Alone Against the North

by Adam Shoalts

  “I’d say we have at least a fifty-fifty chance,” I concluded.

  Wes stroked his scrubby black beard. “Hmm … that’s not good enough. I’d need a one hundred percent assurance we’d be back in time, or else my family will disown me.”

  I sighed, disappointed. After a few moments of silence, I reluctantly said, “Well, in that case, we should turn around. With nothing to guide us, we can’t be certain how long it will take us to reach the Again and then get down it.” It was a bitter pill—so close only to have to turn back. For the second summer in a row, I wouldn’t reach the Again River.

  Wes nodded, “All right, so now what?”

  I pulled out the crude sketch map from my pocket. “We turn around, retrace the trails that we made, portage back to the Kattawagami, then paddle down it to tidewater at James Bay. Cross James Bay to the Moose River, head up the river until we reach Moosonee, and then catch the Polar Bear Express train south to Cochrane.”

  “How long will—” Wes swore and slapped the back of his neck. Several dozen mosquitoes were feasting on him, “that take us?”

  “About ten days,” I replied. Of course, stormy weather on James Bay—a body of water with a fearsome reputation for drowning canoeists and boaters—could delay us for days on end. But since the weather was beyond our control, I didn’t mention this detail.

  “Okay, sounds like we have nothing to worry about.”

  “Right,” I cheerfully replied.

  But by the time we fought our way back to the banks of the Kattawagami—through impenetrably thick forest, across mosquito-infested swamps, and over several pristine lakes—we had to concede our canoe had heard its death knell. The old fibreglass vessel was nowhere near as strong as the cedar-strip canoe my father and I had made, which had survived the punishing rapids and jagged rocks without a single leak. But that beautifully hand-crafted canoe was a real work of art, and I was reluctant to subject it to the punishment of another expedition—preferring to save it for gentle trips on calm water. So I had acquired this old fibreglass canoe, which was now leaking like a strainer as we attempted to paddle it. The canoe had sprung numerous leaks on our return journey down the shallow creek, which was filled with sharp rocks. With spruce gum and duct tape, we repaired the leaks well enough to keep the vessel afloat, but not enough to make it withstand the damage that hundreds of whitewater rapids would inflict upon it if we paddled the Kattawagami all the way to the sea. Our only choice was to try to make it back to the remote mining road where we had started out.

  “You know, it’s sort of ridiculous that we do these crazy expeditions with the gear we have,” Wes observed.

  I shrugged.

  “Most people wouldn’t attempt this sort of thing without a satellite phone or GPS, or the best canoes and Gore-Tex clothing,” Wes continued.

  “Maybe one day we’ll have sponsors who give us that stuff.”

  “It’d be nice to have a canoe that didn’t leak.” Wes bailed a pitcher of water overboard.

  “You’re going soft,” I joked while trying to paddle the half-sinking canoe from the stern.

  Wes and I could travel at great speed when the occasion called for it—sinking canoe or not—and with only one of us paddling and the other constantly bailing, we made it back to the isolated mining road in four days. Just as we emerged from the shadowy, moss-draped forest onto the narrow roadway—soaking wet from sitting in a canoe full of water—the dark sky above us began to rumble.

  “That doesn’t sound good.” Wes glanced skyward.

  We headed for the shelter of a big spruce. The next instant, a hail storm of near biblical proportions descended upon us, furiously pelting us with golf-ball-sized ice. We photographed the gigantic hail, thinking no one would believe us otherwise.

  Battered from the hailstorm and drenched by pouring rain, Wes and I huddled under the shelter of the thick canopy. We were stranded—after dropping us off at Hopper Creek, Terry O’Neil had driven our vehicle back into Cochrane and parked it at the train station for us—some two hundred kilometres away. We didn’t relish the thought of walking the long, lonely road all the way back into town. I suggested hitchhiking, half as a joke. We had no idea when anyone might pass by.

  Wes raised an eyebrow. “But who’d pick us up? A couple of scruffy guys decked out in army camouflage who don’t smell very nice and just appeared out of nowhere. We look like bandits out to rob the gold mine up the road.”

  “Right, well let’s try to look charming.”

  But no opportunity to use our charm appeared for over an hour as we huddled in the rain as night fell, the steady drip of rain filtering down between the spruce boughs. Finally, we could hear the sound of a truck coming down the narrow road. As we emerged from the woods, a black Chevy pickup came into view. Wes and I stuck out our thumbs, and the truck slowed to a halt. Behind the wheel was a middle-aged aboriginal man who looked rather surprised to see us.

  We thanked him for stopping and explained our situation. It turned out that he was hired by the gold mine to keep the road open by trapping beaver. Beavers, when left to their own devices, were inclined to build dams, which would flood out the road. His job was to make sure that didn’t happen. Just now he was coming from Cochrane on his way to the mine. He offered to drive us to the mine, where we could try to find a ride back to town. This arrangement seemed generous to us, and we thanked him profusely.

  “You got to ride in the back,” he smiled sheepishly and gestured to the box. “I’ve got a little too much stuff in here.”

  “Sure,” I replied happily, though I sensed the real reason was because the trapper believed that two men who appeared out of nowhere around these wild parts might not be people you wanted in your truck.

  Wes and I, having left our backpacks, gear, and the canoe concealed in the forest, jumped into the back of the pickup, only to quickly regret it. The driver put his pedal to the metal and we were soon flying along at over a hundred kilometres per hour down a wet gravel road in fading light. Terry, the old-timer who shuttled our vehicle back to Cochrane, was adamant that he wouldn’t drive this road after dark or even at dusk because of the bears and moose (“swamp donkeys,” as he called them) that frequently cross it—a deadly hazard for drivers. A collision with a moose has about the same effect as a collision with a backhoe. Even in daylight, Terry sternly complained when I was driving if he noticed the speedometer creep above sixty. Wes and I held on for dear life in the truck, flying up in the air with every bump on the gravel road and holding on as best as we could when we took turns at terrifying speeds.

  “Is this guy trying to kill us?” Wes shouted in my ear as the trees swirled passed us in a blur of dark green.

  “I think so,” I said, pressing myself down in the truck. We were quite literally in greater danger now than at any time on our expedition—though Wes had stepped on a nail at the old cabin and busted his middle finger on a bad fall while wading in the treacherous, slippery rocks of Hopper Creek. After a wild fifteen-minute ride in the fading light, the driver suddenly slowed down. An oncoming transport truck was returning from the gold mine. Our driver motioned the trucker to stop.

  The trucker peered down suspiciously from his cab at the three of us. Our driver spoke, “These guys here are looking for a ride into Cochrane. Can you take ’em?”

  The trucker boasted an Abraham Lincoln–like beard and shoulder-length hair tucked under a grimy old ball cap. After a pause, he said gruffly, “I only got room for one in my truck.”

  This was a little bewildering—Wes and I thought both of us could fit in the truck. But the trucker insisted there was only room for one of us. I was curious to see the gold mine, so I suggested to Wes that he take the ride—he could drive back to the mine and get me once he had retrieved our vehicle from town. So I remained in the back of the pickup while Wes climbed up into the rig.

  While he rode into town along the winding road that sliced through the vast forest, I was heading in the opposite direction toward the mi
ne.

  It took three hours to reach Cochrane, where Wes retrieved our pickup truck from the train station, refuelled it, and then prepared to drive another three hours to meet me back at the mine.

  At the gold mine, flood lights illuminated the haul trucks, hydraulic shovels, and grey construction trailers that littered the landscape. Exploratory work was being conducted in the area to see if it was profitable to re-open the mine, as it had lain abandoned for decades. The high price of gold made the prospect of mining here potentially feasible once again.

  Beside the construction camp, what greeted my eyes was a deeply unsettling sight: where once had been verdant forests was now a barren moonscape, devastated by strip-mining. It was a bleak, apocalyptic-looking place destroyed by machines and riddled with dark chasms that led deep into the earth. It filled me with dismay that society could permit the wanton destruction of wilderness—earth’s true gem—in the pursuit of shiny stones. But my opinions reflect a life spent seeking untouched, hidden-away places.

  The workers were gathered in the common room of a temporary building erected on the site, watching television. I met most of them as well as the man in charge. Only a few dozen people were at the mine because it wasn’t yet fully operational. I was a little concerned, irrationally so, that one of the workers would recognize me as the explorer who penned articles arguing against mining in the Hudson Bay Lowlands. Yet they seemed to regard me as just some sort of eccentric who liked canoeing rivers no one had heard of. I chatted with them and asked if any of them knew of the Again River. None of them had ever heard of it.

  My escort in, the aboriginal trapper, with whom I talked the most, had likewise never heard of the river. A thoroughly modern trapper, he was eager to fetch his laptop and have me show him the river on Google Earth. I did so, pointing out to him the blurry little black ribbon that snaked through emerald green forest on the low-resolution images. He nodded and affirmed he knew nothing of that river. As we talked, I learned that he was originally from Moosonee, a Cree community on the mouth of the large Moose River, near James Bay, and the northern terminus of the government-owned Polar Bear Express railroad. He had grown up fishing, hunting, and trapping there, before drifting south to Cochrane. He didn’t much care for Moosonee anymore and told me he wouldn’t move back.

  Since he had proved helpful, and I had both enjoyed our conversation and was grateful that Wes and I had not been killed on the ride he generously provided—I decided to pay him as best as I could for the ride. I had little money, but offered him my old canoe, telling him it needed repairs but was his if he wanted it. He happily accepted my offer.

  It was getting on near midnight, and all the workers and the trapper soon disappeared off to bed for the night. I had been given a room of my own to sleep in while I waited for Wes to return, as well as a dry pair of wool socks to replace my soaking wet ones. It wasn’t until 3:00 a.m. that Wes finally arrived. I met him outside the makeshift buildings erected on the site.

  “What took you so long?” I asked, half asleep.

  “I drove slow. It’s pitch dark and there’s moose and bears crossing the road. I was terrified I’d hit one.”

  We decided not to stay at the mine—though we had been offered the room for the night—and instead drove back to where we had stowed our canoe and gear beside the creek. We spent the night there; then departed in the late morning for our drive home, so that Wes could make it to his sister’s wedding. Before we left, we hauled the canoe out beside the road, leaving it there for the trapper to pick up.

  “Well, we didn’t get to explore your river,” remarked Wes as he drove us south.

  “No, but that’s all right,” I said a little ruefully, “the river will still be there next summer.”

  [ 2 ]

  PLANS AND PREPARATIONS

  Geographers … crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect that beyond this lies nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts, and unapproachable bogs.

  —Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, first century AD

  MUCH OF THE HISTORY of exploration is the story of failures. Christopher Columbus, after all, wasn’t looking for North America when he made landfall in the Bahamas in 1492. He was attempting to sail around the world to Asia—more precisely, the East Indies—hence the Italian mariner’s mistaken belief that the people he met with were “Indians.” Sir Alexander Mackenzie, perhaps the greatest of North America’s land explorers, had the misfortune to journey over two thousand kilometres in the wrong direction in his attempt to reach the Pacific Ocean. The eccentric genius Sir Richard Burton, among the most celebrated of African explorers, failed in his famous quest to find the source of the Nile. And then there was Sir Ernest Shackleton, widely considered a gifted leader and polar explorer par excellence, who never succeeded on any of his expeditions in reaching his objective. I took solace in these facts over my failure to explore the Again River two summers in a row. While I had not reached the Again, I had a consolation prize in that I had still explored a nameless river (a tributary of the Kattawagami, a map of which I created) and together with Wes blazed kilometres of new trails into unexplored territory. More importantly, my resolve to explore the Again remained undiminished.

  It would be necessary to wait until the Hudson Bay Lowlands’ long winter ended and the ice melted before another attempt could be made to canoe the Again River. I felt certain that the summer of 2010 would be when I’d finally explore it—in fact, restless as always, I was growing impatient to free myself of the mental hold the Again was exercising over me and move on to other challenges. While the desire to reach the Again remained, haunting me like some sort of spectre, I hurled myself into other undertakings. I ventured to Lake Superior to search for ancient pictographs on that majestic body of water’s rocky shores and to explore its many mysterious caves. I wandered off into remote parts of the Rockies, crossing paths with black bears and elk. On the wide open grasslands of the prairies, I slept under the stars and collected mule deer antlers. And in Manitoba, I paddled azure lakes while fishing for pickerel. In fact, I roamed all around Canada’s wilderness from the rocky inlets of the Atlantic to the temperate rainforests of the Pacific. My life devolved into a restless search for one adventure after another—a desire “to escape from the commonplace of existence,” as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it.

  When the summer arrived, I was impatient to attempt the Again once more. However, a wrench was thrown in my plans when Wes informed me that two weeks was all the time that he could afford for exploration. Financially, Wes found himself in difficult straits (I was no better off), and the practical man that he was, he was attempting to save money in order to buy a house with his girlfriend. For Wes to take an unpaid leave from his construction job to go exploring wasn’t economical. Until that time, I had mainly financed our expeditions the same way most explorers had paid for their work since the Victorian era—through writing and public lectures. While these speaking engagements and articles allowed me to eke out a living as an explorer and had made me something of a local celebrity in our small town, it wasn’t going to buy any house.

  But things got even more complicated when in July, Wes gloomily informed me that a week was now all he could offer me.

  “But a week isn’t enough time to explore the Again River,” I scoffed.

  “That’s all I can afford to take off,” Wes explained.

  “Yes, but just think, if we make this sacrifice now and succeed, it will pay off in the long run.”

  “We need sponsors,” replied Wes, unimpressed.

  “We’ll get sponsors by doing expeditions and making a name for ourselves.”

  “We need them now, though.”

  “We have only a few weeks, it’s not enough time to get any.”

  “Then find a way to explore it in a week.”

  Disheartening as this revelation was, I wasn’t going to abandon my quest to explore the Again that easily. As much a
s I disliked the thought and dreaded the increased financial cost to myself, I entertained the possibility of chartering a helicopter or floatplane to fly us as close to the river as possible, which might, under the best of circumstances, permit us to complete the expedition in eight or nine days.

  However, this approach wasn’t without considerable drawbacks: inevitably it would entail exploring less territory, which would diminish our accomplishment. It felt as if half the point of the expedition—exploring the area fully from the ground—would be unfulfilled by doing things in this manner. Still, if this was the only way Wes could join me, I’d consider it. Since a helicopter was beyond my financial resources, I made inquiries with bush pilots about taking us, our gear, and our canoe to one of the lakes in the upper part of the Again River’s watershed. The response wasn’t encouraging.

  The chief bush pilot in Cochrane, who made his living flying hunters and fishermen to remote wilderness lakes, had never heard of the Again River and wasn’t familiar with any of the lakes in its watershed. By now, I was familiar with this response. The bush pilot was uncomfortable flying to a lake he didn’t know—it might after all prove too shallow or rocky to land on—and suggested that we fly to one of the lakes he did know and content ourselves with paddling some other river. As far as our purposes were concerned, he proved unhelpful—he wouldn’t fly us where we wanted to go, so that option was quickly dropped. There was no way then—given Wes’ time constraints—to explore the Again that summer. Since I had come to regard the Again as the special shared ambition of Wes and me, it didn’t seem right to explore it without him. With much regret, I resigned myself to waiting another year to explore it.

  Wes and I had to content ourselves with some minor adventures and exploring of a different sort—such as searches on the wooded hillsides of our rural countryside for giant puffballs, an oversized mushroom that resembles a volleyball (or as I like to say, a dinosaur egg), which we collected and ate. But the failure to explore the Again left me restless and more eager than ever to hurl myself into new challenges. Perhaps I was compensating for failure, but, regardless, I needed more adventures, more quests—to live a more satisfying existence. That autumn, I worked on my survival skills in the northern woods. I also made arrangements to spend the winter in Ottawa writing articles and doing research for Canadian Geographic magazine and the spring in the Amazon rainforest on a scientific expedition. These new challenges, which broadened my horizons, actually helped dissipate my interest in the Again. I half told myself to forget about that obscure river and to turn my attention elsewhere. The Amazon had long exercised a spell over me—rare is the explorer who isn’t interested in exploring its exotic, otherworldly jungles, where species unknown to science remain to be discovered and Stone Age tribes still live. I also longed to explore the Arctic and the northern reaches of the Hudson Bay Lowlands, the home of earth’s largest land carnivore, Ursus maritimus, the polar bear. The Again, in contrast, was in the southern part of the Lowlands, outside the range of the great white bear. I was eager to undertake bigger expeditions farther afield and convinced myself that the cursed Again had become a sort of millstone that was weighing me down. I told myself that one day I would undoubtedly explore it, but that it could wait for the time being.