Alone Against the North (20 page)

My trembling index finger switched the safety off on the gun.

The bear inched closer, growling menacingly in the river, staring straight at me. I swallowed hard, trying to calm my nerves, gripping the gun tighter and resting my finger on the trigger. The bear was in my sights, but my aim was unsteady.

With no one to steer, the canoe was drifting aimlessly in the current. My heart was pounding. If the bear were to charge across
the shallow river, no more than knee deep, it would be on me in a blink of an eye. If I missed, I wouldn't have a chance to reload. And one shot would not stop this bear. It looked like the king of bears, the king of all the North. The bear growled and glared at me—it was so close that I could see the breath from its nostrils, but still I wouldn't fire. The standoff continued; seconds seemed like minutes, minutes like hours. The canoe continued to drift downriver; when I had drifted about thirty metres away from the bear, I set the shotgun down and grabbed a paddle. I cautiously paddled away while the bear watched me unflinchingly for a while, then slowly moved off in the other direction.

A few minutes paddling brought me to the island with the old goose hunting shack. I had originally planned to pitch my tent onshore, but after my encounter with such a large and aggressive polar bear, I resolved at once to fortify myself inside the shack for the night. Of course, I knew that the bear could plow through any obstacles I could erect without the slightest difficulty. But I at least wanted to create a psychological barrier. I hauled my gear up from the river to the shack, made a quick fire, then climbed onto the cabin's roof to scout out the surrounding area. In the distance, a lone caribou was wandering across the tundra. With my binoculars I could see whitecaps on stormy Hudson Bay. Scanning in all directions, I saw no sign of the bear—but clusters of spruce and willow on the tundra were ideal hiding places.

That night, expecting as I did to find that the shaggy, white-haired giant had come for me, there would be no sleep. In the dark, I sat perfectly silent in the centre of the cabin with my gun in hand, straining my ears to hear the sound of anything stalking
up to the missing door of the shack, which I had barred the best I could with one of the metal mattress frames. I could hear the wind rustling through the alder bushes, the ripples of the current in the river, and a red squirrel scurrying along the cabin roof. These noises grew familiar until they were interrupted by sounds of a struggle in the river—a frantic honking of geese, beating wings, wild splashing, then silence.

Around midnight, a storm struck; lashing rain, screaming winds, and violent bursts of thunder now made it impossible to hear any movement outside the cabin's thin walls. If a bear were to sneak up, I would never hear it. My lonely vigil lasted all night—I dared not sleep knowing such a formidable and fearless bear was in the vicinity, and with no door on the cabin, how easily it could burst upon me should I drift off. Exhausted, I would sometimes momentarily nod off, only to have visions of a snarling bear charging through the door snap me awake. A flicker of lightning illuminated the inside of the cabin—I caught a glimpse of Brent's carving on the wall, “By endurance we conquer.” The morning could not come fast enough.

WITH RELIEF, I
welcomed the dawn, though the sky remained filled with dark storm clouds. I had contacted the pilot with the satellite phone the day before, and he was due to arrive by noon. In the rain, I packed up my gear and paddled downriver to meet him. Waiting onshore with my gun, I kept an eye out for polar bears. Finally, after waiting several hours, I heard the drone of a distant engine. The float plane soon sliced through the dark clouds and landed in the middle of the river. The bearded pilot in the cockpit was the same old-timer who had flown Brent back
to civilization. He steered the plane over to where I stood on the bank and brought it to a halt. Opening his door, the first thing he said was, “There's a huge polar bear just upriver! I saw it as I flew in.”

I nodded. “I saw it yesterday.”

“That's a man-eater that one,” the pilot said wide-eyed, “one of the biggest I've ever seen. It's strange to see it inland like that, normally they're by the coast. He probably caught wind of you.”

We wasted little time in strapping the canoe onto one of the plane's aluminum pontoons and loading the gear. The engine roared back to life and we were soon airborne. From the co-pilot's seat I watched endless green swamp, labyrinthine muskeg, and snaking black rivers unfold below us—and dreamed of exploring them all. It was both comforting and frustrating to think about the thousands of waterways below—even if I devoted the rest of my life to exploring them, I could never hope to cover more than a fraction. In the meantime, I welcomed the thought of a hot shower and a good night's rest.

Some six hours later, with one stop midway on a lake to refuel the plane, we were back in Hearst, the small frontier logging town. The next day, on my drive home, a wild idea entered my head—the thought of turning off the highway and heading straight for the Again River. The thought of exploring it still haunted me. And now, flush with the confidence of my solitary triumph, I knew that if need be I could do it alone.

[ 9 ]

NEW HORIZONS

It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be left alone.

—H.P. Lovecraft,
At the Mountains of Madness
, 1936

O
NCE I RETURNED
to civilization, the work of the expedition wasn't over. The difference between an adventurer and an explorer is that an explorer publishes new geographical knowledge and documents findings. I had to write my official report for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and submit my photographs and film footage. Furthermore, as part of the Society's public outreach and education mandate, I was due to speak at schools, libraries, and other venues. But before I could bring myself to complete these tasks, I was seized by the urge to set off on another adventure. My father and I went on a short exploration of some lakes near the northern boundary of Algonquin Park. Early one misty morning, paddling in one of our cedar-strip canoes, we found a moose skeleton lying on a lakeshore. The small antlers on the skeleton were the perfect size for knife handles, so I sawed one off with the intention of crafting a new handle for my hunting knife.

In the fall, while polishing off the expedition report, I accepted a position teaching survival and woodcraft to students at a wilderness academy. The students seemed to pick up fire-making faster than Brent had, and I was impressed by their willingness to sleep outdoors in temperatures below freezing. But, never having been a Boy Scout or attended a summer camp myself, it was hard to feel much like a kindred spirit with my fellow instructors: they tended to enjoy loud conversations, campfire songs, and strumming on acoustic guitars. When the other instructors would gather around the nightly campfire to sing and socialize, I'd usually slip away into the forest to examine animal tracks and any wildlife I could find. Still, there are worse jobs than teaching wilderness skills, and it was with reluctance that I left to embark on a number of speaking engagements.

Like an itinerant preacher, I spoke at a wide variety of venues—hunter and angler associations, environmental organizations, local libraries, public and private schools, retirement homes, universities, literary festivals, conferences, and museums. I shared photographs from my expeditions, discussed exploring the Lowlands, and emphasized the importance of preserving wilderness for the future. At the end of each presentation, a forest of hands would shoot up, but the first questions were always the same: “Are you and Brent still friends?
Are you still on speaking terms?
”

Brent and I remained friends much the same as we had before. I genuinely liked Brent, and despite the fact he had abandoned me in polar bear territory, I found it impossible not to forgive him. But he never went into the wilderness again. Based on his experience, Brent quickly concluded that he was not cut
out to be an explorer. Whatever he was to amount to in life, it would have nothing to do with wilderness.

Meanwhile, the Geographical Society and
Canadian Geographic
offered me a position on a new project: creating an eleven-by-eight-metre historical map of North America. As appealing as I found cartography—I'd been in love with maps since I was a child—there was yet time to squeeze in another adventure before the map project started. Oddly enough, the taste of solitude I had after Brent quit the expedition had whetted my appetite for more. Thus, with three weeks on my hands, I decided to set off alone into the mountainous wilderness of British Columbia. My objective was to track down and study petroglyphs—ancient rock carvings thousands of years old—in preparation for my doctorate, which I planned to begin in the fall.

TO EARLY EXPLORERS
, the distant mountains on the far side of the continent were a foreboding place of dark legends, rumoured to be inhabited by strange tribes and all manner of monsters. Long before Europeans reached the mountains, they heard fabulous tales of what lurked there. In the 1660s, the French missionary Claude-Jean Allouez reported that his native guide had “made mention of another nation, adjoining the Assinipoualac, who eat human beings, and live wholly on raw flesh; but these people, in turn, are eaten by bears of frightful size, all red, and with prodigiously long claws.” Other explorers heard similar tales when they sailed along the uncharted coastline of the Pacific Northwest. In 1792, the Spanish explorer José Mariano Mociño recorded what may be one of the oldest “sasquatch” stories:

I do not know what to say about the Matlox, inhabitant of the mountainous districts, of whom all have unbelievable fear. They imagine his body as very monstrous, all covered with stiff black bristles; a head similar to a human one but much greater, sharper and stronger fangs than a bear; extremely long arms; and toes and fingers armed with long curved claws. His shouts alone (they say) force those who hear them to the ground, and any unfortunate body he slaps is broken into a thousand pieces.

The tribes along the coast that Mociño met with lived in permanent villages with large cedar houses, elaborate artwork, totem poles, wooden armour, and huge ocean-going war canoes. They looked upon the mysterious tribes of the interior as primitive, half-savages that wandered the forests in small bands like animals. They called these uncouth wanderers “
sésq'
ə
c
,” a Salish word meaning “wild man.” In English, “
sésq'
ə
c
” later became sasquatch. These traditions were garbled up with tales of the grizzly bear—a huge, shaggy-haired creature that stands up to three metres on its hind legs—to create the legendary sasquatch. At least, not believing that such a thing as Bigfoot exists, this was the theory I had formulated based on an examination of archival explorers' journals and research on aboriginal oral traditions.

One of the more intriguing sasquatch accounts that I came across was in the pages of David Thompson's journal. Thompson, an explorer with few equals who mapped more of North America than any other person, penetrated the Rockies from the east in 1811. In the dead of winter, he recorded a singular experience:

January 5: … we are now entering the defiles of the Rocky Mountains by the Athabasca River … strange to say, here is a strong belief that the haunt of the Mammoth is about this defile … I questioned several (Indians), none could positively say they had seen him, but their belief I found firm and not to be shaken.… All I could say did not shake their belief in his existence …

January 7: Continuing on our journey in the afternoon we came on the track of a large animal, the snow about six inches deep on the ice; I measured it; four large toes each of four inches in length to each a short claw; the ball of the foot sunk three inches lower than the toes, the hinder part of the foot did not mark well, the length fourteen inches, by eight inches in breadth, walking from north to south, and having passed about six hours. We were in no humour to follow him; the men and Indians would have it to be a young Mammoth and I held it to be the track of a large old grizzled bear; yet the shortness of the nails, the ball of the foot, and its great size were not that of a bear, otherwise that of a very large old bear, his claws worn away; this the Indians would not allow.

Thompson's encounter likely reflects the grizzly bear contribution to the sasquatch legend, as he himself seemed to believe. Other explorers made similar observations about strange tracks, unknown noises in the night, and legends of monsters prowling in the mountains. I found a hint of the other side of the myth—the stories of “wild men” high up in the mountains—in the diary
of Paul Kane, an artist and explorer. Kane noted in his March 26, 1847, journal entry:

When we arrived at the mouth of the Kattlepoutal River, twenty-six miles distant from Vancouver, I stopped to make a sketch of the volcano, Mt. St. Helens, distant, I suppose, about thirty or forty miles. This mountain has never been visited by either whites or Indians; the latter assert that it is inhabited by a race of beings of a different species, who are cannibals, and whom they hold in great dread … these superstitions are taken from the statement of a man who, they say, went into the mountain with another, and escaped the fate of his companion, who was eaten by the “skoocooms”.… I offered a considerable bribe to any Indian who would accompany me in its exploration but could not find one hardy enough to venture there.