“We put our newbies in here; you’ll be fine,” he said, and took off. I felt skittish, self-consciously raised a knee, to gently wobble into the current after him. From upriver, Playground looked like an idealized wave train, a series of perfect crests. Three strokes forward, and I topped the first, pushed my nose through, then a second, and more. I rode up and down like on a merry-go-round, and the water was so soft, big downy pillows off the bed of a fancy hotel.
John was right. I felt a little better, but not much.
Once through Playground, I headed for the takeout. There was an obvious saddle in the ridgeline. No wonder the traditional portage route starts here, I thought. With a plastic kayak on my shoulder, I followed the same trail as the voyageurs, carrying a heavy boat up the soft sand.
The Slave had humbled me. I had overestimated my skills and learned my lesson. The next day I would start my run on the Mackenzie River, where I wouldn’t have John and Leif to rescue me and capsizing would end my trip.
— 15 —
SHOOT THE MESSENGER, JUNE 1789
“Had a Head wind for most of the Day,” Mackenzie wrote, “so cold that Indians made use of their mittens.” It seemed more than a simple chill or a late-season snap. The freeze that descended on them was violent, always in their faces as they pushed north from the Rapids of the Drowned.
The next morning a hard rain hit. “We were obliged to land and unload to prevent our Goods getting wet.” The squall passed, they launched the boats again, but then the soaking returned, and misery too. Mackenzie tried to push forward, but the wind forced them to shore, and it rained all night. The hunters set out a net. No fish.
On the third morning they did not launch at all. “It blew exceeding hard with rain all last Night and this Day,” Mackenzie wrote. “The Wind continued which prevented us from moving this Day.” The Chipewyan hunters had stayed active in the damp chill, managing to shoot a dozen geese and ducks to fill their cooking pots, and then they disappeared back into the bush.
The voyageurs and women huddled under their canoes, smoking pipes to pass the day, pursued by mosquitoes and gnats. “People not finding this Place agreeable,” Mackenzie said.
But overnight, the rain and wind slackened, so Barrieau awoke the party early, and at half past two they pushed out into a calm and foggy river. Leroux and Awgeenah knew that Slave Lake must be close, less than a day of paddling away. The water was brown in flood, and over and over again the river wound back on itself as a looped and coiled rope. Little progress as the raven flies. The riverbanks were tallow-colored clay and sand, but atop lay huge piles of mud runoff, rich black soil that “rests upon drift wood, so as to be eight or ten feet deep.” They made a wrong turn, into a channel that dead-ended in a lake, and turned back, and the hunters caught up with them, delivering four beaver and ten geese.
Then, at nine o’clock by Mackenzie’s reckoning, they broke free from the river, attained the lake of the Slaves. It was not a moment for celebration. Now they saw why the wind had been such “excessive Cold.” The gale blew fierce over fields of snow.
“The Lake is covered all over with Ice and does not seem to have yet moved,” Mackenzie wrote. “We unloaded our Canoe, and pitched our Tents, for from what we could see we would be obligated to remain here for some time.”
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For six days, the ice anchored them to the shore of Slave Lake. It was the largest body of water Mackenzie had seen since Lake Superior. Awgeenah knew none larger, other than the Arctic Ocean with Mattonabbe and Hearne, and it was the center of his navigation since he had walked across it, frozen in the winter, on that journey to the Far Off Metal River almost twenty years before.
Awgeenah’s people told a story of a flood, that long ago there had been a terrible winter, cold that never ended, and the animals discovered seven bags of weather. Mouse opened the warmth, but the snow melted too quickly, and the world was covered with water. All of the animals got on a raft, and each animal took turns looking for land, but it was muskrat that dove down and returned with mud. Now Mackenzie needed mouse’s warmth again, to cross the lake and reach the Red Knife Indian encampments on the north shore. Awgeenah and Leroux knew the traditional path among the scattered granite islands on the lake’s eastern side. But the way was ice clogged, crammed and piled against the stony archipelago, and there was nothing to do but wait.
They bedded down on a sandy bank covered in willow bushes and trees in full bloom. The voyageurs slept under the overturned canoe. Steinbruck set up the tent for himself and Mackenzie and scouted for evergreen boughs as a rough mattress on the frozen ground. Their camp lay just opposite the trading posts that Cuthbert Grant and Laurent Leroux had built three seasons before. Landry and Ducette had felled the poplar and spruce, squared the logs, set the frame, but in only a short time their handiwork was already decayed, affected by the weight of snow and rot, and the party didn’t use the cabins for shelter.
Mackenzie was again thinking about his stomach, and Awgeenah told him that to either side of the river were plenty of moose, and caribou, and vast herds of buffalo, if only their hunters could reach them. They would have to settle for fowl instead. “We killed 2 swans, 10 Geese, 1 Beaver this morning without losing an hour’s time, so that if we were for the purpose of hunting we might soon fill our Canoe.”
The water was open right at the lake’s shore, so Mackenzie “ordered the Men to set Nets immediately as we could not touch our Provision during our stay at this place.” The Chipewyan hunters said not to stretch two nets, for each would grow jealous of the other, and neither would catch fish. Mackenzie ignored them and for a time suffered no ill effects. “Caught plenty of Fish for our Supper. Say Personenconu, White Fish, Trout, Carp.” They had lost some supplies with the wrecked canoe at the rapids, but at least here they would eat fresh stocks.
It rained all the next day, and Mackenzie thought the ice began to weaken. The next day the winds shifted, the clouds broke, and the wives went to gather cranberries still stuck to the trees from the winter before. Mackenzie and several of his voyageurs gathered swan, goose, and duck eggs, and killed a brace worth of the birds.
But tempers were already running short. “Our old Companions (the Muskettoes) visit us in greater Numbers than we would wish as they are very troublesome Guests,” Mackenzie wrote. Everyone’s long hair kept only the worst of the pests away. Steinbruck stuffed moss around the bottom of the tent to keep the mosquitoes out, and the men filled the fires with rotten wood to make smoke. Nothing helped. When Mackenzie returned from collecting eggs, he found Leroux and his devant in a shouting match. C’est un maudit, chrisse, osti, calisse de tabernac! Christ, Communion, and even the tabernacle damned and named profane. Mackenzie left them alone to work it out themselves. Everyone simply sat and watched the lake, and finally Mackenzie hiked up a hill for a better view. “The Ice moved a little to the Eastward.”
Nothing to do but wait, pray for warmth, toss tobacco in the water to beg off the weather. They waited so long that a family that had left Fort Chipewyan on foot, at the same time as Mackenzie’s canoes, caught up with them and asked for food, because “they marched so hard, that they could not kill enough of Provision for their Families.” Mackenzie was annoyed they did not bring him food either, as his hunters had suffered a streak of poor luck—no large game, just a few swans and gray cranes make a meager meal—and the wind had blown the ice over the nets of his fishery. When there was no fresh meat, the voyageurs ate the limited pemmican, but the Indian hunters would not. They ate pemmican in the winter, rarely in summer, because they knew so much fat would make them weak.
Finally, at sunset on the fifth day, a violent thunderstorm rolled in from the south. “The Sky in that Quarter of a sudden became the blackest dark blue Color and lightened much.” The gusting front passed quickly, but then a soaking rain fell, and Mackenzie knew that their forsaken time was ending.
At noon on the sixth day, the wind shifted once more, blew the i
ce sheets off their fishery nets, and opened a thawed channel to the first set of islands. Immediately, Mackenzie called the men to break camp and set out. They pulled up the nets and found them in tatters, cut by the ice; the Chipewyan hunters knew why. They launched the canoes, a grande traverse, eight miles of open water to cross to the first island. The voyageurs mumbled an extra decade of rosary and the Ave Maria and then dug in and pulled, Ducette and de Lorme leaning out over the water with their paddles, maximum technique, for this was a race, to attain land before the free channel was shut by ice.
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It was nearly midnight when they stopped at the first small island to make camp; in the twilight, Mackenzie was amazed the horizon glowed “as clear as to see to write this.” Mackenzie was used to long summer days—Fort Chipewyan was the same rough latitude as his birthplace of Stornoway—but the phenomenon was increasing rapidly, as the voyageurs regummed the canoes after the long crossing.
In the rest of the pays d’en haut, the trees required to make and fix the birch-bark canoes were found all along the rivers. If one wished to invent ideal natural materials for boat construction—light and strong framing, water-resistant and pliable fastening binders, flexible sheeting—it would be hard to best cedar planks, watape spruce root, and birch bark. And unique in North America, they all grow, together, in the one place they are needed most, as if nature first carved the system of rivers and streams to breach the continent and then grew the perfect boats to traverse it. This was true to the south, but now, for the first time, as they hopped from gravel speck to gravel speck, if they broke a canoe hard, they would have to repair it with the supplies they carried or make do without. And they were already short one canoe, lost in the rapids of the Slave.
The next day the north wind roared, the ice clumping in the channels and stranding them. The voyageurs and Indians caught a few trout with a hook and line, and when the wind died later in the day, they set out again. Their canoes leaked, and the chop threw water over the gunnels, and the boats were full of slosh by the time they limped ashore again. Several days passed this same way, hopping island to island: thunderstorms would blow a passage through the ice, they sprinted to landfall, then huddled under the canoes to avoid the lightning lashing their exposed granite spit.
And still they were “pestered by Muskettoes, tho’ we are in a manner surrounded by ice.”
On each traverse, Mackenzie would drop a lead weight, to sound for the depth of the lake, and then call the readings to Steinbruck, who recorded them in their journal. Six fathoms, then twenty-one fathoms, then forty-four, sixty, seventy-five fathoms. Four hundred and fifty feet deep, between flecks of rock.
On June 21, the longest day of the year, Mackenzie sat up to count the few hours the sun disappeared below the horizon. Four hours and twenty-two minutes. They were at a place the voyageurs called Isle de Carribo, as the Chipewyan hunters had slaughtered seven of the large beasts, “the poor Creatures having no Place to run for Shelter.” Their hot carcasses steamed on the ice-sheathed islands, and the women built a fire and roasted dripping haunches, withers, back straps, ribs, liver: full-bellied relief after meager rations. Mackenzie feasted and took his compass readings, and when the liminal darkness descended with the sinking of the sun, the water “froze so hard during his absence that the Lake crusted half a quarter of an Inch thick.”
Finally, on the seventh day of their island-to-island crossing of Slave Lake, the party reached what they thought might be the far shore. It was very different from the one they left. “One continued View of Mountains & islands & Solid Rock covered here & there with Moss,” rather than the rich earth and sandy soils dumped by the Slave River. In fact, the shore was so checkered with granite and standing water that “we did not know whether it be the opposite side of the Lake or Islands,” Mackenzie wrote. Leroux decided to leave two bags of pemmican on one rock, food for his return journey in the fall, and he named the place Is la Cach. They threaded westerly, among ice and pocked stone, and, after seventeen hours of paddling, finally camped on one larger shelf. Mackenzie had left the hunters behind, he was so desperate to push on. “The Muskettoes are so numerous tho’ the Weather is so far from being warm we cannot rest for them.” The Chipewyan men paddled all night to catch up.
In the morning the whole brigade launched and began to cross a very large bay. The wind shifted, to the south and west, and Mackenzie ordered the sails put out. The men hammered a wooden foot into the cedar frame among the pièces in the bottom of the canoe, and a mast was raised from the brace, and a piece of canvas tied off as sailcloth, and the voyageurs sang for the wind to carry them to safety. “Souffle, souffle, la vieille,” the voyageurs sang, “blow, blow, old woman.”
Finally, a few moments of fair weather arrived, and la vieille blew them twenty-five miles to the far end of the bay, where there stood three lodges, domes covered in caribou hides, and Laurent Leroux found a happy reunion with the Red Knife Indians he had left a few months before.
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They slept two nights among the Red Knives, who were also known as the Copper Indians as they lived near a hill made of the stuff. That ridge was called Sat in the Same Place, because there a woman sank into the earth.
She was a Chipewyan woman, and the Esquimaux stole her, the elders said. They took her to an island, an island made of nothing but copper, and she wore a copper dress and carried a copper knife, and she had two babies by the Esquimaux. She tried to escape, and she followed a wolf that walked through the shallows of the sea, and the caribou followed her, and when she reached the shore, she killed thousands of the animals with her copper knife. She skinned them and lined a cave with their hides and then cooked the meat and placed it in the cave, and then she left her babies behind in the cave with the food so she could move quickly to find her people. But after many nights a group of hunters found her and raped her, every one of them taking a turn, and there she sank into the ground in her copper dress. And her children in the cave lived with the Esquimaux and taught them to speak, and that is why those people only say short baby words, tuk tuk tuk, and no long ones.
The Red Knives were happy to trade with Leroux and Mackenzie. Among those Indians, the bourgeois and voyageurs had come to be called Pale Men. The Pale Men were known to live in beaver houses—low, chinked with mud, covered in sod—but inside those mounds of dirt were piles of goods made of a metal stronger than the copper they dug from Sat in the Same Place. Two leaders among the Indians near Slave Lake were a pair of mixed-blood brothers, François and Jacques Beaulieu. Their father was a Frenchman, their mother a Cree, and they took Chipewyan wives, and they spoke all the languages of their people. François had a teenage son, also named François, and the three acted as interpreters between the North West Company and the tribes.
In previous seasons, Leroux had told the Beaulieus that everyone should bring beaver pelts to the Pale Men who lived in the beaver homes, and they would trade. As a sign of his friendship, Leroux had given the Indians tobacco, but it smelled so bad they were afraid it would scare the fish away, so they hid it in the snow. But the other goods were useful, especially the ice chisels. Theirs were made of bone, but the metal ones from the Pale Men cut the ice like rotten wood.
Now the Pale Men had reappeared. The Red Knife leaders said they had many friends nearby, Slave and Beaver Indians, as well as their own kin, who “will be here by the time that the Swans cast their Feathers.” Leroux had extended credit to these tribes and now collected the past winter’s furs as payment, eight packs of beaver and marten. Awgeenah had many years’ worth of credit to collect as well, for he had often shuffled goods and furs between these tribes and Peter Pond at the Old Establishment. The English Chief collected a hundred skins, immediately handed forty over to Leroux for debts from 1786, and then used the remainder to buy rum from Mackenzie for his hunters. Awgeenah knew his stature as the trading chief of the Chipewyan was always tenuous, and dependent on
his generosity with his followers. Mackenzie understood this as well. He gave the hunters “some more,” which “made them get Drunk,” and in so doing secured their loyalty for several more weeks of the expedition.
But Mackenzie really cared about the great river that flowed from Slave Lake, and on this point he was frustrated by the Red Knives. “They know nothing even of the River but the Entry,” he wrote. This would get them started, though, so for the price of a pair of drawers and one knife, Mackenzie purchased the guide services of a young man, plus a canoe to go with him, to replace the one lost at the rapids on the Slave River. Then Mackenzie gathered the tribe around him and, with Awgeenah acting as interpreter, told the Red Knives that he was leaving in the morning, but that they should all trade with Laurent Leroux, who was staying with them for the summer season.
The Red Knife Indians said they understood, that “it would be great encouragement for them to have Frenchmen upon the Land, that they would work hard to kill Beaver, when they were sure of getting Value for their Skins.” Mackenzie was satisfied, and wrote a note for Roderic and Normand MacLeod and gave it to Leroux to deliver, outlining his progress so far and announcing that he was pressing on to the west.
* * *
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At three o’clock the next morning, Mackenzie and Awgeenah pushed on in their three canoes. Leroux and the Indians fired a rifle volley in salute, and Mackenzie’s voyageurs did the same in return, and Mackenzie’s canoe was very heavily laden, for it was full of pièces from Leroux’s boat, to trade with any Indians he found along the river and, eventually, the Chinese and Russians.
The drifting ice hampered their progress, and “with some difficulty” they beached on an island covered in rotting stumps, cleared as if it had been an Indian encampment at one time and was now abandoned; the Cree often chased off the Slaves. Mackenzie thought they couldn’t stay in such an inhospitable place, so they pushed out into the ice floes, “thro’ some Broken Ice tho’ at the Risk of damaging our Canoe.” They pushed on, hard, made another twenty-one miles along the shore, and everywhere they looked were “old deserted lodges” of tribes that had been exterminated.
Disappointment River Page 16