Alone Against the North (4 page)

In spite of the scarcity of documentary evidence, I could be certain that some people had been to at least a few portions of the river. Fur trappers and occasional canoeists would surely have passed by its outlet on the much larger Harricanaw River. A few of them might even have ventured a short distance up its meandering course, fighting against the presumably swift current. The Harricanaw, while never a major trade route because of its shallow depth and many rapids, served as a minor fur trade river and is still canoed sporadically by wilderness enthusiasts. It would have been paddled by hunter-gatherers for centuries and was first explored by Europeans in the seventeenth century. Even the young Pierre Trudeau had paddled it in the 1940s. But these people had only canoed the Harricanaw and hadn't wasted their time attempting to fight their way up its rock-strewn, swift-flowing tributaries.

It was also evident that during the surveys of the Ontario– Quebec boundary, a small party of government surveyors must have at least criss-crossed the Again at the two points where the artificial boundary crossed the river. Locating these surveyors' records would offer me the best (and only) written clues as to what I could expect on the river and the extent to which it had been previously explored. But I couldn't find their records and neither could the archivists who were assisting me in my search.

So, having exhausted the published record and finding next to nothing, I resolved to explore this mysterious river, of which no one apparently knew much of anything. Whether someone had canoed the river and left no record of their journey was of course no concern of mine. My objective was simple enough: to make the first detailed exploration of and substantial published account on the Again River in history. The idea alone—the first in history—was positively intoxicating.

While there were no written records to assist me in my planned exploration of the river, maps and satellite images were available. These enabled me to plan a provisional route through half-a-dozen lakes, partially down a parallel river, up a nameless creek, and then overland to reach the Again's isolated headwaters. It was a circuitous and difficult route that would entail upstream travel and nightmarish portages through presumably impenetrable swamp forest. Of course, nothing less could be expected. Topographic maps, however, can still be inaccurate or incomplete. Waterfalls and rapids might be omitted; streams that are drawn on the map might not actually exist. This, I knew, could well prove the case with the Again River.

What I did know about the Again, on the basis of blurry, low-resolution satellite images and old topographic maps derived from black-and-white aerial photographs snapped in the late 1950s, was that it measured some 107 kilometres in length. It wasn't surprising that the Again had attracted little attention: it's too small and marginal to be of much interest to most wilderness canoeists, particularly since the Hudson and James Bay watershed contains many dozens of larger, more navigable waterways. For example, the Albany, the longest river in the Hudson Bay Lowlands, extends over a thousand kilometres. I could be certain that the blackflies and other bloodsucking insects would be horrible, since the Again snakes across the southern reaches of the world's third-largest wetland, the Hudson Bay Lowlands. In terms of political geography, the Again meanders back and forth across the artificial Ontario–Quebec boundary, with a total of approximately 63 kilometres of the river within Ontario and 44 within Quebec. I could tell from the black-and-white aerial photos and topographic maps that I would encounter many rapids. The river might also possibly contain waterfalls, but how big and dangerous they were as well as their precise location were unknown.

My intention was to make the expedition as comprehensive as possible. The primary objective was geographical: I would make the first published description of the river, creating a canoeing guide of the sort that exists for other wilderness waterways. I would also keep a record of the wildlife I encountered and, with luck, photograph them. There was also the mystery of the Eskimo curlew to consider, a rare bird believed to have gone extinct. The last confirmed sighting of this
medium-sized brownish shorebird, a member of the sandpiper family, had been in the 1960s. But there had been an unconfirmed sighting in 1976 by an ornithologist in southern James Bay, an area I intended to pass through after exploring the Again. In terms of archaeological exploration, I would keep an eye out for any artifacts that could shed light on the unwritten history of the river. Ancient pictographs and petroglyphs—rock paintings and carvings—were a speciality of my academic research. Finally, I would make what inquiries I could in the Cree communities on James Bay concerning the existence of the Again River to ascertain as far as possible if any individuals there knew anything of it.

Finding this little-known river and exploring it was a chance for adventure and old-fashioned discovery, or so I hoped.

A FEW MONTHS LATER
I was in a pickup truck, travelling along a bumpy gravel road, winding through monotonous boreal forest, heading toward the point where I would leave civilization behind and go to seek the Again River. In the passenger seat was clean-shaven Terry O'Neil, a, genial old-timer who made extra cash shuttling canoeists and hunters to various rivers and hunting camps across northern Ontario and Quebec. Driving was my father, who had decided—quite unexpectedly—to come along on my expedition. We were on the fringes of the northern wilderness heading some two hundred kilometres northeast of Cochrane, a small logging town located over six hundred kilometres north of Toronto.

My father, an engineer and woodsman extraordinaire, built canoes, among other things. He had countless camping trips
under his belt, but he had never undertaken a true expedition: his preference was for idyllic paddles on picturesque lakes, not the gruelling ordeals through mosquito-infested swamps to unexplored rivers that I favoured. At forty-nine, he felt that this was perhaps his last chance to join me on one of my notorious expeditions. Notorious, because generally anyone who had ever accompanied me on an expedition swiftly arrived at the conclusion that—while proud to have done it—they would not readily subject themselves to such a discomforting experience ever again. While I too enjoyed leisurely canoe trips, they're not the stuff adventures are made of, the trailblazing expeditions into the unknown that I hungered for.

Back in Cochrane, Terry had taken down our information in the event that we didn't return from the wilderness. He had been under the impression that our objective was merely to canoe the Kattawagami River, a wild enough waterway, but one easily accessible via a remote unserviced highway that snakes northeast of Cochrane to an old gold mine—the gravel road we were travelling on. The Kattawagami attracts adventurers down its winding, rapid-filled course, but by my standards, it's well-explored territory.

“To tell you the truth,” said Terry from the front passenger seat, as we drove along the road, “I don't like shuttling people to the Kattawagami. I prefer going other places.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

Terry stared out the passenger window for a while at the passing spruce forest, then, clearing his throat, he explained, “Well, the last time I shuttled someone to attempt the Kattawagami, it was a young couple. Only one of them came back alive.”

“Do you know what happened?”

“Their canoe upset in a rapid. The wife drowned. The guy survived. He was delirious when search and rescue found him. You don't get over something like that. He's in a mental institution now.”

My father swallowed hard. “Terrible,” he mumbled.

Later I found a newspaper article about it. In 2006 Zanna Marie Cruikshank and her husband Derek attempted to canoe the Kattawagami. Zanna, a nurse, was described as an “avid outdoor enthusiast.” Their canoe capsized in a dangerous rapid; Zanna was killed. Her husband survived and managed to continue downriver for several more days, until he stumbled across a trapper's cabin. The trapper, according to the story, brought him to the nearest hospital—a considerable distance away in Moosonee, a small Cree community. Zanna's body was later found in a shallow bay on the river. Nor was this the only recent tragedy in the area—two months earlier, some hundred kilometres to the southeast, there had been a fatal bear attack. A woman had been mauled to death and her corpse partially consumed by a black bear outside an isolated hunting cabin.

“The Kattawagami's right up here,” Terry pointed to the narrow bridge just up ahead.

“We don't want the Kattawagami,” I said.

“You don't want the Katt?” Terry asked, surprised.

“No, we want a different waterway, a small creek. It's called Hopper Creek on the map. It drains into the Kattawagami. We want to explore it as a different route to reach the Kattawagami. Do you know it?”

“Ah, no. I've never heard of it. Where is it?”

“
Just a bit farther, roughly another twenty-four kilometres past the Kattawagami.” I knew this because I had measured the distance between the bridge over the Kattawagami and the creek via satellite image ahead of time, and then kept track of the distance on the truck's odometer once we had passed the bridge.

“Fellas, I don't know this creek, never heard of it. Not sure you guys should go down it. You should stick to the Kattawagami.” Terry was uneasy.

But I had not come all that way to paddle the Kattawagami, a river plenty of other people had already paddled. The days when paddling something like it would satisfy me were long past. My father, on the other hand, had never canoed any northern river and was starting to become a bit alarmed at the sight of them, as we passed over each bridge on the road north.

“Maybe we should just do the Kattawagami?” he suggested.

I shook my head. “Let's stick with our plan. We're heading to the Again River.”

“The what river?”

“The Again. Have you heard of it?”

“No.” Terry shook his head.

As we drove deeper into the seemingly endless spruce forest, a wandering black bear crossed the gravel road in front of us. “This is God's country, I've never been this far down the road before,” muttered Terry.

“Keep going,” I said to my father behind the wheel, “everything will be fine.” Fifteen minutes later, we reached a tiny creek shrouded in alder bushes and clouds of blackflies.

“This must be it,” I said with excitement. My father and Terry looked appalled.

HUDSON BAY LOWLANDS

It was raining as Terry drove away in the truck, leaving us by the narrow stream packing a cedar-strip canoe my father and I had made. Shallow and rocky, the creek was only a couple of paddle-widths across, but with a swift current. Amid an onslaught of blackflies, we set off down the dark, swirling waters of the stream into the unknown. It proved barely navigable—choked with rock-strewn rapids that made wading necessary much of the time. Scrubby black spruces and lichen-draped tamaracks hemmed in the waterway, while granite outcrops and boulders as tall as us appeared in places along the banks. It might almost have been called pretty, if not for the swampy muskeg that lay just beyond the fringe of forest skirting the banks and the dismal hum of millions of mosquitoes and blackflies swarming us, enjoying our blood. A gruelling, day-long struggle down the creek brought us to where it joined the swift-flowing Kattawagami River. By nightfall, we reached the shallow waters of a large, weedy lake. On this lake, isolated as it was, stood a lonely, ramshackle hunting cabin that appeared to have been untouched in years.

For the next three days, we hacked, paddled, portaged, and waded through trackless alder swamps to leave the Kattawagami watershed behind. That was enough exploration for my father. He had nothing to prove to anyone—and to him, the Again River was just a meandering blue line on a map—not an ideal. As darkness fell on the third day, my father announced that he was calling it quits and wanted to turn around. I was disappointed but couldn't force him to continue. So I had to content myself with having explored Hopper Creek and a certain nameless tributary river that we had ventured up, as well as the alder
swamps. My father, in contrast, was cheerful enough with a more leisurely form of exploration around our camps at night. He looked at the hardy trees growing in the acidic soil with an engineer's appreciation: “170 years old—remarkable,” he would say in a sort of reverie, after having meticulously counted the rings on another black spruce that had toppled over. In his notebook, he compiled a list of all the flora he found growing along the riverbanks.

When we eventually returned to the isolated mining road, our legs were scraped and cut from the jagged rocks and fallen trees hidden beneath the swift waters, through which we had laboriously dragged the canoe against the current. Our faces were swollen and cut with blackfly bites. My father resolved not to go on any further expeditions, but my determination to explore the Again River remained as strong as ever.