Alone Against the North (10 page)

“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.