Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

  They pushed off soon after two o’clock. The river wound but then made a dramatic turn west. The current slackened, snowy mountains lay ahead, plus those black plumes off the cooking fires. They sped up, for momentum’s sake, the voyageurs leaped from the canoes in the knee-deep water, and the boat drifted in, so as not to drive the delicate birch bark on the exposed rock shore. But in the face of such an invasion, the encamped Indian families scattered. “Soon saw the Natives run about in great Confusion, some making for the Woods and others for their Canoes,” Mackenzie wrote. Awgeenah ordered his hunters to chase down the fleeing men and women. His followers spoke Chipewyan, and the new Indians acted as if they didn’t understand and made motions with their hands to stay away. Mackenzie and his voyageurs did so, though they also unloaded their canoe and pitched tents, while “the English Chief and his young Men were very busy reconciling them to our Arrival.”

  Mackenzie took a keen interest in these new Indians, making copious notes on their unfamiliar appearance. He found their hair disheveled, two black and blue stripes tattooed across their cheeks like the Chipewyan, but with goose quills stuck through their nostrils. They wore bands of leather around their heads, decorated with horn and bone and the claws of bears, and some of the old men grew long beards and the women wore mittens even in summer, held by a cord around their necks. Their long robes of moose hide were big enough to sleep in, but strangely, the men wore almost no covering over their circumcised penises. “Their want of Modesty & their having no Sense of their Nakedness,” thought Mackenzie, “would make a Person think that they were descended from Adam.” But how did they deal with the cold? he wanted to know. Should not the frigid air compel them to wear more clothes? Surely if Adam had “been created at the Arctic Circles he would not have had occasion for Eve, the Serpent, nor the Tree of Knowledge to have given him a Sense of his Nakedness,” so harsh was the climate, Mackenzie thought.

  This is where the English Chief proved his worth, coaxing a frightened people out of hiding. Awgeenah eventually identified five families living in that place, as many as thirty people, from two tribes: a few Slavey, and the numerous Dogrib. The Slavey had been named by the Cree, as good for nothing but bondage and servitude. The Dogrib, though, were known by all as brave warriors with powerful medicine. Their first mother took a husband that was a man by day and a great black dog at night. She gave birth to a litter of puppies that could shift their skins back and forth, as both men and dogs, and from these few all Dogrib claimed kinship.

  The Dogrib were wary, and for good reason. They knew the pale strangers could be the nakan, the men who come only in summer to make trouble, start fires in the forest, and steal women and children. The nakan were known to carry rifles, leave hard-soled tracks in the mud, hunt without dogs; the voyageurs matched the description well. And Awgeenah’s hunters were no more welcome, recognizable in their distinctive shirts with pointed tails. The Chipewyan brought the pox and made war.

  The story of the fight goes like this: Near Slave Lake, Chipewyan warriors had crept into a Dogrib camp and slashed holes in every one of their canoes. Then the Chipewyan attacked, to rape the women and steal the children, as everyone knew this was the best revenge, because children were most beloved by every tribe. With the advantage of surprise they slaughtered the Dogrib, and the few who fled drowned when their death-trap boats filled with water and sank in the dark lake. The Chipewyan were far more powerful, so the Dogrib leader, Edzo, made a plan that used powerful medicine. Edzo put all of the Chipewyan minds into a beaver hide, so that he could control them as long as he sat on the hide. Whatever he thought, his enemies would think as well. So Edzo thought only of peace. But those days were long before.

  Facing the nakan and Chipewyan, the Dogrib should have fought or fled. But Awgeenah did his job well. When “they saw we intended them no hurt, it was found that some of the Men understood our Indians very well,” Mackenzie said. Awgeenah “partly removed their Terror” and persuaded them to call back their relatives, despite their “evident Signs of Fear.”

  Awgeenah offered them a pipe, but the Dogrib looked at it strangely; Mackenzie realized “they did not know the use of Tobacco.” So he opened a cask of rum instead. “We likewise gave them some grog to drink, but I believe they accepted those Civilities more through Fear than Inclination.” Mackenzie judged them practical, so he dug through the trade goods packed in the pièces from Laurent Leroux. The Dogrib pots at the cooking fires were merely woven watape, the same stripped spruce root the voyageurs used to fasten together the cedar frames of their canoes. They couldn’t put the pots over a fire, of course, so the Dogrib dropped red-hot rocks into the kettles instead, to heat the water. Mackenzie could see how valuable his iron pots would be, so he started handing them out, along with “Knives, Beads, Awls, Rings, Gartering, Fire Steels, Flints and a couple of Axes.” These metal tools proved immediately popular, and everyone became much at ease, so much so that Barrieau had to put the men on guard duty. “They became more familiar than we expected,” Mackenzie wrote, “for we could not keep them out of our Tents, tho’ I did not observe that they tryed to steal anything from us.”

  Mackenzie wasn’t there to trade, though. The gifts were simply a diplomatic tactic to get what he really wanted: knowledge about the river, as his Red Knife guide had been useless for a week. Awgeenah translated for Mackenzie, but what he heard seemed hardly possible.

  “The Information they gave us respecting the River, seems to me so very fabulous that I will not be particular in inserting it,” Mackenzie wrote in his journal. “Suffice it to say that they would wish to make us believe that we would be several Winters getting to the Sea, and that we all should be old Men by the time we would return.”

  * * *

  ————

  Long ago, Yamoria and his brother, Yamoga, were foundlings, pulled from a muddy hole among the roots of a bush. They were not born of woman, they simply appeared there, and a girl found them when she heard crying from beneath the earth. She wrapped the babies in a hide and took them home, where her father and mother fed the babies broth made from the brains of rabbits.

  Yamoria and Yamoga grew strong with medicine. In this time, the world was full of giant animals that made trouble for everyone. And the brothers were great men and decided to fix the animals so it was safe for people to live. Yamoria walked the length of the Deh Cho, and fixed all of the problems he found there, but Yamoga went west, over the mountains, and fell out of the stories.

  Yamoria went everywhere to set the animals right, and was an old man who leaned on a stick by the time he reached the sea. Sometimes he walked, and sometimes he stepped out of time and simply appeared in a place, from nowhere. He went to the moose and told him to eat willow instead of people. And he went to the eagle and told him to eat fish instead of people. Three giant beavers swam up and down the Deh Cho, slapping their tails and wrecking the land. So Yamoria chased them to a tall rock that lay at the river’s edge, and he beat the three beavers to death, and skinned them, and stretched their gory hides and pinned them on the great rock to dry. And then he cooked the beaver, and the grease dripped down and smoldered, and some people, when lucky, see that smoke even today.

  Down the river, just past the Dogrib encampment, rose that same tall bloodied rock, three monstrous stains of red upon the slab. Mackenzie saw no smoke.

  * * *

  ————

  The Dogrib told Awgeenah many things. They said that in their travels down the river they “would have to encounter many Monsters.” That much farther on “there are 2 impracticable Falls or Rapids in the River, the first 30 Days March from us.” And finally, and most ominously, “there were very few Animals below this, and the farther we went the fewer there would be.” The Dogrib said that they “should Starve, even if no other accident befell” their party.

  Mackenzie thought all this “can only exist in their own Imaginations” and “put no faith in those Stories.” But Awgeenah was dismayed, and the two men b
egan arguing “with much ado.” Awgeenah said they must turn back, “should absolutely return” the way they had come. The river was not at all as Peter Pond had described, and the lack of food should be the deciding factor. Awgeenah said his hunters were “already very tired of their Voyage” and would be exhausted trying to keep the party fed if game grew any more scarce.

  Mackenzie would have none of it. He cajoled Awgeenah until the trading chief relented and agreed to continue. But both men agreed they needed a new guide and would ask the Dogrib to provide one.

  By now a full musical performance was under way, welcoming Mackenzie’s company. The Dogrib swung bone daggers above their heads and sang atonal songs, howling like wolves to prove their stamina. Mackenzie was frustrated, tired, impatient to move, and thoroughly unimpressed. He thought their dancing full of “Antic Shapes” and “very clumsy.” What’s more, he was repulsed by the lot of them, their “Dirty way of living,” their legs “full of Scabs” from smallpox, the “Dust & Grease” that caked on “their whole Body.” He decided they were an “ugly meagre ill made People,” and he wanted to be rid of them as soon as he could.

  Though Mackenzie had declared his aversion to playacting naturalist or anthropologist, he nonetheless felt an obligation to report any potential commercial prospects to his North West Company partners, so he diligently wrote down in his journal every mean facet of Dogrib life, especially their weapons and methods of hunting. Bows and arrows, clubs, daggers of stone and copper. Spears taller than a man, with a long barbed hook of bone. The size of their fishing nets and composition, the sinews of their snares, every decoration on their garters and shoes. And he tried to discern where they had already acquired their few small bits of iron that they used as needles and razors. He decided they must have traded with the Red Knife Indians and Chipewyan.

  By the time the talk and music were done, it was three o’clock in the afternoon, and Mackenzie was impatient after seven hours onshore. “They promised to remain upon the Banks of the River till the fall in case we should come back,” Mackenzie said, but at the pace things were going, he was afraid he’d never leave. Barrieau ordered the canoe repacked, and when they were finally ready to launch, Mackenzie called over his “new Recruit.” A Dogrib man had agreed to guide them for the price of an iron kettle, ax, hoe, and knife, but now he had second thoughts. He dithered for an hour, first in a show of collecting his belongings among their conical lodges of branches and bark, then in trying to persuade another to take his place. No one would, and Mackenzie pressed him; the voyageurs “in a manner compelled him to embark.” But not before he performed a departure ceremony.

  The Dogrib man cut off a lock of his hair, and blew on it, and spoke words over it, and divided it into three, and tied it to the hair of his wife and two children, as if he would never return that way again.

  The western sky was black with storm clouds, and the Dogrib elders said, “Father comes.”

  * * *

  ————

  They got under way at four o’clock. The party was up to fifteen now, still in three canoes. Mackenzie, Steinbruck, the four voyageurs, their two wives, Awgeenah, his two wives, the two hunters, the new Dogrib guide, and the poor Red Knife Indian stuck with nowhere else to go.

  Almost immediately, alongside the rock upon which Yamoria hung his sopping red beaver pelts, a large river joined in. The Dogrib said its source was the “great Bear Lake,” and Mackenzie thought its water “quite clear, of the colour of Salt Water Sea.” Then the heavy thunderstorm, which had threatened all afternoon, finally arrived, and a “heavy Gust of Wind” blew hard in their faces with driving rain, and they made camp at the base of the ridge. Mackenzie’s reluctant Dogrib guide was miserable in their first camp. “Our new Conductor told us that it blew every day in the Year on the Top of this Hill.” Only a few miles from the guide’s home, Mackenzie grew suspicious and thought he was “pretending sickness, that we might let him return to his relations.” Mackenzie felt “obliged to watch him all Night,” in case he ran away.

  They were shivering when they awoke to overcast, windy, “raw Weather this Morning,” Mackenzie said. He pushed them to the water at three o’clock anyway, enough sun to see, intent on maintaining a hectic pace. In obvious contradiction to the Dogrib’s tales, Mackenzie could see for himself that the river was approaching the Pacific. Around them was a “Ridge of Snowy Mountains always in Sight,” as Captain Cook had described his inlet. For a hundred miles, the river had braided among islands, but now it had reunited in a single channel, wide and strong. They had finally pierced the Rocky Mountains and were heading in the right direction, west-southwest according to his compass. The current was still powerful, but slowing a bit, as one would expect when a waterway of this kind reached the sea.

  True, they had not yet crossed a waterfall of any kind, much less the largest in the world. But Mackenzie only knew of that feature from Pond’s reports, which had already proven inadequate, in the river’s length if nothing else. The Dogrib said that a large cataract lay a month ahead, which also seemed impossible. If Mackenzie would trust anything, it would be his eyes, and the land around him, the direction of the river. At that moment, it all matched Cook’s reports of the river’s exit into the Pacific.

  Mackenzie set a grueling pace that day, over one hundred miles in sixteen hours of paddling. Dictating to Steinbruck, Mackenzie measured every last quarter mile. Not so his paddlers. The voyageurs noted progress by counting pipes, that is, how long it took to smoke one. In other words, they measured distance in time.

  The river narrowed again, entered a canyon with gray rock walls that appeared scraped, as if by the claws of a giant wolverine; the voyageurs called the beast a carcajou. Awgeenah knew that the wolverine could fold the earth in half, like a piece of paper, so that it only took a few steps to travel very far. This is why wolverines never tire. But their paddlers were flagging in the cold and wind, always in their faces.

  Soon the hills closed in ever tighter. To Mackenzie’s right, a headland thrust toward the river, and to the left its shorter counterpart, and the river turned north and poured over the bar in the bed that joined them. Mackenzie ordered the canoes to shore, and they camped at the base of the high hill on the northern shore, and while the voyageurs sat and smoked and regummed the canoes, Mackenzie was determined to summit the ridge.

  “Our Stranger,” the Dogrib guide, “informed us that there are a great Number of Bears and White Buffaloes in the Mountains,” Mackenzie said, so he took one of the Chipewyan hunters to investigate. Perhaps they could see the ocean, or at least kill a bear to eat. Normally, the Chipewyan preferred hunting bear in winter, not summer, when they could scout the den, and then thrust in a long stick to prod the bear, and shout, “Grandfather, grandfather, wake up!” Then, once they were sure the bear was awake, they’d crawl into the den and tie a rope around its neck, and then drag it out and cut it apart. But in summer, bears were dangerous and best left alone.

  But they had no time to hunt anything, as they could not even make it to the top of the mountain. “We were obliged to relinquish our design half way up it being nearly suffocated by Swarms of Musquittoes.” Mackenzie saw enough, though, to be discouraged. “I could see that the Mountain terminated here at least as far as we could see.” The snow-covered mountains that matched Cook’s reports were ending. And below them was a new hazard. “Observed a strong Rapling Current or rapid close by under the Hill which then was a Precipice.”

  In the morning, they quickly ferried to the other side of the river, to avoid the whitewater Mackenzie had seen the night before. But it was no matter. “This proved to be one of the least dangerous Rapids we had to pass & convinced me in my Opinion respecting the falsity of the Natives Information.”

  They were wrong about the size of the waterfall. They were wrong about how long it would take to reach the trifling rapids. And they would be wrong about monsters guarding the approaches to the sea.

  In only a day, their prospects had s
hifted considerably. The end of the river was not in sight; the coastal mountains must lie farther on. But Mackenzie remained determined.

  He would not be an old man when he arrived at the Pacific that summer.

  — 20 —

  RAPIDS WITHOUT RAPIDS, JULY 2016

  The blood-splattered peak of Yamoria, slumped on the river’s shoulder like a great beast slumbering, is now known as Bear Rock. Beneath it lies the Sahtu Dene village of Tulita. Eight months a year, no road connects Tulita to the outside world. Only in deep winter, when the swampy muskeg and lakes freeze, when the snow fills ditches and divots of pocked earth, does the winter road open to the south. In endless summer, plus the slushy shoulder seasons, the small village of five hundred souls is only reachable by expensive plane ticket or a very long boat ride.

  The public dock was a dirt ramp, and Jeremy and I grounded the canoe on the flotsam beach and staggered out on a sweltering afternoon. Kids splashed in the silt, and fishermen launched their workhorse Lunds. It was odd to see roads and trucks again, and Jeremy agreed to wait with our gear while I walked into town.

  “What’s your plan?” Jeremy asked.

  “Ask the first person I meet where the campground is. And the showers,” I said. Landon, my next paddle partner, was scheduled to fly into Tulita the following afternoon, and I welcomed the brief respite from the boat and the river. “Plus Jonas said to talk to Chief Andrews, remember?”

  I followed a gravel path, and at the top of the hill I found four indigenous men and women sitting on an old concrete block, watching the river. Three looked a bit unsteady, but a round man in the center spoke up as I approached.