Northern Borders (39 page)

All my life, from my first great journey up to Lost Nation at the age of six on the Montreal Flyer, I have found traveling north to be an exhilarating experience. Now as our ancient Canadian National passenger coach crowded with miners, fishermen, and Montagnais Indian hunters and guides rattled up into the vast taiga of the Canadian Shield, I realized that I was entering an altogether different land from any I'd ever imagined, a land of deep woods and mountains stretching for hundreds of miles and broken only by glacial lakes and wild white-water rivers. My grandfather, however, regarded the magnificent scenery with a frown.

Directly across the wooden aisle from us sat a youngish-looking man in jeans and a bulky blue sweater embroidered with a bright silver salmon, a polar bear, an eagle with a gleaming white head, and a caribou. His hair was coal-black and very thick, he had sad, almond-shaped eyes, and on his face, when he glanced at me, was the most sorrowful expression I'd ever seen. Half an hour out of Sept-Îles my grandfather offered him a White Owl and fired up one for himself, whereupon the man with the lugubrious countenance began to talk a blue streak. He told us that his name was Donny Snowball, and he was an Inuit guide and trapper from Ungava Bay. He'd been to Quebec City to visit his sister for a couple of weeks. That was all he could stand of any city at one time, he assured us. And where, if he might inquire, were we headed?

When my grandfather explained that we were going up into the Barrens beyond the Snow Chain Mountains, Mr. Snowball shook his head and looked more somber still.

“What's the matter?” Gramp asked.

“Nothing,” Mr. Donny Snowball said. “You'll probably die up there, is all.”

“Die up there! What are you talking about?”

“That's what usually happens when white men go out in the bush alone without a guide who knows the country,” Mr. Snowball said, taking a satisfied puff at his cigar. “They die.”

“Do they now?” My grandfather nudged me. “How do they usually die?”

“They drown in the rapids,” Mr. Snowball said more cheerfully. “Just last summer five white fishermen went down the George River without a guide. That can be a bad river, the George. Full of white water. Three of them drowned. That was really too bad.”

“What happened to the other two men?”

“What other two?”

“The two that didn't drown. You said there were five and three drowned. That leaves two.”

“That's so,” Mr. Snowball said, brightening up a little more. “The blackflies got to them and they went bush-crazy.”

“We've got plenty of bug dope,” my grandfather said. “You wouldn't be trying to scare this young fella here, would you?”

“Oh, no,” Mr. Snowball said matter-of-factly. “What good
would being scared do him? Either he'll drown or go bush-crazy or he won't. Being scared won't help. What you fellas need is a good experienced guide. Without one I wouldn't think you'd last a week. This is a good cigar.”

“Have you been up there?” my grandfather asked. “In the Great Corner?”

“Hardly nobody's ever been up there,” Mr. Snowball said. “That's a bad country. Rivers too rocky to canoe. Witch mirages. Then you got the tall white Indian ghosts.”

“The ghosts?” my grandfather said.

“Sure. The Great Corner, that's where the ghosts of the tall white Indians live. They'll kill you if they catch you. Even the Montagnais don't go there. A few did, long time ago. The tall white Indian ghosts got them. Better not to go there at all. Rivers up there are worse than the George.”

“These ghosts,” I said. “Ghosts of who?”

“I guess we won't be canoeing any rivers quite as big as the George,” my grandfather said. “We're going up the Tree Line River. Are you familiar with that one?”

“Yes,” Mr. Snowball said. “A nice young man from Toronto and his bride of two months went up to the Tree Line two summers ago. That's a much smaller river than the George. It looks very innocent. But they lost their canoe in the white water. Then the husband caught pneumonia. A few days later he died.”

“What happened to his wife?” I asked.

“Well, she tried to keep going on foot. Hoped to come to something, maybe a fishing camp? But it was terrible walking and she didn't understand the bush at all and there aren't no fishing camps up there. So she wrote what happened to her husband on some cliffs by the river. With a lipstick? Later a rescue party found the writing. Never the woman, though. I wonder what she wanted a lipstick for in the bush, anyway?

“Then you've always got lightning fires,” he went on in a downright gleeful vein, though his face was as sorrowful as ever. “Last summer half western Labrador took fire. Three uranium prospectors, educated gentlemen from the States, took refuge from the flames on a big island. Fire jumped a mile to the island on the wind and got them anyway. Not to mention starvation and exposure, like
what happened to Mr. Leonidas Hubbard. You've got to watch out for late-summer blizzards, too. Catch you out unprepared and kill you in a few short hours. Do you know about late-summer blizzards?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” my grandfather said. “You can't best this fella, Austen. He's got a catastrophe for every occasion.”

“Oh, sure,” Mr. Donny Snowball said. “That's generally what happens to white men alone in the Far North. They meet with catastrophe.”

I was alarmed by Mr. Snowball's grim prophecies. But my grandfather said it cheered him up beyond measure to meet a man this gloomy. He added that if he ever needed a guide, he knew where to find a good one.

“Not for the Great Lost Corner, though,” Mr. Snowball said, and he appeared to be totally serious. “That's all going to be flooded out anyway, and when it is, nobody in the Labrador's going to shed no tears. I don't want to talk about it anymore now for a while. It makes my skin creep all over just to think about the Great Lost Corner.”

Farther north, the scenery became still wilder, with long ranges of hills on which nothing seemed to flourish but granite outcroppings and gray caribou moss. In the middle of the afternoon it began to snow. Soon afterward I fell asleep. When I woke up my grandfather was leaning across the aisle, deep in conversation with Mr. Snowball, who was studying one of Gramp's maps with great interest. I had the vague impression that they were calculating how far north the inland sea from the hydro dam would spread, but almost immediately I drifted off again, and this time when I woke, Mr. Donny Snowball was asleep and my grandfather was staring out the window at a huge lake still partly frozen, with the same brooding scowl I'd first noticed a month ago at home in Lost Nation, as if he were withdrawing into the untamed land itself.

 

The electric blue and silver currents shot up and down the night sky from horizon to zenith until I felt connected to all Labrador by them. Although it was past eleven p.m., the brief subarctic night
had just set in. Soon flaring pinks and greens and yellows mingled with the silver and blue. I sat by our campfire transfixed, temporarily forgetting all about my aching shoulders, the fiery pains in my back, and my blistered hands.

For the past seven days, from the first gray light of dawn until twilight, my grandfather and I had been on the water or portaging around unnavigable rapids. We'd passed through spectacularly wild country, encountered scores of fishing ospreys and eagles, several remarkably large and unafraid black bears, numerous small groups of woodland caribou. The trout fishing, what little we'd done of it, had been phenomenal. But as we pushed on into the Labrador interior, stopping only long enough for my grandfather to make rough measurements with his surveying transit and notes for the maps he drew before turning in each night, his face hardened into a somber, determined cast, and he seemed more haunted by his private brooding than ever.

My grandfather's nearly obsessive determination to map every last feature we passed perplexed me. He thought nothing of pushing up small, incredibly swampy or rocky tributaries to discover a new lake, spending half a day hiking to a ridge offering a panoramic view of the surrounding territory, and working on his maps by firelight for two or three hours after I'd turned in for the night, so that he often slept no more than a couple of hours.

“What's the point of it?” I finally asked him. “I can understand exploring the country. Seeing it for a last time. But every last lake and stream and island and river and esker you're drawing will be under water in a year or two. What's the sense of mapping them?”

“Because they've never been mapped, and that's what a surveyor and a cartographer does, Austen. There needs to be a record of all this wild country, goddamn it. There needs to be a record of what it was like before it disappeared.”

“What practical use are your maps going to be to anybody? Once it's gone?”

“That's a shortsighted question. There doesn't have to be any practical use to a map to make it worthwhile. Besides, they'll be useful to you and me. We'll know where we've been. Maybe some places no one else ever went before.”

“Or ever will again,” I said.

Obviously, nothing was going to deter my grandfather from his self-appointed mission. Yet more than once it crossed my mind that Gramp might be making the maps so that if he collapsed on a portage or while tracking the canoe up a bad stretch of river, I could find my way out alone.

“Well, Austen,” he said suddenly as we watched the spectacle of the northern lights, “now you know why the early explorers called Labrador the land God gave to Cain.”

For the first time in days I laughed. “Who else but Cain would want it?”

“You've got a point there. But remember, old Cain was a hunter. He'd have been right at home up here.”

I was bone-tired and ready to turn in. But as the fire began to die down, my grandfather picked up a stick and drew an oval in the sand near the embers. “This is Tree Line Lake, Austen. It's about another three weeks from here. A month at the most, by my calculations.”

Leading out of the top of the lake, he scratched a crooked line a couple of feet long. “This is the Rivière de la Mort. Up here, near where it rises, is No Name Mountain and the Great Lost Corner. And here, about halfway up the river, was the base camp of the Indians I stayed with when the 1910 survey ended. That's our first destination.”

Suddenly I was keenly interested in what my grandfather was telling me. This was the first time he'd mentioned an old Indian camp. I wondered if these were the same tall white Indians whose ghosts Mr. Donny Snowball had mentioned to us back on the bush train. Might they still be lurking in the vicinity, waiting for two unsuspecting explorers who didn't know the country?

My grandfather shook his head. “I don't think the white Indians or anyone else has been up that way for years, Austen. Decades maybe.”

“You mean there really were white Indians? I thought Mr. Snowball was just trying to scare us.”

“No doubt he was. But there actually were white Indians. The Indians I stayed with were white Indians. There were probably
never more than a few hundred of them to start out with. By the time I got to know them, there were no more than a dozen or so. They were the last ones so far as I know, and I imagine they've long since died out entirely.”

“You never told me these were white Indians,” I said. “What's a white Indian anyway?”

“Just what young Snowball said. Except they weren't ghosts. Blue-eyed Indians, white Indians, Beothuks. All names for the same tribe. They were lighter than the local Montagnais, and quite a bit taller, though the Montagnais are a tall people themselves, like the Sioux. Most of the Beothuk men were well over six feet and so were a number of the women. One tale I heard is that they were descended in part from Viking settlers. Originally they were from Newfoundland, but the early settlers up there, the whalers and fishermen, hunted them down for sport, the bloodthirsty sons of bitches. A few survivors escaped across the straits to Labrador and took refuge way up here in the interior, where nobody could get at 'em. The rest were just annihilated, I presume.”

“Did they really have blue eyes, Gramp?”

My grandfather paused. Then he said, “Some of them did. Gray-blue, anyway. The old fella that called himself their chief had gray-blue eyes, and so did a couple of his kids. Whether they really traced back to the Vikings I have no idea. I suppose it's possible. Or more likely they got thrown in with a few old blue-eyed Hudson Bay Post traders. The whole point of this is I want to see that old camp again before it's flooded out. I want you to see it, too.”

Abruptly, before I had a chance to ask more questions, my grandfather stood up and kicked sand over the fire. “Time to turn in, Austen,” he said. “There'll be light in the sky by three. We'll be on the water soon afterward.”

Fatigued as I was, I did not fall asleep immediately that night. I was far too excited over my grandfather's revelations about the white Indians. Why, I wondered, hadn't he ever mentioned their light color and blue eyes to me before? Were they, in fact, the descendants of Vikings? In his own good time, my grandfather might tell me more. Meanwhile, I was terrifically eager to reach the
old encampment. For me too, now, our journey had suddenly become something of a mission.

 

For the next three weeks my grandfather toiled across that trackless country like a driven man. I no longer asked if we could stop to fish, though everywhere trout rose in great numbers to natural flies. We continued to map the main land features, and to name the lakes and rivers, doomed though they were. Mount Sojourner, for my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Sojourner Kittredge. Lake Whiskeyjack for our old reprobate cousin. The Little Abiah River, in honor of my grandmother, not to mention Fiddler's Elbow Falls, Lake Kingdom, Upper Lost Nation Stream and Lower Lost Nation Stream, and a host of other designations reminiscent of the topography of Kingdom County, a thousand miles to the south. My grandfather kept his maps and notebooks in a flat steel case in our big wooden grub box, along with our flour and sugar and tea, a couple of dozen of his most precious travel books, and his transit and theodolite, which he used mainly for gauging the length and width of the lakes we crossed—paddling and portaging from dawn to dusk, as though the floodwaters from the big dam were lapping at our heels.