by Adam Shoalts
We had to maintain a course due east in order to find the nameless lake we were seeking. Aided by the setting sun, I navigated with my brass surveyor’s compass. Meanwhile, Brent followed behind, blazing the straggly trees to mark a crude trail. The blazes were critical for when the time came to undertake the actual portage—the backbreaking labour of carrying our heavy backpacks, food barrels, and finally the canoe through the forest. I knew all too well that when struggling under heavy loads, swarmed by hordes of biting insects, staggering through at turns thick brush and open swamp, battling both physical and mental fatigue, only a few missteps would be sufficient to make us lose our way. For that reason, large blazes were essential.
“Remember, Brent, blaze the trees front and back. We have to be able to see them from both directions,” I said, wiping sweat from my brow.
As we plunged onward, Brent began to tire—though more from lack of enthusiasm than physical exhaustion. His blaze marks were feeble and indistinct—we would never be able to spot them. Despite my gentle cautioning that he needed to make them bigger, Brent kept up with his timid hatchet strokes. Reluctantly, I took over with the hatchet, hacking four inch slices of bark off the tamaracks and spruces while still navigating with the compass. Navigating in the monotonous woods demanded considerable concentration, but I found myself having to multitask still further given the low state of Brent’s morale. It was essential to keep his spirits high so that he would stay engaged in the journey—to that end, while swatting flies, hacking trees, and orienting with the compass, I kept up a cheerful banter on Brent’s favourite subjects, trying to buoy his spirits. For a while it seemed as if we were making fine progress; we were on schedule, and the terrain wasn’t as difficult as it had been in the Again River watershed. But as I continued to trudge along, slicing at the trees, I no longer heard Brent behind me. I turned around, and he was nowhere in sight.
“Brent? Where are you?” There was no reply. I retraced my steps and came upon Brent standing statue-like behind a cluster of black spruces, a dumbstruck expression on his face.
“What’s wrong?”
Brent snapped out of his reverie and looked at me. “Adam,” he said slowly and with emphasis, “this is totally insane. There is no way in hell we can portage through this.”
I tried to laugh it off. “Of course we can. It’s not that difficult. Wes and I have done worse.”
“There is no way we can carry the canoe through this. Just portaging around the gorge was hard enough. Doing this would be impossible.”
“Everyone feels like that at the start of any big expedition. It’s natural. It takes a while to get used to the routine. Once you get broken in, you’ll find it much easier,” I said, trying to hide my exasperation.
“Adam, there’s no way I’ll ever find this easy. It’s too far. This is far worse than I imagined.” Brent paused. “I want to go home.”
“Brent, you listened to my stories, saw my pictures, you knew what it was like. And we’re committed now, we can’t quit. We have no choice but to continue.”
“I never imagined it would be this bad. I have to quit. I’m dead serious. I want to go home. This is awful. I’m sorry, but there’s no way I can stay here.” It didn’t help that just then the blackflies were thick as storm clouds around us.
“You can’t quit. It’ll get better, I promise. We can go back to camp and rest, and start again tomorrow. You’ll feel better then.”
“No, I won’t. Even at camp there’s no comfort. Everything about this is terrible.”
“Brent, no matter what, I won’t quit. If you won’t go on, I’ll just leave you here,” I said firmly.
“Adam!”
“I’m serious, Brent. Your only choice is to follow me.”
“Where’s the satellite phone? I want to call a pilot to come back and pick me up.”
“That’ll cost you a fortune; the pilot will charge you an arm and a leg for that.”
“I don’t care. I have to get out of here.”
“Brent, pull yourself together. We’ve barely done anything and you already want to quit,” I said angrily. “Don’t you have any pride? Everyone will think less of you if you quit.”
“I don’t care. They have no idea what it’s actually like. They would all quit too if they were here—any normal person who valued their life would.”
“You’re just freaking out because of how raw this feels to you. It happens to lots of people when they’re exposed to hardship for the first time. Even Wes wanted to quit on our first expedition. It takes time to get used to things, especially since you’ve never done anything like this before.”
“I can’t do this.”
I was now furious at Brent’s poor effort and his obstinate refusal to push on. We returned through the forest to our camp on the lakeshore, where we continued arguing. Brent insisted that I take him back to the cabins on Hawley Lake and leave him there until we could find a pilot to fly him back to civilization. To do so would mean the end of the expedition and the abandonment of my dreams and what I had strived for years to achieve. Tension between us was at the breaking point when out of the corner of my left eye I noticed something lumbering up the lakeshore.
“Look over there,” I said in a hushed whisper of excitement. A large caribou was trotting along the lake in our direction. It had a huge rack of antlers and was the finest specimen I had ever seen. It looked like it could have been the model for a royal coat of arms. The caribou paid no heed to us and nonchalantly wandered right past our camp, no more than ten metres from where we sat.
“It has no fear of us,” said Brent, staring transfixed at the magnificent animal.
Our unexpected visitor seemed to have raised his spirits a little, and it cheered our mood. If I handled the situation adroitly, I figured I could convince Brent to carry on. With that aim in mind, I kept up the conversation on caribou and other wildlife, as Brent loved animals, while building a heartening fire to keep the bugs away and cook supper.
That night, as we ate Kraft Dinner, I did my best to inspire Brent with stirring stories of adventure. The conversation drifted from Greek mythology to The Lord of the Rings, history and legend, great men and great deeds, of “immortal longings” and why we had to find the strength and fortitude to carry on. In other words, I pulled out all the stops. In the flickering light of our campfire, I could see the fire return to Brent’s brown eyes; my words were gradually winning him over. He became steadily more animated as I talked of overcoming whatever dangers and difficulties lay in our path, and how a few weeks of hardship is worth it for a lifetime of proud reflection. Somehow I succeeded in building up his spirits again. We went to bed that night feeling better. Brent said he would sleep on it and decide in the morning whether to quit or continue.
WHEN WE CRAWLED out of our nylon tent into the cool, misty morning, Brent’s spirits were again low. He looked miserable. In the hopes of encouraging him, I quickly made a fire, cooked some oatmeal, and put on a pot of tea. “How did you sleep?” I asked.
“Horrible,” replied Brent.
An awkward silence followed while I finished preparing breakfast for us. It was demoralizing knowing that all the work of building up Brent’s spirits had seemingly come to nothing. He appeared as lacklustre and shaken as ever. When I could bear the silence no longer, I asked him how he felt.
“I still want to quit. I can’t sleep in the tent. The ground is hard and uncomfortable, and it’s freezing at night. Without sleep, I have no energy. The bugs are unreal, worse than I could ever imagine. The work is too hard and dangerous. I want to go home.”
“You’ll get used to it. I promise.”
“I don’t think I could ever get used to this. I’m not made for this sort of thing.”
“You are what you make yourself,” I said. It was my personal motto.
We argued for some time, more gently and reservedly than the night before, but Brent finally broke down and wept.
“I’ll never make it. I’ll die. I kn
ow it. I want to go home.”
As angry as I was, it was impossible not to pity Brent—he didn’t have an ounce of pride left. He was afraid and made no secret of it. To push him any further seemed not only cruel but certain to cause him to experience some sort of breakdown. I couldn’t force him to undertake the gruelling portage. There was nothing for it. Reluctantly, I agreed to retrace our route back to the cabins on Hawley Lake, some thirty kilometres away. I hoped that on the journey back I could somehow build up Brent’s confidence and willpower enough to continue. After all, Brent was new to expeditions and needed time to adjust to life in the subarctic Lowlands.
“All right, we’ll head back to Hawley Lake,” I said.
We packed up our camp, loaded the canoe, and then launched it back into the clear blue waters of Sutton Lake. We had to perform the portage around the rocky gorge a second time. Brent, eager to return home, displayed considerably more zeal portaging back than he had the day before when we were headed in the opposite direction. Thinking that some fresh fish might help fortify him, after we had finished the portage I cast a line in the lake. It didn’t take long to land a good-sized northern pike.
“This will make for a great lunch,” I said happily. I set the pike down in the bottom of the canoe, where it flopped about. Unsheathing my old belt knife, which had once belonged to my father, I reached down to fillet the fish.
“Adam—” Brent suddenly spoke up from the bow of the canoe, “look at it. We can’t kill it. Don’t you feel sorry for it? Poor fish. Let it go.”
“Are you serious?”
“Just look at how helpless it looks.” Brent’s eyes were full of pity for the pike. He wasn’t joking.
Not wanting to upset him, given the fragile state of his already deflated spirits, I reluctantly released the pike unharmed back into the lake. It bolted off into the weeds as soon as it touched the water. In all the years I had known Brent, he had never expressed the slightest interest in becoming a vegetarian. His objection to killing the fish was sentimental rather than philosophical. Regardless, we resumed paddling up the lake without the benefit of any fresh protein.
Another wandering caribou trotted along the shore. A pair of loons swam in the blue waters ahead of us, hunting for fish, and making what Theodore Roosevelt, a keen ornithologist, described as “the unholy laughter of a loon.” As a child I had learned how to imitate the loon’s haunting call by whistling through my hands. It was a skill I found useful for impressing tourists in Algonquin Park. Meanwhile, on the sparsely treed eastern shore of Hawley Lake, something was moving up the rising slope. It was too far off to make out clearly.
“Brent, look—do you see something on the far shore there?” I pointed out the dark objects.
Brent squinted. “Yeah I do, what is it?”
I fetched the binoculars from my backpack. “Two black bear cubs,” I said, having focused on them.
“That’s what I thought!” said Brent excitedly.
“I wonder where their mother is,” I replied, still with my eyes pressed against the binoculars. The velvety black cubs looked less than a year old, but they soon disappeared from view into the brush. We continued paddling along Hawley Lake; the abundant wildlife seemed to raise Brent’s spirits. I suggested that if he stuck around, we might even see a wolverine or pack of grey wolves. This seemed to encourage him. When we reached the north shore of Hawley Lake, opposite the squalid little hunt camp, the time came for a decision. Like any explorer worth his salt, I hadn’t come this far without formulating contingency plans. We could still explore the alternative nameless river, which wouldn’t involve much portaging. I told Brent about it.
“We would have to travel upriver, against the current, wading through the water and dragging the canoe behind us for about a hundred and twenty kilometres.”
“Drag a canoe against the current for over a hundred kilometres? That sounds horrible. We’ll die of hypothermia.”
“Well, it’s either that or portage.”
“I can’t portage. Nothing in the world could make me go back into those awful woods.”
There was a third option—but it was so dangerous that I was reluctant to mention it. Still, since Brent wouldn’t consider the other two options, I now sketched it out: “I suppose we could try another way. We could paddle down the Sutton River to Hudson Bay, then try to canoe along the coast of Hudson Bay to the mouth of the Brant River, then work our way on foot up the Brant to the nameless tributary. We can probably walk along the shore, its open tundra, and drag the canoe behind us easily enough. Then we’d canoe the Brant’s tributary back to the coast, before canoeing along Hudson Bay to the mouth of the Sutton to finish.”
Actually, this route wasn’t much easier than my preferred one—but it would entail a relatively simple week while we canoed down the Sutton River. I figured this time might prove ample to build up Brent’s spirits and adjust him to life in the wilderness, after which he could endure the real bushwhacking and exploring.
Brent hesitated for a while, weighing his options. I wasn’t sure whether he understood what the plan I had sketched out involved exactly—and I was in no mood to explain it. It was well after dark when he finally came to a resolution. Sitting by the crackling fire in the quiet of the night, Brent spoke at last. “I’ll see it through. I won’t quit. I’m not entirely useless, you know. If we stick to this new plan, I’ll keep going,” he vowed solemnly.
“Excellent,” I replied. “I knew you wouldn’t quit.”
NAMELESS RIVER EXPEDITION ROUTES
[ 4 ]
DOWNRIVER
There is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.
—Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, 1908
SUNBURNT FROM THE LONG DAY spent canoeing through the lakes, the following morning we began our descent of the Sutton River, which drains Hawley Lake, flowing northward some 133 kilometres to the salt water of Hudson Bay. In his expedition notes, D.B. Dowling had referred to it as the “Trout River” and made no mention of canoeing it. The river was too small and shallow to have served as a historic fur trade river—in places the water was less than ankle deep—but Cree trappers had travelled it for generations. Its waters were rich with brook trout, and no major rapids were on its winding course. We would paddle it out to Hudson Bay—and hopefully by the time we got there, Brent would be a new man—hardened and prepared for the real work of the expedition.
The Swampy Cree, or Omushkego, had survived here for centuries. They were described in the 1930s by anthropologist Diamond Jenness as “adventurous hunters and warriors who had traversed half the Dominion” in their heyday. They had ranged farther than almost any other aboriginal group in North America, across much of the boreal forest and onto the Great Plains, waging war against such distant enemies as the Chipewyans, Assiniboine, and even the Inuit. Despite his admiration for their prowess, Jenness had spent too much time immersed in the northern wild to romanticize their hard lives. He noted that historically among the Cree, “Old people who could no longer keep up … were abandoned to starve or killed at their own request.” Nor was this custom confined to the Cree—it seems to have been common among most northern hunter-gatherers. It was, as author Jack London put it, “the immutable law of the northland.” But these same unforgiving conditions made the Cree such intrepid travellers. One individual I had long admired was George Elson, a half Cree, half Scottish explorer who had grown up near James Bay in the southern part of the Lowlands.
Elson had spent his youth honing his knowledge and skills when, in 1903, he was recruited by a couple of American explorers—Leonidas Hubbard and Dillon Wallace—for an expedition into the heart of uncharted Labrador. Elson was asked to meet his new companions in New York City. Despite never having seen a city before, Elson travelled over sixteen hundred kilometres to reach New York City alone, and arrived unfazed in what was, to the James Bay Cree, unexplored territory. Like his European counterparts, he too would return to
his own community with new knowledge of strange places and peoples. With Hubbard and Wallace, Elson set out for the interior of Labrador—a place equally mysterious and unknown to all three men. In the mountainous interior of Labrador, Elson emerged as the real leader of the expedition. Wallace wrote of him: “I do not believe that in all the north country we could have found a better woodsman. But he was something more than a woodsman—he was a hero.” Conditions in Labrador proved to be so difficult that even with Elson’s superb skills, the trio faced a grim death from starvation as the winter closed in on them. Hubbard eventually succumbed, while Wallace grew too weak to move. With almost superhuman strength and against great odds, Elson managed to stagger back through snowdrifts to reach Grand Lake in central Labrador. Ever resourceful, he built a raft to traverse the lake and reach the nearest trapper’s cabin, finding help for the ailing Wallace. As if this adventure hadn’t been remarkable enough, two years later, Elson returned to Labrador with Hubbard’s iron-willed widow, Mina, who insisted on finishing the expedition her husband had died attempting. Together, they triumphantly finished what Leonidas had started. Afterwards, Elson returned to James Bay, married a Cree woman, and lived out his days as a hero of exploration.
The Sutton River was as beautiful a stream in the Hudson Bay Lowlands as I had ever seen—much prettier than the swampy waterways I had been navigating the past number of years. Its shallow waters were clear as crystal. The upper stretch had high sandbanks, which looked like dunes one would expect on a beach rather than a subarctic river. Waterfowl was everywhere: ducklings and goslings swam in procession after their parents, while terns, gulls, and plovers hopped along the muddy, pebbly shorelines. Perched in the spruces and tamaracks growing along the grassy banks were enormous bald eagles, which feasted on the river’s abundant brook trout. At first glance, it appeared to be a pristine wilderness untouched by humans. But upon closer inspection, signs of human use were evident. There were past campsites on favourable river bends, even a few old cabins built by Cree trappers, and the attendant litter from these sites. This was something I had learned years ago—that generally speaking, a river, no matter how far-flung, if used by humans, will retain signs of their presence. I could only wonder if on the nameless river we were seeking we would find any evidence that people had been there previously. Of course, whether someone had or had not been there before was only of consequence to me personally; it had no bearing on our objective for the Geographical Society, which was to record the river through photographs, film, mapping, and a detailed written description.
