Northern Borders

by Howard Frank Mosher

  According to my grandfather, the Great Lost Corner and the surrounding wilderness contained countless unexplored white-water rivers connecting huge lakes frozen nine months of the year. The country was home to numberless caribou, gigantic brook trout as colorful as a subarctic sunset, and, until not so very many years ago, a handful of nomadic Indians with whom Gramp had stayed for a time after the survey ended. This was the place he’d promised to take me when I turned eighteen.

  “You and I and a canoe, Austen,” he’d told me a hundred times. “Just you and I and a canoe, for a summer of fishing and exploring. Then we’ll see what sort of man I’ve made out of you. We’ll see what sort of fella you are to go down the river with.”

  Still, for many years our trip seemed far-off in the misty future, and impossible to imagine in very specific terms—just as growing up and leaving Lost Nation, or the death of either of my grandparents, was impossible to imagine. When my grandmother did die, suddenly and unexpectedly, in the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, my grandfather fell into a prolonged brooding, which not even deer season seemed to jolt him out of; and for many months afterward he didn’t mention our Labrador trip to me at all.

  One evening in May of 1960, less than a month before my high school graduation, my grandfather and I were listening to the CBC news from Montreal on his old battery-operated Stromberg Carlson radio. The broadcaster had just announced in his precise, British-sounding accent that plans had been set in motion to construct a gigantic hydroelectric dam deep in the interior of Labrador. He went on to report that the dam would create the largest man-made lake in the world, a veritable freshwater inland sea covering millions of square acres of wilderness, some of which had never been mapped or thoroughly explored.

  Without a word, my grandfather switched off the radio and disappeared for more than three hours. I knew better than to question him when he returned. I assumed he’d been up at his camp looking at his maps of Labrador, and knew he’d tell me anything he wanted to tell me in his own good time. Over the next few days, he seemed more abstracted and withdrawn than usual. On several occasions, when I asked him a question or made some remark about the weather or school or our work at home, he nearly snapped my head off. At the time, however, I didn’t think much about it. Without my grandmother to contend with, Gramp had not been entirely himself for nearly a year. And with graduation coming up, and college just around the corner, I had important considerations of my own.

  For these reasons, what happened a couple of weeks later hit me like a thunderbolt. It began with an early-morning phone call from the railway freight agent in Kingdom Common, to say that a long wooden crate had just arrived for my grandfather.

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Long,” he said. “Bring your truck.”

  Characteristically, my grandfather refused to tell me what he’d ordered. Something for his sawmill, I supposed. The planer had been acting up recently. Possibly he was replacing it.

  In fact, the mystery crate turned out to have come from Oldtown, Maine, and to contain a brand-new eighteen-foot Oldtown canoe, painted a rich forest-green.

  “The canoe’s mine,” my grandfather informed me when I brought it home from school in the back of the truck. “The trip’s your graduation present.”

  I looked at him, my face as blank as those empty white spaces on his map of Labrador. “What trip?”

  “Our trip north,” my grandfather said. “You and I and that canoe, Austen. Just like I’ve always told you. We’ll leave the day after you graduate.”

  Over the next several days my grandfather assembled what seemed like a ton of camping equipment. A collapsible sheet-metal stove arrived from someplace in Wisconsin. From L. L. Bean came a two-man waterproofed canvas tent, two lightweight insulated sleeping bags, a pair of Maine Guide hiking boots for each of us and two pairs of bear paw snowshoes for crossing the Snow Chain Mountains. My grandfather made several trips to the hardware store in the Common for towing line, a Coleman lantern, a new bucksaw and ax. And he bought boxes, more boxes, and more boxes still of rifle and shotgun shells. “Leonidas Hubbard died of starvation up in that territory for want of a shotgun, Austen. You can bet no such thing is going to happen to us.”

  As our departure date drew nearer, I grew more and more excited by the prospect of a summer with my grandfather in some of the last unexplored terrain on the face of the earth. Yet I must admit that I felt more than a twinge of apprehension, both of the desolate land itself and of the responsibility of seeing that no harm came to us while we were there. Not that Gramp was by any stretch of the imagination over the hill. At seventy-two, he was still about as tough as any man in Kingdom County, which is to say as tough as anyone anywhere. Yet since the CBC announcement about the dam, he’d seemed not only more abstracted than usual, but strangely agitated as well. Not himself—in a way I could not quite put my finger on but strongly sensed whenever I was in his presence.

  Graduation took place in mid-June. Nearly all I can recall from the event itself is that Theresa Dubois had beaten me out for top class honors by a couple of percentage points, thereby earning the privilege of delivering the valedictory address, during which I all but heard my grandmother tell me sternly, “To win is all, Tut.”

  Yet it occurred to me that Gram’s displeasure with my class standing would have been very mild compared to her horror over my impending excursion with Gramp to the Far North. Talk about sashaying!

  “You can’t predict the future, Tut.” Never had Gram’s observation seemed truer; and never, if I’d had a hundred years to try, could I have guessed exactly how unpredictable the summer of 1960 would turn out to be.

  “Nobody lives forever,” my grandfather declared as we pulled out of Sept-Îles, Quebec, on the weekly bush train north. “But they say living in the bush adds twenty years to your life.”

  We’d driven the five hundred miles from Kingdom County to Sept-Îles in twenty-four hours, arriving just in time to load our canoe and gear on the train for the day-long trip to Schefferville, a tiny mining outpost three hundred miles to the north, and our jumping-off place for the Labrador bush. Our plan, as my grandfather had finally divulged to me on the drive up, was to canoe the major river systems and lakes destined to be flooded by the great dam, exploring and mapping the countryside as we proceeded. If all went well, we’d arrive at the Great Corner and No Name Mountain in late August. A week before Labor Day, a bush pilot whom we’d hire in Schefferville before heading into the interior would pick us up on No Name Lake, up in the Barrens.

  All my life, from my first great journey up to Lost Nation at the age of six on the Montreal Flyer, I have found traveling north to be an exhilarating experience. Now as our ancient Canadian National passenger coach crowded with miners, fishermen, and Montagnais Indian hunters and guides rattled up into the vast taiga of the Canadian Shield, I realized that I was entering an altogether different land from any I’d ever imagined, a land of deep woods and mountains stretching for hundreds of miles and broken only by glacial lakes and wild white-water rivers. My grandfather, however, regarded the magnificent scenery with a frown.

  Directly across the wooden aisle from us sat a youngish-looking man in jeans and a bulky blue sweater embroidered with a bright silver salmon, a polar bear, an eagle with a gleaming white head, and a caribou. His hair was coal-black and very thick, he had sad, almond-shaped eyes, and on his face, when he glanced at me, was the most sorrowful expression I’d ever seen. Half an hour out of Sept-Îles my grandfather offered him a White Owl and fired up one for himself, whereupon the man with the lugubrious countenance began to talk a blue streak. He told us that his name was Donny Snowball, and he was an Inuit guide and trapper from Ungava Bay. He’d been to Quebec City to visit his sister for a couple of weeks. That was all he could stand of any city at one time, he assured us. And where, if he might inquire, were we headed?

  When my grandfather explained that we were going up into the Barrens beyond the Snow Chain
Mountains, Mr. Snowball shook his head and looked more somber still.

  “What’s the matter?” Gramp asked.

  “Nothing,” Mr. Donny Snowball said. “You’ll probably die up there, is all.”

  “Die up there! What are you talking about?”

  “That’s what usually happens when white men go out in the bush alone without a guide who knows the country,” Mr. Snowball said, taking a satisfied puff at his cigar. “They die.”

  “Do they now?” My grandfather nudged me. “How do they usually die?”

  “They drown in the rapids,” Mr. Snowball said more cheerfully. “Just last summer five white fishermen went down the George River without a guide. That can be a bad river, the George. Full of white water. Three of them drowned. That was really too bad.”

  “What happened to the other two men?”

  “What other two?”

  “The two that didn’t drown. You said there were five and three drowned. That leaves two.”

  “That’s so,” Mr. Snowball said, brightening up a little more. “The blackflies got to them and they went bush-crazy.”

  “We’ve got plenty of bug dope,” my grandfather said. “You wouldn’t be trying to scare this young fella here, would you?”

  “Oh, no,” Mr. Snowball said matter-of-factly. “What good would being scared do him? Either he’ll drown or go bush-crazy or he won’t. Being scared won’t help. What you fellas need is a good experienced guide. Without one I wouldn’t think you’d last a week. This is a good cigar.”

  “Have you been up there?” my grandfather asked. “In the Great Corner?”

  “Hardly nobody’s ever been up there,” Mr. Snowball said. “That’s a bad country. Rivers too rocky to canoe. Witch mirages. Then you got the tall white Indian ghosts.”

  “The ghosts?” my grandfather said.

  “Sure. The Great Corner, that’s where the ghosts of the tall white Indians live. They’ll kill you if they catch you. Even the Montagnais don’t go there. A few did, long time ago. The tall white Indian ghosts got them. Better not to go there at all. Rivers up there are worse than the George.”

  “These ghosts,” I said. “Ghosts of who?”

  “I guess we won’t be canoeing any rivers quite as big as the George,” my grandfather said. “We’re going up the Tree Line River. Are you familiar with that one?”

  “Yes,” Mr. Snowball said. “A nice young man from Toronto and his bride of two months went up to the Tree Line two summers ago. That’s a much smaller river than the George. It looks very innocent. But they lost their canoe in the white water. Then the husband caught pneumonia. A few days later he died.”

  “What happened to his wife?” I asked.

  “Well, she tried to keep going on foot. Hoped to come to something, maybe a fishing camp? But it was terrible walking and she didn’t understand the bush at all and there aren’t no fishing camps up there. So she wrote what happened to her husband on some cliffs by the river. With a lipstick? Later a rescue party found the writing. Never the woman, though. I wonder what she wanted a lipstick for in the bush, anyway?

  “Then you’ve always got lightning fires,” he went on in a downright gleeful vein, though his face was as sorrowful as ever. “Last summer half western Labrador took fire. Three uranium prospectors, educated gentlemen from the States, took refuge from the flames on a big island. Fire jumped a mile to the island on the wind and got them anyway. Not to mention starvation and exposure, like what happened to Mr. Leonidas Hubbard. You’ve got to watch out for late-summer blizzards, too. Catch you out unprepared and kill you in a few short hours. Do you know about late-summer blizzards?”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” my grandfather said. “You can’t best this fella, Austen. He’s got a catastrophe for every occasion.”

  “Oh, sure,” Mr. Donny Snowball said. “That’s generally what happens to white men alone in the Far North. They meet with catastrophe.”

  I was alarmed by Mr. Snowball’s grim prophecies. But my grandfather said it cheered him up beyond measure to meet a man this gloomy. He added that if he ever needed a guide, he knew where to find a good one.

  “Not for the Great Lost Corner, though,” Mr. Snowball said, and he appeared to be totally serious. “That’s all going to be flooded out anyway, and when it is, nobody in the Labrador’s going to shed no tears. I don’t want to talk about it anymore now for a while. It makes my skin creep all over just to think about the Great Lost Corner.”

  Farther north, the scenery became still wilder, with long ranges of hills on which nothing seemed to flourish but granite outcroppings and gray caribou moss. In the middle of the afternoon it began to snow. Soon afterward I fell asleep. When I woke up my grandfather was leaning across the aisle, deep in conversation with Mr. Snowball, who was studying one of Gramp’s maps with great interest. I had the vague impression that they were calculating how far north the inland sea from the hydro dam would spread, but almost immediately I drifted off again, and this time when I woke, Mr. Donny Snowball was asleep and my grandfather was staring out the window at a huge lake still partly frozen, with the same brooding scowl I’d first noticed a month ago at home in Lost Nation, as if he were withdrawing into the untamed land itself.

  The electric blue and silver currents shot up and down the night sky from horizon to zenith until I felt connected to all Labrador by them. Although it was past eleven p.m., the brief subarctic night had just set in. Soon flaring pinks and greens and yellows mingled with the silver and blue. I sat by our campfire transfixed, temporarily forgetting all about my aching shoulders, the fiery pains in my back, and my blistered hands.

  For the past seven days, from the first gray light of dawn until twilight, my grandfather and I had been on the water or portaging around unnavigable rapids. We’d passed through spectacularly wild country, encountered scores of fishing ospreys and eagles, several remarkably large and unafraid black bears, numerous small groups of woodland caribou. The trout fishing, what little we’d done of it, had been phenomenal. But as we pushed on into the Labrador interior, stopping only long enough for my grandfather to make rough measurements with his surveying transit and notes for the maps he drew before turning in each night, his face hardened into a somber, determined cast, and he seemed more haunted by his private brooding than ever.

  My grandfather’s nearly obsessive determination to map every last feature we passed perplexed me. He thought nothing of pushing up small, incredibly swampy or rocky tributaries to discover a new lake, spending half a day hiking to a ridge offering a panoramic view of the surrounding territory, and working on his maps by firelight for two or three hours after I’d turned in for the night, so that he often slept no more than a couple of hours.

  “What’s the point of it?” I finally asked him. “I can understand exploring the country. Seeing it for a last time. But every last lake and stream and island and river and esker you’re drawing will be under water in a year or two. What’s the sense of mapping them?”

  “Because they’ve never been mapped, and that’s what a surveyor and a cartographer does, Austen. There needs to be a record of all this wild country, goddamn it. There needs to be a record of what it was like before it disappeared.”

  “What practical use are your maps going to be to anybody? Once it’s gone?”

  “That’s a shortsighted question. There doesn’t have to be any practical use to a map to make it worthwhile. Besides, they’ll be useful to you and me. We’ll know where we’ve been. Maybe some places no one else ever went before.”

  “Or ever will again,” I said.

  Obviously, nothing was going to deter my grandfather from his self-appointed mission. Yet more than once it crossed my mind that Gramp might be making the maps so that if he collapsed on a portage or while tracking the canoe up a bad stretch of river, I could find my way out alone.

  “Well, Austen,” he said suddenly as we watched the spectacle of the northern lights, “now you know why the early explorers called Labrador the land G
od gave to Cain.”

  For the first time in days I laughed. “Who else but Cain would want it?”

  “You’ve got a point there. But remember, old Cain was a hunter. He’d have been right at home up here.”

  I was bone-tired and ready to turn in. But as the fire began to die down, my grandfather picked up a stick and drew an oval in the sand near the embers. “This is Tree Line Lake, Austen. It’s about another three weeks from here. A month at the most, by my calculations.”

  Leading out of the top of the lake, he scratched a crooked line a couple of feet long. “This is the Rivière de la Mort. Up here, near where it rises, is No Name Mountain and the Great Lost Corner. And here, about halfway up the river, was the base camp of the Indians I stayed with when the 1910 survey ended. That’s our first destination.”

  Suddenly I was keenly interested in what my grandfather was telling me. This was the first time he’d mentioned an old Indian camp. I wondered if these were the same tall white Indians whose ghosts Mr. Donny Snowball had mentioned to us back on the bush train. Might they still be lurking in the vicinity, waiting for two unsuspecting explorers who didn’t know the country?

  My grandfather shook his head. “I don’t think the white Indians or anyone else has been up that way for years, Austen. Decades maybe.”

  “You mean there really were white Indians? I thought Mr. Snowball was just trying to scare us.”

  “No doubt he was. But there actually were white Indians. The Indians I stayed with were white Indians. There were probably never more than a few hundred of them to start out with. By the time I got to know them, there were no more than a dozen or so. They were the last ones so far as I know, and I imagine they’ve long since died out entirely.”

  “You never told me these were white Indians,” I said. “What’s a white Indian anyway?”