In the summer of 1993 my wife, Jean, and I, along with a friend, waved good-bye to the bush pilot who had dropped us off, and started down the South Nahanni River in a raft and a canoe. The seed idea for Far North came to mind as I was standing on the cliffs above the awesome spectacle of Virginia Falls.
Evenings in camp I was reading Dangerous River, a book by R. M. Patterson describing his experiences on the Nahanni in the 1920s. I was falling under the spell of the river and its lore. I went on to read many other books and journals about the people, the land, and the history of the Northwest Territories, but Patterson’s book, with its firsthand account of winter in Deadmen Valley and along the Nahanni, provided me with the weather- and calendar-related detail I would need to write a winter survival story in this setting.
The dirt-floored cabin that sheltered Gabe and Raymond in Far North can still be found in Deadmen Valley today. It was built in several weeks’ time by Patterson and his partner, Gordon Matthews, in the fall of 1927, and sits along Wheatsheaf Creek a short walk up from the Nahanni. In mid-December, Matthews attempted to trek out for supplies after the pair realized “the complete exodus of game from the valley.” Turned back by pockets of open water in the canyons of the Nahanni, Matthews set out again on Christmas Eve.
Reduced to “tea, salt, beans, and rolled oats,” Patterson waited until early February for his partner’s return, then tried the canyons himself. Each survived to tell their tales of extreme winter conditions, open water, and collapsing ice bridges.