Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

  Sheer to the river, the cliff walls pressed tight, the narrowest chute that had compressed the waterway thus far. The crumbling rock was the color of rendered animal grease and layered; when each horizontal stratum was compared with the water level, it looked as if the river was tipped, the whole channel sloped downward in a flume.

  The canyon turned a corner, and off one ledge wall a thin waterfall tinkled into a hidden basin. It was here, the Dogrib knew, that the giant had to piss.

  * * *

  ————

  The stone walls shrank, as if they were sinking into the earth. The formations fell away, green forest returned to the banks, and suddenly there were Indian encampments everywhere. Over the next three days, Mackenzie lingered at a succession of villages up and down the river, but none of them told him the news of the Pacific that he wished to hear.

  Mackenzie stopped to speak to a few families fishing at a small creek. There were nearly three dozen of the Indians, and they made presents of many green and white fish that Mackenzie had never seen before. He thought them excellent, and everyone in his party was appreciative again for fresh food. Mackenzie gave them metal tools in trade, but when he launched to push farther on the river, all the men in the village followed, each in his own small canoe. Fifteen new boats, plus the four Dogrib canoes from the tribes above the cliffs, plus the craft of his own hunters. A veritable armada made its way down the river, as if on parade.

  Only a few miles later they encountered another cluster of fires and families, and then another, and another, and another. These peoples wore the skins of hares as clothing and happily shared their boiled rabbit and fish. Mackenzie handed out more presents of metal tools, at times throwing the gifts out of the canoe without even stopping. Many of the women and children ran away when they did land, except in one village, where a woman had “an Abscess in the Belly and is reduced to a mere Skeleton,” and the old women of the village sang over her and made the howls of wolves, but “whether these noises were to operate as a charm for her cure, or merely to amuse and console her, I do not pretend to determine.” Mackenzie had a small kit of tinctures and liniments and poultices and Turlington’s balsam, but he did not offer to attempt to heal the woman.

  Most of the Indians said they had nothing to offer in return for the gifts of hatchets and sewing awls. One said they kept all their pelts at a lake many days’ walk to the east. Another offered caribou meat, but it “was so rotten and stunk so abominably that we did not accept it.” A third said they must avoid an island ahead, for it was the home of a “Manitoe,” a spirit that “swallowed every person that approached him.” When a village offered to wait on the bank for Mackenzie’s return, he assured them he would return soon, “in 2 Mos. at farthest.”

  Their Dogrib guide said these were the Hareskin Indians, very meek and mild, with nothing else to hunt but their small namesake. For their generosity masked a shortcoming. Game was growing scarce, as the Dogrib had predicted and was evident in the rancid caribou offering. The Cree and their rifles had forced the Dogrib, Slavey, and Hare too far north and west, and now they were starving. Awgeenah’s hunters had fared no better, killing only a single goose in the last week. Awgeenah knew of the Hareskin people, that they had long been at the mercy of more warlike nations, because many seasons ago they came to his Barren Lands to kill the caribou, so empty was their own home. The Chipewyan attacked the Hareskin to drive them back, but then a Hareskin elder made great medicine to scare away all of the game, and the Chipewyan starved. And so a long war began between the two peoples.

  The valley was growing barren, but there was no reason to believe that more food stock was to be had off the river shores, either. Their guides said that the Mountain people lived to the west and south, many days’ march up the creeks and creases of the land. Those people were dependent on hunting, because they lived in a place with no fish. But once a powerful medicine man made snowy winter come hard and drove away all the animals, so that starvation set in among the Mountain people. And they fled their homes for the safety of the Deh Cho, and the people scattered, so that one mother found herself alone with her son and they had no food. She took a needle and cut open a vein on her wrist, and the two drank her blood until they reached the river. There they found rabbits to eat, and the people on the shore gave them food and shelter, but they were the only two to survive.

  There was a lesson to learn in the land. Fish were in the river, rabbits on the banks, but little more, and Mackenzie had no time for nets and snares. “You can starve on rabbits,” the Indians all said. So much work for so little fat and meat. The ocean awaited, and so their pemmican stocks must dwindle.

  And ever was the persistent chill. Fog. Overcast. Bouts of rain. Mackenzie had not been able to take a measurement with his quadrant for over a week, not since they had entered the mountains. But surely the river would meet the Pacific soon.

  Mackenzie was beginning to think, though, that he must do it without “my Conductor,” their Dogrib guide. He had grown more and more frustrated with the man, who “was become very troublesome, obliged to watch him Night and Day except when upon the Water.” First the man said that they should leave him behind, because he knew nothing of the river anyway. Then he said there were more Dogrib ahead, and Mackenzie should use one of them as guide instead. “But we could not believe him as he told us 10 Minutes before that we should see no more of their Tribe.” After such back-and-forth, in exasperation Mackenzie nearly left him onshore, though eventually, out of desperation, he forced the Dogrib guide back in the canoe and they embarked once more.

  Mackenzie was through with the man. Awgeenah took a different tack and asked what was wrong. Were they not treating him fairly? Were they not feeding him, providing sustenance and comfort?

  Their guide was obsequious. No, he was being very well treated, he said. That wasn’t the problem. This Dogrib man, who had cut off his hair and given it to his wife and children before he left, wanted to leave Mackenzie’s party because he was afraid, because he knew where they were headed.

  Very soon they would come to the land of the Esquimaux. “They are very wicked,” he said, “and will kill us all.”

  — 22 —

  FORT GOOD HOPE TO TSIIGEHTCHIC, JULY 2016

  When I met Wilfred Jackson, an elder of the Sahtu Dene First Nation, he was just back from a moose hunt. Wilfred has dark skin and an avian nose and an admirable shock of gray hair that sticks straight up. His shoulders are hunched, and though he walks with a limp, he shuffles so fast you barely notice it. Most of the year Wilfred now lives in Fort Good Hope, in the side room of a hostel he runs with his daughter Rayuka, but when she and I met, this is the first thing she said: “My father, he’s an old bushman. You should ask him some stories.”

  So I did, and Wilfred told me about the time he came face-to-face with a smoldering bear.

  It was winter, and Wilfred was out on the land tending his traplines. In the perpetual dark, Wilfred used a flashlight to check each spring-loaded snare, laid out to catch martens puffed with their seasonal fur. But trap after trap, he found only a foot and fresh blood in the snow. Something was eating his catch.

  Wilfred remounted his Ski-Doo and returned to his camp. There he found the culprit: a grizzly, a big one, ransacking his food and gear. It had rolled in the coals of his fire for warmth and was blocking his only route of escape.

  “I tell all my children,” Wilfred said to me, “don’t be scared. The bears know if you are scared. The bears are good. Black, brown, grizz. All of them. Just don’t be scared when you see them.”

  Wilfred wasn’t scared, but he was trapped. To each side, the bush was an impenetrable wall. He was towing a toboggan, a sleigh to carry his tools and marten catch; he could never get the rig turned around on the narrow path. And he had not brought a gun, because it would never fire anyway, frozen tight in the extreme cold.

  So he cranked the engine and drove straight at the bear. And right before he hit it, the grizzly did something co
mpletely unexpected. It jumped.

  “My head was down. I could feel it pass over me. I could feel it hit the sled,” Wilfred said.

  The toboggan shook when the bear landed on it, but Wilfred never looked back. He just kept going, faster and faster, dragging the overturned sled all the way to the frozen Deh Cho.

  To this day, Wilfred still has never had to shoot a bear in self-defense, in all his years on the land. Not that he has many left, he reminded me.

  “Almost all the old-timers are dead,” Wilfred said repeatedly during our time together. Sometimes he said it to make a point, and sometimes he said it simply out of the blue, breaking the silence as we sat in his truck.

  * * *

  ————

  Landon and I arrived in Fort Good Hope two days early, and we spent those days with Wilfred Jackson and his family, in their modest clapboard heap heaving in the permafrost. Wilfred calls it a Bed & Breakfast, but it’s more like a Mattress & Help Yourself The Kitchen Is Over There. The communal space is painted red and purple and contains a woodstove, a small library with 1980s Reader’s Digest novels, a record player, and a brand-new wide-screen television hooked to a satellite dish. Outside, Wilfred kept two pickup trucks, two all-terrain vehicles they all call quads, a snowmobile they all call a Ski-Doo, a boat with a spare outboard motor—“You have to hook them up to a computer now to fix them,” Wilfred lamented—and a freezer chest stocked with musk ox quarters and fillets of inconnu, a white fish he called coney. His porch is covered in bird shit; his eaves are full of barn swallow nests. When Wilfred drives around town on his quad, he wears overlarge tortoiseshell women’s sunglasses to keep the bugs from flying in his eyes.

  Fort Good Hope consists of about five dozen shacks in various states of disrepair, a few newer double-wides, an airstrip, a health clinic, an old church, and a new school set on piers. Like Tulita, barely five hundred people live there, nearly all indigenous. There are no street numbers on homes, only family names, and padlocks on the outside of doors. Wilfred said the Pentecostal missionaries and young drinkers live on the north side, which is why he lives on the quiet southern end.

  He didn’t always. Wilfred still keeps a network of camps stretching over hundreds of miles of territory, a time and place for everything: geese in the spring, fish in the summer, caribou in the fall. He spoke of the land with less affection than respect. Bounty is hard won, and by his good fortune motorboats and Ski-Doos long ago replaced canoes and snowshoes.

  Wilfred showed me a photograph on his wall, him sitting in camp surrounded by marten pelts. Last winter, he snared 108 and sold them for a hundred dollars each, to coat makers in Russia and China. It was good money for a month’s work, but seasonal and short-lived. The cash was a windfall, and Wilfred knew it and treated it as such, and was back to subsistence hunting and fishing soon after.

  “When you get rich, you get sick,” he said to me. “You worry, when every dollar goes down. I have money, but I just pay bills. I never keep it, it all goes away. I shoot a ptarmigan”—here he made the motion of pulling a trigger—“I shoot a rabbit. It’s fresh, fresh. That’s what I want. Fresh.”

  So did I, after weeks of freeze-dried dinners. “My father got a young bull,” Rayuka said and then showed me her family’s smokehouse. She called it a teepee, but to me it looked more like a plywood shed, a small fire in the center and a grate over the roof. Inside the smoke was pleasant, just enough to keep the bugs away and cure the meat. Heavy loins and shanks of moose hung draped over a grill, and deep red back straps, thin as prosciutto, were stretched out like a spiderweb to dry.

  “I like to cut it thin,” she said, showing me the bloodstained table where she works. Rayuka is a heavyset woman just on the edge of middle age, with long dark hair and a wry disarming smile. Her name means Northern Lights in North Slavey. “I add just a little salt. Nothing else.”

  She handed me several pieces of dry meat, dark brown with thin white streaks of fat. I expected the sour gaminess of venison or the extreme brine of supermarket beef jerky, but the flavor was surprisingly mild, and it dissolved in my mouth.

  “This is so good,” I said, and Rayuka flashed a set of gapped teeth that would make most self-conscious.

  I ate slowly, and still had a pile in my hand when Lucy, Wilfred’s wife and Rayuka’s mother, stopped at the smokehouse. Lucy is short and deeply wrinkled. She stood quiet a moment and squinted at me, lacking the eyeglasses common among older Americans.

  “Are you going to eat that or hold it?” she finally said. She wore an unamused look.

  “I want to savor it,” I said. “You can’t get moose dry meat back in New York.”

  She seemed to think about this a moment.

  “Do your indigenous nations own their land?” she asked.

  “No, most don’t,” I said. She didn’t reply or move a muscle on her face, so I felt compelled to continue. “They’re out of sight. Most Americans don’t even think about them anymore. It’s a sad history.”

  “It’s more than sad,” she said, and she shook her head. “It’s terrible what your country has done.” And she walked up the stairs of her front porch, went inside her home, and closed the door.

  * * *

  ————

  Landon and I settled easily into a comfortable life at the B&B. I was tired, like I hadn’t felt since the war, from a combination of stress and exertion. Bone-heavy, weighted weariness. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to move. And I knew the worst of the trip, the hardest sections, were still ahead.

  I walked to the Northern store and bought eggs and bacon and moldy rye bread. I cooked the bacon in a pan on the electric stove and then scrambled the eggs in the leftover grease. We scraped blue off the bread and toasted it and made bacon and egg sandwiches, and the liquefied fat ran off my fingers.

  I was getting soft. Every time I washed my hands, my calluses melted a little more. My sunburned arms and legs peeled. My mosquito bites itched again. My belly grew a bit; Landon and I split a half gallon of ice cream, then I went looking for more. I took a shower, and then another, and then another, until my fingernails and ears were clean. I got nervous about getting back on the water. I knew that in three days I would be wet and filthy again, hungry, in pain, eating expired food. I was homesick, and I just wanted to be done, but the Deh Cho was so big, and I still had hundreds of miles to go.

  Landon rediscovered television—“I’ve been in Italy for two years, haven’t seen anything,” he said—and he just lay on the couch watching a marathon of Alone. In that reality show, people compete to see how long they can stay in the wilderness by themselves; most seem to have mental breakdowns after a week or two. The B&B had Wi-Fi, and I turned on my phone. My Facebook algorithm presented me with news articles from my old life: highbrow literary criticism, several essays on identity, the coming election. Completely separated from my current circumstances, they made no sense and I closed them uninterested. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs remained alive and well.

  Wilfred said we could eat some of the coney steaks in the freezer, so Landon thawed a few, rolled them in bread crumbs, and put them in a skillet. I walked back to the store and bought half-wilted lettuce and made a salad, the biggest treat of the day. I told Wilfred thank you, that it was our first fish from the river, and he was incredulous that we didn’t at least have a fishing pole, as if we missed the essential purpose of the trip if we didn’t catch our dinner.

  In previous years, Wilfred worked as a guide, taking American business executives and former professional football and basketball players on great sportfishing adventures. He doesn’t remember their names, only that it was funny that their feet stuck off the end of the bed.

  “Look in there,” Wilfred said, handing me an old photo album packed with three-by-fives. “You might see some people you know. They’re from the States too.” All of the pictures were from the late 1990s, fishermen from Minnesota.

  But Wilfred hasn’t had a client in almost a decade, so he gave up h
is expensive guide license six years ago. “Do you remember when those jets flew into those big towers?” he asked me in all sincerity, as if I might not remember 9/11. “After that, no one came anymore. I don’t know why.”

  * * *

  ————

  The next day was Sunday, and since the Jacksons are devout Catholics, we all went to morning Mass. Bells rang fifteen minutes before the service, to call the village. On the way, we walked past the graveyard, dominated by the small plots of children who all died within a few years of each other in the late 1970s.

  The wooden church is 130 years old, and the interior is painted floor to ceiling, vestibule to sanctuary, with a continuous stream of ocher, maroon, cobalt, indigo, and mustard images: roses and cherubs, storks and lilies, bunches of pears and oranges and bananas, young Jesus in the temple, the Virgin Mary appearing in the cliffs of the Ramparts as Our Lady of the Rapids. When we paddled the river, Landon and I had seen a statue of Mary in the cliff wall, placed to memorialize the apparition. According to local legend, it is immovable and never washes away, no matter what plague the Deh Cho might visit upon it.

  Before Mass, Lucy led a saying of the rosary, one decade in English, the next in North Slavey, the close of each segment always “Oh, Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of your mercy. Amen.” So many “thees” and “thous”; one woman wore a lacy head covering. This was old-time Catholicism from my childhood.