Alone Against the North (13 page)

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 zip-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.

“It's fucking freezing,” said Brent. In my absence, the fire had nearly gone out. Setting the pot of water down, I rapidly built the fire back up with more spruce branches.

“Keep rubbing your hands for warmth,” I said. I set the pot over the fire and kept working to build the blaze up as big as possible. In ten minutes, the water had boiled, and our soup was ready.

“How are your legs now?” I asked.

“Much better. I'm good to keep going.”

“Let's wait for the rain to stop and make some tea in the meantime.” I didn't want to risk a second bout with hypothermia, especially since I knew the prospects of finding dry wood would continue to dwindle as we headed farther north. I broke off some green spruce twigs and tossed them in the pot. Spruce tea, a traditional drink among woodsmen, is rich in vitamin C. In terms of concentration, spruce contains more vitamin C than orange juice. If only Jens Munk, the Danish explorer, had known this his
crew might well have survived the ravages of scurvy that plagued their expedition.

“What would you have done if you couldn't start a fire?” Brent wondered aloud, sipping his spruce tea.

“I can always start a fire,” I replied. While at home, I made it a habit to cook my lunches over fires on rainy days, in order to keep my skills sharp.

“But what if you couldn't?”

“Body warmth would be our only option.”

“Body warmth?”

“Yeah, we would have to strip naked and huddle together in the tent.”

“Oh God!” cried Brent.

[ 5 ]

HUDSON BAY

To take up great resolutions, and then to lay them aside,
only ends in dishonour.

—Snorri Sturluson,
The
Saga of Olaf Tryggvason,
twelfth century
AD

O
N THE FOLLOWING DAY
, we reached the tundra proper, leaving behind the comparative comforts of the scrubby coniferous forest. The vast expanse of almost treeless, green tundra looked strangely like the grasslands of Saskatchewan. Here the permafrost—ice beneath the ground that never melts—prevents trees from taking root in the soil. The wind howled across the open plain. In the river ahead, we could see two caribou swimming across a deep pool, while another lay languidly onshore. The day before we had encountered our first moose on the expedition, finding it standing in the river behind a small island. Ducks and geese remained plentiful. The young ducklings and goslings would flee the river as we drew near, running off into the bushes while their parents feigned injuries to distract us. Not that this was necessary, as Brent and I weren't interested in killing anything other than the occasional fish. Hunting for pleasure had never appealed to me. My inclination was not to
kill anything unless doing so was strictly necessary—and we had packed ample food rations, supplemented with fish and wild berries. The shotgun that we were carrying was strictly for protection against polar bears.

Brent's enthusiasm for our journey was fading. I made all the fires, did the cooking, set up the tent, packed our backpacks and the canoe, took care of navigating, and performed most of the paddling. At times, Brent seemed to slip into an almost comatose state, as if the incessant bugs and dreary weather had left him shell-shocked. Wrenched from the cozy, work-free life he had been living, Brent was finding the rigours of our daily routine a tough adjustment.

Yet we seldom became angry with each other. After all, not for nothing had we been friends for eighteen years. The history of exploration had taught me that camaraderie and good interpersonal dynamics were crucial to success. It was a lesson that Sir Ernest Shackleton took so seriously that he often selected men for his Antarctic voyages less on their knowledge and skills and more on their ability to crack a joke, play an instrument, or laugh off any difficulty. Many an expedition had floundered or ended in tragedy because its participants couldn't stand each other. On John Franklin's horrendous expedition through the heart of the Canadian subarctic in the 1820s, tensions among his men came to a breaking point: Dr. John Richardson, a tough, scholarly type, pulled out his pistol and shot a voyageur, accusing him of having been behind the death of another member of their party. Since Brent and I were together all day and slept side by side in a tiny six-by-four-foot tent with a shotgun and an assortment of knives between us, it was essential that we remain on good
terms. Brent's self-deprecating humour, his love of animals, and our collective reminiscing about our high school days and hockey teams made getting along surprisingly easy.

“Remember our grade eleven biology class?” asked Brent.

“Of course,” I replied, “I did a project on the eastern cougar.”

“I didn't do any projects,” said Brent proudly.

“I remember, your final mark was a forty-eight.”

“Forty-seven,” corrected Brent.

“Except we made sure you passed.”

Brent laughed. With the assistance of Wes, who had acted as a sentry in the hallway, Brent and I had logged onto our teacher's computer while she had left the classroom on an errand. We adjusted his marks so that he would pass the course, with none the wiser. Alas for Brent, he didn't have Wes and me in all his classes and ended up—from sheer laziness, not lack of intellect—failing enough to force him to do an extra year of school.

By day ten of the expedition we were nearing the mouth of the Sutton River on the bleak coast of Hudson Bay. The tundra was all around us now, though clumps of spruces, willows, and alder bushes served to break up the landscape. Soon I would discover whether the week canoeing downriver had been enough to fortify Brent for the real travails that lay ahead.

“There's an old cabin, a goose hunting shack built by natives from Peawanuck, on an island near the mouth of the river,” I said, drawing a stroke of my paddle.

“How do you know that?” asked Brent from the bow.

“I read it in the journal of some geographers and explorers who canoed the Sutton ten years ago.”

Brent convinced himself that this old cabin was probably quite accommodating and built up his expectations that we would soon have a respite from sleeping in the tent, which he despised.

“It was ten years ago, Brent. The cabin is probably an abandoned ruin today,” I cautioned.