Alone Against the North

by Adam Shoalts

  To my surprise, the pilot had never previously flown to Hawley Lake and while in mid-air had to cautiously check his fold-out maps on several occasions. He was new, he explained, to the bush pilot business. After about four hours of flying, the grey outlines of the distant Sutton Ridges suddenly loomed into view, rising above the swamps like small mountains. The pilot circled the plane around in a wide arc to land on the long shimmer of navy blue water that was Hawley Lake, just north of the tabletop ridges. From the air, the surrounding country through which we would have to portage appeared fairly promising: it seemed relatively well-drained and elevated, and at places there were sandy hummocks left by glaciers and what looked like ancient beaches from long-vanished shorelines. Beyond the waterways, the country was sparsely treed—forest fires had charred some stretches. On Hawley Lake itself, I could see near its northwestern shore several small cabins, a dock, and some overturned boats on the grassy banks. The pilot brought the small plane down steeply toward the lake, which for a moment made us feel like we were on a roller coaster. We bounced along the water on the pontoons as the plane gradually coasted to a halt near the wooden dock.

  “I guess this must be the place,” said the pilot.

  “Yes, it is,” I replied, recognizing it from my research.

  “It’s cold,” complained Brent.

  The three of us sprang from the plane onto the bobbing dock. Brent and I wasted little time in unstrapping the canoe from the pontoon and unloading our assorted gear: two bulky expedition backpacks, a plastic canoe barrel, two watertight buckets placed inside old worn packs, two fishing rods, three wood paddles, and the shotgun. The pilot, meanwhile, was busy refuelling the plane from a steel oil drum and half a dozen red plastic jerry cans—the low fuel light had flashed on as we were flying in.

  “Good luck,” mumbled the pilot. He waved a hand, leapt back onto the pontoon, and hopped into the cockpit.

  “Hmm, he seems eager to leave,” Brent observed. “I wonder why … Fuck!” Brent slapped at his ears and waved his arms furiously. “Fuck! I’m getting eaten alive!”

  “Put your bug net on,” I said, as I swiftly donned my own. Unlike Brent, I had grown up in swampy forests, so I never much minded mosquitoes, though blackflies are a torment to anyone.

  “This is horrible,” groaned Brent as he pulled the mesh net over his short black hair.

  “Don’t worry, once we get paddling out on the lake, the breeze should keep the bugs away,” I said. “Let’s quickly check out the cabins, then head out.”

  The lake appeared much the same as it had a hundred years earlier when D.B. Dowling of the Geological Survey had arrived in the area. Dowling had explored the lakes—then known as the Sutton Mills Lakes, since renamed Sutton and Hawley Lakes—in 1901. However, unlike in Dowling’s day, the log cabins were now mostly used by wealthy fishermen who came here to catch brook trout. The more adventurous sorts would occasionally paddle down the Sutton River, where near its mouth they would be airlifted out by float planes. The camp was maintained by a Cree family, the Chookomolins. The closest community, Peawanuck, a tiny Cree reserve of some 237 people, was situated nearly a hundred kilometres to the northeast on the large Winisk River. These northern Cree, or Omushkego as they call themselves, were the descendants of the hunter-trappers of the fur trade, and a few still engaged in trapping. No one was at the cabins, so we returned to the dock and the delicate business of packing our canoe.

  I had hoped to acquire a new canoe for the expedition—ideally, one made of either strong, lightweight Kevlar or heavier but virtually indestructible Royalex ABS. But the price tag for such a vessel was beyond our budget, and I was forced to find something for less than eight hundred dollars, second-hand. After weeks of searching, I despaired of ever finding anything adequate and thought we might have to paddle one of the cedar-strip canoes my father and I had crafted. But at last I found an acceptable, though far from perfect, canoe within our limited price range. It was only thirteen feet long and very shallow, which would limit its utility and safety in whitewater or when facing big waves. But, crucially, given the portages we would face, it weighed only fifty-two pounds. While this wasn’t light by the standards of expensive Kevlar canoes, which weigh as little as thirty pounds, it was an improvement over my other canoes.

  It had been necessary to make some modifications to the vessel. I replaced the seats with lighter ones that I made myself and fastened nylon rope for lining to both ends. My father carved an ash centre yoke to replace the existing steel one, which would enable us to carry the canoe on our shoulders. I didn’t think much of the oak gunwales the previous owner had added and wished to replace them, but time constraints made it impossible to do so. The canoe’s small size, while an asset for the gruelling overland travel through forest and muskeg, was a drawback on the water. But such compromises were necessary; if explorers insisted on perfect gear, not much would have been explored.

  Brent and I set off and began paddling up the lake. Meanwhile, the bush plane droned off into the distance, disappearing from view into cumulus clouds. As the sound of the engine faded away, we were left in the profound silence of the northern wilderness. Hawley Lake was beautiful; its clear blue waters were surrounded by a rocky shoreline and mature forests of cedar, poplar, spruce, and tamarack. Low hills sloped gently up from the lake. If not for the bugs, it seemed like an oasis in a wilderness of swamp.

  The great size of the lake, however, made paddling in our heavily laden little canoe rather risky. As it was, the oak gunwales were riding only a few inches above the waterline, and as we paddled toward the distant south end of the lake, the wind whipped up four-foot swells. I steered the canoe from the stern delicately into each wave, riding over them without much difficulty. But eventually some of the bigger waves lapped over the bow, splashing Brent.

  “Whoa! These are big waves,” Brent said as he drew a stroke of his paddle.

  “At least the wind has taken care of the bugs.”

  The situation was actually quite dangerous. If we swamped in the lake, it would be a long and difficult swim to shore. My heart leapt as another big wave plowed into us and increased the water accumulating in the bottom of the canoe. There was no way around it. We had to head to shore and wait for the waves to die down. I cautiously steered the canoe toward the eastern shore.

  While we waited onshore for the wind to die down, I taught Brent how to load and fire the twelve-gauge shotgun, which wild edibles were around us, and how to make a fire. The wind, meanwhile, showed little sign of slackening, so we ate a simple lunch and I next showed Brent how to operate our hand-held water purifier. Several hours passed while the waves remained as fierce as ever. Brent, never patient, was growing fidgety and restless to press on. He had the intense look in his dark eyes that I had seen years before when we were hockey teammates. He was “in the zone” and primed for a challenge. Buoyed by his enthusiasm, I agreed to his suggestion that we risk battle with the waves.

  “All right,” I said. “I think we can manage it if we can get away from the shore, out of the breaking surf where the waves are the worst.”

  Brent nodded, took a moment to tighten the grey bandana wrapped around his head, and then grasped his ash paddle, much as he would his hockey stick before some on-ice heroics. The waves were noisily pounding against the pebble beach we were standing on and a light rain was falling—a reminder of how quickly the weather could change here.

  “We’re going to have to get our feet wet,” I said. “We’ll have to wade out a bit, then jump in and paddle as hard as we can away from shore.” Even though we were ready for action, I was under no illusion about how grim the struggle actually would be: as soon as we edged the bow into the water, the waves slammed it sideways and threw the canoe back onto shore.

  “We’ll have to be quicker,” I said, “or else the waves will capsize the canoe.”

  Brent and I grabbed hold of the shallow vessel like it was a surfboard, wading with it into the cold water, pushing it into th
e waves. Brent leapt into the bow and swung his paddle into an oncoming wave, while I gave one last push then leapt into the stern. But just as I did so, a wave jarred the canoe sideways, causing my knee to come down hard on my thumb, crushing it against the sharp edge of the oak gunwale as I landed in the stern of the canoe. A surge of pain shot through my hand. I had to ignore it and focus on paddling and steering the canoe; keeping the vessel right-side up as the waves jostled us about. Some water surged over the gunwales, but Brent performed well in the bow, keeping cool as I guided us away from shore. We soon escaped from the breaking surf and continued heading south along the lake, now untroubled by the waves, which we rode over harmlessly.

  Meanwhile, my thumb was bleeding profusely and throbbing with pain. There was a gaping cut on the outer side of my thumb, near the nail. Thrilled as I was that we had beaten the waves, I thought little of my hurting thumb at the time—I quickly bandaged it, then resumed paddling. By evening, the rain had ceased and a warm glow of orange sunshine bathed the lake as the sun sank into the horizon.

  “Let’s paddle to the end of the lake, where the canyon is. That should be a good place to camp for tonight,” I said. I was eager to see the Sutton Gorge; there was nothing else like it in the Lowlands.

  We paddled for another two hours to reach the rock cliffs of the Sutton Ridges, which dominate the end of the lake. D.B. Dowling’s 1902 Geological Survey report of his visit to the area described the scene:

  The rocks at the narrows of the lake … are cliffs one hundred and fifty feet in height of trap [igneous rock], capping beds of probably Animikie age.… Those rocks protrude through the clay plain in rounded oval ridges.… In the narrows the cliffs are broken down and the debris has filled the channel.

  We made camp for the night in the shadows cast by towering rock cliffs. Beneath the black spruce trees grew a carpet of caribou lichen that resembled delicate ocean coral, thick mats of green sphagnum moss, blueberry shrubs, and Labrador Tea shrubs (whose leaves are traditionally used to make tea). Brent set about making a fire inside a circle of rocks we quickly assembled, while I headed down to the lakeshore to gather water and clean my injured thumb. When I returned to our sheltered camp in the forest, I was surprised not to see any smoke rising. The teepee of carefully arranged dead sticks was sitting as I had left it—nothing was burning. Brent, head down and draped in a mosquito net, was sitting on the ground a few feet away in apparent despair. A cloud of mosquitoes and blackflies swarmed about him.

  “Why didn’t you start the fire?” I asked, puzzled.

  Brent looked up slowly, “It’s no use. I tried. It won’t burn.”

  This surprised me. Despite the brief rain earlier, here in this sheltered patch of thick forest everything was bone dry. Merely tossing a smouldering ember would be enough to start a forest fire. “What do you mean? Did you try lighting the tinder?”

  “The sticks won’t burn.”

  “You need to light the tinder first and let it catch. Then the smaller sticks will burn,” I explained as I bent down beside our unlit fire. With a match from my pocket, I lit some dead spruce needles, and in less than a minute had a blazing fire—to Brent’s amazement.

  “Oh,” he muttered glumly.

  “You just need more practice.” I stood up and searched for some bigger sticks to toss on the fire. “Before we reach Hudson Bay, you’ll be making fires in the pouring rain with your eyes closed.” I said this as cheerfully as possible, though inwardly I was a little alarmed by Brent’s inability to start a fire. He probably could have made one if he had merely shown some patience and concentration—but patience and concentration had never been his strong suits, and hordes of biting insects did little to improve this.

  That night, I found it impossible to fall asleep, given the pain in my thumb. Painkillers were in the first aid kit stashed in my backpack outside the tent—but I long had an almost superstitious dread of anything, painkillers included, that dulled the mind. Plus it was cold outside. After two hours of lying there, I was still wide awake. Finally, I relented and crawled outside our tent into the cold darkness to fetch some painkillers, on the grounds that I needed a good night’s sleep for the hard journey that awaited us.

  THE NEXT DAY DAWNED warm, sunny, and windless, which made the blackflies and mosquitoes doubly atrocious. My mangled thumb felt as if someone had crushed it with a sledgehammer. The mantra “mind over matter” was my only comfort. After a quick breakfast of oatmeal—which I had to convince Brent to eat after he explained that as a rule he never ate breakfast—we set off to explore the towering canyon on foot. The lower slopes were a chaotic jumble of grey boulders and loose rocks that rose steeply to a vertical cliff face—the perfect terrain for twisting an ankle.

  Brent stared wide-eyed at the imposing rock cliffs and offered his appraisal: there was no way we could scale those rocks.

  I told him it would be easier than it looked. Brent was unconvinced.

  “Well, we’ll know soon enough,” I said as we picked our way amid the boulders and loose rocks up the slope toward the rising precipice.

  “It looks like Mordor,” said Brent in a low voice, invoking his beloved Lord of the Rings.

  I carried the blue flag of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. The summit of the gorge seemed better than any place I could have imagined to be photographed with the Society’s standard. We found an opening in the cliff face that wasn’t quite vertical and managed to cautiously scramble our way up to the tabletop summit of the gorge. Straggly black spruces crowned the windswept summit. We hiked over to the edge of the gorge; far below a tiny stream trickled into Hawley Lake from Sutton Lake, which was on the southern side of the ridge. In all directions, we were surrounded by unbroken wilderness that stretched to the horizon.

  Then we made an unexpected discovery. We spotted a huge mass of sticks perched on the interior wall of the gorge. With excitement, I realized that we were looking at a bald eagle’s nest. According to the field guide I had stashed in my backpack, we were north of the bald eagle’s range, but there was no doubt that eagles were around. I soon identified another nest on a ledge in the canyon. Brent thought that climate change might have pushed the eagle’s habitat farther north. What was more likely, though, was that the field guide was simply wrong. That tends to happen with the exact ranges of birds, especially in remote parts of the world.

  We photographed the eagles’ nests with the intention of submitting a report to the Society of Canadian Ornithologists. Then we took the obligatory photographs with the Society’s flag—carefully balancing our camera on a spruce branch in order to get one of us together. The blackflies on the summit, however, were extreme, so we soon cautiously climbed back down the cliffs to the forest below.

  “Now what?” asked Brent, half out of breath.

  “We portage around the gorge to Sutton Lake on the south side. It shouldn’t be too difficult. The portage is only four hundred metres. We’ll have to make three trips: one with our backpacks, then the food barrels, and finally the canoe. So, counting doubling back, we’ve got two kilometres to do.”

  “I guess that doesn’t sound too bad,” said Brent.

  But the blackflies and mosquitoes were so intense that it proved a miserable ordeal that took the wind out of Brent’s sails. He complained fiercely and, growing impatient with the heavy loads we carried under the hot sun, he carelessly tangled up our fishing rods while ducking under branches, struggling through thick forest. I was left to untangle the fishing lines, which was no pleasant task given that my face, neck, and hands were consumed by biting flies while I did so. As always, the blackflies not only attacked our necks, faces, and behind our ears, but also crawled up our shirts and bit our bodies. In 1743, English fur trader and naturalist James Isham furnished one of the best descriptions of the torments caused by the Lowlands’ clouds of blackflies, which he knew as “flesh flies”:

  Flesh flies are still more troublesome and offencive [than mosquitoes], they taking a piece wherever they
Bite … these are Very troublesome to the beasts … the poor creatures running as … [if] persu’d by a much more formidable Enemy … into the water, where they Lay themselves Downe, under the Surface of the Water, to Keep these Vermin from Destroying them.

  Fortunately, we were soon on the water again, away from the “flesh flies,” paddling south along Sutton Lake.

  The little canoe, however, was so tightly packed with our gear that there was little room for us, and none to stretch our legs. Within a few hours of paddling, our legs were sore to the point of numbness. I promised Brent that I would somehow devise a better way to pack our gear in the canoe so that we wouldn’t be so cramped. At any rate, I assured Brent that after today, we wouldn’t have much paddling to do for the next two weeks, as I anticipated mostly overland travel and portaging.

  “Two weeks of portaging?” gasped Brent, horrified. In silence he stared off into the dark forest on the distant shore. I kept paddling.

  Sutton Lake appeared much the same as Hawley Lake, a gem in a wilderness of gloomy swamp. It was about thirty-five kilometres long and over two kilometres across at the widest point, gouged out by a glacier some ten thousand years ago. Our plan was to hug the eastern shore for a distance of five or six kilometres, at which point we would begin our trek overland, commencing the long and laborious process of blazing our way to the headwaters of the river we had come to explore. We made camp that evening on the lake’s eastern shore.

  Once we had pitched the tent, we still had several hours of daylight, so I suggested to Brent that we head back out to scout the way forward and blaze a trail, which would save us time the next day. Brent agreed.

  In the recesses of the forest, the mosquitoes and blackflies were twice as bad as in the open near the lakeshore. Therefore, we gave ourselves an extra dousing of bug spray and pulled our mesh bug nets over our heads. I tucked mine in beneath my faded brown fedora. As a rule, when confronted with some looming challenge, I always anticipate the worst, which usually allows me to remain unflappable in the face of any difficulty, since it is never as bad as what I had expected. With map and compass, I led the way into the gloom of the moss-draped woods. The ground near the lakeshore was soggy and uneven, but soon the country began rising and we were heading up a sparsely treed slope where a forest fire had burnt through some years before. Charred black spruces and tamaracks dotted the landscape, while juniper bushes and other emergent shrubbery cloaked the ground.