Through the Woods

by Gary Ferguson

  “I tried to move to Montana last year,” he says in parting. “Just part-time, you know—someplace with milder winters. Too expensive, though. Guess the mountains are out of reach for guys like me.” He looks back once from offshore, tilts his head up at me, a friendly gesture. Likely he’s mistaken my standing around shuffling from one foot to another, thinking up excuses to put off this portage, as being properly deliberate.

  At Loon Lake, four men in two boats have stolen across the invisible line across which motors are forbidden, are anchored there, fishing in the calm of a bay. One of them spots me a good half-mile off, and immediately the lines and the anchors come in, the engines sputter to life and they head west. Like I was some kind of canoe cop. From what people tell me there’s no love lost between paddlers and power boaters. When I asked Charlie Cowden about stopping over to see his friend Freddy who cuts ice out of Loon Lake, he thought it was a great idea. But he changed his mind fast when he remembered I’d be traveling by canoe. “Better not, or you’ll get a raft of shit,” he warned, sure of it, like he’d seen it before. “I can just hear old Freddy: ‘Well, la-di-da. And who are you? Wait—don’t tell me—you’re following the path of the goddamned voyagers!’” Still, it’s tempting, if only for a chance at a tumblerful of Scotch over chips of lake ice. But in the end I carry on northward, reaching the top of East Loon Lake a couple of hours before dusk.

  The camp rests in a modest grove of white spruce and jack pine, dwarfed here and there by the towering pouf of an old white pine that somehow escaped the saw. Every time I see these old giants I can’t help but imagine what this land must have looked like a hundred and fifty years ago: red and white pines so big you couldn’t see the tops, their trunks pruned of branches for fifty or sixty feet. A floor clean and spacious enough to drive a wagon through, except where some old giant had toppled over in a windstorm, kicking off a race of saplings. And always this great hush, birdsong and deer hooves and even the clumsy ways of men soaked up by a six-inch carpet of needles. In most of the north today, when conifers are cut they’re not even replanted, let alone allowed to reach middle-age. Today’s markets are pushed by paper waferboard, which means letting pioneer trees like aspen and birch run up dense patches of suckers—the first stage of forest succession—then mowing them down and tossing them into the chipper. On and on, until you drain the nutrient base, which is no big deal because there’re always fertilizers. Logging for the lazy.

  I’m planted lakeside atop a slab of granite, making notes and dreaming of dinner, when I hear a rustling behind me, moving through the deep woods out toward the shore. I’m about to rise, hoping to creep to the fringe of the forest for a better look, when some forty feet away a coyote pokes its head through a curtain of pin cherry. We stare at one another for five or ten seconds, then it slowly turns and walks back into the woods. A few minutes later I hear it farther down the shore, letting out a couple of yips and yodels, immediately followed by the cry of a loon. After this come long bursts of both creatures singing at the same time—unreal. Charging the mix even more is the fact that every last note is repeated a second or so later, nearly as clear and crisp as the original, running back to me as echoes off a line of granite cliffs on the far side of the lake. When the coyote finally quits, the loon tosses out a few more bars and then it grows silent, too. It’s all I can do not to stand up on my rock and applaud.

  I wake up the next day to rain smooching with the birch leaves, dripping off to drum on the slabs of rock and the fly of the tent. In a way I’m tired of all this wet, but on the other hand I’m thankful for the excuse to roll over and go back to sleep. As usual, I have no watch on, but by the time I pack up, grab a bite, and shuttle over to work the first portage, it’s probably closing in on eleven. The first carry of the day goes fine, but the second one, well, there’s where I end up doing something stupid. Outdoor writer Michael Furtman has told me about this wonderful old abandoned portage he took several years ago, leading into a perfect little lake that few people ever get to. “You may kill me for even suggesting this trail,” he admits. “I’ve no idea what kind of shape it’s in.” Well, after some serious looking, I manage to find the portage, but then—and this is the stupid part—I end up walking the entire length of it, a mile and a quarter, all the way to the next lake without carrying a thing, drawn on by some obsessive need to convince myself that this is really the right path. So instead of walking five miles over downed logs and through the thickets in two trips, I do seven and a half miles in three.

  The good news is that I’m beginning to get more comfortable with carrying the canoe, having figured out that by pushing my elbows up and against the thwart I can increase the amount of arm and shoulder available for the pads to rest on, which makes things hurt a lot less. When I get really desperate I stick my head up against the bottom of the boat, stretching my neck like a singing loon, taking the weight on my noggin. But that trick is less than worthless on uneven ground, since then the Royalex starts rippling and bouncing like a tire against my skull. No matter how long I do this canoe thing I’ll always feel like a weenie, given that the old trappers east of here routinely shouldered three ninety-pound bundles at once and carried them nine miles around Grand Portage, and did it in less time than it takes me to go four miles with sixty.

  Camp is set and I’m down at the shore, rinsing sweat out of my T-shirt, when some forty or fifty yards behind me a loon pops up and lets out a loud yodel. I can’t say what makes me read this as an invitation, but without thinking twice I drop the shirt, slip on my life jacket and ease into the water. Ever so slowly I paddle toward her, out into the middle of the lake. Each time she calls out I answer back in what seems even to me a horrible falsetto warble, half expecting her to either flush or paddle over and peck out my vocal chords. But no, she stays right where she is, just keeps on calling. Twenty yards away I stop, at which point her mate starts chiming in from over on the far shore, then begins to move our way. She swims over and greets him, maybe whispers something about me that piques his curiosity, because pretty soon both of them return, one on each side of me. And there the three of us stay for a good fifteen minutes, they on their bellies and me on my back, the two of them singing back and forth like angels from some wild heaven and me chortling like, well, something less.

  Between choruses, I lie there and watch the clouds drift across the sky, gray and sticky-looking, sunbeams drilling through the holes and then withdrawing. On the shore, millions of aspen and birch leaves are fluttering in a light breeze.

  Chapter Ten

  THE MOSQUITOES HAVE THIS ROUTINE they run through every evening about eight o’clock, hanging back just long enough to let me think I’ve finally found a place where they won’t bother me, then all at once descending in one big grainy, whining cloud. At first I give in, hang out in the tent reading Sigurd Olson, laugh at them through the screen. But I quit all that when I find out how easily they can be left behind simply by climbing in the canoe and giving a few easy paddle strokes away from shore.

  Truth is, I owe those mosquitoes, because this nighttime canoeing thing is fast becoming one of my favorite activities. (Lately I’ve been seriously thinking about laying out my sleeping bag on the bottom of the boat and spending the night out there, hull-to-breast with the loons.) On calm nights, in places with a good wood supply, I light a small blaze in the fire ring and then glide out into the darkness, going as far as I can and still see the winking of the flames, eventually moving back through the black, working to not make a drip or a whisper with the paddle, feeling like I’m piloting a space ship toward a distant star. One night an almost perfectly round hole broke open in the clouds and moonlight poured onto the lake, forming a beam of soft blue-white light fanning out from the bow of the canoe.

  Thanks to the almost complete lack of wind, there are other, equally astonishing special effects to be had here. On several occasions in late evening, the surface of the lake has gotten flat as a mirror, reflecting not only rosy puffs of cumulous cloud
s, but every gull and nighthawk flying overhead. By focusing my gaze slightly ahead and to the side, it’s possible to nurture the astonishing illusion that I’m looking down through clouds from someplace high above the earth. And that yields, at least for a second or two, the rather gut-spinning feeling that I’m paddling through the sky. Like if the canoe tipped over, I’d tumble down through ten thousand feet of clouds.

  The farther out I go, the fewer people I see—just one party, a father and son, in the past two days. Time blurs into a blissful routine of paddle and portage, broken now and then by long swims under smoke-colored granite cliffs; head-down shuffles along the mud looking for sign of bear and deer, mink and coyote; lunches taken afloat, sitting in thick curtains of wild rice.

  Though there aren’t many trails outside the portage paths, there’s no end of opportunity for fine, aimless rambles through the woods. In a few places I’ve found great stretches of the forest floor completely covered in three-inch carpets of moss, perfectly laid from tree to tree and green as Ireland. Elsewhere are pockets of slack water filled with fragrant water lilies and sheets of aquatic grasses, all of it rimmed at the edges by clusters of black spruce. It’s in these places that I begin to hear the unmistakable murmur of the boreal forest, where I get this knee-buckling, breathtaking urge to paddle farther, on into Lac La Croix and past Twentyseven Island, up the Namakan to the Quetico. North. Farther and farther north. On returning to the canoe after such discoveries the only thing to do is to spend a few minutes hovering over my Fisher maps, with their great toss of islands and twists of water leaking everywhere. Wallow a little in the possibilities.

  It’s not surprising that such a twisted, labyrinth-like wilderness, a place of shadowy woods and pocket gardens and stony niches beyond the counting, would be rich with myth, and over the centuries the Ojibwa made it so. From the rockbound lakes to the heart of forest, even in the way geese flow across the northern sky, can be found reminders of the exploits of their great creator-magician Nanabozho, son of the West Wind and great-grandson of the Moon. And other tales too, like when the Great Spirit helped Nanabush make the first butterflies. It was the fluttering of those beautiful winged creatures that so delighted the twin human babies born to Spirit Woman, causing them to reach and stretch and strain in an effort to catch them, which is how children first learned to walk. Again, mythical images flowed from the Ojibwa to the arrivals from the Old World, the most obvious example being Longfellow’s rendition of an Ojibwa Nanabozho story, which he called “The Song of Hiawatha.” Once again the newcomers seemed to find the stories they carried across the Atlantic from their native England and Europe to be strangely incomplete here, inadequate to let them sing the experience of this wild new land.

  On my way west to Boundary Waters, I had the privilege of visiting for the better part of an afternoon with Amelia Legarde, an Ojibwa elder and storyteller. We sat together in the sun-filled living room of her big yellow house, nestled in Duluth on a quiet street in a long row of Victorian houses, the sound of maple leaves and the smell of Lake Superior rolling through the windows. Around us were photographs of strong-looking grandmothers and smiling grandchildren, and on the wall above the floral couch where we sat, a print of a gnarly old conifer—“a spirit tree,” Amelia called it—perched on the shore rocks of the Grand Portage Reservation. On another wall a small painting of an Eskimo sitting in a kayak, and beside that, a collage of other images from the far north cut from magazines and carefully matched in a single frame—a tribute to this mysterious draw Amelia has to the Eskimos, as if in another life she was right there with them, hunting seals on the ice. And finally, on the dining-room table, her latest project: one of the most striking beaded vests I’ve seen, nearly finished, jet-black cloth with flower heads in the sacred colors of white and red, round and bell-shaped, each one resting atop long green stems that seemed to sway against the fabric, like seaweed in the current. I remember thinking how well the images on the vest matched Amelia’s voice—deep and rich and full of color. A storyteller’s voice.

  One of the things we talked about is this trade in woodland myth between settlers and the Ojibwa. And again, just like Barry Dana of the Maine Penobscots, Amelia felt that the swapping grew out of good relations with the French. “The French people seemed to recognize the American Indians as kindred spirits,” she explained. “They had a certain joy for life that our people have also. We’re told that our relations with the French were those of acceptance, fellowship, even love.”

  But while most newcomers (mainly trappers and other people of the woods) were only too happy to take clues about the wilderness from the Indians, some of the black-robed priests seemed intent on burning out all native myth in a fire of Christianity. Over time, the Indian people themselves grew sharply divided over whether to be traditional or fully Catholic, a rift that turned brother against brother, mother against son, and continues even to this day. Amelia was exposed to Catholicism as a child, both in the majority-white school she attended off the reservation and by a lone missionary who came once a month to her village.

  “He took confession on Saturday,” she recalled, “then promised on Sunday that if God didn’t take us, the devil would. All the most faithful gathered and felt holy for that one day. But the people who went to church who were also traditional Indians, their worship never stopped. It was—it still is—an everyday thing.”

  She says she’s grateful to have lived among people who would not abandon the old ways. “One of the few nice memories I have of childhood is waking up at dawn to the sound of my father’s voice. He’s out back, out past the east-facing door of this one-room shack where the five of us lived, giving thanks in Ojibwa for another day. Then he would come inside and say, ‘My children, get up! There’s another new day coming!’ And that’s how we started our morning.”

  Then it was off to school—complete with history lessons, she says, about how evil her ancestors were, how they murdered and burned the good missionaries who brought them this great religion. “To tell the truth, it got into my mind. But in the background there was always the sound of my father giving thanks for another day. Eventually, through a lot of turmoil, the spirituality I learned as an Indian person, and that I held to so dearly as a child, came back. Throughout my life I had seen some people who could balance their Catholicism with their Indian philosophy without hurting themselves spiritually. These were the kinder people on the reservations. But this was not something I could do.

  “I was taught that the earth is our mother—that the mountains and hills are the forms of her body, that the streams and rivers are her blood, that the forest is her hair. My father made part of his living by cutting wood, and sometimes he would take me with him into the woods. And always before he would start chopping a tree, he would put a gift at the base. He would say, ‘Thank you that you’re going to help me feed my children.’ Always with respect. Those limbs were not left just lying around, they were stacked into neat piles. A way of being thankful to nature, centuries old, that lived on in my father. Today in some parts of the Indian world there are places where timber doesn’t grow anymore. Where it’s been…murdered, really. Three years ago, across the street from my house here, there was a beautiful old maple tree, and they said its roots were interfering with the plumbing of the houses. And so it was cut down. I watched them do it, and oh, that hurt. I waited for a quiet time and I went over and spread some tobacco. I told it that it had served the people well. I told it that it was beautiful.”

  In the Ojibwa world, Amelia says, all the trees were sacred. But four were especially important. “There was the maple tree, whose sap provided us with one of our staples at the beginning of food-gathering in the spring. The cedar we used in our spiritual practices. And the poplar and the birch we used in many ways. There’s a story about how the birch came to be such a helper to the Ojibwa. Nanabozho was a strong spirit who came to the people to teach them how to live on this earth. At that time, the animals and the people communicated well, s
ometimes to the point where it was hard to tell where the human left off and the four-legged, or the winged creature, or the scaled creature, began. Though he could transform himself into whatever he wanted to, Nanabozho also had all the qualities of the human being. He could be bad or good, generous or stingy, happy or sad, he could love and hate. Well, one day he was in his mischief-making mood—as he was growing up, he found this mood to come upon him more often than his teaching side. He was out walking in the woods, enjoying the forest, when up ahead he spotted a mountain. And on this mountain was a tall pine tree, and near the top was the nest of an eagle—a thunderbird. Now this piqued his curiosity. He could see one of the eagle parents up there, and he told himself that when it was gone, he would climb up to the top. So sure enough, the parents left and he climbed up and found two baby eagles. He was about to grab one when the parents returned, frightening him, sending him half-climbing and half-falling down the tree. The eagles were very angry and kept diving at him, over and over. Nanabozho was running as fast as he could to get away. There was an old dead birch standing there, the inside rotted out and forming a cavity; and on seeing it, Nanabozho dove into the cavity and hid there, trembling.

  “And that is what protected Nanabozho from the thunderbirds. He realized that he had done a wrong thing, and that the birch had saved him. And so he said to this birch tree, ‘This is what I will do for you. You will help the people. Your bark will be used in many ways—for their homes, for their storage baskets, for their dishes. And the inside part of you, your wood, will be prized because it will provide much warmth.’ And indeed, the birch has been one of the mainstays in the lives of the Ojibwa people. There is yet today a great respect for this tree.”

  I’m writing from the canoe, in the middle of Pocket Lake, on an evening so quiet you can hear the jaws of pine beetles as they saw through wood along the shore. I found paradise yesterday evening, a stone’s throw from Lac La Croix. I’d been following a small watercourse out through the rice grass, past thousands of fragrant water lilies, each one just beginning to close its rosette of waxy, milk-colored petals against the darkness. The inky water was perfectly still, reflective again, leaving water striders to skate off from the side of the boat across a plate of clouds. At one point the flow split around a massive block of granite, and right there beavers had built dams across the entire watercourse, using the boulder as a kind of midway anchoring point. I carefully glided up to the back side of the dam and peered over, down some six feet, to where I could see the overflow tumbling across a series of smooth, rounded loaves of granite, then losing itself in the most beautiful meadow I’ve ever seen, blushing with wildflowers, cradled at the far edges by weaves of alder and aspen and birch. And the most remarkable sky—mare’s tails and angel-hair clouds flashing pink and then coral and then rose with the fall of the sun.