supper, I couldn’t leave my dishes unwashed—not that I cared about clean dishes, but scraps of food could attract bears. So I stumbled back down through alder bushes to the river’s edge to clean them. Finding myself too exhausted to move my plastic food containers very far from camp as I customarily did, I instead carried them only five metres away and sat them beside a small tamarack. My theory was that if a black bear came across my camp, it would leave me undisturbed and content itself with raiding the food rations.
That last task accomplished, I brushed my teeth and finally crawled into the tent, which now seemed like the most comfortable place in the world—a tiny sanctuary where I could escape from the torment of the mosquitoes and blackflies, the biting wind and rain, and the toils of the day. I spread out my sleeping bag and arranged all my accoutrements just as I liked them: the shotgun along one side, the hatchet, old hunting knife, and pocket flashlight on the other. I placed my hat above a makeshift pillow of extra clothing stuffed into my jacket and tucked my compass and matches into the mesh pocket of the tent. The GPS and satellite phone were stashed inside a waterproof bag at my feet. One consolation of being abandoned by Brent was the extra space I now had inside the little tent. Here in the Lowlands, dry ground for campsites was unusual, and by necessity I was often forced to sleep on slopes, undulated terrain, or in soggy patches of reindeer moss. With a partner it was necessary to choose who would sleep where—one side of the tent generally being preferred over the other. Now at least I had the pick of the best side and could therefore rest more comfortably.
With the last remaining rays of clouded sunlight, I had just enough light to look over the maps and dig out my journal from my tattered pack. It was the same journal that I had carried with me barely two months earlier in the jungles of the Amazon. It felt strange to think that some of the insect bites on my legs came from a different continent. Flipping through the water-stained pages, my eyes fell upon an entry that read: “Saw a tarantula on a palm leaf while doing a night transect, many ant bites on legs. Large insect bite on thigh looks infected.” I scribbled some notes, recorded my coordinates, and noted the weather. Then, all my muscles aching, I stretched out in my sleeping bag. The pitter-patter of rain hitting the tent lulled me to sleep; as always, a tree root was jabbing at my back beneath the tent floor.
A NOISE FROM SOMEWHERE in the darkness roused me. On the other side of the paper-thin wall, something was noisily crashing about. I dashed out of my sleeping bag and crouched in the centre of the tent—my knife out and ready to lunge. Ignoring the instinct to remain silent, I began shouting to scare off what was probably a black bear. Any moment, I expected a bear to burst through the tent. The noise outside ceased. I switched on a flashlight, though this would allow whatever was out there to see me. Light in hand, I unzipped the tent door and peered out.
“Hey!” I shouted, startling something that tore off in the direction of the river. It plunged into the shallow waters as I shone the dim light after it. A thick mist concealed the river, but I could hear the animal wade across to the far side then crash through the forest on the opposite bank. Whatever it was, I had apparently scared it off. Replacing my knife with the shotgun, I went to investigate. My concern was that a bear had raided my food rations and, with its powerful jaws, ripped open one or more of the watertight plastic barrels. Cradling the gun, I tiptoed over to where I had stowed them. They appeared untouched.
Back inside the tent, I laid down. It was 2:17 a.m. Finding it hard to get back to sleep, and adhering to my habit of imagining the worst case scenario in order to fortify myself, I recalled some of the most gruesome black bear attacks that I knew of. I had an excellent stock of them, thanks to many an evening spent reciting such tales to fellow campers. There was the time in 1978 when a black bear stalked, killed, and partially ate three boys in Algonquin Park. That story always seemed to make an impression on audiences. Then there was the notorious incident in 1991 when a perfectly healthy male bear defied everything the textbooks said about black bear behaviour and turned man-eater in Algonquin. The ferocious bear stalked two adult campers, swam out to an island they had camped on, broke their necks, and afterwards consumed their corpses. Interestingly, Cliff Jacobson had reported that the expert consensus was, contrary to what might be expected, that the most dangerous black bears are the wildest ones with little or no previous contact with humans—presumably the kind of bears that live around unexplored rivers. Suddenly, a branch snapped outside the tent. My body went tense. Maybe it was only a red squirrel. Having waited another ten minutes and heard nothing further, my exhaustion overcame any lingering concerns and I fell asleep again.
THE IMMORTAL GODS of ancient Greece, perched in their palace on Mount Olympus, took a perverse pleasure in tormenting mortals, sending them fair weather and favourable winds one moment, then hurling down terrible fury the next, just to remind mortals of the order of things. On my third day travelling upriver alone, I received a lesson in the caprices of the gods. The day had been glorious: I made excellent progress and stopped for the night on a beautiful stretch of river with wide open grassy banks. At last, it seemed that fortune was smiling upon me. The weather was so idyllic and the sun felt so warm that I actually bathed for the first time in two weeks. Refreshed from a brisk swim in the river, I then caught two speckled trout and gathered some wild berries for supper. I decided to treat myself to an open campsite near the water rather than hike back into the forest as I normally did.
But just as twilight faded to darkness, the wind changed ominously. A tremendous gust blew the coals of my campfire into a red glow. Seemingly out of nowhere, storm clouds crowded the sky. The wind howled savagely, bending trees to the breaking point. With dread and with anticipation, I rushed to prepare for the coming storm. I tied my overturned canoe, which was resting beside the tent, with rope to the nearest shrubs, fearing that it might otherwise be blown away. I had to act quickly—any moment the heavens were going to open up—so I grabbed as many rocks as I could, piled them around the edges of my tent, then dashed inside just as a bolt of lightning struck the far bank. It was followed by the loudest burst of thunder I had ever heard.
The storm raged all around me, the tent swayed violently, and each burst of thunder seemed to shake the very ground beneath me. The rain pounding the tent was as deafening as anything I experienced in the Amazon. The open ground and metal tent poles left me dangerously vulnerable to lightning. It felt as if this hurricane of a storm would carry me off in the tent like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Instead, the tent just came crashing down on top of me. Water began to accumulate inside from the lashing rain. I sighed: it was going to be one of those nights.
Squirming around inside the ruined tent, I somehow managed to avoid the accumulating pools of water. There was no hope of fixing the tent in the storm—I couldn’t risk getting my dry clothing drenched. So, powerless against the elements, I resigned myself to sleeping in what felt like a body bag, with the collapsed tent on top of me. As for the possibility of getting struck by lightning, I’d just have to hope for the best.
IN THE EARLY MORNING, I awoke to the sound of splashing in the river. I stuck my head out of the collapsed tent and saw three caribou, a mother with two young calves, swimming across the water. Moments like this made it all worth it.
That day, the fourth since Brent quit, I paddled, lined, waded, and poled my canoe up the Sutton. By early afternoon, I reached “the meeting of the waters,” as I called it, the junction of the Sutton and Aquatuk Rivers. From here I would leave the familiarity of the Sutton and head into unknown territory. Scant published information existed on the Aquatuk. The explorers D.B. Dowling and James Edwin Hawley had only briefly mentioned it in their notes. There was a dry geological paper published back in 1971, H.H. Bostock’s Geological Notes on Aquatuk River Map-Area, with Emphasis on the Precambrian Rocks, that shed some light on it. But Bostock focused on rocks, not canoeing, and his work had been done mostly via helicopter. Other than that, I knew of two recent scientific studies in the general area: an aquatic survey that had been carried out a few years earlier on various lakes had also sampled the headwaters of the Aquatuk, and a botanical study that had been conducted the previous summer in the vicinity of the nameless river, a tributary of the Aquatuk. But these studies said little to nothing about the waterways.
Conversations with a couple of old-timers I had tracked down before leaving on the expedition had been more fruitful. An aged aboriginal man from Peawanuck told me that the Aquatuk had “a lot of pike.” Another veteran of the north, a retired cartographer, told me that he had worked on a survey some forty years earlier that, in winter, went along part of the frozen Aquatuk. One thing seemed clear: only a handful of people had ever previously ventured up this river. Rope in hand, wading with my canoe in the dark, swirling waters of this new river, I felt a mixture of trepidation and excitement as I left the Sutton behind and strayed into the unknown.