That was the moment that ts’ii deii days were done. The time of the long now came to an end. The muskrat released its tail. Medicine started to fade, history marched forward, and from then on the Gwich’in were caught up in all of it.
They were not afraid. Four men at the camp gathered their wives and children to seek the source of the wood chips. They loaded in their canoes and turned upriver, paddling into the future.
* * *
————
“Thunder and Rain last Night, and, in the course of it, our Conductor deserted.” Mackenzie was relieved to be rid of the troublesome Dogrib man and immediately sought a more competent guide to show him the way. He ordered the voyageurs to claim “one of the others against his will,” and as a press gang Barrieau and the voyageurs snatched a new young Dogrib man from the closest cluster of cooking fires. He fought, but the canadiens outnumbered him, and had rifles besides, and though he threw a paddle in the shuffle, Mackenzie “pacified him,” and they pushed off the canoes at half past three in the morning.
Soon smoke appeared on the right side of the river, and when Mackenzie ordered his boats in, their new guide became apoplectic. “Our Stranger began to Hallow to them in a very strange manner,” Mackenzie wrote. This encampment, he said, was “not of his Tribe,” and they would “beat us all, and pull out our Hair.” Four hardy men stood onshore, the women and children having made for the spruce on the high mud bank. They were dressed in shirts of muskrat skins, and wore mittened gauntlets stretching to the elbow, and were armed with bows made of sinew. They did not cower or run or beg for gifts or offer tokens of friendship. Instead, they commenced to “Harangue us all at the same time before we Debarked seemingly in a very violent Passion.”
Mackenzie wasn’t fearful, but he was confused, because the meaning of their words was far less clear than the tone of their voices. The Chipewyan hunters could understand nothing, Awgeenah only the words of a single man, though the English Chief’s replies proved ineffectual. Their new guide spoke briefly, and the four men went quiet. Mackenzie put out his hand to shake, and they looked at his empty palm confused. Mackenzie took this as a signal to pass out iron gifts. At that, “the Women and Children came out of the Wood and met with a similar treatment,” and the tension left the air.
Using their new bondaged guide as an interpreter, Mackenzie traded sewing needles and knives for several large moose skins. He was “surprised to see them have any as I did not think there were any of those Animals in the Country, and they tell us that they are very scarce.” So were many other fur-bearing animals; “they don’t know what Beaver is.” Mackenzie had finally reached the point where traveling farther north and west did not yield richer pelts. A three-century-old truism of the fur industry had reached its limit.
The voyageurs’ clothing was in rags, and their arms in short supply as well, so Barrieau, Landry, Ducette, and de Lorme purchased shirts, bows, two-feathered arrows, and snares as well; if there was nothing to eat in this place but rabbit, they must be caught somehow. The Indian women offered fish, which Mackenzie found “most delicious,” and one of the men, of his own volition and without cajoling, agreed to accompany them down the river to introduce them to more of his people.
Mackenzie was impressed by the new tribe. This new man “spoke much in derision of the last Indians who we had seen, that they were all like old Women & great Liars, which coincides with the Opinion I had already entertained of them.” To Mackenzie, they did not call themselves the Gwichya Gwich’in. Awgeenah heard their name as Diguthe Dinees, the Quarrellers. Mackenzie thought they “had a better appearance than any of those we had yet seen, being healthy and full of Flesh.” Clearly the pox had not reached this far, nor trade goods either, as the men possessed only small bits of salvaged iron that they used as razor edges.
Mackenzie’s crew reloaded their boats and pushed off, and in a tradition reaching all the way back to Montreal, several voyageurs “fired a Couple of Guns loaded with Powder.” Their new guide was “startled, having never heard or seen any thing of the kind before.” He refused to join Mackenzie’s canoe, the source of the noise, and insisted on paddling his own instead, asking two of his brothers to join him in their own boats.
The rest of the day they traveled southwest, by Mackenzie’s observations. The river was laced with sandbars, and battlements of rock enclosed their passage. In late afternoon, they saw more cooking fires in a bay framed with aspen, and their guide’s brothers paddled their solo craft ahead to warn their families of strangers. But still, when Mackenzie landed, the Quarrellers who encamped there “made a terrible uproar speaking quite loud & running up & down like perfect Madmen,” he thought. “Perceiving the disorder which our appearance occasioned among these people, we waited some time before we quitted the canoe; I have no doubt, if we had been without people to introduce us, that they would have attempted some violence against us.”
There were five families there, Mackenzie figured, though he “did not see them all as they kept in their hiding places.” Their hair was long and tied off at the temples and hung before their ears. He offered gifts, as was his custom, and discovered they wanted nothing but blue beads to decorate their clothing. So he bought new shirts for the Chipewyan hunters, and more arrows for his voyageurs, and dry fish to supplement their ever-shrinking pemmican stocks.
But always, Mackenzie wanted information on the Pacific. “Those Indians told me that from where I met the first of their People this Morning it was not far to go to the Sea over Land on the East Side & from where I found them it was but a short way to go to it to the Westward that the land on both Sides the River was like a Point.” He was getting close, and his new Quarreller guide predicted that “we will sleep 10 Nights more before we come to the Sea.” And what’s more, the Esquimaux, now only “three Nights farther.”
* * *
————
The Esquimaux. They had come at last to the sticking place. No longer a far-off threat to be dealt with later, the Esquimaux were now an immediate hazard.
At times the Quarrellers traded with the Esquimaux, who provided all their knives, arrows and bows, the method of their canoe construction. And yet their guide also indicated a nearby hill where his grandfather had been killed by the Esquimaux only three winters before. There had not been war since, but what did that mean?
Their Gwich’in guide knew that a raid could come at any time. A woman of his tribe, Ahts’an veh, had once been taken by the Esquimaux and held in captivity for years, long enough to give birth by her new husband. They raided the Gwich’in villages, killed her brothers and brought her the heads, and when she escaped, they hanged her new baby from a tree.
The young Quarreller knew the Esquimaux, everything about them, he wanted to assure Mackenzie and Awgeenah. His two brothers mockingly sang “in Imitation of the Esquimaux,” which “amused us” and “enliven[ed] our new Guide.” He danced Esquimaux dances and, in a final show of encyclopedic knowledge, “pull’d his Penis out of his Breeches, laying it on his hand & telling us the Esquimaux name of it.”
Their new guide, who had joined them only hours before and “took much Pains to shew us that he knew the Esquimaux & their Customs,” wished to go no farther. “He was afraid that we should not come back this way,” Mackenzie said, because the Esquimaux were too dangerous. They would “perhaps kill us,” take the wives of “my Men & Indians.” He feared for his life.
But Awgeenah and his Chipewyan hunters said that “we were not afraid & that he need not be.” Their rifles were their phallus. Perhaps they could take the Esquimaux scalps to Hudson’s Bay and sell them, pass them off as some animal that lived in the water.
For Awgeenah knew the Esquimaux as well. He knew their cruelty and deceit. He had run their naked bodies through with spears and then bathed in their heart-blood. His instinct was war, but he also knew that he did not lead a party of warriors as had Matonabbee almost two decades before. He traveled with only two of his own retainers. What use would
be their equivocating guides, and even the voyageurs, who endured hardship and toil and beat one another with their fists, but did not know the art of battle?
Mackenzie, for his part, remained quiet and ambivalent but undeterred. For days, he and his voyageurs were the first white men ever to meet a succession of Slavey, Dogrib, Hare, and Quarreller tribes, people whose languages were foreign even to Awgeenah. Their small party had survived thus far without bloodshed. They would press on, he decided, even to a place of frozen monsters and the Esquimaux who hunt them.
* * *
————
They slept long into the cold morning and did not launch until four o’clock. “Not far from our Campment the River narrows between high Rocks,” and they followed a twisting course until, in dramatic fashion, “the Banks get low” in all directions. Far in the distance, “Snowy Mountains ahead,” but all around them “the River widens & runs in many Channels amongst Islands some of which are nothing but a Bank of Land & Mud.” In those walls of silt he found “a face of solid Ice intermix’d with Black Earth,” drooping into the water as it melted in the hot sun. Some larger mounds hosted trees larger than he had seen in months, but they were tipped and dizzy, tumbling about. Mackenzie had entered a new kind of country: expansive, marshy, and, but for the peaks in the distance, completely unlike the descriptions of Captain Cook’s inlet.
The sun was blazing, relentless, but, most important, visible. For the first time in two weeks, since they probed their way along the north shore of Slave Lake, the sky was clear at noon, and Mackenzie could use his quadrant to measure the sun’s distance off the horizon. The reading could not have been more disheartening.
“I got an Observation which gave me 67 degrees 47 minutes North Lat., which is farther North than I expected, according to the course I kept.” What had gone wrong? He had dutifully marked his mileage, checked his course constantly. Perhaps his error was “owing to the Variation of the Compass which is more Easterly than that I thought.” There had been so many storms he had not been able to recalibrate his instruments via celestial readings, and so never considered accounting for a drastically shifting magnetic deviation. Hundreds of miles behind them, in the mountains, the river had turned northward, but he never realized it. For weeks, they had been going the wrong way.
“I am much at a loss here how to act being certain that my going further in this Direction will not answer the Purpose of which the Voyage intended, as it is evident these Waters must empty themselves into the Hyperborean Sea.”
The Arctic, the Northern Ocean, the White Man’s Lake known as Billhully Toe. There were many names for the same body of water, but Mackenzie called it the Hyperborea, a term from his Scottish school days and Roderic’s books on Greek history and philosophy. Pliny and his ilk said that the warm Hyperborean Sea was home to nine-foot-tall men who lived a thousand years. Eighteenth-century geographers held a similar consensus: at the warm North Pole lay a shallow temperate ocean completely encircled by high walls of ice, as Captain Cook had encountered in the Bering Strait. The only question for Mackenzie was whether the mouth of this river was locked in ice as well. Summer navigation was a minimal requirement for any practicable northwest passage.
In either case, he was as far from the Pacific as ever. To go on “would satisfy Peoples Curiosity, tho’ not their Intentions.”
That night, full of discouragement, Mackenzie left his tent and stayed up “to observe at what time the Sun would set.” He sat and sat, on that mushy shore, for one hour, then two, then three. Just after twelve o’clock, Mackenzie stood and walked to the canoe and shook awake Barrieau, his old Athabascan guide, trusted for so many seasons, to show the man “what he never saw before.” Barrieau was groggy, confused, thought it was time to embark, and woke Landry, Ducette, and de Lorme as well, and none could “scarcely be persuaded” by what they beheld, as all the voyageurs stood with Mackenzie and looked at the midnight sky in amazement.
After weeks of nighttime storms, Mackenzie wanted to see when the sun set, but “found that he did not set at all.”
— 24 —
INTO THE EARTH SPONGE, JULY 2016
The Gwich’in village of Tsiigehtchic appeared not so much quiet as abandoned, a few tidy homes, a stately church on the hill, and every business locked up tight. I had made contact, via e-mail, with an elder who agreed to meet and talk, but she had warned me she might be out on the land, fishing, when I came through. I wanted to talk with her about the efforts to save the Gwich’in language, about the book of Gwich’in stories she had provided me, and about ts’ii deii days and how her people know the word contains great meaning but have lost the ability to translate it. Mackenzie’s Quarrellers have stayed feisty and resilient; one council recently voted to ban hydro-fracking under its lands.
I walked the hilly gravel streets of Tsiigehtchic, looking for anyone to speak to, but found not a single soul. Only flocks of the ubiquitous ravens and the foreleg of a cloven-hooved animal lying on the roadside. Eventually, I gave up. It was a Sunday, after all. No meeting would occur, and with the Northern store closed, no supplementing of our moldering bread and fruit. We’d live on the staples we had.
The only life in town was on its edge, along the Dempster Highway, where a single industrial tug kept a regular business shuttling trucks back and forth across the river. The sun was full and the air was cool. Maybe everyone was off fishing?
Since we had broken free from the Thunder River three days before, the wind had not changed, but our attitudes had. We were weary but resolved. We would not stop. We would always attempt progress, no matter how small. The goal of reaching Garry Island, previously so far off as to be incomprehensible, was drawing near. And yet, even as we approached, I recognized more and more that the river was in control of whether we succeeded. We would keep working, and the Deh Cho would stop us or not.
Between the Thunder River and Tsiigehtchic, we solved mazes of unmapped sandbars, repeatedly crossing whitecapped water. At times, the waves were three feet high while the river was only one foot deep, and I wondered how we didn’t get marooned in the middle of the channel, dropped and lifted and dropped again as one does in surf at shore. There were dust storms off bare islands, sunburns in frigid north winds, and the nights were bone-shivering cold; no amount of hot oatmeal in the morning seemed to warm us. The great river was the color of old dishwater, and just as dirty, so we stopped when we could at smaller side streams to filter for cooking and drinking. The Tree River, where it entered the muddy Deh Cho, was so deeply tannined that their junction looked like a meeting of two completely different substances. “Look, it’s a peanut-butter-jelly line,” Senny said of the contrast between brown and purple. The Tree River was just warm enough to consider bathing, and Senny volunteered to go first. He dove naked into the iced-tea stream and immediately leaped out with a yelp. I contented myself with a rinse of my dank and greasy hair.
At Cony Bay, where Mackenzie met the Gwich’in, we saw our first massive chunk of dirty ice onshore, a railroad car covered in grime. The bay itself was wide and empty and thick with white birch as we had not seen in weeks. I replenished our supply of bark—I hoarded a stash in a dry corner of the canoe, to start cooking fires—in case it would be hard to find in the swampy delta.
It was bright and clear, and while Senny lay in the sunshine, I studied the sky. Mare’s tails and mackerel scales, horizon to horizon.
“Oh shit,” Senny said, when I pointed.
The final leg to Tsiigehtchic passes the Lower Ramparts, an enormous horseshoe of shale that created a circular wind tunnel, blowing always in our face all the way around the dial. Progress was excruciating.
“Senny, I think we’ve stopped,” I called.
“No, we’re moving,” he said, and pointed ahead. “Look, cliff parallax.”
And he was right. With the speed of a glacier cutting or a continent thrusting, the shale cliffs opened and shifted as we dug our paddles around the horn.
But this great cur
ve of the river would prove the last gasp of descension. The valley was over. We were done dropping, and though still 150 miles inland, a mere dozen feet above sea level. All the downward movement, since driving that ridge near Edmonton, had led here, to the delta, and Tsiigehtchic served as its head.
As a sign that the funnel was spent and the swamp had returned, just outside Tsiigehtchic a loon floated on the water, diving and fishing. I had not seen one in a month.
“It’s good to see a loon,” I said. “I was afraid we were too far north for loons, which I didn’t think was possible. Loons are the north to me.”
“Like koalas,” said Senny. “There’s no place too Australian for a koala.”
At Tsiigehtchic, Senny and I were cooking dinner at the empty dock, enjoying the seats of a picnic table, when two men pulled up in a rickety powerboat packed with gas canisters. They wore heavy parkas with the hoods up, and one had a thin black goatee; I thought they were indigenous. But in fact, they were German, Matthew and his son Jan, from Basel. They were traveling down from Inuvik and needed gas. I gave them the bad news that everything was closed, so they prepared camp, right there at the dock.
Matthew said he was doing the river in stages, had already completed several upper sections, and was now working toward Norman Wells. I asked him why he traveled so far, just to boat the Deh Cho, and he said, “I saw a big river on the map, and I wondered, what is there?”
“Turns out the answer is nothing!” said Jan, with a smirk.
Senny and I pressed on that night, following my habit of not spending more time in towns than necessary. We camped on a slimy, mosquito-choked beach, and the next day faced the first navigational decision of the trip.
Disappointment River Page 30