Alone Against the North (22 page)

“No,” I said to Wes on the phone, “I can't wait. I'll do it by myself if I have to.”

“That's crazy,” replied Wes.

My frenzied schedule and lack of any partner meant that there was little time to prepare for the expedition. I had no chance to review my old notes on the Again or even to obtain new topographic maps. The old charts from three years earlier with Wes had become water-stained and illegible. There was neither time nor money to replace them. But like the explorers of old, I had canoed many rivers without maps and could, if need be, create my own. All I had was a single 1:50,000 scale map of the most important part of the route supplemented with a few sketchy printouts from satellite imagery—more than sufficient, I thought, to find and explore the river.

Flushed with confidence and practically half-mad with a long-suppressed desire to pry open the secrets of this obscure
waterway, I could barely permit myself a moment's rest until I had reached it. The Ohio dig finished, I drove back to Canada without delay, packed up my gear, and set off to finally free myself of an obsession that had long vexed me—a river that no known person had ever fully explored.

[ 10 ]

TRAILBLAZING

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

T
ERRY 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.

AGAIN RIVER EXPEDITION ROUTE

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.