King of The Road

by Alex Deborgorski

  When you drive from Fort Providence up to Yellowknife you’ll see these warning signs beside the road with buffalo on them. I’m not kidding. Most southerners think that buffalo were all wiped out during the 1800s on the Great Plains. But we still have thousands of wild buffalo up here. Keep your eyes peeled and you’ll see them standing in the woods as you go by. Lots of times you come around a corner and they’ll be standing right in the middle of the road. Sometimes they’ll run when they see a vehicle; sometimes they’ll stand there and glare at you. It’s very difficult to predict what a wild buffalo is going to do. And since a bull weighs over two thousand pounds, you want to be very careful when you’re driving at night.

  Our wolves are big, too. I guess it has something to do with heat efficiency. Big animals don’t lose their body heat as quickly as small animals. Arctic wolves have long legs, and when you see one crossing the ice road up ahead of the truck, they’re so big you sometimes mistake them for a caribou.

  My friend Dave Smith and I are both curmudgeonly. We’ve lived in Yellowknife over thirty years and on occasion have shared the same shack in the bush, drank the same frozen beer, and have been wakened in the morning by the same bears. Dave does a lot of freighting work with his boat on Great Slave Lake and he has a wolfskin on the back of his couch at his home in Yellowknife. Pure white, with beautiful fur about four inches thick. He got it from a trapper who told him it was the biggest wolf he’d ever caught. If you measure this wolf it’s eight feet from the tip of the nose to the base of the tail. Imagine going out for a walk one day and meeting an animal that size face to face.

  You’ll see lots of caribou crossing the roads, especially the Tibbit to Contwoyto Winter Road. Sometimes you’ll see wolves before you see the caribou. If you see wolves that means there’s caribou around. The wolves are always following the caribou and picking them off. Of course, when you get the caribou carcasses you will get foxes, wolverines, ravens, and eagles cleaning them up. The hunters come along and shoot a few caribou and leave the gut piles. That attracts the birds and the animals.

  When you’re driving along you can see those ravens from a long way off. You’ll see these black shapes sitting on the snow, and that means there’s a caribou down. Where there’s the remains of a caribou, you’re going to see wildlife. Might be a fox, or even a wolf. Pure white, like a ghost—you won’t see him unless you look real hard and then all of a sudden he’s just standing there.

  I like telling people about the giant rabbits we have up here. They’re properly called Arctic hares. These things are a lot bigger than most big rabbits. How big are they? Well, one time I was sleeping behind the wheel. I hear a noise and I turn my head and there’s one of them Arctic hares looking right in the side window. Darn ears were sticking up over the door handle of the truck. This rabbit was almost as tall as a man in a bunny suit. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but these rabbits get big.

  The town of Yellowknife is full of ravens. They’re always getting into mischief. They will tease dogs and steal stuff. They are a lot like people in some ways. They are sociable, they never stop talking, and they are always working the angles, so they get along real well in an urban setting.

  You have to be careful putting down your tools or your car keys because some raven will come in and snatch them just for fun. The Indians have many stories and legends about ravens, and they regard them as the tricksters of the north. They are looking for a way to tease mankind and steal his food. They say that animals don’t have a soul, but I can tell you that they definitely have a sense of humor. You don’t have to be an expert on the subject, it’s just common sense. If you spend enough time in the north and you watch these animals you can tell that sometimes they’re just having fun.

  One time I saw a raven swinging on a telephone wire. He would hold on to it with his feet, then cock his head in a goofy kind of way and swing upside-down, hanging by his claws. He looked like a toy up there, swinging back and forth and using his wings to get back upright again. I guess he was enjoying himself after a good meal, just playing like a kid in a schoolyard. They are also really good imitators. If you’re out in the bush, banging nails or splitting wood or running a power tool, you will sometimes hear someone else working after you stop. You look around, thinking, What the heck, is someone else chopping wood out here? Then you look in a tree and see it’s just a raven making chopping sounds, having some fun with you.

  I sometimes play a joke on them, too. Driving down the ice road, I’ll put a sandwich on my dashboard. A raven will go flying past, he’ll spot that sandwich, and he’ll come in for a landing on the hood of my truck. As soon as his buddies see him, they’ll come zooming in to see what’s going on. Before you know it I’ll have two or three ravens skidding around on the hood of the truck, cocking their heads this way and that because they can only see properly out of one eye at a time, pecking the windshield and trying to figure out how they are going to get that sandwich. It’s pretty comical. They are smart birds and they know there’s no point in pecking at window glass. But they just can’t bring themselves to fly away without trying to get that sandwich.

  You can’t actually feed them, though. The rule book states it in black and white: “Feeding wildlife while operating/ travelling on or near the Winter Road is strictly prohibited.”

  I’ve never gotten in trouble for hitting an animal. And that’s good, because I like animals and they make a long drive way more interesting. One day I was driving down the ice road and I saw the strangest sight. A whole bunch of little crawly black critters came boiling up over the snowbank and ran onto the road right in front of the truck. I slammed on the brakes thinking, What the heck is this?

  Well, I’ll be darned if it’s not a family of otters!

  I always thought they lived in the open water, rivers and lakes. But here they are way out in the middle of the ice road, on a bitter winter day, with the air temperature at least 30 degrees below zero. It was Mum and Dad and the kids, about three little ones, and they were pretty darn surprised to see this massive truck coming at them right in the middle of nowhere.

  As soon as they saw me, Mum and Dad were concentrating on getting off the road, but the kids weren’t too worried. In fact, they weren’t worried at all. They looked like they were having a whale of a time, and that’s when I realized why they were out here on the ice road. When they plow the ice road they leave these steep snowbanks on both shoulders, and the otters always cross a frozen lake just so they could slide on the snowbanks. The parents were kind of worried about the truck, but the young ones ignored me. They would just run up the snowbank, slide to the bottom on their bellies, and then run back up to do the same thing again. They looked just like a bunch of kids at a toboggan park, and you could tell by their expressions that they weren’t going to let a gigantic truck disturb their afternoon of fun.

  I had to stop and watch them for a while. Didn’t have a camera, but I’ll never forget the sight of those animals whooping it up in the snow. They have got to be one of the neatest, funniest animals on the land. I don’t know much about dolphins, but I imagine that otters are like a furry four-legged dolphin, with the same sense of humor.

  Humor is one of the main things about living in the north. People up here are funny, and they are good storytellers. And it seems like most of the funny stories have an animal in them. There are lots of bear stories, for example. I don’t know how many run-ins I’ve had with bears. And there was always something funny about it.

  Like this one time, in the off-season, I was working in a bush camp with some diamond drillers. For some reason diamond drillers always seem to be afraid of bears. So my buddy Dave and I gathered up this bear shit from outside and took it over to the drill shack where they usually ate dinner and put this bear shit on the floor. And then we sprayed it with bug spray to make it look like it was fresh and still damp, and then sprinkled it with bread crumbs to make it look like he was eating that. Then we kicked over a few pails and made a little bi
t of a mess the same way that a bear might knock things down, and then off we went.

  One of these drillers was pretty experienced in the bush, so he wasn’t too concerned. In fact, he was such a cool customer that he never even mentioned it. But this other guy, this rookie, he was scared silly. He couldn’t stop talking about it: “Oh, man, this bear must be really dangerous, walking right into the cook shack like he did. What are we going to do about this bear? I’m not getting paid to fight bears,” and so on. It was his main subject of conversation.

  And of course Dave and I were having trouble keeping control of ourselves because it was so funny. We’d be sitting at dinner listening to this city boy going on and on about this big dangerous bear that was going to pull us out of our sleeping bags and rip us apart and we’d practically blow food out our noses trying not to laugh.

  Another time, I was in this drilling camp by myself and this one bear would come and visit me. The cabin door opened to the inside, and every night around one in the morning, when I was lying asleep in bed, the door would swing open and this bear would look inside at me. I don’t know how that woke me up, but I would open my eyes and get a hell of a start because this bear would be looking at me. I wasn’t too worried that it was going to eat me, but it makes it hard to sleep when you’re thinking that at any moment a bear might walk in.

  So this got to be quite annoying, and one night when the bear showed up I went outside and yelled at it. I had this little Defender 12-gauge shotgun—have you ever seen one? They’re a neat little gun and they’ll knock a door off the hinges. I shout, “Hey,” to the bear. And it just looks at me. It’s turning its head back and forth and you can just tell by its expression that it doesn’t know what I am. I guess it’s never seen a man before. I aim the gun at the ground next to the bear and I fire a slug into the gravel at its feet. Kaboom! Stones and earth go flying and that bear jumps three feet in the air. It takes off running and I fire another shot into the sand right under its heels to give it a good sendoff.

  Later on, the rest of the crew shows up, and of course when you have workers, you have food, and when you have food you get bears. Despite what anyone tells you about “bearproofing” your campsite, you simply cannot live in an area for any length of time without attracting bears. Even if you’re out on the land and you pee on the ground, animals will come and investigate that spot. So naturally, we started getting bears. And the drillers were terrified. These bears would come around the cook tent and oh boy, you could hear everyone yelling and banging pans, trying to scare them away.

  I don’t know why, but I would just stamp my foot and they would take off running like they had seen the devil. I told the cook that it must have been my body odor. They were all bathing with Herbal Essence, and I smelled like a mountain man. But I don’t know the real reason. Maybe the word got out or something. That one bear must have told the other ones: “Stay away from that big guy. He has a bad temper.”

  An Unusual Hitchhiker

  One time I was driving down the road with a buddy and I saw this eagle sitting up ahead on the side of the road. You’ll often see them sitting on a dead animal, so the eagle itself wasn’t unusual. It was just the way he was sitting. You know how sometimes you can look at an animal and just tell that there’s something wrong with it? I don’t know if this thing had been hit by a vehicle, but I could tell that something wasn’t right.

  I got out and walked over to the eagle. As soon as he saw me coming he reared back on his tail and spread his wings out like a tripod and extended his claws and started clicking his beak at me. I guess that’s how they defend themselves. I had a light windbreaker on, so I took it off and threw it over the eagle and picked him up. He was big and heavy. I mean, he was as big as a barnyard turkey. I told my friend Ian to drive, and I climbed in with his eagle on my lap. “What are we going to do with it?” my buddy said.

  “I have no idea but there must be a place that takes injured eagles.”

  So we were driving down the road and I had this big damn bird on my lap and his claws were sitting right on my crotch. His claws were about the size of my hands, and that made me wonder if maybe I was making an error in judgment. If this bird grabbed me by the balls I would be in serious trouble. So I said to Ian, “If this son of a bitch goes crazy on me, jam on the brakes and I’m going to wring his neck and throw him out the window.”

  Having grown up on a farm, I know how to kill a bird real quick, and I really didn’t like the idea of those big claws sitting about an inch away from the family jewels! Of course, I didn’t want to scare him, but every time we hit a bump I could feel his claws tense up a little bit and all kinds of interesting thoughts were going through my mind about what I was going to do if he just suddenly grabbed me. Finally I said, “Let’s take him to the RCMP. They’ll know what to do with him.”

  So we survived the journey down the road and we got to Fort Providence and went into the little police detachment there. And of course the constable there was about twentyone years old and he didn’t have a clue what he was supposed to do with this eagle. It just showed you how we expect the police to be able to fix any kind of problem. I mean, here’s this young cop and he knows even less than we do. He said, “What do you expect me to do with it?”

  “I don’t know; you’re the cop.”

  “But nobody ever brought me an eagle before.”

  “Well, all I know is, these things are protected by law and that means you’re in charge of protecting it.”

  “Okay, bring it in here.”

  He had a doggie cage in the back, a cage for bad dogs, and he put it in there. This poor eagle, now he’s in jail. Anyway, we left, but I read about that bird a week later. That young cop drove that eagle for 200 miles to Yellowknife and gave it to the vet, who rehabilitated it and put it back in the wild. That young policeman was a little aggravated when we dumped that eagle on him, but you could tell from that newspaper story that he got into the spirit of the rescue. It was probably the most interesting thing he did all month.

  The Mouse That Wrecked a Car

  Speaking of funny animal stories, I sometimes entertain the truckers with the story of the time that a mouse wrecked my Mark III Lincoln.

  It all started with this time that my son Curtis and I took a driving trip to Victoria. There was a battleship in the harbor and I wanted to have a look at it. We were walking across the street and he threw a tantrum right in the middle of the crosswalk. He was about five years old. He laid down right in the road and the thought crossed my mind that if I could pack him in a box I would just send him as cargo direct home to Yellowknife.

  Then we went to visit my cousin Justina, whose daughter Simone is just as pretty as a picture. I think her dad was Jamaican and played the trumpet in a reggae band. She had two pet white mice, and her mom offered them to Curtis as a present.

  They had a cage, so we took these white mice with us. As we were driving from Vancouver back to Yellowknife, well, one of these dang mice got loose in the car, and the only time it would come out was when you were driving. He’d come out and sit on your knee, but as soon as you’d stop, he would disappear. I’d leave food and water for the mouse because I didn’t want it to die inside the seat and rot and stink up the car.

  One day my sister wanted to borrow the car and see her boyfriend in Fort Rae, so I gave her the Lincoln and off she went. Well, on the way back from seeing her boyfriend, the mouse came out and sat on her knee. She grabbed the mouse but while she and the mouse were wrassling around, she forgot to pay attention to the road. She flipped the car and ended up hanging upside-down over deep water.

  She crawled out of there with the mouse in her hand, brought the mouse home, and put it in the cage with the other one. The car was a write-off.

  Now she had to go to the police station, where she was working as a secretary. Normally she’s on one side of the desk, but now she’s on the other. She’s the one giving the statement, so she’s all stressed out. She says to me, “What am I goin
g to tell the RCMP? I work for them!”

  I said, “Tell them the truth. You don’t tell them the whole truth. You don’t have to tell them where the mouse came from. You don’t have to tell them what color the mouse was, unless they ask, and believe me, they’re not going to ask you what color the mouse was. Tell them a mouse ran up your leg, that’s all you have to say.”

  I can see that she doesn’t like the sound of this.

  So I say to her, “Okay, did the mouse run up your leg or did it not run up your leg?”

  “The mouse ran up my leg.”

  “Just friggin’ tell them that.”

  She nods.

  “And don’t friggin’ tell them it was white!”

  So she goes in to make the statement and she’s all nervous.

  The cop sits down and gets out a piece of paper for her to make her statement. He gives her this stone-faced look and says, “Tell me what happened.”

  “A mouse ran up my leg.”

  “I beg your pardon?”