Far North (3 page)

W
ITH DAYLIGHT FALLING
off by more than ten minutes a day and the cold attacking as we ran between classes, the dark subarctic winter was approaching, and the menace of it seemed to stretch endlessly ahead. It was early October, and homesickness was going around the boarding school like a bad virus. Though they were accustomed to the cold and the darkness, the native kids from all over Canada's North seemed to have almost no immunity to homesickness. A half dozen had already dropped out and gone home. “Dropping like flies” is how some of the boom kids put it.

I was worried about Raymond. When he looked at things, including me, he didn't really seem to be seeing them. The sadness in his eyes was unmistakable. This gray school and the gray
skies were enough to dampen anyone's spirits.

I took a walk after school one day and ended up wandering inside the public rink where the school hockey team was practicing. I spotted Raymond up in the stands watching, and I joined him. We didn't say anything for quite a while, and then I asked him how it was going. He said, “Everything's too hard here. Back home, I used to be good in math. But this algebra…I don't get it. I don't see why they have to put letters in with the numbers.”

“I know what you mean,” I told him. “I had algebra last year. I thought it was going to kill me, but finally I got the hang of it. I can show you if you want.”

“Could you?” he said, and I said, “Sure.” We went back to watching the hockey practice. “Are these guys any good?” I asked him.

“Some of 'em are real good.”

“How come you didn't go out for the team?”

“I dunno. I just like to play. At Nahanni we always just get some guys together. People come and go from the game. It's no big deal; everybody gets to play.”

“Can't you just get a few guys together and come and play here on your own?”

“It's reserved for clubs and schools and stuff.”

He looked awfully down to me. I said, “I still haven't even been on skates. You think you could find me a pair of skates and a hockey stick?”

“Sure, I guess. Then what?”

“Tomorrow night, let's see if we can sort of forget to leave when they close up. Maybe play some one-on-one?”

“You kidding?”

That's just what we did. As it turned out, there was enough moonlight streaming through the windows that we didn't even have to turn on the lights. Raymond was beautiful, dancing all around the ice with that puck while I was flapping around the rink like a wounded goose, laughing at myself and just trying to keep on my feet. Every time Raymond would slap the puck into the net, I'd yell, “Score!” That smile never left his face the whole time, no sadness in his eyes. It was perfect. We didn't even get caught sneaking back into the dorm. “That was way cool,” he said.

“Where'd you learn to talk like that?”

“TV, I guess.”

I gave him a poke. “It'll rot your mind, you know.”

“You read too much. Your head will get too big.”

“Then what?”

His eyebrows lifted way up and then dropped.
“Explode, I guess.”

After that, Raymond and I started spending more time together. I helped him with his algebra, and he was picking up on it fast. We found out there was open hockey on Sunday afternoons. I'd sit in the stands and watch him skate circles around guys. People were telling him he should be on the school team. Back in our room, I called him the Great One. I told him he'd have no trouble making the team.

He thought that was pretty funny. “Sure, Gabe. I'm Wayne Gretzky like you're a scout for the Edmonton Oilers.”

“Still, you should talk to the coach—maybe it's not too late to sign up.”

“Maybe next year,” he said. “Tell you what—I'll go out if you go out.”

“Sure, Raymond. But by the time I'm ready for the school team, you'd be ready to retire after your big career in the NHL.”

Everything seemed better. I thought he was over the hump.

Right before our three-day weekend at the end of October, I got a call from Clint. He said to meet him at the floatplane dock first thing in the morning if I wanted to do some sightseeing. I realized that my father had come through for me, and
I was going to get to do some flying.

Clint was saying that he hadn't heard where he was flying to yet, but he'd been hired by a Dene council to take a kid and a village elder back home. “Wear everything you have that's warm and then some,” he was saying. “A polar bear would freeze to death inside that airplane!”

With the memory of my van ride with Clint not all that distant, I'd have liked it better if it had been some other pilot, but then, beggars can't be choosers.

I never had a chance to talk my flying plan over with Raymond. When I drifted off to sleep it was past curfew, and he still hadn't showed up.

In the morning I was raring to go. No guts, no glory, I told myself. Raymond had slept right through my alarm and was sleeping so soundly I didn't want to wake him up. In a couple of days, I figured, I'd be back and could tell him about my big adventure. I remembered Clint's warning and wore all my warm stuff, the thermal underwear and even the wool trousers instead of my jeans. I stuffed my daypack with a couple of changes of underwear, some spare socks, my huge mittens, and my toothbrush.

I left Raymond a note saying I was going flying, pulled on my ski gloves, and hurried through the
empty streets making vapor clouds every time I exhaled. It was 7:00 A.M., an hour before first daylight. There was a good buildup of ice along the shores of Yellowknife Bay.

Clint was already there, fueling the floatplane. In a winter flying suit with a fur ruff around the hood, he looked the part of the dashing bush pilot. “Hey, Stump,” he called. “Good to see you dressed warm. Starting to cool off, eh?”

“Hammer's coming down,” I agreed.

“Getting close—you'll know it when you see it. Freeze-up on the lakes and rivers is coming any day. Then the hammer. After this trip, we're switching all the planes from floats to skis.”

Clint's passengers were supposed to have been ready to go at dawn. He told me about the bush plane as we waited for them. It was a red-and-white Cessna 185, single-prop, two seats in the front, two close behind, a very small cargo area behind that. Somehow I'd expected a bigger airplane. “Great old plane,” Clint said. “It'll lift about anything you can stuff into it.”

Dawn came and went, other planes were taking off, and Clint was muttering, “We're burning daylight.” We went back inside the office, where it was warm. Clint glanced at his watch and I looked at mine.

“Hey, that's some watch you got there,” Clint said. “Looks pretty high-tech.”

“Bombproof, too,” I said proudly. “My dad just got it for me.” I fished my new pocketknife out and showed him that as well. Clint was impressed with the titanium handle. “Never seen one of these before. It's really light—much lighter than a regular pocketknife.”

Ten o'clock rolled around, and still nobody had showed. Clint was muttering to himself now. We went back out to the airplane. “Too late to get there today,” he said. “Can't fly in the dark—do they think this is a 747?”

“So where are we going?” I asked.

“Nahanni Butte.”

I had a sinking feeling. “You said you were taking a kid home?”

“And an old man who's been in the hospital. The kid's dropping out of school.”

“What school?”

“Yours. It happens all the time.”

Just then I looked up and saw a slender old man with a light duffel bag coming toward the ramp. He was squinting as he took a look at the floatplane. His hair was as white as a polar bear's fur and just as thick, though not very long. His skin was a light brown. He was dressed in a cloth
parka that looked homemade, and he was wearing tall moccasins that were tied with thongs at the ankle and calf.

“Here's one,” Clint said. “And here comes the other.”

It was Raymond, toting that big duffel bag, his hockey stick, and that red electric guitar.

R
AYMOND'S EYES TOOK
in a glimpse of me, and then they stuck on the ground. He looked embarrassed, defeated. The old man with the thick white hair looked distant and sad.

“Why didn't you tell me you were going back home?” I asked Raymond. “I had no idea.”

“It didn't seem like it was any use,” he muttered. “Then you would've tried to talk me into staying.”

“You bet I would have! You should have told me!”

“I know. I was going to tell you this morning, but when I woke up, you were gone.”

“But how come you're leaving?”

Raymond kept his eyes on the ground. I just kept waiting. Then he said, “At home I can get up when I want to, I can stay up all night if I want to,
I can play hockey any time I want, I can play guitar any time I want, I can go hunting with my dad if I want to, I can mess around with my friends…nobody makes any rules.”

“But you said it was boring back home.”

Clint leaned between us and said, “I hate to rush you guys, but we're burning daylight, and daylight is precious.” As he grabbed their duffels, I gave him a hand with Raymond's heavy bag—everything he'd brought to school was in there. We stowed all the stuff behind the backseat, Clint arranging the load carefully around a couple of army-green metal boxes. “What's in these?” I asked.

“Those are ammo boxes,” Clint replied. “Army surplus—they make good waterproof storage. We've got some food in 'em and some other survival gear.”

Clint jumped back out and helped the old man into the plane through a little hatch door on the left side that gave access to the rear seats. Then Raymond climbed in. I jumped in front with Clint. I was all keyed up about my first flight ever in a bush plane. I glanced back at Raymond, wishing he was sharing in the excitement. His face had about as much expression as a wooden mask. What were people back home going to think
about him dropping out of school?

Inside the airplane, doing his cockpit check, Clint seemed about ten years older than he had when he was driving the van. All business. I was feeling reassured seeing him throwing switches and pulling levers and talking over the radio while my eyes were scanning the complicated array of gauges and controls that he was reading and manipulating by second nature.

Clint told us to wear our headsets or we'd wreck our hearing, the engine was going to make such a racket. As soon as he fired it up I could see what he meant. Our headsets had mouthpieces that swung out in front of our faces. Clint switched on the intercom and started talking to us through our headsets. “Don't talk to me when I'm taking off or landing,” he instructed us. “Otherwise it's fine.” Then that boyish grin of his was back. He said, “Don't worry about this old ship. It's got a lot of experience—it's seven years older than I am!”

I clenched my teeth as he taxied out onto the bay. As much as I wanted to fly, I still had a knot in my stomach. I remembered my father saying once, “It's a rare bush pilot who ends up in a rest home.” I had a feeling Clint was not destined for the rocking chair.

Our pilot suddenly yelled, “Let's open up the tap and pour on the coal! With that he started his takeoff run. Water sprayed high on both sides, and with a sudden lift we were airborne.

Before long we were flying over an arm of the Great Slave Lake. Ice was showing all along the shore. Out Clint's side of the airplane I could see the open lake, vast like an inland sea. In another hour it would be noon, but the sun was pathetically low by Texas standards for the thirtieth of October.

For hours I saw mostly swampy lowlands peppered with stunted trees—not a single cabin, not a single moose. Nobody was talking over the intercom, not even Clint. Maybe we were too cold to talk among ourselves. I was flexing my toes inside the best winter boots money can buy. Raymond was hunched up against the cold and his teeth were chattering. He had his winter boots on, winter gloves, wool cap, but not enough under his parka. I couldn't tell how the old man was doing because he was seated directly behind me. I wondered why he'd been in the hospital.

At last Clint broke the long silence. “After the late start we got, we're going to have to put down in Fort Simpson for the night. We'll fly on to Nahanni Butte in the morning.”

As we approached Fort Simpson on the Mackenzie River, I took in the vastness of the Northwest Territories' biggest waterway. More than a mile wide, the Mackenzie made a spectacular sight. Scattered cakes of ice were floating in the river, and the water was reflecting the pinks and oranges of the sunset. We could see a tributary nearly as big—the Liard River—joining the Mackenzie barely upstream. It was only 4:00 P.M. when we splashed down, but day was done. The Mackenzie was headed for the Arctic Ocean, and we were headed for a couple of rooms in the tiny town above us on the bluff. In the morning we'd follow the Liard River up to Nahanni Butte.

We all ate supper together at the café. It was a pretty silent, gloomy meal, I'd have to say. I still hadn't heard a word out of the old man. Then Clint and I went to our room and watched TV. I would've rather been with Raymond, but when we checked in, Raymond had said he wanted to room with the old man from his village. Probably he didn't want me asking him more questions or trying to talk him into changing his mind. I mentioned to Clint that Raymond had been my roommate at school. Clint shrugged and said, “I guessed it was something like that. Don't feel bad about it. They drop out all the time.”

Surfing the channels, Clint got all excited when he found a rodeo from the Cow Palace in San Francisco—highlights, actually, right as the show was ending. “I can't believe I missed it,” he said. “You ever rodeo down in Texas?”

“Never did,” I said, “but I've been thrown by a horse, if that counts.”

“I'll count it,” he said. “Bull ridin' was my game.”

“No kidding?”

“Rode in the Calgary Stampede when I was nineteen. I was a hometown boy.”

“Hey, I've heard of the Calgary Stampede.”

“I'm not surprised. Calgary's big time.”

“How come you gave it up?”

“For flying. Not even hockey and bull riding beat flying.”

After breakfast on the last day of October, Clint fueled the airplane and we started southwest up the Liard River, which was lined with cottonwoods. Raymond was still stuck in his gloom. If he'd made a good decision, I wished he felt a little happier about it. Clint was in good spirits, which lifted mine. I'd left the boarding school behind and I was out taking a look at the Northwest Territories.

It was a sunny day, and Clint was delighted
with the flying conditions. I noticed he couldn't keep his eyes off the mountains to the north and west of us.

Everywhere I could see, the forest below was crisscrossed with bulldozed paths running straight as arrows and ending on the horizon. They made a strange sight in the middle of nowhere. Clint explained that they were left over from the last boom—something to do with sonic testing for oil and gas.

Clint looked over at me, and he had a conspiratorial grin on his face. “We should go take a look at the falls on the Nahanni,” he said. “Remember me telling you about it—Virginia Falls?”

“Twice as high as Niagara, right?”

“Hey, what do you guys in the back think of taking a little detour—doing some sightseeing before we take you home?” Clint asked over the intercom.

I looked over my shoulder at Raymond. He said, “Whatever you want.” We heard nothing from the old man.

“Raymond, have you ever seen Virginia Falls?” Clint continued.

“Never been up there.”

“Never seen the canyons either?”

Raymond shook his head.

“Well then,” Clint said, delighted with himself. “It's settled. We've got a perfect day for it. I'm going to give you guys a sightseeing tour you'll never forget.”

With that he banked the plane to the north and west, at the same time letting out a big whoop. “Let's go find the source of the South Nahanni River! Follow it down to the falls and then all the way down to Nahanni Butte!”