Alone Against the North

by Adam Shoalts

  THE FIRST PORTAGE was approximately two kilometres one way, a trek that would have to be done in three stages: the first with my backpack and fishing rod, the second with the watertight barrel and paddles, and the third with the canoe. So, in total, counting doubling back, I had ten kilometres to cover on foot to reach the next lake, assuming that I managed to maintain the correct course and never lose my way in the forest. Wes, knowing the difficulty of carrying the canoe across the open bogs and almost impenetrable forest, doubted the feasibility of my doing this alone. But the iron law of necessity makes many things possible.

  I soon located the spot where Wes and I had camped on the lakeshore three years earlier, and from there scouted the forest until finding a few of our old blaze marks on the straggly tamaracks and spruces. The sap, which had oozed out of the trees when struck with a hatchet, had since hardened on the bark and stained the once white blazes a yellowish hue. There was, properly speaking, no trail to follow, for the ground remained covered in saplings, shrubs, lichens, moss, and swamp pools. But it didn’t matter—the important thing was that I had found the faded blazes and could follow them to the next lake.

  In the forest, the blackflies and mosquitoes were appalling—far worse than on the breezy lakeshore, and I was soon sweating heavily from the labour of carrying my gear over the uneven terrain, which made walking exhausting, sinking as I did into the soggy, moss-covered ground. Parts of the portage cut through fairly open forest of stunted tamarack and spruce, but the middle section passed through an alder swamp, where finding the old blazes was difficult and my boots were soaked in the stagnant waters. Frequently, I had to set down my load and scout ahead until I refound a blaze mark and could safely continue. As I staggered forward under the hot sun, I snapped off branches to make a more visible trail and added a few new blazes with my knife. After the first two loads were across, I brought the canoe. I dragged it most of the way over the swampy ground rather than attempting to carry it over my head, which would never work in the thick forest, given how closely spaced the trees were. At any rate, it would be impossible to follow the blazes with a canoe over my head. Panting heavily, I had to continually flip the canoe on its side, slide it between some trees, then readjust it again to avoid the next obstacle blocking the way forward. It felt something like playing a game of Twister, where the challenge was to somehow move my thirteen-foot canoe between ranks of small trees that at times grew so close together they resembled prison bars.

  It took six hours to complete the portage—encouraging progress. When I reached the lake on the far side, I quenched my thirst in its waters, then paddled against a strong headwind to its far end, where another gruelling portage awaited. This time, the start of the portage was right in the middle of an alder swamp, and once more I had to search for the old blazes to find the way forward. The alders were nearly impenetrable, entangling me as I attempted to hack a way through with the heavy pack on my back while balancing on little clumps of dry moss in the morass of foul black water. The bugs were as fierce as ever, and if I failed to pay attention for a moment, I would lose my way in the jungle of alders that was so thick it felt almost suffocating. It was impossible to see more than a few feet in any direction.

  Eventually, I crossed the alder swamp and emerged in a more pleasant wood on the other side with tall trees festooned in old man’s beard. The ground here was carpeted in green moss with clusters of bright red mushrooms, creating the vague impression of a fairy-tale forest—an effect that was enhanced by the croaking of a wood frog. I halted to eat some wild raspberries and blueberries and satisfy my thirst. Birds sang in the trees above me. Growing in a shadowy patch nearby were some Indian pipes, a type of white herb shaped remarkably like a tobacco pipe. They reminded me of home—Indian pipes grew in the forests that surrounded my family’s house and had been one of my favourite things to search for in the woods as a child. Refreshed from the drink and the berries, I pressed on, passing through more thick brush before finally reaching the shore of a picturesque little lake with shining blue waters enclosed by dark green woods. Near the shore were bright-coloured, carnivorous pitcher plants, a sort of northern Venus flytrap that feeds on insects and frogs, trapping them in its “pitcher,” from which they never emerge.

  It was still hot and sunny, so I pressed on further once this portage was completed, heading out onto the lake. Three years ago, this lake had reminded me of Temagami, a rugged region of rolling hills, waterfalls, and beautiful lakes in central Ontario. In my journal I had named it Temagami Lake. The forest surrounding it boasted the biggest trees I had yet seen on my journey: ancient spruce and tamarack that grew to a large size owing to better soil. The ground in this area was less swampy and in places included actual hills, a rarity in the Hudson Bay Lowlands, though I was still somewhere near the southern boundary between the Lowlands and the more rugged Canadian Shield. A short paddle brought me across the lake to its thickly treed eastern shore. A few hundred metres into those woods and over a steep hill lay another nameless lake, which three years ago I had called Last Lake, because it was the last lake before the final forbidding portage to the Again River’s headwaters. Too agitated with anticipation to stop for the night, I decided to keep pushing on, first hacking my way through the thick brush and forest, then dragging my canoe up the steep hill and down to Last Lake on the other side. The sun was setting, but I managed to finish off this third consecutive portage of the day and canoe to the lake’s far shore, where I made camp. It had been a thirteen-hour day of continuous labour, in which I had portaged some sixteen kilometres and paddled several more. And the next day, I would have to do it all over again.

  This lake was as far as Wes and I had reached three years ago, and as close as I had ever come to the Again River. When we made the decision to turn back, we had been blazing a trail through swamps beyond the lake’s northeastern shore. This time I decided to pursue a different course to another lake that my map assured me lay several kilometres away—I would head east, into the rising sun, rather than attempt to follow the non-existent course of a stream that appeared on the map but did not in fact exist, which had led Wes and me astray last time.

  That night, exhausted as I was, sleep proved difficult—the anticipation of the critical next day kept me awake. I looked upon the portage to the Again’s headwaters as the make-or-break of my entire enterprise. There was simply no way to know in advance if I could locate the headwaters, let alone portage my gear and canoe there. From what I could gather from the satellite images, a vast morass of muskeg barred the way forward. Early explorers had judged the muskeg of the Lowlands as an impassable barrier to overland travel. The woodsman and writer Grey Owl furnished one of the best descriptions of it:

  In places the forest dwindles down to small trees, which, giving way to moss and sage brush, thin out and eventually disappear altogether, and the country opens out into one of those immense muskegs or swamps which makes overland travel in whole sections impossible.… These consist mostly of stretches composed of deep, thin mud, covered with slushy moss, and perhaps sparsely dotted with stunted, twisted trees. Bright green, inviting looking fields show up in places, luring the inexperienced into their maw with their deceptive promise of good footing. These last are seemingly bottomless, and constitute a real danger to man or beast.… There are holes between hummocks that are filled with noisome stagnant water, which would engulf a man.

  But as I finally drifted off to sleep in my tent, visions of bottomless muskeg on my mind, I told myself that I would find a way, no matter what.

  I AWOKE AT the crack of dawn—the day’s labours would require all the daylight I could get. After a hurried breakfast of oatmeal and tea, I struck off into the gloomy, dew-covered forest, carrying only my hatchet and compass. This time, there were no old blazes from three years ago to follow—I was starting from scratch. Therefore, it was impractical to attempt carrying anything across on this first trip, when all my physical energy and mental powers would be devoted to navigation an
d trailblazing. I was excited and a little nervous. I was really in the unknown now—a place where every sight was new to me, and each step carried me deeper into unexplored territory.

  My cargo pants were soaked by the dew on the shrubs and trees as I trudged into the dark woods, but things appeared promising at first. The ground sloped upwards—a welcome sign, as it meant no immediate muskeg, but it quickly led into impenetrable brush, where spruce and tamarack branches clawed at my face as I tried to hack a way through. It felt claustrophobic in the deepest thickets, where the sunlight never penetrated beneath the gloom of the thick, entangling trees. It was vital to blaze a set of marks on both sides of the trees—which, like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumb trail or Theseus’ ball of thread in the labyrinth, would allow me to find the way back. I relied on both my brass surveyor’s compass and the sun—when I could see it—to navigate. Eventually, I emerged from the thicket into more typical Lowlands forest—sparsely treed, swampy moss and lichen covered ground, and plenty of dark pools and little hummocks that turned walking into an exhausting ordeal. Each step would cause me to sink down into the moss, and in a few places, I had to leap across swamp holes, all while swarmed by clouds of blackflies and mosquitoes.

  The forest seemed to go on forever. At times my mind wandered—I would begin doubting myself, wondering if I was heading in the right direction and if there was any lake to be found. Maybe, for all I knew, it was just a quagmire. But then I would give my head a shake, banish all such doubts, and trudge deeper into the woods.

  In a shady grove, I caught sight of a dash of red moving along the ground—a spruce grouse. The docile bird seemed to hardly notice my presence, pecking and scratching at the ground like a domestic chicken. As much as I hated killing anything unnecessarily, I was awfully hungry. Almost in spite of myself, I unsheathed my belt knife, crept closer to the grouse, then threw the knife at it. The bird gave a cackle and flew into the branches of a big spruce. I sighed—but then I remembered the hatchet gripped in my other hand and tossed it tomahawk-style at the bird in the tree. It narrowly missed the grouse’s head. Lunch would have to wait. I collected my weapons and resumed the portage.

  Finally, after four and a half hours of hiking and blazing through what felt like an endless swamp forest, I laid eyes on what to me was the most splendid and thrilling sight—an expanse of dark, misty water in the distance—the lake. Columbus must have felt the same intense excitement when he first glimpsed land in 1492. All my doubts dissipated, all my restless anxiety evaporated, and what was left was the exhilarating satisfaction of a scheme revealed to be possible. The fact that several hundred metres of open muskeg, denuded of nearly all tree cover, separated me from the lakeshore barely put a dent in my enthusiasm. All that mattered at the moment was that the lake appeared to exist, and that I appeared to have found it.

  It took nearly an hour to return through the forest to my camp on the other side. I had left my tent up and my gear unpacked in the event that I ran into difficulties blazing a way across, in which case I imagined spending another night in this spot. But that was now unnecessary, so I quickly packed up my gear, strapped on the watertight barrel, and headed back into the gloom of the woods. I did the portage in stages—taking each load halfway across, then returning for the next load. By late afternoon, I had transported my backpack and plastic barrel, as well as the paddles and fishing rod, to the end of my blazes, which was still nearly three hundred metres short of the actual lakeshore—which remained beyond the open muskeg.

  I now hiked all the way back to fetch my canoe—the last and most difficult thing to transport. I pulled it behind me, but it constantly wedged between trees, forcing me to push and heave to get it through and slowing my progress to a crawl. Rain began to fall in the evening when I was still only about halfway across. Reluctantly, given the fading light and steady rain, I knew I had to give up my hopes of finishing the portage that day. As things stood, it looked like I was in for a miserable night, not having had the chance to make camp yet or find any dry ground to pitch the tent on. Leaving the canoe behind me in the forest, I headed to where I had left my other gear to rest for the night.

  The whole area near the lakeshore was a soggy sea of muskeg. In the rain I searched for a patch of solid ground big enough to pitch my tent on—not finding anything, I settled for rigging up a tarp between a couple of scraggly tamaracks to keep the rain off. Camping as I was in the middle of muskeg in a rainstorm, I assumed that it would be a wet night no matter what I did. But somehow, I managed to stay more or less dry inside my tent beneath the rain tarp, and on the bright side, the muskeg was quite comfortable to sleep on.

  IN THE MORNING I put on my wet clothing, skipped breakfast, and resumed my portage in the sodden forest. Just walking a few feet through the rain-soaked brush further drenched my already wet cargo pants, boots, and socks. The sky above me remained grey and overcast, offering little hope of drying anything. But the Again’s headwaters were near at hand, and within a few hours I had completed what I had failed to do three years ago with Wes: I successfully carried the canoe and all my gear across the last terrible portage, which, counting all the doubling back, totalled nearly fifteen kilometres. The final stretch—the remaining three hundred metres or so across the muskeg—was the most difficult of all. I loaded my canoe with everything aside from the plastic barrel, which I strapped onto my back, and began dragging the whole assemblage forward. As I sloshed onward, the ground visibly sank beneath me, causing pools of cold water to form around my feet. But the sight of what lay before me—the mysterious mist-shrouded headwaters of my long-sought river—gave me the strength to finish the task.

  When I reached the marshy lakeshore, I pushed the canoe into the water and hopped into the stern. A thick mist made it impossible to see the far shore, or much beyond the canoe’s bow. The water was shallow—that much was plain from the green rushes sprouting up from the lake. It was still a large body of water, though, probably more than a kilometre across, and as such I was wary about venturing too far from land into the mist, for if a storm were to strike, my shallow vessel could easily swamp. By paddling off into the misty lake, I had crossed my Rubicon—there could be no retreat now. The idea of attempting to portage back was unthinkable—no matter what the Again River contained, I was irrevocably committed to continuing.

  [ 11 ]

  RIVER OF MYSTERY

  Fearlessness is better than a faint-heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors. The length of my life and the day of my death were fated long ago.

  —Skirnir’s Journey, Ancient Norse Myth

  IPADDLED THROUGH THE MIST to the far side of the lake and then skirted its shoreline, searching for some sign of the Again River. At first there seemed to be nothing but an uninterrupted shore of cedar and spruce trees. Had I made some mistake and come to the wrong lake? Anxiously I kept paddling through the mist and rain, trying to find an outlet somewhere. At last, I spotted a black stream, little more than a creek, flanked by alder bushes and swampy woods on either bank and covered in lily pads, arrowheads, and rushes. This was it—the start of the unexplored river that I had dreamed about for years. I had stared at its vague outline on those old maps, trying to picture what it looked like and what it would be like to paddle. Even now, I half doubted that I had really found it—it was hard to believe that after so many false starts, I had finally made it.

  The river itself, despite the ancient forest on either bank, could have been one of the creeks I had paddled in the countryside where I grew up. I actually imagined that the hardest and most dangerous part of the journey was now over—that the challenges ahead were nothing compared with the navigational complexity and sheer endurance required to complete the trailblazing portages. So, despite the fact that the skies in all directions remained one unbroken mass of unfriendly grey clouds, I felt sanguine. I paddled downstream in the drizzle, unfazed by a swarm of mosquitoes buzzing around my head. If I had known what awaited me downriver, I would not have been quite so
confident.

  Soon I encountered large beaver dams, which I had to lift the canoe over, but I did so with relative ease. The dams were of such solid construction that I could stand right on top of them while hoisting the loaded canoe up and over. More problematic were shallow, sandy stretches of river that required wading and dragging to get the canoe through—but they were nothing unusual. The river seemed to be an untouched sanctuary for wildlife—beavers, otters, muskrats, moose, and waterfowl were all around. A kingfisher glided low over the water before disappearing into the woods. Freshwater clams were scattered along the river bottom, a good meal should I need it.

  The river’s meandering course passed through several weedy lakes, which I paddled across in the rain, hoping that the waterway would grow bigger and spare me from more canoe dragging. These lakes were of considerable size, spanning several kilometres. Nevertheless, after passing through another big lake, I found that the river remained little more than a rocky creek, hemmed in by lush cedar trees and too shallow to paddle. The only way forward was to carefully wade in the swift current and drag the canoe behind me with a rope. But as I slogged along, cautiously balancing in the rushing water, my hopes were dashed—ahead the river vanished entirely. Instead of flowing water, all I saw was a dry creek bed covered in rocks. The river, I soon realized, was still there, flowing beneath the rocks as little more than a trickle. I had no choice but to do another exhausting portage, carrying the canoe over my head and all my gear forward until the river re-emerged.