After ten minutes of towing, Jen perked up in her seat, “Listen!”
She peered at the far bank, and we followed her gaze to find four blond wolves standing out against the horizon. One tipped its nose up and howled into the sky.
Jen laid her paddle across the gunwales, and looking to us for silent approval, cupped her mouth, threw her head back, and howled in return. The wolves froze for a moment and then trotted straight toward us.
As we tugged that boat downstream, the wolves galloped along the riverbank, yowling and skipping along. The wind whipped their fur upward as they stared at us. They looked down on our boats and chatted to each other; they made sounds I’d never heard before: trills, stable single notes, and low ruffs. Levi and I found each other’s eyes. Perhaps they were the same wolves we’d seen on the hill. The four of them skipped in a line next to the six of us before they turned and blended back into the tundra.
Desiree didn’t settle down. She kept dragging on us like the girls had. The shadow boat tugged like an anchor, tucked behind us like an alter ego. I J-stroked in the stern again and again to pull her back under control.
After two hours, we stopped for lunch, and I accepted that it was time to let Desiree go. We couldn’t carry that failed journey anymore. We laughed to each other about the idea of taking her with us: “It was fun while it lasted.” I didn’t want to admit how much I had wanted her.
Levi and I escorted her over a rise in the bank where she wouldn’t be visible from the river. We left her right-side up and filled her belly with rocks. I extracted a Sharpie marker from my life jacket pocket and wrote, “Abandoned July 23, 2005. Paddlers safely evacuated. Feel free to take spare parts.” Not that there were many left.
I wondered who would find her next, if anyone. It’s an ill-fitting life for a canoe — full of stone, bleaching part of the year, and freezing the rest. The plastic would last a long time.
Before we left, I turned to face the boat and framed her in my vision. Goodbye.
THE CURRENT CARRIED us on, and the sun grew stronger until we actually felt warm. The change in weather reminded me of a Hollywood movie; good things, like the conclusion of a trying experience, bring good weather. My arms relaxed in relief.
“Check it out,” Tim called from the bow of our boat. “I took off my jacket and my toque at the same time! And I spy a really big star!” He pointed up to the sun.
Tim continued in his usual bow-paddler style, a mix of paddle strokes and sporadic wildlife scanning. On most days, he had to stern-paddle, which takes more focus, so when he got a day in the bow, he preferred looking around to keeping his paddle in the water. When he picked up his binoculars for the six millionth time that day, I didn’t think anything of it until he stopped scanning and stared in one spot. He held his gaze steady, lowered the binos, then looked again.
Without a word, he took the binoculars off with his left hand, leaned back across the spray deck, and stretched his arm toward me. I rocked onto my knees and reached out in time to catch them in my palm.
I scanned the distance and found a couple of caribou sauntering along. We’d seen that lots of times already. I shot Tim a questioning glance, but he nodded his head in their direction again. A second look revealed not two but twenty-five or fifty animals.
I grinned and passed the binos forward again. Tim almost always found the wildlife first. We called out to the others and were heading toward them when Tim cracked a huge grin.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes!”
He swung the glasses back to me a second time, and I discovered that those fifty animals had multiplied into three hundred. And they were headed our way. We took turns studying them at eight times magnification.
The caribou kept up a trot — neither relaxed nor hurried — the young, males, and females jumbled together into a giant pincushion of antlers and ears.
My heart tightened in excitement, relief, and anxiety. We found them! But which way are they going?
As soon as the caribou came over the horizon, on our right and still a long way off, they turned to parallel the river, targeting a peninsula in front of us. We paddled hard to gain on them, until their goal became clear: the river itself.
The leaders reached the peninsula, where the water narrowed, and they waded into the quickening current. As the caribou changed their trajectory again to cross the river, the sun lined up behind them, and each one, in turn, transformed from scruffy and brown to crisp and silhouetted. The leaders sank into the river until only their heads and a strip of their backs broke the surface. I imagined their hooves pedaling against the current — caribou on bikes. Individuals of all sizes crowded into the water, while we sat 400 meters away and stared. The black, throbbing line of antlers spiked up like lichen until the animals climbed dripping from the far side, in formation, and disappeared over the crest of the bank. We never heard a sound.
AFTER A SUPPER of veggie shepherd’s pie, we gathered under the bug tent in our long underwear, jackets, and neck warmers. We chatted about the caribou and wondered if we were close to a bigger herd and if we would see them again. I prayed that we would; Tim and I had been farther back than the others during the crossing, and I felt I’d missed out a little. Jen passed around Alie’s mug full of hot chocolate spiked with Kahlua from our tiny alcohol stash, and we admired the two fresh pans of fluffy cinnamon raisin buns covered in icing (with a few mosquitoes struggling in it) that we would eat for dessert. We waited for Levi, who was dressing up in a special holiday outfit. Our trip Christmas should have been on Day 25, but it had been postponed by cold temperatures and the Dead Girls Debacle. We had rescheduled for that night to receive gifts from our Secret Santas.
Levi trotted up to the mesh and performed the bug tent swoop we had all perfected to get inside: grab the bottom of the net, lift and duck simultaneously, shift from one foot to the other, and push the mesh back to the ground with minimum bug leakage.
“Merry Christmas, everyone,” Levi smiled. He sported his navy and green plaid wool shirt, an army-green wool pullover vest, and a necktie made from a strip of red webbing he’d found in our repair kit.
“Okay,” said Jen, who was the most excited for the festivities, “who got Tim?” And the gift giving began.
I awarded Tim a circular orange ripstop nylon badge embroidered with navy blue flowers that I had made from repair kit materials. I called it the George Back Stop and Smell the Flowers Award for excellence in natural history observation. Tim had found a lucky Arctic hare foot, only slightly gory, which he gave to Jen, along with a poem. Jen had embroidered “Darth Vegan” on a fresh red bandana, and gave it to Levi, who performed an inaugural blow into the only clean cotton for miles. Levi’s gift for Drew wasn’t quite like the others, but no one expected that it would be: a handmade backstage pass to a Rod Stewart concert, complete with a personal gift pack that contained extra-strength Gold Bond body powder, a condom, and a personalized note: “Drew, Looking forward to seeing you after the show, Rod.” It hadn’t occurred to me that someone would bring condoms — I doubted they were just for this gag, but if anyone was hooking up I didn’t know about it. Drew gave Alie a rental of his futon-sized Therm-a-Rest, along with one of his poems, and then it was my turn. Alie stood up and called on her backup singers (everyone else). They swooped out of the tent and stood in formation with Alie at the front. She pulled out a piece of paper and started in on “California Dreamin’,” rewritten for me.
All our boats are long
And our packs are fat
Well, we’ve got a funky bug net
And the IBM hat . . .
They sang, danced, and stopped only occasionally to hack up a mosquito or wipe one from their eyes. At the end of the show, Alie gave me a hug, and then, in the long tradition of small gestures that mean so much more when you are far away from home, she presented me with a small Ziploc bag. Inside was a handful of valuables: jujubes, sour keys, and licorice. Where had those treats come from?
“They are from my shar
e of the gorp. I’ve been saving them for you,” she said. “Merry Christmas.”
CHAPTER 12
REPRIEVE
BOXING DAY STARTED beautifully: 12 degrees Celcius, warm muffins, and some time to lounge. I even took off a layer. When a sudden wind drop-kicked the temperature and slanting rain dripped down our necks, Drew simply said, “It was good while it lasted.”
We took to the river anyway.
It wasn’t long before we spotted more movement on the bank, as if the bank itself were moving. Caribou. Our journey was about to fold into theirs.
We parked the boats and wandered up to take a look. I lifted my binoculars to scan the patch of snorting animals, but there was no edge. The hundreds had grown. We settled in to watch.
The herd rippled in a mixture of action and rest. As many as half of the animals would graze or pause, though they rarely lay down, and the others wandered — aimlessly, it seemed. Just as the group appeared totally scattered, with no nucleus and no direction, one — somewhere — would startle and snap a wave of movement through the others. Large groups rushed together, like a flock of birds that swoop in synchrony across the sky, mindless of what sparked the chain reaction. When they fled, the hill darkened with bodies straining past each other until they forgot their fear and spread out again.
Sometimes a few leaders would begin walking and tug the others along by some invisible leash; yet the herd didn’t seem to go anywhere. That entire mob — mothers, babies, huge bucks, and aging grannies — had to make the tree line by winter. The scars of their nose-to-tail migration score the tundra’s entire face. We had followed the tiny trails ourselves many times. Watching them bob and weave across the hill with no discernible direction, I couldn’t imagine they would make it very far, but if I left one group to watch another, sometimes a whole hillside would be empty by the time I looked back at it.
ALIE AND I were on kitchen duty the night after that long caribou-filled day. After supper, she dumped out the last slick of dishwater and we headed back to our tent. We were sharing The Boss that night. It was late, but not dark, so we saw the packages addressed to each of us right away when we opened the vestibule. The mailman was nowhere in sight.
Alie scooped up the envelopes, and we dove into the tent’s dim light. The Boss’s atmosphere was sometimes rosy, sometimes a sickly beige, depending on the sun and your mood.
I stripped off my down jacket and shoved it under my chest as I sprawled onto my Therm-a-Rest. I tugged off my toque, and Alie handed me my envelope. I saw my mother’s handwriting, and tears welled up. I kept quiet at first — I didn’t want to interrupt Alie’s excitement — and I slit the envelope to search its contents. Then I couldn’t stop myself. Hot sobs erupted from my chest and tears splashed onto my bed.
“What happened, sweetie?” Alie looked surprised. “What happened?”
I couldn’t answer.
Alie rolled toward me for a hug.
“I was hoping for something from home,” I said.
That didn’t make sense, because the letter was from home, sort of; I had a fistful of letters from Ottawa, where I had family and a few friends, but there was nothing from Victoria, where I lived. My heart dropped when I didn’t see a letter from Dalton. The pain of it shocked me, and to my embarrassment, I couldn’t slow my tears. I had promised nothing; yet out there I wanted everything.
Our tradition of mail had begun on the Hood River three years before. My paddling partner on that trip, Steve, had the brilliant idea of gathering letters from everyone’s friends and family and secretly delivering them about halfway through the forty-six-day trip. None of us knew a thing about it, and the surprise delivery brought joy across the board. On the Back River, Levi wanted to continue the tradition. He had mentioned it once, so I wasn’t entirely surprised, but I felt disappointed. Steve had been thorough; Levi had not. It was a beautiful idea, but without correspondence from anyone in Victoria, mail day sharpened my loneliness.
“What did you get?” I sniffled. Alie had something from her partner and her sister, including a facial masque packet from the drugstore, to help cleanse her pores and have a laugh, I supposed. Alie immersed herself in reading. I was glad to be in the tent with her where it was okay to cry, especially since I felt like a spoiled drama queen. I sat up, let the tears flow, and wrote in my journal.
I started a letter to Dalton. At first, I wrote in generalities, then marked the page with an asterisk: “I don’t know if I will read you this next part . . . I am so happy everyone has letters, and I am grateful for my package . . . But I was hoping for something from you.” It reads like a passage from an Elizabethan novel. The page was so wet I had to scatter the words across it, wherever the ink would stick.
I had started to fill the cold afternoons and stormy mornings with fantasies of home, an explorer’s crutch. I imagined the people I loved and the scenarios I missed most, like fireplace evenings or warm baths and a bowl of summer berries, but I tweaked those waking dreams beyond perfection. I added Dalton’s cabin and woodstove, his steadfast, calm presence, but I took away the jokes I didn’t find funny and his endless need to talk over every detail. Even as I missed him, the real him, I knew there was something beyond reality about it. It would measure up sweetly when I got home, but it wouldn’t last. Right then I didn’t care. I missed him because I missed comfort, and I didn’t mind a few compromises to soothe my Arctic sores. I would sort it all out later.
Once I’d dried my tears, I read through the packet. My best friend from my middle school days reminded me not to pick my mosquito bites (a terrible habit), and her husband, a board game lover and competitive Scrabble player, included a few sketches from Pictionary cards for me to guess; one was definitely “baby teeth.” A girlfriend included a list of “Top 10 Reasons Why Getting Your Ass Frozen Off in the Arctic Is Better than Being in Victoria,” and my mum wrote lots of proud mum stuff and tried to imagine my experience. The biggest surprise was from my dad, a retired news producer who wasn’t much for talking about feelings. He made his letter extra tiny and sealed it with Scotch tape. He’d written it on a narrow page that read “Things To Do” across the top — the kind of pad you get at the dollar store:
“To do! . . .
Live for each moment and be a part of all that surrounds you.
Blend into the land and feel the heartbeat.
Feel the earth and water and let your presence blend as one with all around you.
Let it spread out until you and all around you are one.
Then pull it back into the concentrated life force which is you.
Practice this whenever you can find a quiet moment, and soon, like those 3-D images we can see by looking through the patterns, you will be able to retreat into a oneness with all around.”
My dad actually wrote that.
My favorite letter was from my granny, who was ninety-two at the time. She had immigrated to Canada from England at age sixteen after finishing a middle school education and going to work for a tailor. In Canada, she worked as a cashier until she met my grandfather, whom she outlived by twenty-five years. When I was growing up, I split my time between three houses. I lived mostly with my mum but sometimes with my dad and also with my granny. In some ways Granny’s was my favorite; it was always the same. Her toast was the yummiest, I got through my homework early, without a fuss, and never had the bad dreams that dogged me at the other houses. When I had a stomachache, she soothed it with a spoonful of milk of magnesia that came from a mysterious blue bottle, old enough to have come with her from England. I liked that Granny put butter in my peanut butter sandwiches and wrapped spongy homemade cookies in Saran Wrap. At night, she would come into the tiny bathroom and sit her slender frame down on the toilet seat so we could talk while I was in the bath. Her house didn’t have a shower. Bath times lasted until I was almost a teenager and old enough to stay home alone. When I got my first boyfriend, Granny was the first family I told; ditto the first time I got drunk. I could trust her with any se
cret, and she would never complicate something that could be simple.
By 2005, dementia was encroaching on her mind but not her spirit. Her note came on a rich piece of creamy paper that she had likely saved from a special notepad. It was three inches square and read, “Jenny. I hope you are having a wonderful trip. Love Gran. June 1st, 2005.” She liked to put the date on everything.
We didn’t talk about the mail too much, but it changed things a little. Alie cried while she paddled the next day — from homesickness, I supposed, but I didn’t want to ask. In the absence of any real privacy, sometimes you have to construct some. Her tears reminded me that she had come into our group without knowing anybody very well, so she probably missed her friends back home a bit extra. I was too nervous to ask Tim what it was like to get a letter from his dad but not his mom.
In some way, the letters buoyed me up and reminded me that I was loved. Everyone, except Granny but including my friend’s husband, reiterated that sentiment, but several people also tried to imagine where I was and what I was doing or feeling — my mother more than anyone — and they all got it wrong. Of course they got it wrong; how could they know? But those letters indicated a reality of my wilderness-bound life: most of the people closest to me would never see me in the places I love most, where I am often at my best and sometimes at my worst. The separation between my outdoor life and home life had already begun by 2005, because I had started guiding professionally in remote places and taking trips far away from my wider community. The gulf would continue to grow after the trip, when I started working deep in the temperate rainforest of British Columbia, out in the bush of the Northwest Territories, and across the Arctic into Greenland. There was no overlap between home and away. I spent more time with bears than with my closest friends. Although I sometimes yearned for home, I felt restless once I got there, and I moved a lot.
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