The mountains formed a single ridgeline to the west, like the jagged crest of a dinosaur, and looked a bit like Utah, stripes of gray and brown tinted blue by the bright sun. How could Mackenzie not notice he had turned north? I wondered. Storms hampered his ability to use his quadrant, so he trusted his compass, maybe more than his senses, and it betrayed him. On the morning paddle, the sun baked my right elbow, rather than my back, and in the late evening the sun clearly lowered on my left. How did he ignore this? Up here, the sun was piercing, headache inducing, unavoidable.
The magnetic north pole moves, and when Mackenzie made his journey, it was located at modern-day Victoria Island, just above the Canadian mainland. Mackenzie knew about the magnetic variation from true north, correctly noted in his journal that on Lake Superior the two roughly aligned, and calibrated his compass when he could. But as he moved farther north, the error increased quickly; the magnetic north pole actually lay more to his east than north. This positive declination skewed every measurement he made. When he stood on the riverbank and looked in the direction that his compass claimed was north, in reality he was looking northeast. When he thought he was paddling northwest, he was really paddling due north. And the farther north he went, the more incorrect every measurement proved.
From the moment he made the turn at the Camsell Bend, Mackenzie was headed in the wrong direction, and staring at his bewitched compass, he had no idea.
* * *
————
Two days past the bend, I made good on my promise to visit Jonas Antoine at the Willow River, as I had pledged to him at the Deh Cho First Nations Annual Assembly in Jean Marie.
We could see Jonas’s camp from miles away, a homely house against the wilderness. He met us at the dock at the base of the bluff and helped us tie off our boat next to his flat-hulled Lund. “You made it!” he said with warmth and then, looking at our laden canoe, added, “You’ve got everything in there, even a satellite dish, eh?”
Jonas’s home sat in a compound at the exposed point where the Mackenzie and Willow Rivers meet. It was open and grassy, a few log cabins crumbling into memory near the cliff edge, three overturned canoes—red, yellow, and green—the first I had seen since we rented ours in Hay River. Jonas was wearing a Ducks Unlimited hat, stained sweatpants, bifocals, and galoshes with no socks. His modern home had an open-air porch, where he invited us to sit and swat bulldogs as he lit a Player’s cigarette that he pulled from a small tobacco pouch.
Jonas offered us coffee, which I gratefully accepted and then he forgot to provide. I had read that it was always polite to bring a gift, so Jeremy gave him a bag of loose tea from the Edmonton airport, but Jonas only glanced at it once and then ignored it the rest of our conversation. Maybe we had messed up the ritual somehow? I didn’t want to offend him, but I also really wanted the coffee.
Then Jonas’s brother-in-law, Tony, stepped out, and I stood and shook his hand. Back in Jean Marie, Jonas had warned me that Tony only speaks Slavey, but I said hello anyway. Tony smiled and nodded his head up and down to the rhythm of our handshake.
“I worry about him, to take care of himself, but he won’t leave the land,” Jonas said, explaining why, though his wife works as a health-care aide in Fort Simpson, he lived with Tony.
“And I’m a dog person,” Jonas said, “but he forgets about them.” Jonas had half a dozen dogs, bruisers with matted calico coats and rough haunches and thick strong jaws. They were chained up outside, and at one point, when a stray dog or wolf came through the wood line, they leaped and barked, flinging mucus from their bared teeth and lips. Jonas was on his feet in an instant, and his brother-in-law too. “They’ll fight if they break loose!” Jonas yelled to me as he ran up to the head bitch and whispered in her ear to calm her. Tony yanked another’s choke chain and dragged the gurgling dog back to a kennel.
Jonas said he is seventy-five years old, old enough to have been stripped from his family and forced to attend residential school in Ontario. “The only thing I learned is church and English and Shakespeare,” he said. “ ‘True courage rises as occasion.’ That’s King John.”
When he was a young man, Jonas moved to America to play in a traveling rock-and-roll band. He saw the country and then eventually settled in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, got married, became a Packers fan, worked as stage crew at a television station and then in a factory that made plastic trays for Burger King. His children stayed in the United States when he moved back north.
“I told people in Sheboygan about where I’m from, and they don’t believe me. And I tell people here about Sheboygan, and they don’t believe me either.” I mentioned that I went to college in Wisconsin, at Marquette in Milwaukee, and he immediately mentioned Al McGuire and the 1977 NCAA National Championship in basketball. “The whole state felt a part of that,” he said.
This connection, this is why I think he chose to share his vision with me.
We were making small talk when out of the blue he said, “I saw skyscrapers rise out of the ground. In Wrigley, looking out over the Deh Cho valley, during a drum session. With the elders. We’re drumming, drumming”—here he closed his eyes tight and made the motions with his hands—“and I saw them. In the distance, rising out of our beautiful mountains. And I thought, ‘This can’t happen here.’ I knew I had to stop it.”
“Was it a medicine dream?” I asked. It was an inappropriate and rude question; I didn’t really know what I was saying. Later, I learned from anthropologists that the residents of Wrigley are known for their medicine power, but also that those with medicine don’t talk about it.
Jonas ignored me as he should have. Instead, he told me about the Mackenzie Gas Project that threatens to put hydro-fracking wells throughout his valley, and the pipeline that leaked several thousand gallons into the muskeg a few years ago, and the caribou that are frightened to mate near gas-turbine-powered pumps. His niece was in the new Revenant film, he said, so he wanted to contact Leonardo DiCaprio to talk about climate change.
“Our culture is the land,” he said. “Take that away, we go away. I realized, everyone has their business. And for me, and our nation, our business is taking care of our people.”
Eventually, Jonas wanted to talk about our trip as well. He hadn’t seen a canoe like ours in some time. “People stopped paddling. Now you can google everything,” he said, adding that he had paddled the entire river once, a six-man canoe race to Inuvik in 1989. “Some bicentennial thing for Sir Alex. I heard that when Mackenzie did the Deh Cho, he broke down and cried.”
As we left, Jonas gave us tips, where to stop, whom to see, including Chief Frank Andrews in Tulita, to ask for permission to cross his nation’s land. He also told us to stop at Northern to buy a fishing pole, and showed us what wild mint looked like. “Does it keep off the mosquitoes?” I asked. “My old grandpappy said it did,” he replied.
Stay on the right side, Jonas said, the clean side, and drink from the small streams that come in to join the Deh Cho. “I’ve spent forty years of my life protecting that plateau,” he said, gesturing to Horn Mountain behind him. “I know the water is good to drink.”
I said I would, and then asked for advice for the hazard that had nagged us thus far.
“Is there a trick to knowing when a thunderstorm will come your way?” I asked.
“Just look at the clouds, eh?” he responded.
* * *
————
After we left Jonas, we spent more than a week looking at the clouds and fighting the unrelenting north wind.
Once, seeking shelter, we stopped at Old Fort Island, a slab of gray stone rising out of the river. We were nearly swept past it, as the current veered to either side of the island’s rocky prow. We got caught in the rapid, were pulled around, and then fought through a huge eddy line on the leeward side of an outcropping. There was still water in a cove, and we grounded the canoe and climbed the rock face. We discovered a grotto full of stinking mud and bright orange algae, and a little shelf with a
rapid at the center of the island.
“I feel like I’m on the moon,” Jeremy said as we walked across the cracked and fragmented surface of the rock.
It was like another world, an oasis of geology and plant life separate from the spruce valley that surrounded it. A porcupine shuffled toward us and made a noise, something between a chirp and a whinny, and then turned its back and entered the tall grass. We gave him plenty of space. I grabbed the bear spray and screwed in the banger to the pen flare for the first time.
We waited out the storms that scattered around us and paddled until late at night, camping along a cliff in the golden night.
All the next day, headwind. Filthy, sore, wet, exhausted, we found ourselves stuck on a sandy beach next to a small creek when the rain hit. The mass of clouds to our east did not move; it simply grew like a black fungus that cast darkness over us, half a true night. The deluge washed away the sand beneath us so that a stream ran through the tent vestibules; we had unknowingly sought shelter in the drainage. I left the tent and saw the creek was widening, our boat parked in its delta. I dragged the canoe up higher just in time; fifteen minutes later, the beach was under water. As soon as the rain turned to drizzle, though, the bulldogs returned, joined by energized mosquitoes.
I built a cooking fire, and as had become his custom, Jeremy stayed in the tent. We had begun to call it the Fortress of Solitude. The bugs tormented Jeremy, and he sequestered himself behind layers of gear—head nets, jackets with hoods, boots—and retreated to the tent at the first opportunity, where he hunted the bugs that pursued him. My style was to pick at the blood-filled mosquitoes, gently popping them one by one between my thumb and forefinger. But Jeremy was vicious, clapped like a maestro chastising a musician, a sharp crack that startled me every time.
Jeremy did not participate in dinner, because, as I had feared, he had become sick, light-headed, and was living on Imodium. Poor guy had never shit in the woods, and now he had the runs. Even when healthy, Jeremy had plenty of ailments and ointments and treatments, flavors and scents and tonics and rituals. Now he was gutting out a stomach virus that could dehydrate him, just as the weather was turning and I needed his help.
Paddling with Jeremy was wearing on my body. I did everything twice as much: two tent stakes driven for every one of his, two paddle strokes, two bags carried. At this pace, like a voyageur, I was due for a hernia. My left shoulder and left elbow had begun to ache badly. I told myself that I was sleeping odd, as my left arm was numb each morning, but that explanation felt insufficient. More likely, it was a repetitive use injury, five hundred miles of paddling thus far.
That evening, lying in my bag, I did my regular body checkup. I was starting to lose weight, and my hair and beard were getting long. I stretched my back and hips, tight but okay. My sunburn blisters had scarred, and a cut on my right ankle was healing. Good news, since the bulldogs liked to eat from open sores, and I was afraid this one, after standing so often in river water, had gotten infected. A fever out here could be dangerous.
Physically, Jeremy relied on me, and with professional rescue help so far away, I felt alone and on my own.
* * *
————
The next morning, I stood on the shore and made my daily offering to the river, asking for an easy day of travel. The Deh Cho threw the tobacco back at me, driving waves against the rock.
“That’s a bad sign,” said Jeremy.
We reached Wrigley in the early afternoon. We had enough food and were healthy and safe, so we didn’t even stop. I didn’t want the hassle, after all the words of warning we had received from the residents of Fort Providence, Dean, even the mounted police. So we just turned on our cell phones, downloaded our e-mails and texts and correspondence—“Thanks for the signal, Wrigley,” Jeremy said—and then floated on by.
Jeremy took many paddling breaks, but he always kept his face up, to watch the sky and try to predict the storm tracks. So that afternoon, he suggested a new strategy, to preemptively siesta, so we weren’t caught exposed. We chose Rock Island, north of Wrigley, to wait out the thunderstorms and then paddle afterward. Pillars of clouds, the size and shape of mountain ranges, hung above us to the east and west. So we planned to bunker down early, gather wood to cook dinner, wait out the north wind and heat of the day.
After Old Fort Island, we thought we were ready for a rough approach, but the current still managed to surprise us. The strength of it, so strong that the island’s nose tossed off whirlpools that stacked up in a traffic jam. The water couldn’t get out of its own way fast enough, and boils imploded with a mix of suction and noisy spray. The impromptu rapids were unpredictable and loud, popping high with a boom on one side of the canoe while opening deep vortices on the other. I guided us away from the island, drifted along its flank, and then we landed on the far side.
When, in mid-afternoon, you find a spot—that Goldilocks spot near the trees but not too near—when the tent is up and all of the gear is safely under cover, there is a sense of relief. That I have made myself safe. A cabin is never cozier than in a rainstorm, and our tent had not yet leaked. To pass time on such an occasion, Jeremy had brought along two books—Tainaron, by the Finnish author Leena Krohn, about a woman who sails to a land of giant bugs, and The Once and Future World, by J. B. MacKinnon, about the return of wilderness—and it seemed both applied to our current situation.
MacKinnon argues that our conception of nature is actually a denuded shadow, and we find peace and serenity there only because we have, over millennium, slaughtered everything trying to eat us. When we go for a quick hike in the woods, we are not returning to nature but rather strolling through a Potemkin park of our own creation. We have forgotten that we humans made nature safe.
In contrast, I was reading The Lonely Land, the naturalist Sigurd Olson’s 1961 paddling travelogue through central Saskatchewan. He is a follower of Thoreau, who wrote, “We need the tonic of wildness.” And so Olson too has a dreamy-eyed adventure: “phantom brigades” of voyageurs paddle his river, “singing can still be heard on quiet nights,” after a long day “an expedition means the most; for a moment life had been seasoned with excitement,” and out of doors he found a “zest for living and joy on the trail.” Life was simpler on a canoe trip; one could “iron out the wrinkles in my soul.”
But to me, in our present circumstances, Olson seemed all romantic bullshit. Out here, life was not easier, or simpler. It was tedious and exhausting to do simple things: eating, sleeping, shitting. Jeremy found out that having the runs is not easier in the wilderness. Nor washing dishes with sand, collecting wood to cook, counting rations, being exposed to the weather. Microwaves and beds and toilets are easier. We had descended several rungs on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; food and shelter trumped all, and it seemed to me that Olson, writing safely at home in front of a fire, had confused his memory of the trip with the real thing.
And anyway, Walden Pond is only a mile outside Concord, and Thoreau sent his laundry out to a maid.
We passed the afternoon with our books, Jeremy slept, but our preparations were for naught, because the storm never came. The clouds stayed motionless and only expanded. We ate dinner, bathed unsuccessfully—in the silty water, we came out with a film, and the riverbed sucked at our legs like quicksand—and then I grew impatient, so we packed and pressed on, so as not to lose a day of progress.
The paddle started easy. We passed the hill Mackenzie and Awgeenah climbed to get a better view; it was obviously overgrown and impossible for us to hike. But then a huge north wind descended on us, and the Deh Cho erupted in whitecaps. We fled the chop, finding calmer water on the dirty side of the river. My paddle felt gritty in my hands again. Lightning moved in from the southwest, the storm traveling in the opposite direction of the wind, and we were forced to beach on the left, the silty floodplain we had been avoiding since Fort Simpson. We grabbed the secondary emergency shelter and ran across the soggy cake, looking for higher ground. The rain pounded us, and
three hundred yards in we finally put up the triangular tarp in more willow bushes. We huddled back in the lightning position, under the tiny pop-up tent, and eventually the thunder moved on.
“It’s just rain,” I said, of the lashing against the tarp. “We can paddle in the rain. We have to.”
Back on the water, we immediately looked for somewhere to put up the main tent. The western floodplain was an unsafe choice, but ahead a high ridge was coming in on the left, to match the one on the right. The valley was tightening at the moment we needed a loose beach. No good camping anywhere.
According to the map, a few miles farther on several smaller rivers joined in from the east. Our best chance for flat land lay at those intersections, so we decided to cross the river. Half an hour in open water, in the midst of the storm.
We started our ferry, and as encouragement the rain slackened to a drizzle. But then behind us, the left bank started exploding with lightning, no gap between the flash of the strike and the wrenching crack of the thunder. My heart rate doubled, and we dug in and pulled as hard as we could. The river had narrowed, and we ground up on the right bank and took cover against a cliff face. When the wave of lightning rumbled past a second time, we ran back to the canoe and pushed off and paddled down the eastern shore.
Then I heard a sound behind me like a waterfall. I turned over my shoulder and saw a curtain of rain moving north, chasing us, gaining on us. There was nowhere to put a tent, nothing to be done, and when the opened heavens arrived, we got soaked straight to the skin. A deluge from a bucket poured by God himself. The surface of the river looked as if every second it was being hit with a million gunshots simultaneously.
The banks were steep, and at the waterline the beaches consisted of nothing but rocks the size and shape of watermelons, multicolored, every kind of rock in the world. The weather struck in fronts, and the sky was roiling, like a squirming mass of monstrous gray snakes. Nowhere to put a tent, no flat space free from the boulders, we pressed on.
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