Far North

by Will Hobbs

  By morning my worst fears were realized. The river was running cakes of hissing, colliding ice. The Nahanni had dropped several feet as water had formed ice, leaving the raft stranded a hundred feet away from the water across a beach of gravel and ice. Raymond came up from behind me. I could see it in his face, the enormity of our mistake. I said, “Is there any way we can go back to where we were? Do you think there’s a trail upstream? Maybe we could hike back?”

  I felt sick to my stomach, waiting for him to speak. He chewed on his lip, shook his head. “There’s no trail. Like you saw, the canyon is straight up and down. I remember that canoe guide telling me that the only place there’s a trail along the river is the portage around the falls.”

  “I feel so bad,” I said. “I talked you into this.”

  Raymond shrugged. “Too late now,” he said. “We better get the raft unstuck and get it back to the water. It’s a race with the ice now. The sooner we get going, the better our chances.”

  We could only manage to drag the raft a few feet at a time. The old man wanted to help us, but Raymond wouldn’t let him. It took an agony of effort and precious time before we were able to drag it all the way to the river.

  We started downriver again, this time wearing our winter boots. Even if they were going to get wet, we knew we needed some insulation on our feet now. We just had to hope that the air temperature didn’t get low enough for frostbite.

  Around the bend we encountered a break in the canyons where steep forested mountainsides met the river. There was hardly any current for miles, no whitewater at all but plenty of sweepers. Our feet were staying warm and dry. We pushed hard on the oars to try to gain any speed compared to simply floating. The river split and meandered among islands below the mountains that rose and rose until they vanished in swirling clouds.

  We kept pushing along with the hissing ice as the day froze into a changeless gray. As we rounded a bend we heard whitewater. The old man gave a quick cry, and then I saw the river up ahead rushing in a line of waves straight up against a rock wall fifty feet high where the river was making a sharp left-hand turn. To the right, there was an enormous whirlpool where the water that hadn’t made the turn was swirling in a vicious circle. All the current in the river was rampaging straight toward the wall. “We gotta pull left!” I yelled to Raymond. Our only chance to avoid crashing into the wall was to try to break out of the current and cross into a lesser whirlpool on the left side.

  We rowed with all we had. But the current was too strong and the raft too cumbersome, and we were being swept right down the current line toward the wall.

  As we neared the wall I saw that the force of the river had undercut it, and we were going to be pushed under that overhang. In an instant, all three of us threw ourselves down on the raft, and I heard an oar shatter. It was mine—I saw the sharp broken shaft pass right by my head. Now the raft was spun around and wedged in against the wall, pinned, with the river streaming up against us. I knew the raft couldn’t stay together long under this much pressure. Raymond and I scrambled across the raft and tried to push off the cliff with our legs. I caught a glimpse of the old man scrambling for something to hang on to.

  I don’t know what it was that freed us, but now we were bumping down the cliff under that low overhang. The raft was spinning; suddenly we both realized that the old man was missing.

  “Johnny!” Raymond yelled, and we looked all around, but he was nowhere to be seen. Without a life jacket, I realized, he didn’t have a chance.

  The raft was bumping alongside the wall again, and still we couldn’t see him. The wall ended, and the raft lumbered into the last part of the rapid. Suddenly I spotted the thatch of white hair and Johnny’s face bobbing in the waves, barely behind the raft. I gave a yell, and Raymond saw him too. Raymond lunged across the raft and reached, grabbing the old man by the parka hood, as the raft drifted into the slow water below the rapid. We hauled Johnny back onto the raft, where he lay on his side, barely breathing. “He must’ve been caught under the raft,” Raymond said. Johnny’s cloth parka was freezing solid as we watched. I thought he was going to die right there before we could get him to shore.

  Trying to do what we could with one oar, it must have taken us a mile before we were able to reach some shallows. I jumped out with the braided parachute cord we were using for a bowline and dragged the raft a little closer. Raymond and I were shaking violently from the cold; the old man was beyond shivering and had a glassy look in his eyes. Raymond stripped Johnny’s clothing off for him. I was shocked: the old man was nothing but skin and bones.

  Raymond spread out the blue tarp and helped Johnny into a sleeping bag while I fumbled with frozen fingers, trying to get a fire started. At last I succeeded, and we ran around in our wet boots collecting driftwood to add to the fire. Finally we could change clothes and start to dry out our boot liners. It took hours for Johnny to come around. We’d been within a thread of losing him.

  I said to Raymond, “Johnny was right all along, and you told me we should listen to him. This is all my fault. I’m sorry.”

  Raymond shrugged. “‘Sorry,’ that’s famous last words.”

  “Well, I mean it,” I told him.

  His dark eyes flashed, and he said, “It was just as much me as it was you. I should’ve known better. It’s because I don’t know anything. I don’t know hardly any more than you do about winter out on the land. I got scared.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Make a new oar, I guess.”

  Raymond found a birch and started working on the new oar. We had to spend the night there, huddling by the fire. As we put out into the ice-filled river the next day, I said to Raymond that I couldn’t get over how Johnny could have survived that swim. Raymond said, “He spent most of his life out in the cold. Those old people are used to it. That nurse in the hospital in Yellowknife…” He laughed.

  I was amazed he could laugh about anything, given our circumstances.

  “When I came to the hospital to get him, she said he was the hardest guy to give shots to that she ever met in her life—it was really a challenge to get through his skin.”

  “No kidding?”

  “She said she had to ram that needle, at just the right angle….” Raymond pointed at his own backside, and laughed. “She said his skin was tougher than moose hide. ‘From being out in the cold so much of his life,’ she explained. She was Dene herself—she knew.”

  That night we camped at the mouth of a creek that joined the Nahanni from the right side. We spent the night huddling close to the fire, dozing off a little, but we had to keep the fire going, and every so often we had to go down and push the raft into open water. The shallow water was icing up fast, and we knew the raft could get locked in solid if we didn’t watch it.

  The next day we entered a much deeper canyon. This one towered thousands of feet above us, pitted with caves and broken every mile or two with forested draws that came all the way down to the river. At one point the river narrowed and passed between a sheer wall on the right, which rose a thousand feet or more, and a massive stranded pinnacle on the left that had trees growing from its top.

  All the time, our channel of free water in the middle of the river was shrinking as the ice cakes coming down the river adhered to the ice growing along the shores. We pushed on, rowing as hard as we could down the narrowing passage. The river swung slowly through the canyons, bend after bend. Unlike us, it had all the time in the world.

  The next day the canyon seemed to die out at first, but within a few miles we were back under towering walls, and the canyon seemed even more constricted than before. In some places the riverbed was only a couple of hundred feet wide from wall to wall. We steered our way around immense boulders with logs perched on top, left there by floods, I guessed.

  The freezing clouds dropped down inside the canyon and clung to the walls and the pinnacles. We were floating now among great blocks of ice that jostled us for position, and we fended them off with
driftwood poles we’d picked up along the shore. We were stunned to hear a motor suddenly, the unmistakable drone of an airplane. “Where is it?” I asked desperately, hoping it would appear for a second in the clouds.

  “Heading upstream,” Raymond said, pointing where Johnny was pointing. “And it’s flying high…it’s just about gone…they’re going someplace else, someplace where it’s safe to fly under the clouds. They can’t fly down in the canyon with these clouds, that’s for sure.”

  I knew what he was thinking. “Up above the falls,” I said. “That’s where they’re going to look.” Suddenly I pictured my father inside that airplane. If we had only stayed put…Could our signal fire still be burning, still barely smoking? I knew that was impossible. We hadn’t even built it up on the day we took off, we were in such a hurry.

  I looked at Raymond. He was thinking all the same things I was. He said, “At least now we know they’re still searching.”

  But will they ever think of looking down in the canyons, on the river itself? I wondered. How could they ever guess what we’d done?

  Around a bend, I looked downstream and gasped. The ice had formed a dam across the entire width of the river. “Look at that!” I yelled to Raymond.

  We were suddenly stopped dead in a rising lake full of ice floes. I thought this was the end. Raymond and the old man obviously thought so too. We quit rowing; there was nothing to be done. There was no shore to go to, no way to get around the dam, just sheer canyon walls on both sides. Johnny stood up for a better look, studied the ice dam for a long time, then sat back down on the moose meat. We both looked to him for some kind of idea, but his face was blank.

  Raymond and I talked a little, but then we just sat down on the duffel bags and waited. I could picture what was going to happen now: the river was going to freeze us in solid right here, maybe sometime during the night.

  Out of the silence came a sudden shearing crash, loud as thunder. I wondered for a half second what it was, then jumped up and saw that the ice dam had burst. The lake was pouring through a small gap in the center of the dam. Raymond and I both grabbed the oars. “When it starts to take us,” he said, “really hang on!”

  It was no more than a couple of minutes before the raft went surging downstream among the tumbling ice floes. From the corner of my eye I saw Johnny getting down low, bracing his back against the moose quarter. I concentrated on the gap that had broken open in the ice dam, no more than a hundred yards ahead. The gap itself couldn’t have been more than thirty feet wide, and the river was pouring through it, down onto a steep chute of whitewater below. We had no choice but to push on the oars, line up dead center for the gap in the dam, and take whatever happened below. “Hang on!” I heard Raymond yell just before we passed through the gap and started down the chute.

  Down we plunged, fast, into the very bottom of a deep trough, then rode up, up on the colossal wave cresting below. The raft was slowing as it climbed the wave; I thought we didn’t have enough momentum to make it over the very top. We were stalling out, and I realized we were just about to slide back down into the trough.

  Raymond could feel it as well. At the same moment, we both pushed on the oars as hard as we could, topped out on the wave, and started down into a series of lesser waves leading to calm water.

  I looked around. All three of us were still on the raft. “We did it!” I shouted.

  Raymond raised his fist triumphantly. “I can’t believe we made it over the top of that thing!”

  Johnny was beaming too. I thought, I bet he’s never done anything like that in his whole long life.

  I couldn’t help but let my hopes rise. We were moving again, and as far downstream as I could see, it was all calm water. We threaded our way among countless ice floes, many standing up like icebergs.

  Midafternoon the canyon opened up onto a wide, forested valley, with a stream coming in from the right that drained mountains standing back at a distance. The left side of the valley was made up of an immense gravel bar below three side canyons that had gouged their way down through a flat escarpment tilting toward the high mountains. A creek ran across the gravel bar toward the Nahanni, entering the river at a dozen places along the shore. I could see the channels picking new paths around ones that had previously frozen shut.

  “Deadmen Valley,” the old man said, in English. It was apparent that this was a name and a place he knew.

  Some miles ahead we could see the narrow gate where Deadmen Valley ended and the Nahanni entered another, deeper canyon. We knew we had no choice but to stay with the river, enter that next canyon, and hope to squeak on through to Nahanni Butte. But as we were nearing the gate of the canyon, we came around a bend and saw that the ice had sealed the surface of the river solid from one bank to the other and as far downriver as we could see. The river was running under the ice from here on. “This is it!” I yelled.

  “Get your knife ready to cut stuff loose!” Raymond yelled back.

  In another minute we were swept against the ice. We cut all the tie-downs as fast as we could and started unloading the raft. Ice floes were jamming up against the raft, and water was sweeping across us and freezing. “Which shore do we go to?” I shouted. Johnny Raven was pointing to the right side.

  We were throwing everything off onto the ice as fast as we could. As I stepped off the raft with the bigger piece of moose meat on my back, I slipped and fell hard on the edge of the ice, landing on my left side without the chance to break my fall. I watched the meat plunge into the river and disappear under the ice. I looked up and saw Raymond’s eyes, and the old man’s, staring where the meat had disappeared. Suddenly I realized how bad my left side hurt, where I’d cracked a rib in football.

  I stumbled around in a delirium, shuttling gear up to the top of the riverbank and helping Raymond with the heavy frozen moose hide. After that I went back to the raft but found we’d already taken everything off it. I recovered the bowline we’d braided from parachute cord, then watched as the raft buckled and went under the ice. Then I trudged up the bank and fell in a heap, stricken with remorse that hurt much worse than the pain in my side.

  Raymond was starting a fire with birchbark and kitchen matches. “It only makes sense we’d have bad luck with moose,” I heard him mutter. “Leaving all that meat behind.”

  12

  THE OLD MAN STOOD on the top of the bank, taking the measure of Deadmen Valley, watching the cold wind bend the trees down. He was scanning the high mountains that had us encircled. What was he thinking? Were we going to stay here now? Our remaining moose meat couldn’t have weighed twenty-five pounds. But Johnny had those three bullets. Our lives were in his hands now.

  A quick fire and dry clothes, a lean-to and a night’s supply of firewood, then darkness. A little dried fruit to eat and the howling of wolves across the river. I was utterly exhausted, and I had a deep ache in my side, pain whenever I breathed or moved. Had I recracked the rib? “Wolves in the valley should mean moose,” Raymond grunted in my direction.

  Johnny Raven was looking into the fire as he warmed his hands and feet. He seemed to be letting his mind drift, and I couldn’t blame him. How did he keep going? For such a gentle man he was tough as nails.

  “This bare ground will make tough moose hunting,” Raymond said, holding out his hands to the fire and stamping his feet. “I wish it would snow about four or five feet—that’s when the moose stick to just a few trails so they can get around. Sometimes they stand right in our snowmobile trails—won’t even get out of the way.”

  “I can’t believe we’re hoping for snow, but I see what you mean. Could we even get around?”

  “We’ve got the moose hide. Johnny can make snow-shoes now. Tomorrow, I bet he finds some birch and starts making the frames.”

  “Without him…” I didn’t want to finish my thought.

  Raymond finished it for me: “Without him we’re dead meat.”

  The old man stood up. By the light of the fire, he started stowing what was
left of our moose meat in one of the army boxes. Then he picked up the rifle, motioned for us to follow him, and started to walk away. I was confused, and so was Raymond. Where did he want us to go? I wasn’t about to force an explanation from him, that was for sure. I thought of grabbing the flashlight, then remembered it was dead. As the crescent moon disappeared behind the mountains towering over the valley, we walked into the darkness, following his silhouette.

  Beyond the firelight the stars were blazing in the brittle, dry air. Even with only a few patches of crusted snow here and there to reflect the starlight, my eyes adjusted and I could make out where I was going. We followed the old man upriver as, from nowhere and everywhere, curtains of iridescent green and yellow light materialized in the night sky, swirling and shimmering and dancing. The northern lights. My father had often told me about them, the aurora borealis. I stopped to stare at the dazzling aurora shifting in a moment from horizon to horizon, returning just as fast, this time like brilliant searchlights. I ran to catch up, and then I walked with my eyes on the eerie lights and their strange, shifting shapes.

  Where a small creek, almost frozen shut, reached the Nahanni, the old man turned away from the river and led us into the big trees. Then he pointed, and we could make out a small cabin in a clearing up ahead. The cabin was glowing yellow-green under the light of the aurora, and it looked like an apparition. Nearby stood a food cache on tall stilts. “Patterson,” the old man said, pointing at the cabin.

  “Johnny knew about this place!” Raymond exclaimed. “He must have been here before.”

  Johnny Raven fashioned a torch from a rolled piece of birchbark. By its light we lifted the cabin’s latch and swung the door open on creaking hinges. We stepped over the doorsill, which was the shaved top of the second log up from the ground. The torchlight fell on a small woodstove in the corner and sections of stovepipe lying on the dirt floor. About thirteen feet square and tall enough for us to stand even in the corners, the cabin had a couple of shelves and a crude handmade table—that was all there was to it. Above the table, the initials RMP and GM were carved large on the logs, along with the inscription Deadmen Valley 1927. The old man pointed at the initials and repeated that name, “Patterson.”