by Will Hobbs
“So where are we going?” I asked.
“Nahanni Butte.”
I had a sinking feeling. “You said you were taking a kid home?”
“And an old man who’s been in the hospital. The kid’s dropping out of school.”
“What school?”
“Yours. It happens all the time.”
Just then I looked up and saw a slender old man with a light duffel bag coming toward the ramp. He was squinting as he took a look at the floatplane. His hair was as white as a polar bear’s fur and just as thick, though not very long. His skin was a light brown. He was dressed in a cloth parka that looked homemade, and he was wearing tall moccasins that were tied with thongs at the ankle and calf.
“Here’s one,” Clint said. “And here comes the other.”
It was Raymond, toting that big duffel bag, his hockey stick, and that red electric guitar.
5
RAYMOND’S EYES TOOK in a glimpse of me, and then they stuck on the ground. He looked embarrassed, defeated. The old man with the thick white hair looked distant and sad.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were going back home?” I asked Raymond. “I had no idea.”
“It didn’t seem like it was any use,” he muttered. “Then you would’ve tried to talk me into staying.”
“You bet I would have! You should have told me!”
“I know. I was going to tell you this morning, but when I woke up, you were gone.”
“But how come you’re leaving?”
Raymond kept his eyes on the ground. I just kept waiting. Then he said, “At home I can get up when I want to, I can stay up all night if I want to, I can play hockey any time I want, I can play guitar any time I want, I can go hunting with my dad if I want to, I can mess around with my friends…nobody makes any rules.”
“But you said it was boring back home.”
Clint leaned between us and said, “I hate to rush you guys, but we’re burning daylight, and daylight is precious.” As he grabbed their duffels, I gave him a hand with Raymond’s heavy bag—everything he’d brought to school was in there. We stowed all the stuff behind the backseat, Clint arranging the load carefully around a couple of army-green metal boxes. “What’s in these?” I asked.
“Those are ammo boxes,” Clint replied. “Army surplus—they make good waterproof storage. We’ve got some food in ’em and some other survival gear.”
Clint jumped back out and helped the old man into the plane through a little hatch door on the left side that gave access to the rear seats. Then Raymond climbed in. I jumped in front with Clint. I was all keyed up about my first flight ever in a bush plane. I glanced back at Raymond, wishing he was sharing in the excitement. His face had about as much expression as a wooden mask. What were people back home going to think about him dropping out of school?
Inside the airplane, doing his cockpit check, Clint seemed about ten years older than he had when he was driving the van. All business. I was feeling reassured seeing him throwing switches and pulling levers and talking over the radio while my eyes were scanning the complicated array of gauges and controls that he was reading and manipulating by second nature.
Clint told us to wear our headsets or we’d wreck our hearing, the engine was going to make such a racket. As soon as he fired it up I could see what he meant. Our headsets had mouthpieces that swung out in front of our faces. Clint switched on the intercom and started talking to us through our headsets. “Don’t talk to me when I’m taking off or landing,” he instructed us. “Otherwise it’s fine.” Then that boyish grin of his was back. He said, “Don’t worry about this old ship. It’s got a lot of experience—it’s seven years older than I am!”
I clenched my teeth as he taxied out onto the bay. As much as I wanted to fly, I still had a knot in my stomach. I remembered my father saying once, “It’s a rare bush pilot who ends up in a rest home.” I had a feeling Clint was not destined for the rocking chair.
Our pilot suddenly yelled, “Let’s open up the tap and pour on the coal! With that he started his takeoff run. Water sprayed high on both sides, and with a sudden lift we were airborne.
Before long we were flying over an arm of the Great Slave Lake. Ice was showing all along the shore. Out Clint’s side of the airplane I could see the open lake, vast like an inland sea. In another hour it would be noon, but the sun was pathetically low by Texas standards for the thirtieth of October.
For hours I saw mostly swampy lowlands peppered with stunted trees—not a single cabin, not a single moose. Nobody was talking over the intercom, not even Clint. Maybe we were too cold to talk among ourselves. I was flexing my toes inside the best winter boots money can buy. Raymond was hunched up against the cold and his teeth were chattering. He had his winter boots on, winter gloves, wool cap, but not enough under his parka. I couldn’t tell how the old man was doing because he was seated directly behind me. I wondered why he’d been in the hospital.
At last Clint broke the long silence. “After the late start we got, we’re going to have to put down in Fort Simpson for the night. We’ll fly on to Nahanni Butte in the morning.”
As we approached Fort Simpson on the Mackenzie River, I took in the vastness of the Northwest Territories’ biggest waterway. More than a mile wide, the Mackenzie made a spectacular sight. Scattered cakes of ice were floating in the river, and the water was reflecting the pinks and oranges of the sunset. We could see a tributary nearly as big—the Liard River—joining the Mackenzie barely upstream. It was only 4:00 P.M. when we splashed down, but day was done. The Mackenzie was headed for the Arctic Ocean, and we were headed for a couple of rooms in the tiny town above us on the bluff. In the morning we’d follow the Liard River up to Nahanni Butte.
We all ate supper together at the café. It was a pretty silent, gloomy meal, I’d have to say. I still hadn’t heard a word out of the old man. Then Clint and I went to our room and watched TV. I would’ve rather been with Raymond, but when we checked in, Raymond had said he wanted to room with the old man from his village. Probably he didn’t want me asking him more questions or trying to talk him into changing his mind. I mentioned to Clint that Raymond had been my roommate at school. Clint shrugged and said, “I guessed it was something like that. Don’t feel bad about it. They drop out all the time.”
Surfing the channels, Clint got all excited when he found a rodeo from the Cow Palace in San Francisco—highlights, actually, right as the show was ending. “I can’t believe I missed it,” he said. “You ever rodeo down in Texas?”
“Never did,” I said, “but I’ve been thrown by a horse, if that counts.”
“I’ll count it,” he said. “Bull ridin’ was my game.”
“No kidding?”
“Rode in the Calgary Stampede when I was nineteen. I was a hometown boy.”
“Hey, I’ve heard of the Calgary Stampede.”
“I’m not surprised. Calgary’s big time.”
“How come you gave it up?”
“For flying. Not even hockey and bull riding beat flying.”
After breakfast on the last day of October, Clint fueled the airplane and we started southwest up the Liard River, which was lined with cottonwoods. Raymond was still stuck in his gloom. If he’d made a good decision, I wished he felt a little happier about it. Clint was in good spirits, which lifted mine. I’d left the boarding school behind and I was out taking a look at the Northwest Territories.
It was a sunny day, and Clint was delighted with the flying conditions. I noticed he couldn’t keep his eyes off the mountains to the north and west of us.
Everywhere I could see, the forest below was crisscrossed with bulldozed paths running straight as arrows and ending on the horizon. They made a strange sight in the middle of nowhere. Clint explained that they were left over from the last boom—something to do with sonic testing for oil and gas.
Clint looked over at me, and he had a conspiratorial grin on his face. “We should go take a look at the falls on the Nahanni,” he
said. “Remember me telling you about it—Virginia Falls?”
“Twice as high as Niagara, right?”
“Hey, what do you guys in the back think of taking a little detour—doing some sightseeing before we take you home?” Clint asked over the intercom.
I looked over my shoulder at Raymond. He said, “Whatever you want.” We heard nothing from the old man.
“Raymond, have you ever seen Virginia Falls?” Clint continued.
“Never been up there.”
“Never seen the canyons either?”
Raymond shook his head.
“Well then,” Clint said, delighted with himself. “It’s settled. We’ve got a perfect day for it. I’m going to give you guys a sightseeing tour you’ll never forget.”
With that he banked the plane to the north and west, at the same time letting out a big whoop. “Let’s go find the source of the South Nahanni River! Follow it down to the falls and then all the way down to Nahanni Butte!”
6
“THIS IS CESSNA 6–7-Z-RAY calling Fort Simpson. Do you read? Do you read me?”
Clint let his finger off the TALK button. “I’m calling in to report our change of flight plan,” he explained. “The UNICOM dispatcher must have stepped away for a minute. I’m not getting an answer.”
“What’s UNICOM?” I asked.
“It’s for pilots flying in uncontrolled areas. Our closest one here is Fort Simpson—that’s who I’m trying to raise.”
The mountains were on our left now, and closer. Clint handed me a map of the Mackenzie Mountains, not a flying map but one I could read, with the rivers and the mountain ranges and all the place-names. Then he got busy with his own maps, which were all marked up with notations. He was steering west for a wide opening a river made in the front range of the mountains. “We’re awful lucky today,” Clint said excitedly. “There can be lots of suicide weather back here. The Mackenzie Mountains are right on the boundary between two great air masses: the cold, dry arctic air and the warm, moist Pacific air. That’s why these mountains have such unstable and unpredictable weather—those two air masses are always jockeying for position.”
He reached for the TALK button again. “This is Cessna 6–7-Z-RAY calling Fort Simpson. Do you read me?”
All we heard was some crackling static. “We’ll try again in a few minutes,” Clint said.
I wondered if this was such a good idea, to go ahead when we weren’t getting through on the radio. Nobody would know where we were going. I thought about saying something to Clint, but he was concentrating intensely on his flying. We were already starting into the mountains.
The plane took a good jolt from some turbulence, and then a few more jolts. I cinched the harness tighter across my chest. With a glance back, I saw Raymond reach over and tighten the old man’s for him.
“Just a few bumps,” Clint assured us. “If a Chinook was blowing today, we wouldn’t be doing this—we’d be looking at a fifty-mile-an-hour headwind, maybe even seventy. You see, the prevailing winds come from the west, and they can get heated by pressure and riled up by the terrain—just like water over boulders—as they come pouring down the east side of the mountains.”
Even if we weren’t fighting a Chinook, I didn’t feel so reassured all of a sudden. Out either side of the airplane all I could see was nearly vertical mountainsides covered with snow, timber, and rockslides. I couldn’t help thinking about what would happen if the Cessna’s engine quit on us. No one would even know where we went down.
Clint tried once more to get through to Fort Simpson. Again, no reply.
I said, “Don’t you have some kind of backup radio, or some kind of emergency signaling gear besides the radio?”
“Nervous?” Clint asked with a grin.
“Heck, yes,” I admitted. “Man, this is wild country.”
“There’s no second radio, but we do have an ELT—an Emergency Location Transmitter—fastened to the floor of the plane, just behind the partition at the rear of the cargo area.”
“How does it work?”
“The impact of a crash sets it off. If we were to crash, it would start transmitting our location. It’s on its own battery, and it’s got a little antenna attached to it that sticks up above the airplane.”
“It’s good to know we have that, but what I’m wondering about is why we’re not getting through to that UNICOM. You want to try again?”
“No chance of getting through now, not in this kind of terrain. We’ll try again in a few minutes when we get more out in the open. Don’t worry, Gabe, everything’s going great, she’s running like a top. Lots of times it takes a while to get through to UNICOM. That’s just part of flying up here in the boonies.”
I tried to relax and quit worrying. In the deep gorge below us, the river we were following wound like a snake, and Clint was all concentration adjusting to the bends. Just let him fly the plane, I told myself. Anyway, the mountainsides off both wingtips gave us no choice but to keep following this canyon upstream—no room to turn around here even if you had to. Hang on and try to think positive, I thought.
We kept following the river canyon’s snaking turns until finally we cleared the pass at its headwaters and entered a world of mountains without end, ranges upon ranges, the highest ones wrapped in glaciers and cloud. I was overwhelmed by what I was seeing, thankful after all that Clint had bent the rules for me, or maybe broken them, in order to show me this. It was all too beautiful, too immense to be believed, and yet it was real. I began to read out loud some of the names from the map I was following, realizing some were names Clint had talked about the first day we met: “The Ragged Range, the Sunblood Range, the Sombre Mountains, the Funeral Range, the Headless Range…Hey, Clint, this is a cheerful place!”
“Up here,” he replied dramatically, “nature reigns supreme.”
“Listen to these! Crash Canyon, Stall Gorge, Death Lake, Hellroaring Creek…So where’s that Deadmen Valley you had all the stories about?”
“It sits in a break down in the canyons of the South Nahanni. Up ahead here, that’s the very headwaters of the South Nahanni you’re looking at, right up against the N.W.T.’s border with the Yukon.” He reached for the radio. “Now we’ll tell ’em where we are,” Clint said confidently. “Cessna 6–7-Z-RAY calling Fort Simpson. Fort Simpson, do you read? Do you read me?”
Nothing but more static.
“Could there be something wrong with our radio?” I asked.
“It was working fine this morning,” he said. “But you could be right…. There’s lots of things that can go wrong with the radio. I don’t like this either, but there’s nothing we can do about it right now. I’ll get it checked as soon as we get back. It’s no big deal, really—it’s easy flying from here to Nahanni Butte.”
Clint checked his watch. “It’s only noon. Hey, that’s why I’m hungry. Too bad we can’t eat the scenery, eh?”
Behind me, the old man was tapping on one of the windows. “Caribou,” Raymond explained, pointing, and then we saw them, maybe fifty caribou grazing on a windswept patch of grass atop a plateau. “Unbelievable,” I whispered. I wished my dad could be seeing all this with me.
Before long we were following the Nahanni as it slipped from under the frozen ponds at its source in a wide basin ringed by peaks. “A stream flowing out of paradise,” Clint purred. The river soon tumbled into a broad, forested valley flanked on both sides by mountains and more mountains. All along the way, creeks kept adding to its emerald green waters. We saw a moose along the shore, then a black bear.
This is it, I thought. The North. The Far North.
“I’m surprised there isn’t more snow cover back in here,” Clint commented. “There’s ice all along the shore, as I’d have expected, but there’s hardly any more ice running in the river than we saw in the Mackenzie. I thought it’d already be past freeze-up in the mountains. But look, the Nahanni’s open all the way down through here. Probably it’s been Chinooking—warm winds have melted the e
arly snow and ice.”
Up ahead, just back from the river, a huge mound of orange-and-white mineral terraces was sticking up out of the dark spruce forest. Clint headed toward it to give us a closer look. That’s when we finally heard something from the old man. Suddenly he had a whole lot to say, and none of it was in English. His tone didn’t sound too cheerful. I asked Raymond, “What’s he saying?”
Raymond shrugged. “I’ve heard about that mound down there—they call it the Rabbitkettle. If the water is flowing out of the top, it’s a good sign. If no water is flowing out, it’s a bad sign.”
Clint said with a wry grin, “I sure don’t see any water coming out of that thing, do you?”
I asked Raymond, “What language was he speaking? Is that the language they speak where you’re from?”
“Yeah, that’s Slavey. The old people still speak it.”
“I thought you did too.”
“I only know a few words here and there.”
“Can’t he tell us in English?”
“No, he only knows a few words of English. He’s my great-uncle. He was born up here somewhere on the Nahanni. I think he remembers all these places, but I bet he’s never seen it from an airplane.”
The sky was turning murky with high clouds racing in from the west. “A change in the weather,” Clint remarked. “Probably the last day we could’ve done this.”
A few minutes later the old man was tapping again, and pointing in the direction of the gray cliffs off his side of the airplane.
“Dall sheep,” Clint said. “Gabe, see those tiny white dots way up there? The old man still has the eye of a hunter.”
Up ahead, we saw the river’s long calm stretch ending on a bend, where a sudden raceway of whitewater was tumbling down a gorge toward an enormous cloud of mist.
Now we could see where the whitewater was heading as it sluiced down the gorge at a steeper and steeper angle. It was racing to the edge of an immense waterfall. “Virginia Falls!” Clint crowed. At the very brink of the drop-off, the river beat up against a towering island of solid rock that rose from the base of the falls. The island resembled a gigantic pyramid. Three-quarters of the Nahanni took its furious plunge on the pyramid’s right side; the rest snaked around its back and cascaded down from the left. My eyes were mesmerized by the falling white torrents, endlessly plunging yet always remaining. Even above the plane’s engine, we could hear the thundering of the falls.