by Adam Shoalts
“It’s fucking freezing,” said Brent. In my absence, the fire had nearly gone out. Setting the pot of water down, I rapidly built the fire back up with more spruce branches.
“Keep rubbing your hands for warmth,” I said. I set the pot over the fire and kept working to build the blaze up as big as possible. In ten minutes, the water had boiled, and our soup was ready.
“How are your legs now?” I asked.
“Much better. I’m good to keep going.”
“Let’s wait for the rain to stop and make some tea in the meantime.” I didn’t want to risk a second bout with hypothermia, especially since I knew the prospects of finding dry wood would continue to dwindle as we headed farther north. I broke off some green spruce twigs and tossed them in the pot. Spruce tea, a traditional drink among woodsmen, is rich in vitamin C. In terms of concentration, spruce contains more vitamin C than orange juice. If only Jens Munk, the Danish explorer, had known this his crew might well have survived the ravages of scurvy that plagued their expedition.
“What would you have done if you couldn’t start a fire?” Brent wondered aloud, sipping his spruce tea.
“I can always start a fire,” I replied. While at home, I made it a habit to cook my lunches over fires on rainy days, in order to keep my skills sharp.
“But what if you couldn’t?”
“Body warmth would be our only option.”
“Body warmth?”
“Yeah, we would have to strip naked and huddle together in the tent.”
“Oh God!” cried Brent.
[ 5 ]
HUDSON BAY
To take up great resolutions, and then to lay them aside, only ends in dishonour.
—Snorri Sturluson, The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason, twelfth century AD
ON THE FOLLOWING DAY, we reached the tundra proper, leaving behind the comparative comforts of the scrubby coniferous forest. The vast expanse of almost treeless, green tundra looked strangely like the grasslands of Saskatchewan. Here the permafrost—ice beneath the ground that never melts—prevents trees from taking root in the soil. The wind howled across the open plain. In the river ahead, we could see two caribou swimming across a deep pool, while another lay languidly onshore. The day before we had encountered our first moose on the expedition, finding it standing in the river behind a small island. Ducks and geese remained plentiful. The young ducklings and goslings would flee the river as we drew near, running off into the bushes while their parents feigned injuries to distract us. Not that this was necessary, as Brent and I weren’t interested in killing anything other than the occasional fish. Hunting for pleasure had never appealed to me. My inclination was not to kill anything unless doing so was strictly necessary—and we had packed ample food rations, supplemented with fish and wild berries. The shotgun that we were carrying was strictly for protection against polar bears.
Brent’s enthusiasm for our journey was fading. I made all the fires, did the cooking, set up the tent, packed our backpacks and the canoe, took care of navigating, and performed most of the paddling. At times, Brent seemed to slip into an almost comatose state, as if the incessant bugs and dreary weather had left him shell-shocked. Wrenched from the cozy, work-free life he had been living, Brent was finding the rigours of our daily routine a tough adjustment.
Yet we seldom became angry with each other. After all, not for nothing had we been friends for eighteen years. The history of exploration had taught me that camaraderie and good interpersonal dynamics were crucial to success. It was a lesson that Sir Ernest Shackleton took so seriously that he often selected men for his Antarctic voyages less on their knowledge and skills and more on their ability to crack a joke, play an instrument, or laugh off any difficulty. Many an expedition had floundered or ended in tragedy because its participants couldn’t stand each other. On John Franklin’s horrendous expedition through the heart of the Canadian subarctic in the 1820s, tensions among his men came to a breaking point: Dr. John Richardson, a tough, scholarly type, pulled out his pistol and shot a voyageur, accusing him of having been behind the death of another member of their party. Since Brent and I were together all day and slept side by side in a tiny six-by-four-foot tent with a shotgun and an assortment of knives between us, it was essential that we remain on good terms. Brent’s self-deprecating humour, his love of animals, and our collective reminiscing about our high school days and hockey teams made getting along surprisingly easy.
“Remember our grade eleven biology class?” asked Brent.
“Of course,” I replied, “I did a project on the eastern cougar.”
“I didn’t do any projects,” said Brent proudly.
“I remember, your final mark was a forty-eight.”
“Forty-seven,” corrected Brent.
“Except we made sure you passed.”
Brent laughed. With the assistance of Wes, who had acted as a sentry in the hallway, Brent and I had logged onto our teacher’s computer while she had left the classroom on an errand. We adjusted his marks so that he would pass the course, with none the wiser. Alas for Brent, he didn’t have Wes and me in all his classes and ended up—from sheer laziness, not lack of intellect—failing enough to force him to do an extra year of school.
By day ten of the expedition we were nearing the mouth of the Sutton River on the bleak coast of Hudson Bay. The tundra was all around us now, though clumps of spruces, willows, and alder bushes served to break up the landscape. Soon I would discover whether the week canoeing downriver had been enough to fortify Brent for the real travails that lay ahead.
“There’s an old cabin, a goose hunting shack built by natives from Peawanuck, on an island near the mouth of the river,” I said, drawing a stroke of my paddle.
“How do you know that?” asked Brent from the bow.
“I read it in the journal of some geographers and explorers who canoed the Sutton ten years ago.”
Brent convinced himself that this old cabin was probably quite accommodating and built up his expectations that we would soon have a respite from sleeping in the tent, which he despised.
“It was ten years ago, Brent. The cabin is probably an abandoned ruin today,” I cautioned.
“I bet it’s actually quite nice,” said Brent confidently.
Excited to reach the cabin, Brent paddled with renewed enthusiasm. We were now within the haunt of polar bears and had to be extra cautious of them. It was the most dangerous time and place to be in polar bear territory—summer on the shore of Hudson Bay. All the sea ice by this time had melted, forcing the bears, which normally remain on the ice hunting seals, to come ashore and fast until the return of the ice in the fall. During this time, a hungry bear will kill anything: caribou, walrus, humans—the males will even cannibalize smaller bears. The shotgun rested in its case behind my seat in the canoe.
Brent was breathtakingly naive about the dangers posed by polar bears—he seemed to regard them as harmless and misunderstood plant-eaters. But I knew better. A passage I had once read in biologist Jerome Knap’s classic Canadian Hunter’s Handbook was seared in my mind: “Hunting polar bears … is sport for big game hunters who want to experience maximum thrills and danger. It is not for the physically frail and soft. The polar bear is not afraid of man. It recognizes no enemy.” Ranking as the earth’s largest land carnivore, the biggest polar bear ever recorded weighed a staggering 2,209 pounds and stood over 11 feet tall on its hind legs. These monarchs of the north are so powerful that they can effortlessly break through cabin doors and even plow through electric-fenced compounds, which one did in 2013 in a remote part of northern Labrador. A group of seven hikers was camped inside an electric fence they set up around their campsite, when one night a polar bear burst through the barrier and severely mauled one of the group. In fact, at the same time Brent and I were en route to Hudson Bay, a polar bear attacked a twelve-person expedition in Svalbard, shredding through a tent in the night and mauling one of its occupants to death. In one particularly horrifying incident in 1990, a
bear chased down a man in broad daylight in Point Lay, Alaska, killed him, and consumed his corpse on the town’s main street.
It was understandable why government policy recommended nothing smaller than a party of four adults, all armed, when travelling in polar bear territory—and why scientists study the bears via helicopter or from within electric-fenced compounds. Travelling by canoe or on foot in polar bear territory is not for the faint-hearted. American canoeist and wilderness traveller Cliff Jacobson, a veteran of many Arctic trips, recorded his experience with polar bears while canoeing in northern Manitoba in 1992:
July 20 [1992]: Coming around a bend, my partner Joanie points and says: “Hey, Cliff, look at that mountain goat up there!” Seconds later the goat materializes into a full-grown male polar bear, which slides down the bank and swims straight toward our canoe…. Soon as the boat touches land I’m out, rifle in hand and praying I won’t have to shoot. Seconds later Dick and Finette arrive, sheet white … everyone massed in a tiny group, scared as hell, me clutching the half-cocked Marlin while Dick drops shotgun slugs into the sand and Tom gropes for a pack of shells…. We’ve arranged tents like a fort. Perimeter teams have capsaicin (bear mace). I served everyone double shots of Pusser’s rum.… Twenty miles from Hudson Bay we came upon Doug Webber’s hunting cabin. The windows were heavily barred and huge spikes protruded from the door—testimony to the destructive power of polar bears. We saw another cabin on Hudson Bay … which had been invaded by curious bears. Everything … had been torn to shreds. We climbed onto the roof … and promptly saw two more bears. After that no one went out without a gun.
Jacobson concluded:
Polar bears are not like other bears. They can swim faster—even through rapids—than I can paddle my canoe. You can’t outrun a polar bear, and there are no trees on the tundra big enough to climb.… A charging polar bear can cover 100 yards in about three seconds, which is faster than most people can fire an accurate shot.
When I told Brent this story, it seemed to have a sobering effect on him. Staring at me from the bow of the canoe, he asked gravely, “Did we bring any Pusser’s rum?”
Jerry Kobalenko, an accomplished Arctic explorer who has done several expeditions for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, by his own admission immediately opened fire on a polar bear he found outside his tent one night on Ellesmere Island. Not much of a shot, Kobalenko missed the bear and hit himself in the face from the recoil of the blast. Clearly, even hardened Arctic explorers are terrified of white bears. Few things seemed more repulsive to me than the idea of killing such a magnificent animal. I vowed to myself that I would never fire on a bear unless it was an absolute matter of life and death. Of course, vowing to myself was one thing—how I, or anyone else, would actually react when faced with an aggressive, growling polar bear could not be predicted.
As we rounded a bend in the river, I caught sight of a man-made structure jutting above a thicket of alder bushes on an island. It was the old goose hunting shack. We beached the canoe on the island’s pebble shore and hopped out, our legs sore from having spent the day cramped in the canoe.
“Let’s load the shotgun first, before we head off,” I said. Anything could be lurking in the alder bushes, which cloaked the island and stood nearly as tall as us.
“All right,” said Brent.
Cradling the gun, I led the way into the labyrinth of alders, heading toward the centre of the island. At every step I half-expected a snarling polar bear to materialize. After a short hike, we emerged from the alders at the cabin. Brent sighed from behind me—it wasn’t what he had envisioned. The shack was really that—a dilapidated shack cobbled together from spruce logs. The door was missing and several logs had fallen out from the walls. Rubbish lined the interior, which was dark and windowless. It had a rusty cast-iron stove with no chimney, a few decaying chairs, and some metal bed frames with no mattresses. The setting sun shone through cracks in the thin walls and several holes in the roof were plainly visible.
“Well,” I said, “would you prefer to sleep in here or set up our tent by the shore?”
“In here,” Brent replied dejectedly.
We needed a good night’s rest—tomorrow we would head out to meet our dreaded foe, the merciless expanse of frigid salt water and desolate seacoast known as Hudson Bay. Our little canoe would be at the mercy of enormous waves while polar bears would be roving the tundra. It was a cold night; the temperature dropped close to freezing. Brent, foolishly, had run out of dry socks. I had warned him to always keep an extra dry pair just for wearing at night around our camps. But he had insisted upon putting on a dry pair each morning on the journey downriver, though he knew they would be wet the second we plunged into the river. Fortunately, I had saved two pairs of dry wool socks, and now gave him my extra pair. Stretched out on the comfortless metal bed frames, Brent found it too cold to sleep. A storm struck in the night, pounding the cabin with lashing rain while deafening bursts of thunder shook the land. The wind was so fierce that I feared the cabin might collapse on us. As it was, we had to stumble about in the dark, dragging the bed frames to dry spots, trying to avoid the accumulating pools of water. With duct tape and a flashlight, I patched the holes in the roof as best I could. The bitter cold forced us to press our beds together for warmth and drape our emergency blankets over us.
When the morning dawned, the wind was just as fierce. “There’s no way we can set off into Hudson Bay in this wind. The waves will swallow us up,” I said, looking out the open door frame of the squalid cabin. “We’ll have to wait until the wind dies down before we can leave. We need calm weather to cross the bay.”
Brent nodded in agreement. He was alarmed by the prospect of our shallow canoe doing battle with the sea.
We waited all day for the wind to die down, which it refused to do. Given the wind and scarcity of wood, making a fire to cook breakfast on the island was a tiresome chore. Yet, there would be even less wood along Hudson Bay—and nothing at all to shelter us from the winds. Finally, by five in the evening, the weather had calmed enough for us to take our chances. We put on our warmest clothes and wool toques, packed the canoe carefully, and then pushed off from the island. Flocks of snow geese and tundra swans swam in the river, drifting along with the outgoing tide. The water near the river’s mouth was salty, which would further complicate our crossing of Hudson Bay. We would have to travel inland to fill our water bottles with freshwater or else collect rainwater. Several sets of rapids confronted us as we paddled toward the sea. We ran them without much difficulty and continued northward to the river’s mouth. It was a wide tidal estuary filled with countless sandbars, shoals, and grassy islands. It was low tide, and the estuary soon proved too shallow to paddle.
“What do we do?” asked Brent, jabbing his paddle into the sandy bottom that the canoe was resting upon.
“We’ll have to wade and tow the canoe behind us.” This was highly dangerous, given our brush with hypothermia earlier. But we had no other choice, save to wait for high tide and attempt paddling then. Yet if we did that, we would have to battle large waves, which our canoe wasn’t built to sustain. I preferred to take our chances with wading. We would just have to try to move as fast as possible to stay warm.
Over a hundred years earlier, the explorer D.B. Dowling had commented on sailing alongside Hudson Bay’s flat, marshy coastline: “In sailing along this coast, it is impossible to know which way to steer so as to run parallel to the land as nothing is to be seen ahead by which to shape one’s course.” The English explorer Luke Foxe, who had explored Hudson Bay in 1631, summed it up even better: “A most shoald [sic] and perilous coast, in which there is not one Harbour to be found.”
We pushed on for an hour, dragging the canoe through frigid salt water. Fortunately, it was only ankle-deep. The wind, however, soon picked up, and we were once again battling a stiff headwind sweeping off Hudson Bay. Brent and I crouched low in the water, pulling with all our strength to drag the canoe slowly onward, trying to
maintain our balance against the fierce winds. As far as the eye could see was the most desolate stretch of harsh, unforgiving wilderness imaginable—with barely a tree in sight. Making a fire, assuming that we could even find wood to burn, would be nearly impossible with the strong winds. And, I was keenly aware that hungry polar bears were roaming the seacoast all around us.
The sun was already setting and we hadn’t made much progress. For the first time I found myself doubting if we would make it at all. I now cursed Brent inwardly for having made me abandon the original route through the swamp forests. It would have been extremely gruelling and nightmarish as far as hordes of bloodsucking insects went, but a much safer way to seek the nameless river. Stumbling onward in the water against the wind, my back aching, my thumb still painful, my sinuses and head sore with a cold, I found myself earnestly wishing that Wes hadn’t backed out of the expedition. For the first time I felt the need for a sturdy, capable partner that I could rely on. Pushing these thoughts out of my mind as best I could, I turned around to see Brent standing still in the shallow water—gazing toward the frigid ocean on the horizon with undisguised horror.
“Adam … I can’t go on,” he said solemnly.
WE TALKED THE MATTER OVER at some length. Unlike when Brent first attempted to quit, I didn’t argue much this time. It was clear he was unequal to the task, that his spirits were broken, that the wilderness had vanquished him. I did, however, propose that we consider abandoning Hudson Bay in favour of seeking the alternative nameless river. I made no illusions about the difficulties and dangers this plan would entail: it meant travelling up various rivers, against the current, roughly 153 kilometres in total. Challenging as this would doubtless be, if the weather wouldn’t cooperate, traversing Hudson Bay was even more hopeless.