The next day the swells were heavy on the lake as they skirted bay to bay with a tailwind. They spotted caribou on one island, and put in to let their hunters run them down. Mackenzie grew frustrated waiting—“we lost 3 Hours aft Wind going for them”—but the rich meat was essential. Bloody, heavy big game, to sustain them as fish and geese could not. They needed to stock up while they could; though the white man was anxious, the Chipewyan hunters knew they still had to carefully bleed the animals and contain all that was spilled, as anything else was taboo.
The wind-driven ice eventually forced them to ground, and they set up camp early on yet another island. Mackenzie saw that the shore of the mainland was low and covered in moose tracks but also “very flat and dangerous there being no safe place of landing in case of bad weather.” It was a most unsettled feeling, looking for a secure place to pass the night. At the fort, at the rendezvous, in Montreal, even along the established voyageur routes where campsites were known and marked, there was never a question of where to sleep. For the first time, Mackenzie was learning the anxiety of searching out safe harbors but also the great satisfaction and relief of such a discovery, the peace when it’s a “good spot.”
That night, they had not found one. They all slept poorly. Mackenzie complained of “a very restless night being tormented by Musquittoes.” Landry had it worse, arguing with his wife to the point of such frustration that he “arranged for her to remain at the Campmt.” His Acadian cousin intervened. Ducette and Landry’s wife had an understanding: Mackenzie’s called Ducette “her furreaux,” her fur dealer, though insinuating more. Ducette calmed the dispute—Mackenzie noted “the Husband said nothing to the contrary”—and then they all loaded back in their canoes as per usual.
But their frustration bled over to the water. Fog obscured the view. Their Red Knife guide admitted it had been “8 Winters since he has last been here,” and every bay was looking like the mouth of the river. They picked their way among islands, lost in a cloud, until finally Mackenzie called a halt in the darkness and they made camp.
Another early morning, probing bays in the fog. After forty miles of paddling, Barrieau guided them into “a deep Bay” to the west, “having no land in Sight a head in hopes to a Passage which the Indian informed us was to be met with.” Perhaps they had at last discovered the mouth to Peter Pond’s river? But then a storm rose, “a strong aft wind,” and in the rising surf the canoe brigade became separated. Mackenzie ordered the sail cut, and Ducette and de Lorme started bailing water with a large kettle. “We lost sight of the Indians, nor could we put ashore to wait for them without running the Risk of wrecking our Canoe,” Mackenzie said. The wind drove them to the far western shore at the back of the bay, and they beached in a pile of willow bushes; “we found there was no Passage here.” Barrieau ordered the men to build a fire, and they waited two hours, then three, until finally the Red Knife’s canoe appeared. It did not land. They stopped in the shallows, dumped water from their boat, which appeared nearly full to the brim, and turned back out. Mackenzie followed until sunset, when they made camp, and then Awgeenah flew into a murderous rage.
For incompetence, for untrustworthiness, for foolhardiness, the English Chief wanted to shoot the Red Knife dead. Nowhere to camp, nowhere to eat, nowhere to hunt, plagues of mosquitoes and gnats and storms upon the lake. “For having undertaken to guide us in a Road he did not know, indeed, none of us are well pleased with him,” Mackenzie admitted. “But we don’t think with the English Chief that he merits such severe punishment.” Their Red Knife guide assured them they were getting close, and Mackenzie soothed Awgeenah, and they tried to sleep, grateful for having “narrowly escaped” capsizing.
They found the current at half past five the next morning. The water was shallow, and the channel not very wide, but there was a hint of movement beneath the canoes, fish visible just under the surface, and “the Place was almost covered with wild Fowl, Swan, Geese & several kinds of Ducks.” Eventually, they realized they were tracking along a large island. The southern shore collapsed to a point, and the main river came in from the left, a waterway “upwards of 10 Miles across.” An enormous river, just as Pond had drawn on his map. Since Montreal, Mackenzie had trudged up and down the watery ladder, but now, at last, they had come to their final descent to the sea.
The current grew and grew and grew. The river narrowed, banks of yellow clay and rock rose on each side, and the wood that covered the land seemed burned over by fire. “Have a stiff breeze from the Eastward wch drove us on at a great Rate under Sail,” Mackenzie wrote, as they wound westward among tall forested islands.
The water turned a shocking emerald green, the same green as the Niagara below the falls, and the rate of the current accelerated still further. It bubbled and boiled, like the cooking pot of Macbeth’s witches, and quickened still further, pushing them past high mud banks, until, all at once, the current and wind fled and their momentum faded.
“Here the River widens,” Mackenzie wrote. They drifted into a lake, the voyageurs and wives began to paddle. But to where? Their guide knew that they were in a basin formed long ago by the tail slap of a giant beaver, when the animals could speak and wrecked the world. But of this lake’s nature, the consistency of its shore, its outlets and destinations, he could say nothing to Mackenzie and Awgeenah.
“We cou’d see no opening in any Direction so that we are at a loss what course to take,” Mackenzie said. “Our Red Knife Indian has never been further than this.”
— 16 —
THUNDERSTORMS AND RAIDS, JUNE 2016
Hay River is a small industrial town on the south shore of Great Slave Lake, about thirty miles east of the mouth of the Mackenzie River. For a hundred years, Hay River has been the place where Canada’s freight railroads and asphalt highways and Arctic shipping lanes all meet. A port town, a logistical hub, the home of semitrailers and boxcars and tugs and barges and sporadic fishing vessels.
I stayed only one night, at a dingy motel that catered to transient construction workers. In the parking lot I met an out-of-place white man named George. He was walking a dog, a small furry thing bred for laps, and his white T-shirt bore a silk-screened photo of two of the dogs with ribbons in their hair. He was late middle-aged, with a gentle bearded face and the sad look of a man who wore a T-shirt with two dogs but only walked one.
George’s station wagon had Ontario license plates and a canoe strapped to the roof, so I stopped to speak to him. He said he was on a self-appointed quest to reach the far corners of Canada. He had already paddled to the southern point in Lake Erie, and along the Arctic Ocean to the Alaskan border in the west. Now he was working on the east, toward Nunavut and then on to Labrador. In the morning, a floatplane would fly him and his canoe and all their provisions to the shattered eastern coast of Great Slave Lake, where he would paddle up the Lockhart River, six hundred hard, lonely miles to Hudson’s Bay.
“There are undiscovered places,” he said. “Gems that only you will find.” I wished him well; there were no Chipewyan or Inuit settlements along his route through Awgeenah’s barrens, and George and his dog wouldn’t see another human for months.
In the morning, I picked up David Chrisinger, my first paddling companion, at the tiny one-gate airport. After Wick Walker’s warning about the fragility of my team, my biggest headache, I feared, would be getting my shipmates in and out on time, but David was punctual. His musk followed him into the truck; he smelled like he had already been camping a week.
David Chrisinger is a big man, a former college football defensive tackle with a soft polite voice and a dense red beard. We were not long fast friends—our week in a boat would be the most time we had ever spent together—but we had similar writing interests and experience camping and canoeing. “I’ve always wanted to do a trip like this, ever since I read Canoeing with the Cree as a kid,” David told me. He grew up deer hunting with his grandfather, a game warden in central Wisconsin, a place I used to think of as prohibitively nort
hern. I laughed at such thoughts now.
Before our trip could begin, David and I had one final piece of business: purchasing tobacco. “You have to give something to the river. It’s an indigenous belief,” I explained. “Loose tobacco is the traditional gift. If you don’t freely give something, the river will take it. I didn’t make an offering to the Slave River, and it took my sunglasses. I can’t afford to give the Mackenzie my only spare.”
We stopped at a local grocery store, and a young Korean girl at the customer service counter didn’t understand what we wanted. Swisher Sweets cigars? Marlboro cigarettes?
“No, no, loose chewing tobacco,” I said. But then I saw the right package and groaned. “Um, how about the Red Man?”
“Which one?” she asked.
I was embarrassed to speak louder. “The…Red Man.”
“Which?”
“By your knee,” David said, trying to help.
She eventually found the small white and green pack; in the logo, the eponymous chief wears a large feathered headdress. The pouch was smaller than my hand and cost forty-five dollars.
“Is the river going to think we’re racist if we give it Red Man chew?” asked David.
* * *
————
Doug Swallow runs his medical supply and canoe-outfitting business from a sheet-metal warehouse on the other side of the railroad tracks. He had bandages all over his rough fingers and moved quickly about the small store, gathering us bailing buckets and bear bangers and large food barrels and other survival equipment.
Doug made me promise, for safety’s sake, that I’d send him a text every day, from my inReach GPS, to say all was well. He could track my location on the device’s linked web page, but that wasn’t enough. “If you don’t move for a day, I need to know you’re not hurt, that you’re just wind-bound on Mills Lake.”
“I read that in Michelle’s guide. That wind is a big problem there,” I said.
“The lake is so shallow, the wind picks up just a little and you get big whitecaps. You could get stuck three days, easy,” he said, and I thought again about Wick’s admonition, that the team logistics were the weak spot in my plan. We had eight days to get to Fort Simpson; that’s where David and my next paddler, Jeremy, would swap. The thirty-miles-a-day plan was tight but doable. Even if wind did slow us, with so much sunlight we could paddle all night if we had to.
Doug had other pieces of advice: Great Slave Lake is too shallow to paddle near the shore, Point Roche was a good place to camp tonight, there was a “wicked strong eddy line” where the Liard River meets the Mackenzie, and the campgrounds at Fort Providence and Fort Simpson were good places to stay. Towns offered shelter, showers, food. “Can we just leave our canoe?” I asked. “I don’t want to be the suspicious New Yorker.”
“People respect your gear. You need your equipment for survival,” he said, echoing what I had heard from John in Fort Smith the day before. “As long as you don’t leave that GPS hanging from your paddle and walk away, you’ll be fine. None of our customers have ever had a problem.”
Out in the gravel yard, Doug introduced us to the third member of our team. The Sea Clipper canoe was lipstick red, eighteen and a half feet of unblemished fiberglass and Kevlar. A few feet shorter than Mackenzie’s, but still long by modern standards.
“I just drove it back from B.C. the other day,” Doug said.
“I don’t know if you can trust us with a new canoe,” I said. I knew that that candy-coated shell would be scratched beyond recognition by the end of our trip.
Doug drove the canoe to the boat launch while I dropped off my truck at the barge company next door. They said my truck was guaranteed to arrive in Inuvik in about four weeks; I handed over my keys and walked—vehicle-less, an odd feeling after driving four thousand miles from Buffalo—to where David was loading our boat. The gear was all new to him, and having finally seen the canoe and barrels, I had no better idea than he on how to best pack. We had no routine or habits yet, and it all felt clumsy, not knowing the one best way to puzzle in all the gear. We stood the barrels up to save space, tucked in the maps along the sides, David stuffed extra food in the black nylon bags. It was motley and inefficient.
A fisherman motored past in a serious-looking commercial rig. “I wouldn’t do the Mackenzie in a canoe. Maybe in this thing,” he said, but in a way to indicate there was little chance of that either. We took a final picture, Doug waved, David dropped a little tobacco in the water, and then—about noon, with the skies starting to gray—we left.
The first step in a new pair of shoes always feels a little odd.
The water was dark, and the riverbank industrialized, held up by rusting metal bulkheads. To get to the Mackenzie River, we had to paddle the few miles out of the commercial docks and canals of the Hay, then skirt left along the coast of Great Slave Lake. As we passed shipyards and warehouses, men onshore sandblasted and welded hulks that appeared long past serviceable life. Once at the lake, we headed out as Doug instructed, to avoid the shallows, but our top-heavy canoe wobbled as breeze-blown rollers came in off the open water. David and I had never paddled together, and we would never be heavier, I realized. So much food, plus David, the largest of my companions. But the weight didn’t add stability; the canoe felt slow and unresponsive and yet still tippy in the swells.
We had paddled two hours—but only six miles, according to the GPS I was just learning to use—when the sky in the west turned the color of slate. Over the lake, feathers of rain hung from the underside of dark clouds.
“Should we stop already?” I asked David.
“Let’s ask them,” David said. “Maybe they have a weather report.” He pointed to a beach campground full of pop-up trailers and RVs. With a sinking feeling, I realized we had not yet even made it all the way out of town.
We grounded the canoe in the sand, and David approached a small group drinking beer at a picnic table. They didn’t have advice on the weather, but looked skeptically at our boat and gear.
“Got a quad? And a gun?” one man asked David.
He told them no.
“That’s a mistake,” the camper said.
We remounted, but only a mile later lightning lit up the sky, forcing us to shore again. We set up the tent on the edge of a sandy beach, where green bushes and grass met piles of driftwood. The Hilleberg is actually two tents, a ruby-red outer shell and a bright yellow inner core suspended inside, a substantial air gap between the two layers. This keeps rain from reaching the sleeping chamber, but it also stretches the skin tight as a trampoline. We barely had the shelter up when the storm hit; rain beating against the tent, it sounded like we were hunkered down in a popcorn popper. Several mosquitoes had followed us inside, and when David squished them, they sprayed our blood all over the fresh ripstop nylon.
All afternoon, we lay on top of our sleeping bags, listening to the driving rain. David wrote in his journal and then took a nap. The weather forecasting app on the inReach said there was a 10 percent chance of light drizzle in our area. Outside, we heard a pickup truck driving up and down the beach, splashing through the water like a dog.
“Well, this is a fuck of a way to start,” I said.
* * *
————
We got to Point Roche about ten o’clock. The sun was an orange ball four fingers above the horizon, but the warm golden hours did nothing to improve the view at the point. Bulbous rocks, fishing flotsam—ripped nets, a rusty fillet knife, empty oil jugs, half a particleboard cabin with a rotting mattress—and standing at the highest point, a metal-framed marine marker that looked like half a Christmas tree. Despite what Doug said, we didn’t see anywhere to put up a tent.
We reluctantly pushed on, into a sun that refused to set. All had calmed after the storm, loons sat on liquid glass, and the lake was the color of the sky. In contrast to Mackenzie’s experience, no fog and ice floes blocked our view. Just before midnight we found a gravel beach, adjacent to a bog built by beaver dam
s, and set up camp in the twilight. Much of our gear—maps, books, spare clothes—had gotten soaked in the storm, but at least our sleeping bags were dry.
The tent was full of mosquitoes in the morning, and David and I were covered in bites. One of us had failed to double-check the two doors, and they snuck in through a small gap in the zipper, attracted by the bright fabric and carbon dioxide of our exhales. The interior of our tent was already polka-dotted, brown on yellow, every surface covered with mosquito body parts and our own blood.
All morning, the lakeshore to our left barely changed, nothing but muck and low trees, and a crosswind lapped small whitecaps against our gunnel. David and I decided to switch places. I had started the trip in the back, my traditional place as a guide, but we wanted to see if the canoe handled better with his greater weight in the rear; we wobbled less in the breakers, but our speed didn’t improve. Sandbars and shallow flats, hundreds of yards from shore, would betray themselves by producing riffles in the olive-green water. We ate a lunch of bagels and peanut butter on a tern rookery, a gravel mound two inches above lake level.
We didn’t reach the mouth of the Mackenzie River until afternoon. Stuck in shallow water between barrier islands, I pushed off the bottom with my paddle and noticed streamers trailing off the high grass poking out of the water. Ahead, all the submerged reeds were lying down in the same direction.
Disappointment River Page 17