We didn’t have paper, a pen, or a camera. We committed four digits of the camp phone number to memory and used the dials on our compasses to record the last six. We flipped the canvas closed and cinched the straps back in place before heading to the river.
BACK ON THE other side, we found Drew, Alie, Jen, and Levi in the lee of a hill, lounging in the broken sunlight with the lunch bucket open and a bannock feast ready. They waited for us before starting to eat. I felt bad about my earlier stubbornness.
We agreed to call the RCMP, and I started practicing in my head.
“My name is Jennifer Kingsley, and I am traveling with the Irvin group on the Back River in Nunavut. Our coordinates are 65º 54.906′ north, 98º 37.674′ west,” I recited. “We’ve found an abandoned camp with a marked absence of life jackets, sleeping bags, clothes, and personal gear. We are above a long and dangerous set of rapids.”
Levi dug up our satellite phone, and I dialed the RCMP in Yellowknife from the number we had printed on the front of our recipe book. The little black bars in the top left corner of the screen wouldn’t come up. The battery was charged but no signal. We were getting too far north. I tried anyway and got a busy signal. I tried three times. We loaded the boats, and I tried again. As I secured our spray deck, I struggled to get my imagination under control.
Now that we had portaged the first rapid in the series, the river calmed enough for us to cross back to the other side. We would be downstream of the abandoned camp, and we wouldn’t be able to get back to it without crossing a small channel, but at least we could begin a search. Farther downstream, the rapids ramped up again, but we would think about that in the morning.
It was getting late by the time we had set up camp. We decided to search for an hour and a half: Levi and I would head upstream toward the camp, Tim and Alie downstream. Each search party took a first-aid kit and extra clothes. Jen and Drew stayed put to cook lentil barley stew and kept dialing our useless satellite phone.
Before we left, I pulled Tim aside. “Are you okay?” I asked. He didn’t say anything. “What if we find, you know . . .”
“It’s okay,” he said, and we parted.
As Levi and I skirted the upstream canyon, I stared down into rapids you try not to think about. You know they are there because you’ve read the map and because the current beckons, and when you look from upstream, the river seems to disappear. If you stop paying attention, the slick talk of the current will lure you in. The water picked up speed to become black and glossy, like a vinyl record, then exploded into whiteness. The boiling undercurrents promised to break us or hold us under. What will I do if I see a bright life jacket down there?
Levi and I climbed the banks in silence until we could see unexplored ponds and streams, Lower MacDougall Lake, and the girls’ abandoned camp in the distance. Turnaround time. Nothing to report.
When I finally took my eyes away from the horizon to look down at the hillside below us, I slowly reached for Levi’s arm. He looked at me, then followed my eyes. Four wolves were climbing straight toward us, padding easily over angled boulders.
We stood still at first, mesmerized by the casual rhythm of their gait. Their legs chose each rock blindly yet never missed. Yellow-white twists of fur lifted and dropped with each step; their eyes fixed me in place. They climbed straight for us and showed no sign of stopping until two broke off to our right. Are they flanking us? Levi and I shrank back on our haunches behind a boulder, I unholstered my bear spray — just in case — and we waited for the wolves to crest the rise. After a few moments, Levi and I stood up again, but the wolves had vanished. I scrutinized each rock with my binoculars, picking out lichen and cotton grass, but we never saw those wolves again.
Our own camp came back into sight as we headed downstream. We had twenty minutes left on our time limit, but the other searchers were back early. We hustled down the rocks, back to our friends. Tim and Alie stood by our camp kitchen with Jen and Drew. The four of them formed a circle and stared down into the middle of it. A damp patch of sand bled out around their shoes. In the center sat a large, soggy backpack, just like the ones at the camp. Levi and I stepped into the circle, but nobody spoke. The pack’s canvas bulged toward me. Clipped to the outside was a small beige teddy bear.
CHAPTER 10
FORWARD
ALIE SLID THE straps from the pack and folded back the top flaps. She dug in and began lifting out dripping objects: running shoes, a sleeping bag, a bloated paperback, a wallet, a half-finished knitting project, and a river stone. The stack of clothes was all cotton, which sucks heat from your body in a flash. Then Alie found a journal, still dry in its plastic bag. My stomach flipped when she opened the cover to reveal loopy blue handwriting.
“Her name is Rosemary,”1 Alie said. “Her last entry is from July 14.”
“Six days ago,” said Levi.
Alie flipped through the pages and read a few sections, little tidbits about the journey. Enough for us to see Rosemary was having fun.
“They left that book at Buliard’s cabin on July 10, and we found it on July 12,” said Drew. “There is no way they could have made it here by July 14. I guess she wasn’t keeping up with her journal.” So we didn’t know how many days ago the bag had been lost.
We put the pack back together and got camp ready for the night. The ledges and hilly rock piles that created the rapids up- and downstream also surrounded our camp. Levi suggested we hike our red canoe to the top of a nearby hill.
“If they are still out here, let’s help them find us,” he said.
Tim helped portage the boat to the peak a few hundred meters away. The Back River basin is pretty flat, so even a 50-meter hill sticks up like a flagpole. They flipped the canoe at the summit and lashed it to the rocks.
I approached Drew as he stowed the satellite phone.
“No luck?” I asked, though I knew the answer.
“It’s weird,” he said. “It worked for me not too long ago.”
I didn’t understand. We had agreed not to use the phone.
“I know. But I used it to call Hilary.” His wife. “I miss her.”
“But we said — ”
“I know. But it worked last week.”
Safe inside my tent that night, my mind raced. I imagined Rosemary dragging herself toward our temporary beacon. Based on her backpack, the landscape that she imagined — and that her summer camp imagined — was different from this one. We had not been expecting the same things, she and I, when she shoved fistfuls of underwear and jogging pants into her bag.
When we first found out about the girls back in Yellowknife, we’d heard that they wouldn’t be paddling any white water, yet they chose a route with dozens of sets of rapids. The camp hadn’t equipped them with spray decks, which are essential for keeping water out of the boat in big weather and waves. Perhaps they didn’t want to tempt the girls by giving them that equipment, but it meant riskier lake crossings and heavy-weather paddling. None of it mattered anymore. We just wanted to know where they were.
MORNING BROUGHT SHIT cubed weather, so Drew and Levi made pancakes. We all felt tired and worried. We wouldn’t travel until the weather settled.
The men decided to hike down to Sinclair Falls that day. The falls marked the end of the deadly rapids, and they wanted to stretch their legs and take a look. It would be 20 kilometers, round trip. Alie, Jen, and I would take the day to sleep and catch up on writing our journals. It was the third day of wondering about those girls, but there was nothing we could do without a connection to the outside world.
I watched the men walk away across the tundra and let the wind settle into my ears. The sky had grown heavy overnight, leaching the color away again. I imagined what we looked like from above. I could see the tents like heads of pins and the colorful specks of Tim, Drew, and Levi walking away. There were caribou out there somewhere, and bears and wolves that followed them. I could barely see myself from above. I had come north to rediscover the feeling of being small,
but in the midst of an unexpected mystery, I didn’t like it.
I picked a sprig of yellow cinquefoil to remind myself of the tundra’s brightness. Back in the tent, I crawled into my sleeping bag with my clothes on and crushed the flower into my journal. “I know I have to get over it,” I wrote, “but I can’t believe how fucking cold it is — all the time. We sleep, eat, wait. I hope the girls had a phone that worked.”
DREW’S “YOO-HOOOO!” BLEW into camp around suppertime. He marched toward us with another pack on his back.
“We found it in an eddy,” Tim said.
The pack looked like the ones from the island: same writing in black marker, same leather straps to close it. Drew opened the lid to reveal food stores, different from ours. He laid out potato flakes, cocoa, rice, butterscotch chips, and just-add-water cheesecake on the ground. And they had onions; we hadn’t brought any fresh vegetables. My mouth watered. Drew then reached down the side of the pack and unearthed a hard, black waterproof case. Their satellite phone.
“What the hell?” said Tim.
“Oh, no,” Alie followed.
We all had the same run of questions in our minds. If we had their phone, how could they get out? Many groups traveled with only one piece of communication equipment. Were they were still out there somewhere? Where? The rapids themselves could have been fatal, and if they survived those, exposure would be the next threat. If they had been separated, some would have to survive without the food, clothing, and shelter they had lost to the river.
Although the phone deepened our worry, it could also solve our problem. I unsnapped the lid and slid the phone from its foam nest. I saw with relief that it was an Iridium phone, not a GlobalStar like ours. Iridium had a more extensive constellation of satellites and provided service all the way to the poles. I pushed the power button and watched with relief as the service bars came up.
I dialed the RCMP in Yellowknife and managed to say, “Hello?” before we got cut off. It took a few more tries before I got out the lines I had been practicing.
“My name is Jennifer Kingsley, and I am traveling with the Irvin group on the Back River in Nunavut. We came upon an abandoned campsite yesterday, and we want to know if you have any information about a group from Camp Widjiwagan.”
“Just a minute, please,” the dispatcher answered.
A moment later: “Jack Kruger here, Yellowknife Search and Rescue.”
I explained our situation — the camp, the search, the abandoned satellite phone — but Kruger hadn’t heard of the girls.
“Call me back at 1900,” he said. He would check with some of the detachments in Nunavut. Still, wouldn’t he know if there had been a recent rescue?
Jen made supper with one of the girls’ onions — our first fresh vegetable in weeks. My mouth filled with saliva even as a lump swelled in my throat. It felt wrong to use their food before we knew if they were alive or dead. I wanted to know whom we were stealing from. Nausea rose from my gut, and I forced it down with reason. They don’t need it, no matter what happened.
Jen caught me staring at her. “We don’t want to waste it.”
At 1900, I dialed Officer Kruger again.
“Quickly, before I lose you,” he said when the connection finally held. “I talked to the RCMP in Baker Lake, and the campers are all there. They were evacuated on Monday.” The day before we had seen the camp.
The line started to crackle. The girls must have had a satellite beacon like ours. No time to ask questions, and I couldn’t afford to run the battery down.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Enjoy your trip,” Kruger replied before he cut us off from the rest of the world.
“Well,” Alie said into the silence after I hung up the phone. “That’s good, right?”
Good, but strange. A disappearing act. An example of how technology can drop us into the wild and quickly pluck us out again. The girls had gone, and we were caught in their wake.
From what we had seen, I didn’t think the girls were prepared for that river. At the same time, I had dumped a canoe myself on a much easier stretch of water. Sometimes it’s only a hair’s breadth between bad judgment and bad luck.
We decided to use the camp phone to call Drew’s dad, Greg Gulyas, whom we had appointed as our main safety contact. Now that we had a working phone, it made sense to keep it, and we feared the camp would cancel the service if they thought it was lost on the tundra.
“If we call Greg, I don’t want him to contact the other families,” I said. “No news is good news.”
Since I had found out about Drew’s clandestine phone call and spoken to Kruger “on the outside,” I was obsessed with protecting our wilderness quarantine. We wanted to get away from everyone and everything familiar — that was what we had agreed. It was time to defend that agreement.
“If he starts calling everyone, they’ll worry. They won’t be able to help themselves.” I wanted my fifty-day communication break. That was the plan. “It’s simpler this way, no?”
No one put up much of an argument; everyone was probably too tired to care.
Drew slid the phone from its case again and dialed his parents.
“Remember,” I nagged, “we need to conserve the battery for emergencies.”
“Dad-it’s-Drew-it’s-not-an-emergency-our-group-is-all-okay,” he announced in one breath.
He explained the situation concisely and asked that Greg call the camp to request permission to use the phone until the end of August. “Gotta go, Dad. We’re fine. Gotta go. Love you too.”
We clicked back into the sounds of the river and each other. The outside world had been pushed back into its corner, for the moment at least.
WE DIDN’T WANT any other paddlers to worry as we had — though there weren’t likely to be any until the following year — so Drew, Jen, and Levi left the next morning for the girls’ camp. They would try to wade back to the island and leave notes with the remaining gear. Hopefully, they would come back with some of the girls’ awesome paddles, too. Alie prepared six waterproof notes to stash with the abandoned packs.
“The owners of this gear were evacuated safely on July 18, 2005. Take any gear that might be of use to you, but please leave this note with the remaining packs.”
It took Drew, Jen, and Levi two hours to hike up and attempt to reach the camp. Drew and Levi donned wet suits to wade across a narrow channel, and Jen belayed them from shore with a throw rope, but the current was too much. They built a cairn for the notes instead, took some pictures, and hiked back to us.
After lunch, we left the dreary campsite we had been in for three nights. We took Rosemary’s bag and the food bag to the first portage, where we planned to stash them.
“Now that the Dead Girls aren’t dead, can we take their stuff?” Jen asked.
“The Dead Girls?” said Levi.
“Seems fitting.”
“Morbid.”
Alie went back through the bag for Rosemary’s wallet, journal, and knitting. We figured she would want those things. We also kept the river stone she had collected.
“Who wants what?” Alie asked about the remaining pile of junk. She took Rosemary’s yoga pants and running shoes, and I scored her charcoal gray cashmere sweater. It was a couple of sizes too small, but I could fit it over my grubby undershirt.
Meanwhile, Jen and Tim dug through the food pack for anything we would eat; we couldn’t carry it all. Onions, rice, butterscotch chips, and cheesecake filling made the cut. We added more notes to the packs and stowed them out of sight of the river.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Tim.
We picked our way through the sets of rapids that afternoon and finally gained some distance on the Dead Girls — the nickname had stuck — but it wasn’t long before another bright throw bag and backpack caught our attention.
This was starting to feel like a chore.
“This one is Katherine,”2 Alie said once she’d found the diary. Half of it was still dry.
&nb
sp; Katherine had packed three paperbacks, five bandanas, endless underwear, a bag of craft supplies, and a stack of cotton clothing similar to Rosemary’s. Everything bulged, swollen with river water, from her overstuffed “waterproof” bags.
“Let’s take the wallet and journal with us,” Alie said. “And maybe this homemade hat and address book. What would you do with an address book out here?”
Then we descended on the bag like a bunch of pickpockets. Tundra Shopping, Part 3.
Jen helped herself to some fleecy socks, and I took tiny fleece tights, which I later sewed into a neck tube and some wrist warmers. Another note, another stash job, and we were gone. It’s amazing what can become routine.
I SPENT FIVE years wondering what it had been like for the Widjiwagan girls to be in that wilderness. I felt sure they must have been terrified, despite the happy ending. (Happy, or simply not disastrous?) I imagined a hundred versions of what had happened before the helicopter whisked them away.
The story made a small sensation in the canoeing community later that year when a paddling magazine published an article criticizing the girls’ rescue. The evacuation would have been funded by public money, and rescues often cost somewhere in the ballpark of $100,000. The writer, Bill Layman, who had published on this subject before, rightly pointed out that paddlers must use the correct technology, which is a Personal Locator Beacon, or PLB, specifically engineered for recreational use. Some canoeists, especially at that time, were guilty of using systems designed either for ships (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons, or EPIRBs) or planes (Emergency Locator Transmitters, or ELTs), leading to inappropriate rescue measures and even extra costs.
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