Beyond the Trees

by Adam Shoalts

  Afterward I unpacked the satellite phone from its waterproof case and called the pilot in distant Yellowknife to confirm the resupply. When I got through to the pilot, over the staticky line, I also asked a favour. My waders had become hopelessly punctured from bumping against sharp rocks while wading upriver, and I asked if he could get me a new pair from the store—the cheapest ones would do, I said, as I was still on a budget. Luckily, the pilot indicated that conditions on the radar looked decent enough for him to attempt the flight early the next morning. It would be a long flight for a little single-engine bush plane to make—about a thousand kilometre round trip, over uninhabited forest and arctic tundra.

  In the meantime, while arctic terns soared gracefully over the river, I sorted through my gear. The long portages and strenuous upriver travel had made me obsess over ways to travel lighter by eliminating anything I could. The canoe cart, which hadn’t been effective and had been a pain to lug all this way, would definitely be a gift for the pilot. Also included on the to-go list were my trekking poles (which I hadn’t used since the Dempster), the ripped hip waders (I’d be getting a new pair in my resupply barrel), as well as the chest waders (which I’d worn only once and figured I could do without), the broken water purifier (I hadn’t gotten sick at all and no longer had any worry on that account), a harness with ropes that I’d also worn only once on the Mackenzie while walking on shore (it didn’t weigh much, but I figured that the improvised harness I made out of ordinary rope was good enough), as well as small miscellaneous items such as carabiners and dead batteries. On the flip side, I’d have additional weight coming in from the new waders as well as several canisters of camp-stove fuel that I’d included in my next resupply barrel. Wood was becoming scarce, and especially on the tundra, during storms, it would be nice to be able to boil water beside my tent to warm up.

  The morning dawned cold and rainy, delaying the flight in. Finally, by noon I heard the drone of an engine, and then out of the overcast sky a plane materialized, looking in my imagination like a machine from another world. The little floatplane sliced through the grey clouds, and flew in low over the wide stretch of river. Twice the pilot circled, scouting out the water below before attempting a landing. I’d verified from my canoe that there was no rocks, but one can’t be too careful when landing planes on isolated northern rivers.

  Finally the pilot executed a perfect landing, skimming along the water on the plane’s pontoons. I’d never met this pilot before—I’d been communicating only with his boss beforehand down in Yellowknife. A young man of about my age emerged from the cockpit, jumping down on the plane’s left pontoon and waving to me. I waved back (it seemed the appropriate thing to do). With him were two passengers—Francis and Pablo—who’d come along for the ride.

  These were the first people I’d seen since my brief interaction with the two fishing guides on Great Bear—who in turn were the only humans I’d seen over the last forty-one days since my brief stop in Fort Good Hope.

  The pilot, whose name was Michael, handed me the barrel I’d carefully packed before the journey. As before, I emptied it into my existing barrel then handed it back to him, only this time I left half of the supplies in it. He also handed me the new hip waders. Then we discussed the logistics of where he’d leave the food drop for me on an island. It was impossible to say precisely; bush-plane flying has its own set of rules, and he couldn’t know in advance where it would be safe to land (water levels shift frequently, exposing rocks), but we’d agreed on an approximate location.

  Francis, who’d seen me set off on the Dempster, said he’d never fully realized the vastness of the land until he saw it from high above in a tiny bush plane. Flying for hours, they’d passed no signs of any human-made object below—just thousands of lakes, rivers, ponds, and mountains appearing to go on forever in all directions.

  I was anxious to get on my way, regretting the time I’d already lost that morning. And again I felt a little overwhelmed with socializing, especially compared to the relaxing simplicity of navigating canoes up whitewater rivers. When everything was settled, the plane’s engines roared back to life. They waved goodbye and I was already off. The day was getting on, after all.

  I listened to the floatplane as it faded away into silence—leaving me with just the sounds of water swirling from my paddle strokes as I headed upriver, enjoying the slacker current and the sight of the wild mountains framing the land.

  That night I camped on an overgrown island on a small hill in the rain. Lying outstretched in my tent, a mattress of soft moss and lichens beneath me, I felt content and even serene, feeling like I’d overcome the worst of the Coppermine.

  * * *

  For nearly a week the weather stayed cold and rainy. Meanwhile the river’s character changed dramatically as I continued my upriver journey. It widened out to more than a kilometre across in marshy lowlands surrounded by mist-shrouded mountains. They were great, green crags with dark, rocky summits that, in the fog and rain, appeared gloomy and forlorn, much like the Scottish Highlands. Or, at least, much like what I imagine the Scottish Highlands look like.

  The river’s current had slackened such that I was actually paddling my canoe upriver most of the time, alternating with poling in stretches where it narrowed. My days were long, but with the wind occasionally in my favour, I even managed to sail a little. I was now averaging about forty kilometres a day. And it was always with a feeling of contentment that at the end of a long, tiring day, wet from the rain, I’d climb into my tent to get warm. The weather didn’t bother me too much—I was able to scrounge up enough wood to keep making fires, and there was something about the rain and wild, romantic scenery that helped lull me into daydreams as I paddled. This whole section of the river had a lazy, dreamlike air to it, with its fog and mountains, and its marshy shorelines of sedges and willows. It was a welcome change from the fury and roar of where I’d first entered the Coppermine.

  The more subdued river brought a return to wildlife. Robins, bald eagles, terns, swans, loons, sandpipers, ducks of various kinds, including ones I hadn’t seen before, and even a beautiful little red-coloured pine grosbeak. Muskrats were also about. Caribou and white wolves wandered the riverbanks. I startled a big bull moose that was busy munching on some weeds in the water; in response, he startled me too. In a wider, more tranquil stretch that I could paddle, the sight of a white wolf along the banks stirred my sense of awe. The wolf was more timid than others I’d seen, but still very curious as it watched me paddling along.

  The only wildlife that wasn’t very friendly were the nesting arctic terns. These elegant birds make their annual migrations from the Arctic all the way to Antarctica—the longest migration of any animal on the planet. I’d always admired the tern’s beauty and amazing flying abilities, though I was rather less enthusiastic about their insistence on trying to dive-bomb me with their razor-sharp beaks as I navigated upriver. Paddling downriver, I could travel fast enough to escape from their aerial assaults, but going upriver is another story, and I found myself repeatedly experiencing the sensation that Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds had been adapted to 3-D. To protect myself, I had to switch from my broad-brimmed hat into my helmet, which I’d actually only packed for running whitewater rapids later in the trip, not bird attacks.

  On July 24, while making camp in a marshy area, I found my first ripe blueberries. They were a bit tart but I regarded such a find as a great treasure. And I eagerly looked forward to more becoming ripe soon, as well as all the other berries that I’d been eyeing for weeks with anticipation.

  One decidedly unexpected thing was what I uncovered one night in the crooked branch of an ancient, twisted black spruce near my camp: the white-feathered claw of a small animal. Evidently, it had been severed from its body—for there was no sign of the rest of the creature. Turning it over in my hand, I realized it was the talon of a snowy owl. What could have killed it? Owls are sometimes hunted and killed by foxes, as well as by lynx, which pounce on them
unseen. It seemed likely that this particular owl had fallen victim to one or the other, its talon and some feathers were all that was left of it. For a while I thought of keeping it as a good luck charm, like a white rabbit’s foot, but then it occurred to me that an owl that had been killed in such a manner probably wasn’t very lucky. So I tossed it away.

  * * *

  After five days of relatively pleasant travel, conditions became more difficult. I awoke the morning of July 26 to find frost blanketing the ground. And just as the weather had turned cold the Coppermine turned rough again, with swift currents and huge rapids.

  That frosty morning I was frequently reduced to painstaking wading, harder than anything I’d yet experienced. My feet took a beating among the sharp, jagged rocks along the river bottom in those spots where I had to wade almost up to my waist against the powerful current. In most places, though, the shoreline was a chaotic jumble of rocks and boulders, such that I could usually, holding on to the canoe’s bow for balance, half wade and half jump along these rocks to make progress.

  The chilly morning turned into a cold day. At one point I stumbled in the current, allowing waves to come over my hip waders, flooding them. I inhaled at the shock of the cold. Then I pulled my canoe into shore, climbed up onto a flat rock, and emptied the waders. My pants and socks were drenched, but there wasn’t time to dry things out. I just wrung out the socks, put them back on, and kept going. Discouraging as having your waders flood with frigid waters can be, I always found that there was some little thing to cheer me up: the sight of robins hopping along the banks, or a lone wolf wandering the shoreline, or an eagle soaring overhead. Sometimes it’s the little things that make all the difference.

  Since wading was proving increasingly punishing on my shins and feet, I tried to line, or track, the canoe with rope wherever possible. In a few stretches the bank, with its low boulders, wasn’t too difficult; I could jump from one to another with relative ease. My progress was pretty good. Then, up ahead, I saw a couple of big rocks extending from shore out into the turbulent water. These kind of rocks always made me a little nervous, as they are often the hardest and most dangerous to navigate around.

  Still, it looked possible. So with the canoe in the water and me on shore holding it with rope, I went beyond where the two rocks protruded from the river. Then I began to pull the canoe upstream toward me. I had to extend my right arm out from shore, tugging the canoe so it would nudge around the boulders. But the canoe’s bow edged just an inch too far, catching the current on its side.

  Fear shot through me. The force of the water began to tip the canoe as it pivoted sideways in the current. Water began lapping in; I had only seconds to act. If the canoe flooded it would be swept downriver through the rapids and lost. I had to do the opposite of what instinct suggested—instead of holding on tightly my only option was to ease up, letting the rope go slack in my hand.

  Doing so allowed the half-flooded canoe to right itself as it spun back to a straight position out of the rapid. Then I dashed downstream, pulling it in toward a tranquil pool where I could safely haul it ashore.

  My heart was pounding—had I reacted a second slower my canoe would have been lost, the current’s force carrying it and all my gear far away downstream. I stepped into the water beside the canoe and began to unload it on the bank. I had to empty the water out of it before I could continue. I wasn’t going to risk a second attempt lining with rope around the rocks—instead I portaged.

  After such a close shave, my reaction is generally to get back in the saddle as fast as possible. Dwelling on what might have been, I don’t think is helpful, but pushing on helps restore confidence. So, once I’d portaged around the boulders, I was back to tracking the canoe with a rope along the shore and in some places wading, as the swift current continued for miles.

  Then I came across something else on shore—a destroyed canoe. It was an old aluminum boat, apparently crushed and mangled by the rapids when it had pinned on a rock, the force of the current folding it in half. Evidently, whomever had been paddling it never made it downriver—at least not in that canoe. It looked several decades old at least and was a reminder of what a single mistake in powerful rapids can do.

  That afternoon, after hauling, wading, and lining up a succession of large-scale rapids alternating with calmer sections, I came to the wildest rapid I’d ever seen—a tremendous, roaring affair over a kilometre wide. Normally rapids occur in narrow sections of river, so such a wide, tumbling rapid that went on for as far as I could make out upriver was an impressive sight (and also a little demoralizing). Beneath this massive cataract of rushing water and boulders was a wide calm stretch, allowing me to paddle in toward the start of it. I canoed toward its roaring fury, trying to determine if one side might be better than the other to struggle up it. Neither looked promising, but I opted for the left.

  It took all my reserves of willpower and strength to get the canoe up this great rapid—wading, hauling, dashing between rocks, doing everything I could to overcome the current. Then, amid the endless sharp rocks, my new waders, fresh in from the resupply, punctured. The frigid waters of the Coppermine flooded right into my boot. There was nothing to be done about it; I had to push on for another two hours before I could call it a night and make camp.

  Once I had the tent up and a fire going, my priority was to repair the wader. From the bark of a nearby black spruce I gathered some sap, or spruce gum. The sticky resin I heated on a rock in my fire until it melted to a honey-like consistency. Then with a stick as a ladle, I applied it to the small puncture in my wader. Overtop the pitch I laid down some tape (the tape on its own won’t stay, even when you heat it beforehand). This done, the waders were as good as new. I just had to hope they didn’t puncture again, as I knew the spruces were thinning out and that soon there’d be none at all.

  * * *

  My belief that I’d overcome the worst of the Coppermine’s rapids proved a bit optimistic. It took another two and a half days of gruelling travel to battle my way through endless swifts and many more large rapids—some of them as much as Class IV or V on the paddlers’ difficulty scale. In the midst of one fast section of river with high sandy banks, I was standing in the canoe poling along when I looked up and suddenly saw other canoes coming downriver. At last, in two months of travelling, these were the first other campers I’d encountered.

  To my eyes, there seemed to be unbelievable multitude of them—fully eight people. It was the biggest crowd I’d seen in months. They were men in their early or mid-twenties, divided between four canoes, each of them wearing a helmet. The current was strong, with swirls and eddies everywhere, and it was carrying them along at a fast pace.

  The sight of me, long-haired, heavily bearded, standing upright in a canoe while poling off the river bottom, seemed to surprise them. They stared at me in apparent bewilderment as they drifted rapidly by on the current. At last, when they were almost past, one of the eight in the rear canoe mustered a shouted hello. I responded with “hi,” as I jabbed my long pole through the rushing waters, driving the canoe forward. As quickly as they’d come, the river carried them out of sight, and I saw no more of them. I supposed it would only be logical for them to have assumed I was some sort of crazy hermit of the kind that’s best prudently avoided, as doubtless they thought, as everyone I’d spoken to about the matter beforehand had, that travelling upriver on the Coppermine was an act of insanity. Or perhaps they figured I was only poling upriver a short distance for some odd reason—and would soon set aside the pole and follow after them.

  In any case, I kept going upriver. Fortunately, after passing another roaring rapid, I came to a short stretch that was a bit less fierce, and here I met a friendlier group of river travellers: a family of seven Canada geese. Five goslings followed their watchful parents, paddling along near the grassy shoreline, the little ones seeming to regard me with curiosity. They were a much more communicative bunch, honking at me cheerfully. The geese come here to raise their y
oung; then by late August, once the goslings are big enough to fly, they make their own great journey south to warmer climes.

  The following day I wearily continued upriver. After some eleven hours of exhausting travel I stopped and made camp at a narrow section where a massive rapid thundered ferociously. I camped by the rapid, though the blackflies were atrocious, on account of the fact I was just too tired to press on farther. I’d made it twenty-eight kilometres upriver during the day, and there was now a decent crop of ripened blueberries for me to feast on.

  With July nearing its close, the bugs were worse than ever. Each night, inside my tent I performed a little ritual, it consisted of killing every last blackfly that had made its way in. No matter what I tried—wiping them off, standing near the suffocating smoke of my fire—about a hundred of them managed to get inside during the seconds it took me to unzip and rezip the tent door. Not only were there always intense swarms of them outside my tent, but many would also be hidden in my clothing, hair, beard, and anywhere else they could get at. There’s nothing worse than blackflies buzzing around inside your tent at the end of a long, hard day. Fortunately, they tend to fly up to the top, where they can be easily squished against the ceiling. My once beautiful tent had become utterly streaked with bloodstains from squishing bugs.

  Lying inside my tent, the mid-summer arctic sun still shining, I cast a glance out the screen door at the river and was surprised to see bright objects moving on it. I sat up and looked closer: it was a second party of canoeists, some half-dozen of them! My goodness, I thought, this river is getting altogether too crowded, I need to get off it soon.

  The canoeists landed above the rapid on the side of the river I was camped on, evidently intending to scout out the whitewater. They hadn’t seen my camp yet, so I lay quiet inside my tent, making notes in my journal. The proper thing to do was probably to have gone and introduced myself, but having just worked so hard to make my tent blackfly free, I really didn’t wish to unzip the door and allow another invasion. At any rate, one of them, having spotted my camp, headed in my direction.