by Adam Shoalts
Immersed in the preparations for the expedition, Brent showed an uncustomary keenness in helping (which was promising). He began to accompany me on my daily errands obtaining supplies. One of those errands was the important task of acquiring a suitable firearm. My arsenal consisted of only two guns—a .22 calibre rifle and a 1930s-era twenty-gauge shotgun—neither of which would deter a polar bear. My preference was for bows and arrows rather than firearms. I had grown up using a fibreglass longbow and had once fashioned my own bow from the wood of an osage orange tree, the finest of all North American trees for bow making. But government policy was to carry twelve-gauge shotguns in polar bear territory—nothing less was considered safe. So, Brent and I paid a visit to the local gun shop on the main street in our small town. We parked outside the wood-shingled building and entered a storeroom crowded to the rafters with firearms and mounted animal heads. The proprietor, a man in his mid-eighties who had been in the gun business since shortly after the Second World War, stood behind the counter, rows of rifles mounted behind him.
“We need something for polar bears,” I explained.
The old clerk nodded solemnly at my question, as if he had expected as much. “You hunting them?”
“Uh no, it’s just for a worst-case scenario. We’re going on an expedition and need some protection.”
“I got just the thing.” He reached behind the counter and produced a mean-looking shotgun. “Winchester Defender, twelve gauge, pump action, the perfect expedition gun. The short barrel will let you get it up in a hurry,” and with a rapid movement that belied his age, the clerk jerked the gun up to his shoulder, feigning a bear attack.
“Excellent,” I said.
“You’ll want rifled slugs. Nothing else will stop a polar bear,” he said as he reached behind the counter and produced a box of shells.
“Great,” I replied.
“And I’ll tell you what. I’ll throw in some birdshot, should you find yourself in an emergency like a plane crash and need to kill something for food.”
Brent stared wide-eyed at the accumulating arsenal on the counter.
“Perfect,” I said.
“And some target shot for practice shooting.”
“Wonderful.”
After completing the purchase (at a rather steep price) and the required paperwork, we exited the store with our new hardware. Brent, feeling hungry, suggested that we pay a visit to the Subway down the street.
“All right, then we’ll have to head to the map library at Brock University to get the topographic maps,” I said, glancing at the time. I had a hundred things on my mind, having to plan every detail of our journey down to the last food ration. As we entered Subway, there was one more thing on my mind: my friend’s notorious habit of misplacing things. Brent would lose his car keys pretty much daily, his phone regularly, and his TV remote habitually. My concern was that in the wilderness, his carelessness could have serious repercussions were he to leave behind some vital piece of equipment.
“God, I love meatball subs,” said Brent, between mouthfuls.
“Yes. Did you find your cellphone?”
“No,” said Brent, pausing to think, “must have left it at the bar the other night.”
“You know, when we’re on the expedition, it will be critical not to lose anything. We can’t afford to forget something at a campsite or misplace the satellite phone.”
“Don’t worry,” Brent gave a dismissive wave of his hand, “I won’t lose anything.”
We finished our subs and got up to leave. Just as we were walking out, the young woman who had served us spoke up. “Hey, I think one of you guys forgot your wallet.” She pointed to a black leather wallet at our table.
“Oh, my bad,” said Brent, as he sheepishly retrieved it.
I couldn’t help but feel a little uneasy about my new partner. He admitted that he had lost his wallet twice before that summer. This didn’t inspire a lot of confidence for our long journey ahead.
IF THERE IS ONE LESSON that can be gleaned from the history of exploration, it’s that nothing ever goes according to plan. Therefore, I had made a point of devising alternative plans for our expedition in the event of any unforeseen difficulties. From the very beginning, when I was preparing the expedition proposal back in Ottawa, I had made sure to keep my plans flexible. I zeroed in on two rivers in the northern reaches of the Hudson Bay Lowlands that I was interested in exploring, both apparently nameless. It didn’t much matter which of the two rivers we ended up exploring, as they were similar. The larger of the two was situated some forty kilometres east of Cape Henrietta Maria, and it appeared on maps as a nearly 150-kilometre-long nameless tributary of the isolated Brant River. This, however, as is so often the case when dealing with obscure geography, wasn’t entirely clear: other maps labelled the tributary as the Brant River itself. Consulting various maps from different government agencies only compounded the problem: there was no agreement on which of the upper forks in this river was the Brant and which was unnamed. Since the basis of my expedition proposal to the Geographical Society was the exploration of a nameless river in the Lowlands, I was loath to go to the effort of exploring this river only to have someone later claim that it was the fork which was properly known as the Brant. Government scientists, ornithologists, and others had flown via helicopter and bush plane to the Brant and explored portions of it. But no one, insofar as was known, had ever canoed the river from its headwaters to the seacoast. I spoke on the phone with the superintendent of Polar Bear Provincial Park, a reserve whose boundaries on the ground are indistinguishable from the surrounding wilderness. She was unable to tell me anything about these rivers or their names, except to say that she knew of no one who had ever attempted to canoe them.
In contrast, the other river that I had my eye on was more obscure and had no name on any map. This fact made it seem almost perfect—except that it wasn’t quite as long as the other waterway, measuring only a hundred kilometres. Thus, the choice was between the more obscure smaller river or the bigger, but somewhat better known, waterway that might or might not have a name.
I eventually resolved, having absorbed the lessons of past explorers, to keep our plans flexible. The presumed tributary of the Brant River would remain our primary objective, with the more obscure nameless river serving as an alternative should, for whatever reason, we fail to reach the first one. In any case, I planned to eventually explore both rivers over the course of several expeditions. If I had the funds and a willing partner, I might have attempted both in a single season—yet Brent affirmed that forty days was the absolute maximum amount of time he would spend in the wilderness.
As things stood, there were plenty of obstacles to undertaking any exploring that summer. I had originally imagined that the backing of the Geographical Society would open doors and make our preparations straightforward. This wasn’t the case. An almost soul-crushing plethora of problems and obstacles arose in the weeks leading up to our departure. Things were already complicated by the last-minute lineup change from Wes to Brent, which put the entire burden of making preparations on my shoulders, as I dared not delegate anything to Brent—knowing him as well as I did. Time was of the essence: my hasty arrival back in Canada from the Amazon coupled with my work as a guide had severely compressed our preparatory time into a few hectic weeks. Everything needed to be in order by the end of July. Besides the annoyance of my lingering Amazonian recovery, there were serious logistical problems. My old car, our means of transportation to the northern town where we would board a bush plane, was pronounced unfit for the road by my mechanic. And Brent’s vehicle was no better. To add to our difficulties, it was a hot, dry summer in the North—the Ministry of Natural Resources fire report indicated that 109 forest fires were burning across Ontario’s wilderness, a serious hazard. I kept an eye on them via satellite updates, apprehensive that one might sweep across the area we were headed into. And if these concerns weren’t enough, I was informed by the Geographical Society’s pres
ident that the other expedition sponsored that year, to a river in Labrador, had failed to materialize. This news doubled the pressure for our expedition to succeed.
Most problematic of all was the common bane of an explorer’s existence: a shortage of cash. While I was accustomed to performing expeditions with limited resources—I put my faith in traditional skills and knowledge rather than flashy gear—this was a Society expedition, so I couldn’t take the risks I normally did, and all sorts of expensive equipment, such as a satellite phone and a GPS, had to be obtained. But even with the Society’s generous funding, we had to cut some corners.
This put us in good company: most of history’s greatest explorers were impoverished. Columbus set the template for many Renaissance-era explorers by spending years shifting between royal courts seeking a patron who would sponsor his proposed voyage across the Atlantic. The famed Victorian explorer of darkest Africa, Sir Henry Morton Stanley, was so embarrassed by his threadbare funding that he felt compelled to wildly inflate his expeditions’ budgets in his books. Despite his fame, Stanley was reduced to all sorts of cost-saving measures and once had to sell his watch for food. His contemporary, David Livingstone, wasn’t much better off. Livingstone had difficulty raising two thousand pounds in 1866 for his African explorations, complaining that even that amount was “wretchedly inadequate.” Sir Ernest Shackleton struggled almost as much in the drawing rooms of imperial London to raise funds for his expeditions as he ever did in the howling wastes of Antarctica. Unable to raise the necessary funds, Shackleton’s 1907 expedition to the South Pole left him deeply in debt. Seven years later, for his epic and unprecedented attempt to cross Antarctica, the Royal Geographical Society offered him a paltry thousand pounds, which would comprise only a tiny fraction of his budget. To make up the difference, Shackleton was forced to plead with wealthy private sponsors as well as a British government preoccupied with the looming conflict on the continent.
Legendary explorer Percy Fawcett was a beggar at the Royal Geographical Society’s coffers, chronically short of money for his expeditions. On his quest in the 1920s to find the ruins of a lost civilization deep in the Amazon jungle, Fawcett received no salary, and the funding provided by the Geographical Society proved insufficient. But it took a certain flare, even genius, to mount expeditions with limited funds, and explorers like Fawcett who could do it were highly prized by underfunded geographical societies. Sir John Keltie, secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, noted:
It is quite true that [Fawcett] has a reputation of being difficult to get on with, and has a queer manner in many ways, being a mystic and a spiritualist, but all the same he has an extraordinary power of getting through difficulties that would deter anybody else.
While Fawcett did succeed time and again against great odds, eventually he vanished without a trace in the Amazon.
I now found myself in a similar financial situation: the Society’s generous grant of 5,500 dollars was inadequate to cover the entire expedition, which I estimated at around 10,000 dollars if we stuck to just the bare essentials. So, like Stanley, Livingstone, Shackleton, and Fawcett, I did the necessary trimming. We couldn’t afford bear spray, so that was dropped. We couldn’t afford watertight canoe barrels, so I improvised some of my own (in addition to one that I already possessed). We made a road trip to the United States to purchase a GPS, but couldn’t afford the mapping software that went with it—so we had to content ourselves with a GPS that had no maps but could at least give us our coordinates. Freeze-dried meals proved too expensive—so pasta, rice, and oatmeal would be our staples. Expensive waterproof Gore-Tex clothing was out of the question, as was a new canoe. Any sort of tripwire system or electric fence for protection against polar bears proved beyond our budget. Hiking boots and other miscellaneous gear were all old stuff that I had worn for years. Brent, having no money of his own, was outfitted entirely from my own closet: he was wearing my shirt, cargo pants, jacket, hat, bandanna, boots, and belt knife the day we left. Wes, meanwhile, lent Brent his backpack, sleeping bag, and a waterproof liner. By
2011 standards, our expedition was woefully under-equipped, but it was still the best outfitted expedition I had ever mounted—and besides, I reasoned, we were better provisioned than any of our historic predecessors. I took heart in those explorers who had done the seemingly impossible with what limited geographical society funding they had possessed. I resolved that, like Fawcett, we would find a way to get through all difficulties—be they pinched nerves, tick bites, malaria pills, a broken-down car, inadequate gear, raging forest fires—or anything else fate might have in store for us.
[ 3 ]
INTO THE WILD
Exploring is delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not to deserve the name.
—Samuel Butler, Erewhon, 1872
FROM THE CO-PILOT’S SEAT of a bush plane, I peered through cloud and rain at a reddish and green patchwork of bog, sphagnum moss, and isolated clusters of stunted spruce and tamarack trees. It was about as gloomy and forbidding a landscape as I could imagine.
The night before, Brent and I had arrived in the small frontier logging town of Hearst, Ontario, which is nestled on the fringes of the great northern wilderness. The thirteen-hour drive north had been complicated by my injured back, which caused me considerable pain to the point where I was literally choking from back spasms as I drove. But the car didn’t let us down, despite my mechanic’s grave prognosis, and we arrived without much difficulty.
Bright and early the next morning, we met our pilot on a lake outside of town. His plane was a 1960s-era single-engine DHC-2 Beaver, the standard bush plane of Canada’s North. We weighed our gear to ensure it was under the limit for the long flight to the Hudson Bay Lowlands: it measured in at 165 pounds. Our canoe, which weighed 52 pounds, we strapped onto one of the plane’s aluminum pontoons.
We would have to fly more than five hundred kilometres due north across vast wilderness to reach our expedition’s starting point, an isolated lake situated some seventy kilometres south as the crow flies from the shore of Hudson Bay. The roar and vibration of the plane’s engine rattled us inside the cockpit; talking was only possible through the headsets. Brent, who was sitting behind me, complained that the noise of the engine was giving him a headache and kept his head down and ears covered for the duration of the flight.
From the co-pilot’s seat, I was taking in the vast wilderness below us. Immense boreal forest, interspersed with meandering black rivers and island-studded blue lakes, dominated the first stretch of the flight. Gradually, as we flew farther north, the landscape began to change: trees became sparser and smaller as the boreal forest thinned out into the open muskeg and innumerable ponds and beaver meadows of the Hudson Bay Lowlands. I knew all too well that every one of those waterways made excellent breeding ground for mosquitoes. Sandy eskers, an elevated ridge of gravel and sand left by retreating glaciers thousands of years ago, occasionally snaked across the landscape. But mostly it was a dreary swampland of stunted trees and countless small ponds, lakes, and rock-strewn creeks. The rainy weather we were flying through served to make the swampland below appear even drearier.
We were headed to Hawley Lake, named after explorer and geologist James Edwin Hawley. From there, Brent and I would veer off into unexplored territory. I had read Hawley’s dry report from the 1920s on the geology of the area, as well as reports by the handful of other Geological Survey explorers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who had been active in the Lowlands. Those explorers had come here in search of mineral wealth. But, until recently, virtually no mineral extraction had been undertaken anywhere in the Lowlands, leaving it a nearly untouched wilderness. That changed in 2006 when De Beers, a South African diamond conglomerate, began mining for diamonds near the Attawapiskat River. The controversial project was vehemently opposed by the few environmentalists who knew of the plans. They argued that it was a travesty
to put an open-pit mine in the middle of pristine wilderness. But the project was approved, ostensibly on the grounds that it would generate prosperity for the province and particularly for the community of Attawapiskat, a small, impoverished Cree reserve situated some ninety kilometres downriver from the mine site.
“We’re going to pass near the diamond mine on the Attawapiskat River soon,” mumbled the pilot into his headset a few hours into the flight.
We didn’t pass near enough to see the mine; the thick cloud cover and rain prevented us from spotting it in the distance. That was fine by me: I had no real desire to see another environmental tragedy inflicted on Canada’s wilderness for limited short-term material gain—especially on a river I had once paddled. Wes and I had canoed together on this very river as teenagers after high school. Despite the mine, the vast majority of the Lowlands remained untouched and unexplored by the modern world—a fact amply illustrated by the countless acres of wilderness passing beneath us. The mine, though a travesty for the Attawapiskat area, was but a pinprick in what remained an immense wilderness.
The landscape below us was as flat as a pancake—a poorly drained lowland that seemed more water than land. At times it was impossible to spot a single patch of solid ground. When R.M. Ballantyne, a fur trade clerk, first laid eyes on the desolate Hudson Bay Lowlands from the decks of a nineteenth-century ship, he noted, “Though only at the distance of two miles, so low and flat was the land, that it appeared ten miles off, and scarcely a tree was to be seen.” While almost all of the Lowlands is marshy, like what Ballantyne saw from his ship, near its northern fringe lies a series of spectacular ridges that tower several hundred metres above the surrounding swamp forest. Known as the Sutton Ridges, I had selected this unique area as the drop point for our expedition. One of these towering rock escarpments runs across Hawley Lake, forming a large canyon, or gorge. We would land near there to begin our journey.
