Beyond the Trees

by Adam Shoalts

  The wind had held steady, blowing hard to the southeast. When I’d first come upon the bay the southeast wind meant it was hitting my canoe broadside, the worst place for waves to hit. If I’d attempted the three-kilometre crossing at the bay’s opening, the wind’s full force would have been hitting me broadside and pushing me out into the centre of Great Bear’s icy expanse. But when I’d turned into the bay and attempted to beeline across it to the south shore, that meant the wind was hitting me head on, driving me back where I’d come with every gust. Now, having traced the bay to its inner shore, if I were to chance this open-water crossing southward I’d have the wind behind me for the first time, giving me a powerful tailwind.

  Yet tailwinds can still be risky in a little open canoe: if the waves are too big they can spill into the canoe and sink it. The winds were fierce, but I’d paddled larger waves before—though perhaps not in such an isolated place all alone.

  Though canoeing is not normally associated with Great Bear, given that it’s ice-covered for nearly nine months out of the year and too northerly for birch trees big enough for traditional canoe-making, I knew of at least five people who’d drowned canoeing on it. There were the two geologists who had drowned in 1960 while canoeing along Great Bear’s north shore. Earlier, back in the 1930s, a young trapper by the name of Abe Van Bibber had perished when his canoe overturned in the lake’s icy waters. And more recently, in 1987, two men on a fishing trip had drowned when their canoe overturned in big waves.

  Once again I got down on my knees in the canoe—it helps concentrate the weight lower, and makes the canoe more stable. If I paddled fast, I might just make it across the more than three-kilometre span before the wind had a chance to shift or pick up. Once committed, there could be no turning back, since that would mean opposing a headwind. One last glance at the thin grey outline of the distant shore and my mind was made up. I gathered up my courage and went for it.

  I started paddling quickly but cautiously: I had to navigate the waves just right. Halfway across, a kilometre and a half from either shore, the waves seemed much larger. My canoe rose and fell with each swell. I knew the importance of remaining calm, but it was a white-knuckle affair to see land so far on all sides. Up the canoe rode on the waves, then down again as they passed along.

  At last, twenty minutes of hard paddling later, I reached the far shore. Dry land never felt so good. I beached my canoe to rejoice, having saved much time and energy that would have been expended in tracing out the whole bay. I celebrated with a power bar.

  My transit of the bay had taken three and a half hours, after which I was once more back out on the waters of Great Bear Lake proper. I pushed on for another thirteen kilometres, bringing my total distance for the day to fifty kilometres. Feeling exhausted, I used my last reserves of energy to haul my canoe up over the rocks to the tundra. There I made camp—setting up my tent, building a driftwood fire, and boiling water to cook a meal.

  As I did so, I was surprised to see in the distance moving ice floes, smashing and crashing into each other on the strong wind, and floating down the coastline. It was an ice pack the size of several soccer fields, rushing along on the wind, and drifting right by my little camp. Sitting there on the tundra, it was the oddest feeling witnessing this ice procession moving rapidly along, floe after floe, as if it were an ice parade with me as the sole spectator. A half hour later the parade had passed by, with just a few stragglers, ice slabs the size of kitchen tables, still drifting off after the rest of the pack.

  I crawled into my tent and fell into an exhausted sleep.

  × 9 ×

  GHOSTS OF THE PAST

  July brought warmer temperatures, the last of the ice, and fierce winds and storms. Severe winds along the middle stretch of Great Bear’s north shore, where the whole mighty expanse of the lake was facing me, required switching to more nocturnal habits. During the rough winds of the day I’d sleep; at night, when the winds had died, I’d paddle under the glow of the midnight sun with everything I had.

  Bolts of lightning across the dark water brought me to a halt in the early evening on July 3. A storm was gathering strength in the distance, and it seemed the wind would be bringing it in my direction. I raced to make camp in time, setting up my tent in a low, sandy area back a ways from the water that seemed the safest bet for a thunderstorm. Fortunately, the storm remained distant, and I listened to it thundering across the lake while warm and dry inside my tent.

  I slept only a few hours on that lonely beach. By midnight I was on my way again, paddling hard into a thick fog. Following along the wild, rocky shoreline meant taking numerous detours into bays—one of which proved so surprisingly shallow that I actually switched from my paddle to my pole, and ended up poling right across it. This swampy bay stood in sharp contrast to the almost unfathomable, cold depths of the lake proper. In its sheltered reaches I saw pike, flocks of ducks and geese, and even a great bull moose swimming across the water. It was the first moose I’d seen north of the Arctic Circle, since the ones I’d encountered along the Hare Indian River were just short of that latitude.

  Except for one particularly frightful day of wind that kept me on shore for much of it, my daily average distance ranged from fifty to fifty-five kilometres. This was better progress than I’d anticipated making, and I’d managed to make up for time lost in the ice. This was good news in more ways than one—the sands of the hourglass before the inclement weather of late summer weren’t looking as discouraging anymore. Of more immediate concern, it meant that I could increase my daily rations.

  Pretty much from day one of my journey, I’d been hungry. The recommend daily calorie intake for an adult male is 2,500 calories. I’d been consuming more than 3,000 calories a day. That still left me ravenously hungry, and I certainly would have consumed more had it been possible—but there’s a limit to how much you can cram into a canoe. And the more I packed, the more I’d have to lug through the trackless swamps, as well as the more deadweight to slow me down when poling up rivers or battling winds.

  However, my better than expected progress had yielded me a surplus of food, and I’d now happily increased my allotted daily rations to ten energy/builder/granola bars, a pack of nuts of various kinds, some dried fruit, a bit of low-sodium jerky (some of it goose jerky, a gracious gift from a friend I’d known since grade four), and two freeze-dried meals to be eaten when I stopped for the day. That put my calorie intake at closer to four thousand—enough to keep me going hard all day at distances of up to seventy kilometres—but I was still losing weight—as is virtually inevitable on a journey of this nature.

  On the bright side, I figured that as I grew steadily thinner I’d be less appealing to bears, who probably wouldn’t find my skeletal figure very appetizing. At least I hoped so.

  After a stretch of about a hundred kilometres of rather uninviting shoreline dominated by low-lying willow swamps, the character of Great Bear’s landscape changed. I’d entered into the part of the lake known as the Dease Arm, another of its five great arms. As I advanced up the north coast here, I found the willow swamps and tundra gave way to dramatic cliffs. I passed two incredible waterfalls tumbling over cliffs that seemed like something out of an ancient legend. In other places there were pinkish granite rocks with a mix of open tundra and clusters of spruce that looked like a Group of Seven painting come to life—well, aside from the thick clouds of bugs, which don’t seem to have made it into any of the Group’s paintings.

  These changed landscapes were a tell-tale sign I’d reached the Canadian Shield, that gigantic geologic zone covering almost half of Canada’s landmass—some eight million square kilometres, if one includes parts outside Canada. The Shield, perhaps the country’s most famous landscape, stretches as far south as Muskoka, all the way north to the shores of Ellesmere Island, and east to Labrador. Its western extent is roughly Great Bear Lake itself, right where I’d now arrived. The rocky uplands and millions of lakes within the Shield make it ideal canoeing territory, a
t least in its more southern reaches.

  My last days crossing Great Bear were filled with wildlife. A lone wolf wandered along a marshy section of shoreline as I passed by. When the wolf spotted me she just sat down and stared at me, tilting her head to the side in curiosity as I drifted past in my canoe, staring right back with equal wonder. After a good while she rose and ran off from shore, pausing twice to look back at me, filling me with awe. In the wild, wolves have an average lifespan of about seven years, which means some arctic wolves will likely never encounter humans. This seems to partly explain the differences in how wolves in isolated areas behave compared with ones closer to human settlements. The former react with curiosity; the latter, having learned to fear humans, flee.

  Wolves weren’t the only carnivores about. At the other end of the size scale, I spotted a lithe little weasel scurrying along a great slab of granite like a character out of a cartoon. Weasels are striking, tough little animals, often taking down prey as much ten times their own size, principally rodents and birds, but sometimes even hares. Pound for pound, they may just be the toughest carnivores on the planet, exceeding even wolverines in their ability to kill prey larger than themselves. They kill with a bite to the base of their prey’s skull. In the Arctic there are short-tailed weasels and their smaller cousins, least weasels, both of which are hardy and adaptable enough to survive the harsh conditions. In winter their coats are all white to camouflage with the snows, but in summer they change to brown on their heads and backs.

  Soon after spotting the weasel, paddling on calm waters I came across an odd little sight bobbing up and down on the lake, a portly brown lemming swimming valiantly but largely ineffectively. It seemed so slow and helpless as to be almost cartoon-like in its frantic paddling. I wondered what it was doing so far from land, and if perhaps a hawk had dropped it from its talons while flying over the lake. On the other hand, lemmings are known to make great migrations, including even the crossing of large water (not always successfully; they sometimes drown). Their populations follow cyclical fluctuations every few years, much like other arctic prey species, notably hares, which trigger famines among “apex” predators, including wolves, lynx, and, at one time, humans.

  Birds were plentiful in the eastern waters of Great Bear. I saw hawks, jaegers, gulls, terns, loons, ducks, geese, and bald eagles. One arctic tern dive-bombed a raucous gull in an impressive display of aerobatic manoeuvres. The terns are elegant flyers with long, sharp beaks, which they don’t hesitate to use on any bird, animal, or person getting too close to one of their nests. Gulls will steal and eat other birds’ eggs if given the chance.

  Once I’d reached the eastern shores of Great Bear Lake I began working my way southward, to seek the mouth of a river draining in from the east. This river, known as the Dease, formed the next link in the hypothetical chain I’d devised to take me across Canada’s Arctic. Along this rocky eastern shore were many deeply indented bays several kilometres in width, but I was able to cut across most of them without much trouble, saving me from tracing them out.

  One of these big open-water crossings surprised me by the unusual landscape on the opposite shore I was heading toward. It looked nothing like anything I’d yet seen on my journey: rolling hills of open tundra dotted with clusters of spruces and framed by dramatic red cliffs. The whole scene reminded me of Prince Edward Island—the Canadian Arctic astonishing me again with its amazing diversity of landscape. The stereotypical view of the Arctic (some might even say all of Canada) is a place of ice and snow and not much else. During winter, that may be so—but when the snows melt during the brief summers, a delightful complexity is revealed.

  On the afternoon of July 7, tracing Great Bear’s eastern shores southward, I passed into a channel formed by the mainland and the lee side of an immense island over fifteen kilometres long. It was somewhere up this channel that nearly two centuries ago in 1836, the fur traders Peter Warren Dease and Thomas Simpson and their companions had built a fort to endure the harsh winters, after a long boat journey north from more southern trade posts. Their orders from the Hudson’s Bay Company were to chart the unknown coastline of the Arctic Ocean. Dease had selected a crack team of Dene hunters, Canadian voyageurs, and Scottish sailors and craftsmen for the mission.

  They built their isolated post, Fort Confidence, here on Great Bear’s north shore to serve as a base of operations while they pushed on in summer to map the Arctic coast, hoping to solve the riddle of the Northwest Passage. The older Dease’s competence and careful planning, long years of experience in the fur trade, and ability to speak four languages, combined with the younger Simpson’s physical prowess and daring, made for a potent combination. Dease, Simpson, and their party spent nearly three years here, departing in 1839. As for Fort Confidence, over the next century it gradually fell into ruin and was forgotten.

  Despite the importance of pushing on, I couldn’t resist the temptation to pause to search for the remnants of Fort Confidence. Knowing it was somewhere on the northeastern shore, I paddled closer in to keep an eye out for any clues to its whereabouts. There wasn’t much to go on, as the shore was screened from view by tall black spruces, willows, and alders, despite being north of the Arctic Circle. (It was precisely the presence of that forest that had attracted the explorers to build Fort Confidence here, as they needed timber for construction and huge quantities of firewood to survive the long winters.) However, I noticed a slight hill where there seemed to be a bit of a clearing, and though nearly two centuries had passed, I figured some scant glade might remain. I also figured the hill would be a logical choice for the establishment of a fort, offering a view of the lake.

  There was nowhere to land along the bank, as it was a bit steep and thickly grown over with alders and willows. So instead, with a rope I tied my canoe to a spruce tree, promising the canoe not to worry and that I’d be back soon. Then taking a paddle as a walking stick, I climbed to shore through the thick alder bushes.

  Once through the alders, the ground sloped uphill, which was mostly open, grassy land. I scanned around, but couldn’t see any artifacts or ruins. So I went a bit farther, rounding a thick cluster of spruces and pushing through some tall willow bushes to see if anything lay hidden behind them.

  Then my eyes caught sight of something odd poking up through the thicket of willows and spruces ahead: the ghostly ruins of two stone chimneys. It was Fort Confidence, or rather what was left of it. I pushed through the willows to take a closer look. All that was left of the fort, it seemed, was the masonry associated with the chimneys and their stone and clay hearths. The buildings themselves had long since burned down, with the spruces and willows swallowing up the site over the ages. The chimneys were made of rocks pulled up from the lakeshore, the hearths neatly shaped in half-moons to reflect the heat out—a vital concern in the long, dark, bone-chilling winters. One of the chimneys had toppled over, but the other was still intact and standing upright. I bent down in the hearth, inspecting it, then lay down on my back and gazed up through the chimney at the clouds passing overhead.

  Dease and Simpson proved a remarkably effective exploring duo, far more competent than their more famous contemporary, Sir John Franklin. Dease was a native-born Canadian who’d travelled extensively across the country as a fur trader before coming north. He was universally liked and respected, but was noted as being not overly ambitious and, at fifty years of age, inclined not to push things too hard. Simpson couldn’t have been more different: he was twenty years younger, a brash, impetuous Scottish Highlander. But they worked well together, and with their expert Dene hunters, Canadian woodsmen, and Scottish carpenters and sailors, they’d mapped huge stretches of the Northwest Passage in small boats, without any loss of life from starvation, accidents, or the elements—more than can be said for Franklin with his vastly larger naval expeditions.

  However, things later took a decidedly strange turn for Dease and Simpson. Maybe it was the winters spent isolated in their three log dwellings that were rather
grandly called Fort Confidence. Certainly they’d endured numerous dangers on the Arctic Ocean and all the hardships associated with continual darkness during brutal winters. Whatever the reason, while on the return journey south, Simpson, always high-strung, had apparently gone insane, murdering two voyageurs and then shooting himself in the head. Others, however, insisted it was murder made to look like suicide, in order to steal the maps and papers he carried. What truly happened will likely never be known.

  There wasn’t time, however, to dwell much on the impermanence of things and the ghosts of the past—there’d be time enough for that in the future; for now, I had to be on my way. Turning my back on the crumbled ruins, I returned through the willows to where I’d left my canoe. I was happy to see it, for if by some freak chance my knot had come undone and the canoe had drifted off, my bones might have made a nice addition to the archaeological site.

  * * *

  Once back on the water, I paddled on. Another six kilometres and my journey across North America’s fourth largest lake was complete. I’d reached the eastern end of the lake. It was the evening of July 7, meaning it had taken me eleven days to cross Great Bear. That was much faster than I’d expected. I estimated beforehand that, having to assume the worst with winds and ice, it would take at least two weeks, if not three. When planning a solo expedition, it’s imperative to always plan for worst-case scenarios.