Alone Against the North

by Adam Shoalts

  That winter, Wes and I were snowshoeing and tracking wolves north of Lake Huron when he suggested that we canoe the Florida Everglades. Such an adventure sounded like a suitable warm-up for the Amazon jungle, so I started making plans for an Everglades canoe trip as soon as we returned from the wilds. But just days before we were to depart, Wes abruptly cancelled. He had decided instead on a trip with his girlfriend to a resort in the Caribbean. I was disappointed—considering the time that I had invested in making arrangements for the Everglades—and began to wonder whether his thirst for adventure was drying up. It certainly seemed like he was becoming domesticated. I shuddered with horror at the thought of such a thing ever happening to me.

  ON MY FIRST DAY at Canadian Geographic’s head office in Ottawa, I attended an editorial meeting. On the wall opposite from where I sat was a glorious collection of old charters for the magazine’s publisher: the venerable Royal Canadian Geographical Society. The Society, modelled on Britain’s Royal Geographical Society, was founded in 1929 by the explorer Charles Camsell and other like-minded individuals. Besides publishing Canadian Geographic, the Society sponsors expeditions, produces the Atlas of Canada and other maps, promotes geographical education, and bestows awards and honours on explorers and geographers. I had held the institution in holy reverence ever since my grandparents had given me a subscription to Canadian Geographic as a child for my birthday. I dreamed of carrying the Society’s blue flag, emblazoned with its crest—a white, eight-point compass overlaid with a red maple leaf—on an expedition of my own one day.

  Beside the old charters hung an antique Asian-looking sword with a golden hilt and decorative scabbard. With this curious artifact directly in my line of sight, it wasn’t long before I lost the thread of the editorial discussion and started pondering the sword. Beneath the sword, a plaque mounted on the wall read:

  Presented to The Canadian Geographical Society by Sir Francis Younghusband, guest-lecturer, at the inaugural meeting of the Society in Ottawa. January 1930. This Tibetan sword was presented to Sir Francis Younghusband by the Chief of Bhutan in 1904.

  Sir Francis Younghusband—now here was a true adventurer and explorer. He had lived a life so extraordinary that it seemed like he was straight out of the imagination of some adventure novelist. Younghusband was born in 1863 in the British Raj, or what is now Pakistan, where his father was stationed on military service. He was sent to England to receive an education and attended the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. But it was as an explorer, not as a soldier, that Younghusband would make his name.

  In 1886, Younghusband participated in an expedition journeying from India to Manchuria. Impressed by his abilities, his superiors then dispatched him to explore the vast Gobi Desert of Mongolia and northern China. With only a few guides, he set off from Beijing on a journey through unknown territory, successfully crossing the Gobi Desert and then making his way over the Himalayan Mountains into India. For this remarkable journey, at age twenty-four, he was elected the youngest ever Fellow of Britain’s Royal Geographical Society. Next, Younghusband explored the border regions between India, China, and Russia, and the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan, entering remote lands that time seemed to have forgotten. He wrote about these adventures in his book The Heart of a Continent.

  In 1903, he was tasked with leading an expedition to Tibet, one of the world’s least known and most mysterious countries. Tibet’s isolated location high in the snowy Himalayas and its policy of keeping out all foreigners made it something of an adventurer’s dream—an enchanted kingdom hidden in the clouds. Younghusband became one of the first Europeans to enter Tibet’s ancient capital, the Forbidden City of Lhasa. But the dream became a nightmare when Younghusband’s troops massacred Tibetan militia. The bloodshed and lofty mountains left a deep impression on Younghusband, and he underwent a spiritual epiphany. He became a mystic, contemplating founding his own religion and writing numerous books on the subject. Younghusband even mused about fathering a “god-child” who would become a prophet of the new religion he dreamed of creating. Regardless of his eccentricities, he was elected president of the Royal Geographical Society, and in that capacity began promoting an expedition to scale Mount Everest. In 1930, by then an explorer of legendary stature, he arrived in Ottawa with a memento from one of his expeditions, a sword from the chief of Bhutan. Younghusband presented it to the newly founded Canadian Geographical Society, and perhaps by doing so hoped to inspire the same sense of adventure and wanderlust that drove his life. Whatever his claims as a mystic, he succeeded in bewitching me. Staring transfixed at his sword on the wall, I felt myself seized by an irresistible urge to explore distant lands.

  As a result, I spent only three months in Ottawa working at Canadian Geographic. More importantly, during this time, I also submitted a detailed expedition proposal to the Geographical Society’s Expedition Committee, which approved and sponsored expeditions. I proposed to explore a remote, nameless river in the northern reaches of the Hudson Bay Lowlands that, like the Again, was all but unknown and had nothing on it in the published record. I planned to mount the first expedition to canoe this far-flung river with Wes. To reach the river would entail a long and difficult journey, preceded by an expensive flight north by bush plane. As far as I could ascertain, the Geographical Society had never previously sponsored a journey to the blackfly-infested Lowlands—which would give me the distinction of leading the first-ever Society expedition into North America’s largest wetland. But a response from the Expeditions Committee wouldn’t be forthcoming for some months, leaving me to pursue other projects.

  In April, I was back home in Fenwick, working with my father to build a birchbark canoe for a local museum. In the swamp forests beside my family home, we found a large white birch that was straight with few branches and knots, which made it suitable for our purposes. With a knife and chisel, I climbed a maple sapling growing beside the birch and delicately peeled off the bark to a height of six metres. Not wanting to waste anything, we later chopped down the tree for firewood (my parents heated their house with wood in the winter). In a stroke of fortune, a windstorm struck the area in the following days, toppling over several big spruces. I dug up their strong and supple roots for lashing, while my father fetched some basswood bark for additional lashing. We felled a white ash for the canoe’s gunwales and thwarts, as well as for paddles. The only tree we needed but couldn’t find in our forests was eastern white cedar—the cedar’s flexible wood we wanted for the canoe’s ribs. Instead, I went to the local farmers’ co-op and bought some cedar fence posts, which my father and I split and bent to form the ribs. After working only intermittently for four weeks, we finished the thirteen-foot canoe (which was as large as we could make it, given the limited size of the birch we felled) and tested it in our pond. It handled well and, unlike the old fibreglass vessel Wes and I had paddled, didn’t leak at all. I penned an article for Canadian Geographic about it then boarded a plane to Ecuador, to set off into the Amazon rainforest.

  ONCE I ARRIVED at a base camp deep in the Amazon jungle, a written test was placed before me by the scientists there, asking me to identify sundry species by their Latin names. I hadn’t done much biological fieldwork since my time working for Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources as a student, but I had spent the last eight months reading Amazon zoology books in my spare time. I have always been blessed with the capacity to memorize large amounts of data, and while rote memorization may not be much of a skill, my visual memory is one of the best assets I possess as an explorer—it has invariably saved me from losing my way, since I can always remember where I have been. The scientists seemed satisfied when I got a perfect score on the test, correctly identifying each species by its scientific name and all of the tropical bird calls they played on a tape recorder.

  Soon I was hacking my way through the jungle with a machete, helping to carry out biological inventories and in the process acquiring a fine collection of ant bites. There was no electricity at our base camp
in the rainforest, but after five weeks in the jungle I paid a visit to the nearest village with an internet connection to check my email. It proved a moment of triumph: I learned that the Geographical Society’s Expedition Committee had endorsed my proposal and was sponsoring the expedition to the Hudson Bay Lowlands.

  A WEEK AFTER that I was back in Canada—eager to begin the greatest adventure of my life. Not even the “hangover” from the Amazon could dampen my enthusiasm. My legs were covered with insect bites, and I had pinched a nerve in my back when doing some heavy lifting in the jungle. I would have to continue my daily doses of malaria pills for another four weeks, and as a precaution I was prescribed a course of antibiotics because of a tick bite on my leg. But I had escaped any serious illness or inconvenience—some of the scientists had contracted leishmaniasis, dengue fever, and other tropical diseases. I came back feeling impatient to plunge into the subarctic wilderness.

  Upon my return from South America, I expected Wes to be primed for our expedition, which we planned for the end of July. It was, after all, just over five weeks away and the adventure that we had dreamed of since childhood. But to my dismay, I found him noncommittal about whether he would even accompany me at all. He wanted to come, he told me. But he had to think about his job, his girlfriend, and saving money.

  “But Wes, this is a dream to have the Geographical Society sponsor us to explore a wild river with no name,” I said in disbelief.

  “It is a dream,” replied Wes, “but it’s your dream.”

  Several weeks passed while Wes procrastinated over whether he would quit his job and accompany me on the expedition. In the meantime, I couldn’t be idle: over the winter I had made arrangements for my own intermittent employment as an occasional wilderness canoeing guide in Algonquin Park. I soon found myself guiding a short trip there with some German and Australian tourists. Still taking my malaria pills each morning, I was hiking and paddling around the wilds of Algonquin. When I returned home, I was greeted with the news I had been dreading. Wes told me that he couldn’t go through with the expedition. This was a huge blow—to me it felt something like Clark abandoning Lewis on the eve of their journey into the uncharted American West in 1804. Trying to pull off the expedition without Wes would be difficult, if not impossible. I certainly couldn’t do the expedition alone. I would have to find a replacement for him. I needed someone with Wes’ skills and experience whom I could rely upon. But more than that, Wes had been my friend since childhood; to do the expedition without him would be a deep disappointment.

  That evening, melancholic from having received Wes’ unwelcome news, I took a lonely walk in the woods, accompanied by my dog Riley. He was a magnificent animal—he stood nearly three feet at the shoulders, weighed a trim 138 pounds, and had a handsome black and tan coat highlighted by a patch of white fur on his muscular chest. For eight years he had been my closest companion, a beloved and faithful dog that shadowed my steps through the woods.

  As we passed through some maiden-hair ferns growing beneath a big swamp oak, I turned to him and said, “Well, Riley, Wes may have quit on me, but I know you never will.”

  He wagged his tail and looked up at me, his big brown eyes full of understanding.

  As we walked on through the woods, I noticed that Riley didn’t leave my side. At first I imagined that was only because he had missed me while I was away in the Amazon. But I sensed something wasn’t right—he didn’t have his usual lightness of foot and was curiously uninterested in the rabbit trails we were passing. The following day, I took Riley to the veterinarian. I was informed that he had an inoperable tumour, that there was nothing for it, and that all my love couldn’t save him. I was stunned. For the first time, I no longer cared about unexplored rivers. All I cared about was saving my best friend—the dog that I had shared countless adventures with. Refusing to believe the veterinarian’s diagnosis, I drove Riley to a specialist outside Toronto. But I was told the same thing. Riley had to be put down. He died in my arms. Heartbroken, feeling as if I had lost a part of myself, I buried his kingly body beneath a maple tree that he had always loved to sit under.

  I HAD BARELY OVER THREE WEEKS to find a replacement for Wes, get him up to speed, and take care of all the planning and logistics for the expedition. It wasn’t going to be an easy task. I knew, from past experience, that my options for finding a suitable substitute for Wes—in fact finding any substitute—were not good. I learned quickly that wilderness exploring didn’t hold the same deep appeal for everyone that it did for me. While most people might enjoy a weekend spent leisurely paddling around tranquil lakes, a gruelling, hazardous expedition deep in the nightmarish Lowlands—where far more time would be spent carrying and dragging the canoe through thick forest and muskeg than ever paddling it—came across as decidedly unappealing. Typically, when I broached the subject of joining my expedition, the response was initially enthusiastic—until I explained the details of the horrendous portages through trackless swamps filled with millions of bloodsucking insects and the deadly hazard posed by half-famished polar bears looking to devour anything foolhardy enough to stray into their domain. Suddenly, that enthusiasm would dissipate.

  After two weeks of interviews, I still hadn’t found anyone to replace Wes. The first people I had turned to were a couple of my cousins. Both experienced outdoorsmen who had in the past roamed around the wilds with me, neither of them (prudent people that they are) wanted to step up and accompany me to the Lowlands. My twin brother was equally uninterested—he positively despised portages and couldn’t fathom the over one hundred kilometres of it I was planning on doing, all of it without a trail. Next, I fired off a message to a friend of mine who was serving in the army. Unfortunately, so he told me, he had used up all of his leave for the year and wouldn’t be able to take the time required for the expedition.

  In the midst of these hectic preparations, chance brought across my path an old friend, a gifted all-around athlete named Brent Kozuh. He was one of the most skilled hockey players our small town had ever seen and was equally adept on the tennis court and soccer field. It was thought by some that he might have gone pro in some sport. That is, if not for his Achilles heel: like many extraordinarily talented athletes, Brent found training, hard work, and old-fashioned grit beneath him. He liked to boast, with peculiar pride, how in high school he had been such a slacker that he had failed even his career studies course—and that he had literally slept through economics, finishing with a grade of seven percent. At age twenty-five, he was unemployed and still living at home with his parents. His life, so he proudly told me, consisted of getting by with the minimal level of effort. Since Brent had been on a few easy canoe trips with me in the past and because we unexpectedly crossed paths, I jokingly asked if he might like to join me on an expedition to the subarctic.

  To my surprise, Brent took an immediate interest and said that he had always wanted to do a serious expedition. Perhaps, I wondered, he did have some iron buried in his soul—or maybe he just wanted to prove his doubters wrong. He didn’t exactly seem to be an ideal candidate for a gruelling wilderness journey. Despite his athletic physique, he was still an inveterate slacker. But I was fresh out of candidates and Brent, unburdened by a job, leapt at the chance to join me. If Brent really wanted to complete an extreme wilderness journey, I had no doubt he had the physical skill to do it. He did, in addition to a few canoe trips, have a passion for animals and the natural world—albeit largely limited to watching the Discovery Channel.

  Desperation breeds hope, and with the expedition only a couple of weeks away I was desperate. I needed a partner—any partner. To go alone into polar bear territory was unthinkable. What gave me some hope that Brent would cast off his laziness and prove himself a capable expedition partner was his tremendous prowess as an athlete. Paradoxically, while anywhere outside a sporting match he was paralyzed by an all-consuming listlessness, when he was “in the zone,” he transformed into a fierce competitor. Whatever the sport, Brent was the kind of
player for whom dominance came naturally. If his team was down in the third period, he’d single-handedly strip the opposing team of the puck and even the score. But after the final buzzer, it was as if a switch flipped off in his brain that caused him to transform back into an incorrigible idler who struggled just to carry his hockey bag to the parking lot. I figured that if I could get Brent to see an expedition as a sport—a physical challenge to be won—he would snap out of his habitual indolence and exert himself with all his superb skill.