Alone Against the North

by Adam Shoalts

  The Sutton River, for most of its course, was about eighty metres wide. Small rapids, little more than undulating swifts of rushing water around boulders, appeared in the river with increasing frequency as we journeyed onward. Just as we neared the first sizable rapid, a caribou dashed through the shallows near the far shore. For a moment, as we drifted into the whitewater, it looked as if this rather pugnacious caribou had a mind to charge us.

  “Do caribou charge people?” asked Brent, staring suspiciously at the animal’s impressive antlers.

  “Not to my knowledge,” I replied, while steering the canoe around an oncoming boulder.

  “This one looks like it might want to,” Brent said anxiously. The big caribou was directly facing us, no more than thirty metres away, standing in ankle-deep water.

  Suddenly the canoe banged into an unseen boulder beneath the surface, jarring us sideways in the current. “Oh! There’s a rock!” exclaimed Brent, turning from the staring caribou.

  “I noticed.”

  “My bad,” replied Brent. As the bowman, it was his job to keep an eye out for rocks, while I piloted us around them from the stern.

  The caribou remained watching us as we drifted closer to the shallows near the river bend it occupied. I cautiously paddled us forward. Then, just as the caribou appeared ready to charge through the shallow water at our canoe, it pivoted sideways and struck a pose. It stood statue-like in the water, looking rather vainglorious.

  “I think it’s interested in pursuing a modelling career with Canadian Geographic,” remarked Brent. We photographed the caribou for several minutes while it stood striking poses in the river. Then abruptly it dashed off along the river’s edge, before disappearing into the alder bushes onshore.

  We soon stopped on a treeless, grassy island in the river to gather tiny but delicious wild strawberries. The intensity of the blackflies, which only breed in running water and which the Sutton amply provided, prevented the moment from becoming too idyllic. As well, unfortunately Brent was sick with a cold he had been battling for a few days before we arrived. And I now felt I was picking up his illness: my throat was sore, my nose was stuffed up, and I was developing a headache. But my love of wilderness—my delight at discovering what lay beyond each river bend—the expectation of glimpsing another eagle swooping down to capture a trout or duckling in its talons or a beaver slapping its tail on the water to warn others that intruders were approaching—kept my spirits high. Brent too, despite his cold, seemed to be enjoying himself and took readily to photographing wildlife. The journey thus far wasn’t overly difficult: paddling the river was fairly easy—though my back was still sore and my mangled thumb ached horribly. Frequently we were forced to get out of the canoe and wade through shallow stretches. This, however, was no real danger even this far north, so long as the weather remained warm and sunny. Otherwise hypothermia, which kills more people in North America’s wilderness than all deaths by wild animals combined, could prove a hazard. As it was, our first few days canoeing the Sutton were as tranquil as could be expected in the Hudson Bay Lowlands.

  Indeed, seldom in the history of exploration has anything proved as bleak and deadly as the inhospitable Lowlands was to early explorers. If even aboriginal people regarded the Lowlands as “sterile country,” unfit for permanent habitation, one can only imagine what the first Europeans made of the place. Mortality rates on early expeditions to the Lowlands were astoundingly high. The first European explorers had reached the Lowlands by ship. They sailed across the North Atlantic, through Hudson Strait, into the uncharted immensity of Hudson Bay, and worked their way down to what is the Bay’s southwestern coastline. They had come seeking a northwest passage to Asia that wasn’t to be found.

  The first of these pioneering mariners was the English navigator Henry Hudson, who arrived on the body of water that now bears his name in the spring of 1611 on-board his ship, the Discovery. He wintered on the more hospitable eastern shore of James Bay, which unlike the Lowlands of the western coast is not swampy and therefore has much better stands of timber, essential for surviving long winters. The following spring, however, Hudson’s crew mutinied when he announced his intention to push on westward. Hudson, along with his son and seven other loyal retainers were cruelly set adrift in a tiny lifeboat on James Bay. They were never seen again and probably perished somewhere on James Bay’s windswept coast. Of the thirteen mutineers, only eight made it back to England alive.

  Eight years later, in 1619, the resourceful and talented Scandinavian explorer Jens Munk sailed into Hudson Bay in the service of the Danish king, with sixty-three men under his command. They wintered on the bleak coastline near the northern reaches of the Lowlands, building squalid shelters to survive in. As the unforgiving winter dragged on, men began to drop like flies from scurvy, a horrendous disease brought on by a lack of vitamin C. No aboriginal people were to be found anywhere—though on a trek inland, Munk and his men found a pictograph drawn on a rock that depicted what they thought was the devil. Truly, it must have seemed as if they had strayed into some northern hell. By the time the ice melted in spring, only three of the original sixty-four men were left alive. Incredibly, Munk, who had survived the punishing winter along with two other weakened crew members, managed to sail his ship home to Denmark, an astonishing feat of seamanship.

  For aboriginal people, the Lowlands was a place where starvation was a fact of life. English explorer Charles Bayly, who sailed into James Bay in 1674, reported starvation among “Indians” near the mouth of the Ekwan River, on the Bay’s western shore. Bayly observed that the natives seldom ventured into the Lowlands and spent the winters far in the interior, away from the swamps. Other explorers, when they chanced to encounter anyone at all, witnessed similar cases of starvation. Life in the Lowlands was, as Bayly’s contemporary Thomas Hobbes would have put it, “nasty, brutish, and short.” Making conditions even more extreme during this era of exploration was the so-called Little Ice Age, a climatic anomaly that saw the northern hemisphere’s average temperature drop several degrees from the fourteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. Even the Lowlands’ brief summers brought no relief—many explorers found the incessant attacks of mosquitoes and blackflies worse than the torments of winter. The bloodsucking insects literally drove men mad. Suicide was common at the fur trade forts built at the mouths of the Lowlands’ major rivers, namely the Severn, Albany, and Moose.

  ONE EVENING, after a week in the wilderness, preoccupied with rigging up a tarp between some stunted spruce trees to keep off the rain, I dispatched Brent to gather firewood. He took my hatchet and headed off into the shadowy forest that sprang up some twenty metres beyond the treeless, grassy riverbanks. Off in the woods, I could soon hear him chopping up a storm. “Well that’s good,” I thought to myself. “Brent seems to be getting the hang of this.”

  A good fifteen minutes later, Brent emerged from the woods, triumphantly dragging a sizable tamarack tree behind him. In despair, I saw that he had chopped down a live tree.

  “Brent,” I said incredulously. “That’s not a dead tree, it won’t burn.”

  “Oh, it will burn,” replied Brent confidently.

  “No,” I said quietly, “green wood doesn’t burn.” Though I said nothing more, I was mystified by how Brent, after a week in the wilderness, hadn’t absorbed the simple lesson that only dry, dead wood goes into a fire. He had, after all, seen and to some extent helped me make fires and cook our meals twice a day for the past week. Sensing his frustration at having exerted himself pointlessly, I tried to soften his disappointment.

  “You did do a good job chopping down that tamarack,” I said light-heartedly. “Maybe we can use it as a pole to help hoist up that side of the tarp.”

  “I’m useless here,” Brent mumbled, discouraged.

  “Not at all,” I said. “You’ve been doing well in the canoe. You have excellent balance, and you paddle as well as Wes.”

  “Really?” Brent shrugged modestly. It was one of his mos
t likeable traits that even when he had been the best player on our hockey team, he never boasted of his talents. He was invariably self-effacing.

  We headed back into the swamp forest to look for some proper firewood, pushing past tamaracks and black spruce.

  “It’s so quiet here, it gets on my nerves,” Brent whispered as he stared at the crooked, moss-draped trees. He was experiencing what Theodore Roosevelt referred to as “the perfect silence so strange and almost oppressive to the novice” that comes with northern wilderness.

  “At least, we’re from the countryside,” I said as I stripped some dead branches from a spruce. “Imagine how much of a shock it’d be for someone from a city to be out here. Whenever I go to a city, I can’t get over the noise.”

  “You say that as if a city is the most horrible thing in the world.”

  “To me it is,” I shuddered. “Nothing horrifies me more than the thought of a place without wilderness.”

  “Nothing horrifies me more than wilderness,” Brent muttered.

  When I looked at the forest, I saw a fascinating place full of enchantment and wonder. Brent saw only a grim, alien environment.

  That night, as we lay huddled in our sleeping bags inside the tent, a growling noise arose from somewhere in the darkness. I bolted upright and reached for my knife. My heartbeat quickened. Brent was asleep next to me.

  “Brent,” I whispered, nudging him. “Did you hear that?”

  He mumbled inaudibly.

  “Brent, I heard something growl outside.”

  “What?” he hissed back, now awake.

  “Yeah, it—wait, there it is again.”

  Brent looked over at me. “That’s my stomach.”

  “What?”

  “That growling is my stomach.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “No. That macaroni and cheese isn’t cutting it for me anymore. Do we have any midnight snacks?”

  As a rule, we never kept food inside the tent. Any food, even the wrapper of a granola bar, could attract black bears, which have a remarkably keen sense of smell. While plenty of black bears were around, we were still outside the nominal range of polar bears, which typically remain near the seacoast. I crawled outside the tent in the darkness to fetch one of our plastic food containers, in order to find some granola bars for Brent. Against my better judgment, I allowed him to eat them in the tent, since he complained that it was too cold to get out of his sleeping bag. Thinking his borrowed sleeping bag wasn’t quite as warm as mine, I gave him my extra sweater. At night, the temperature had been dipping down to about two or three degrees Celsius.

  Later that night, our sleep was again disturbed. A crashing noise came from the forest behind us. I grabbed my flashlight and knife, unzipped the tent door, and cautiously stepped out to investigate. The noise continued for a moment—then abruptly ceased. The gloom of the flashlight failed to illuminate anything but the vague shapes of contorted trees swaying in the wind.

  “Probably just a caribou,” I told Brent as I crawled back inside the tent. Exhausted from the long hours spent paddling, we soon fell back asleep.

  SINCE BRENT SAID that he was hungry, I insisted that we resume fishing, regardless of his objections to killing anything. No matter what his state of mind, I could no longer restrain myself from casting a line for the river’s delicious brook trout. Thinking to cheer Brent a little, when we stopped to rest at midday, I prepared the fishing rod for him and encouraged him to try a cast in a deep pool at the foot of a rapid.

  “All right,” said Brent, “but I have no talent for fishing.” “That’s not true. I remember you caught a nice smallmouth bass on that canoe trip we did back in high school.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I forgot about that.” Evidently feeling more confident with the memory of what, I believe, was probably the only fish he ever caught, Brent boldly grasped the fishing rod and cast it toward the pool. The lure landed in the branch of a spruce tree near the bank. “Damn,” muttered Brent.

  “That’s all right … happens to the best of us,” I said as I untangled the line from the tree. I encouraged Brent to try again. This time, he landed the lure right in the pool. Just as he began to reel it in, a fish struck. It was a beautiful four-pound speckled trout. His next cast brought in another trout of equal size.

  “Two fish on only two casts,” I said, impressed.

  “Three if you count the cast that landed in the tree,” Brent corrected.

  That night we feasted on trout, blueberries, and raspberries, and drank hot chocolate before rain forced us to take cover in the tent. On the bright side, Brent so enjoyed the fresh fish that I heard no more objections to catching them.

  THE NEXT DAY, as we were canoeing, the sky turned dark grey with alarming swiftness. Flashes of lightning appeared. “We have to take shelter,” I said from the stern. I didn’t want to risk paddling out in the open in a storm.

  “Can’t we just ride it out?” asked Brent. It was a quirk of his that, despite his habitual laziness, once we started on a day of paddling, Brent didn’t generally like to stop for anything.

  “No. It’s too risky. We can’t be out in the open on the water like this with lightning.” I counted the intervals between the bursts of thunder and the lightning flashes. The storm was close and getting closer. We headed for the river’s grass-covered shoreline. We couldn’t risk sitting under any trees to take refuge from the rain. But with our paddles as a frame, I quickly rigged up the tarp for us to shelter under. Brent curled up in the mud, out of the rain yet visibly dejected.

  “This is horrible,” he moaned.

  “It will pass soon enough.”

  The wind blew so hard off Hudson Bay that the storm was over shortly, though the rain continued. We launched the canoe back into the river and resumed our journey. As we snaked our way farther north along the windy river, the trees grew smaller and more sparse. Soon we caught our first glimpses of open, windswept tundra. With no trees here to block the wind, we were at the mercy of the elements. We came to a straight section of river, where it proved impossible to make any headway against the fierce wind and lashing rain. The wind was so strong that it felt like we were paddling upriver.

  “This wind is unreal!” shouted Brent above the gale.

  “Let’s paddle hard until we reach the next bend!” I shouted back.

  We dug our paddles furiously into the waves, trying to fight our way against the billowing wind to no avail. My teeth were chattering in the cold.

  “Man,” I heard Brent mutter, “my legs are fucked. They feel asleep.”

  Brent’s words snapped me into action. “Your legs aren’t asleep. We’re starting to get hypothermia. We’re losing feeling.” I couldn’t feel my legs either, drenched as they were from wading through the shallows and from the steady rain.

  “What do we do?” asked Brent.

  “Head for shore,” I replied, paddling furiously.

  The muddy shoreline had high, treeless banks that rose to a height of nearly ten metres. We reached the shore in short order, but stumbled like drunkards as we tried to stand on our numb legs in the mud. Staggering about, I led Brent up the steep embankment into the scruff of stunted forest.

  “We have to find a big tree to shelter under,” I said, trying to keep Brent engaged as we struggled on. We were lucky to come across a big spruce, which protected us from the wind and rain.

  “Try jumping around and waving your arms to keep warm as I make a fire,” I told Brent.

  Most of the wood was wet, but from the dead inner branches of the spruce I stripped enough dry wood to build a teepee of sticks. Hypothermia in the subarctic is nothing to fool with. I knew that Brent’s life, and my own, depended on getting a fire going in the rain and wind. I crouched down around the teepee of sticks, trying to shelter it from the elements, and instructed Brent to do the same. With a match from my pocket, I lit some old man’s beard, a type of lichen that grows on tree branches, and dry spruce needles, which I had stored inside a zi
p-lock bag in my pocket for just such an emergency. Ever so slowly, with numb fingers and chattering teeth, I built up the fire.

  “I didn’t think it was possible to make a fire,” mumbled Brent.

  “I can always make a fire,” I said, tossing on more sticks. Though in truth I had been a little alarmed by the prospects, given the rain, wind, and lack of forest cover. “Keep adding dry branches from this spruce,” I said, showing Brent the ones to break off.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back down to the canoe,” I said, feeling chilled to the bone, “we need to make some hot soup to warm up. Stay by the fire.”

  My legs were still wobbly as I jogged awkwardly through the scrub forest back to the embankment and our beached canoe. Out in the open once again, I was soaked by the rain, though my army rain jacket kept my torso and arms dry. I stumbled over to the canoe and with trembling hands unfastened the metal ring of one of the food barrels, which kept it watertight. I quickly dug out the pot for boiling water, two packages of Mr. Noodles soup, bowls and spoons, and stainless steel mugs for a hot drink. The pot filled with river water, I staggered back to where I had left Brent.