Alone Against the North

by Adam Shoalts

  At any rate, I had more immediate concerns—my injured thumb. It still hurt horribly whenever I brushed it up against anything. Wearily, I sat down on some sphagnum moss and slowly began to peel off the duct tape and the bandages. It looked worse than ever: the flesh was still hanging out near the nail, and now the skin around it had turned a sickly green. I concluded that if the cost of exploring the nameless river was a lost thumb, I would accept it. With my other hand, I rooted around in my backpack for the first aid kit, dug out some alcohol pads, and gingerly cleaned the wound. If I ran out of alcohol pads, I could rely on the Lowlands’ abundant sphagnum moss; absorbent and highly acidic, it was long used as a traditional treatment for wounds in both Europe and North America.

  The next task was to start a fire: grey clouds were rolling in from the west, threatening more rain. The search for dry land had led me some way inland, making it a chore to hike back down to the river’s banks and fetch water. My hiking boots sank into the muck as I filled a pot in the swirling waters. Nearby were some large caribou tracks. It was comforting to know that benign animal companions were at hand. It made the isolation seem less intense.

  The smoke from the fire helped keep the bugs away, letting me remove my mesh bug net. My face, neck, and the area behind my ears were covered in red sores from blackfly bites. Blood smeared my beard from swatting flies and mosquitoes all day, squishing their blood-filled bodies against my face. As I waited for the water to boil, I changed into dry clothes and hung my wet ones on the crooked branches of the spruce. I didn’t have the benefit of any Gore-Tex clothing, which costs a small fortune. “But,” I told myself, “I’m fine without it. Explorers and fur traders did without it.” Having fallen into the habit of talking to myself, I gazed out on the stunted, windswept boreal forest all around me and muttered, “People are getting soft these days.”

  The sky continued to look ominous, but there was no rain. A northern flicker, a type of large woodpecker, sat above me in the old spruce, keeping me company as I ate rice and drank blueberry tea. After supper, I couldn’t leave my dishes unwashed—not that I cared about clean dishes, but scraps of food could attract bears. So I stumbled back down through alder bushes to the river’s edge to clean them. Finding myself too exhausted to move my plastic food containers very far from camp as I customarily did, I instead carried them only five metres away and sat them beside a small tamarack. My theory was that if a black bear came across my camp, it would leave me undisturbed and content itself with raiding the food rations.

  That last task accomplished, I brushed my teeth and finally crawled into the tent, which now seemed like the most comfortable place in the world—a tiny sanctuary where I could escape from the torment of the mosquitoes and blackflies, the biting wind and rain, and the toils of the day. I spread out my sleeping bag and arranged all my accoutrements just as I liked them: the shotgun along one side, the hatchet, old hunting knife, and pocket flashlight on the other. I placed my hat above a makeshift pillow of extra clothing stuffed into my jacket and tucked my compass and matches into the mesh pocket of the tent. The GPS and satellite phone were stashed inside a waterproof bag at my feet. One consolation of being abandoned by Brent was the extra space I now had inside the little tent. Here in the Lowlands, dry ground for campsites was unusual, and by necessity I was often forced to sleep on slopes, undulated terrain, or in soggy patches of reindeer moss. With a partner it was necessary to choose who would sleep where—one side of the tent generally being preferred over the other. Now at least I had the pick of the best side and could therefore rest more comfortably.

  With the last remaining rays of clouded sunlight, I had just enough light to look over the maps and dig out my journal from my tattered pack. It was the same journal that I had carried with me barely two months earlier in the jungles of the Amazon. It felt strange to think that some of the insect bites on my legs came from a different continent. Flipping through the water-stained pages, my eyes fell upon an entry that read: “Saw a tarantula on a palm leaf while doing a night transect, many ant bites on legs. Large insect bite on thigh looks infected.” I scribbled some notes, recorded my coordinates, and noted the weather. Then, all my muscles aching, I stretched out in my sleeping bag. The pitter-patter of rain hitting the tent lulled me to sleep; as always, a tree root was jabbing at my back beneath the tent floor.

  A NOISE FROM SOMEWHERE in the darkness roused me. On the other side of the paper-thin wall, something was noisily crashing about. I dashed out of my sleeping bag and crouched in the centre of the tent—my knife out and ready to lunge. Ignoring the instinct to remain silent, I began shouting to scare off what was probably a black bear. Any moment, I expected a bear to burst through the tent. The noise outside ceased. I switched on a flashlight, though this would allow whatever was out there to see me. Light in hand, I unzipped the tent door and peered out.

  “Hey!” I shouted, startling something that tore off in the direction of the river. It plunged into the shallow waters as I shone the dim light after it. A thick mist concealed the river, but I could hear the animal wade across to the far side then crash through the forest on the opposite bank. Whatever it was, I had apparently scared it off. Replacing my knife with the shotgun, I went to investigate. My concern was that a bear had raided my food rations and, with its powerful jaws, ripped open one or more of the watertight plastic barrels. Cradling the gun, I tiptoed over to where I had stowed them. They appeared untouched.

  Back inside the tent, I laid down. It was 2:17 a.m. Finding it hard to get back to sleep, and adhering to my habit of imagining the worst case scenario in order to fortify myself, I recalled some of the most gruesome black bear attacks that I knew of. I had an excellent stock of them, thanks to many an evening spent reciting such tales to fellow campers. There was the time in 1978 when a black bear stalked, killed, and partially ate three boys in Algonquin Park. That story always seemed to make an impression on audiences. Then there was the notorious incident in 1991 when a perfectly healthy male bear defied everything the textbooks said about black bear behaviour and turned man-eater in Algonquin. The ferocious bear stalked two adult campers, swam out to an island they had camped on, broke their necks, and afterwards consumed their corpses. Interestingly, Cliff Jacobson had reported that the expert consensus was, contrary to what might be expected, that the most dangerous black bears are the wildest ones with little or no previous contact with humans—presumably the kind of bears that live around unexplored rivers. Suddenly, a branch snapped outside the tent. My body went tense. Maybe it was only a red squirrel. Having waited another ten minutes and heard nothing further, my exhaustion overcame any lingering concerns and I fell asleep again.

  THE IMMORTAL GODS of ancient Greece, perched in their palace on Mount Olympus, took a perverse pleasure in tormenting mortals, sending them fair weather and favourable winds one moment, then hurling down terrible fury the next, just to remind mortals of the order of things. On my third day travelling upriver alone, I received a lesson in the caprices of the gods. The day had been glorious: I made excellent progress and stopped for the night on a beautiful stretch of river with wide open grassy banks. At last, it seemed that fortune was smiling upon me. The weather was so idyllic and the sun felt so warm that I actually bathed for the first time in two weeks. Refreshed from a brisk swim in the river, I then caught two speckled trout and gathered some wild berries for supper. I decided to treat myself to an open campsite near the water rather than hike back into the forest as I normally did.

  But just as twilight faded to darkness, the wind changed ominously. A tremendous gust blew the coals of my campfire into a red glow. Seemingly out of nowhere, storm clouds crowded the sky. The wind howled savagely, bending trees to the breaking point. With dread and with anticipation, I rushed to prepare for the coming storm. I tied my overturned canoe, which was resting beside the tent, with rope to the nearest shrubs, fearing that it might otherwise be blown away. I had to act quickly—any moment the heavens were going to open up—so I grabb
ed as many rocks as I could, piled them around the edges of my tent, then dashed inside just as a bolt of lightning struck the far bank. It was followed by the loudest burst of thunder I had ever heard.

  The storm raged all around me, the tent swayed violently, and each burst of thunder seemed to shake the very ground beneath me. The rain pounding the tent was as deafening as anything I experienced in the Amazon. The open ground and metal tent poles left me dangerously vulnerable to lightning. It felt as if this hurricane of a storm would carry me off in the tent like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Instead, the tent just came crashing down on top of me. Water began to accumulate inside from the lashing rain. I sighed: it was going to be one of those nights.

  Squirming around inside the ruined tent, I somehow managed to avoid the accumulating pools of water. There was no hope of fixing the tent in the storm—I couldn’t risk getting my dry clothing drenched. So, powerless against the elements, I resigned myself to sleeping in what felt like a body bag, with the collapsed tent on top of me. As for the possibility of getting struck by lightning, I’d just have to hope for the best.

  IN THE EARLY MORNING, I awoke to the sound of splashing in the river. I stuck my head out of the collapsed tent and saw three caribou, a mother with two young calves, swimming across the water. Moments like this made it all worth it.

  That day, the fourth since Brent quit, I paddled, lined, waded, and poled my canoe up the Sutton. By early afternoon, I reached “the meeting of the waters,” as I called it, the junction of the Sutton and Aquatuk Rivers. From here I would leave the familiarity of the Sutton and head into unknown territory. Scant published information existed on the Aquatuk. The explorers D.B. Dowling and James Edwin Hawley had only briefly mentioned it in their notes. There was a dry geological paper published back in 1971, H.H. Bostock’s Geological Notes on Aquatuk River Map-Area, with Emphasis on the Precambrian Rocks, that shed some light on it. But Bostock focused on rocks, not canoeing, and his work had been done mostly via helicopter. Other than that, I knew of two recent scientific studies in the general area: an aquatic survey that had been carried out a few years earlier on various lakes had also sampled the headwaters of the Aquatuk, and a botanical study that had been conducted the previous summer in the vicinity of the nameless river, a tributary of the Aquatuk. But these studies said little to nothing about the waterways.

  Conversations with a couple of old-timers I had tracked down before leaving on the expedition had been more fruitful. An aged aboriginal man from Peawanuck told me that the Aquatuk had “a lot of pike.” Another veteran of the north, a retired cartographer, told me that he had worked on a survey some forty years earlier that, in winter, went along part of the frozen Aquatuk. One thing seemed clear: only a handful of people had ever previously ventured up this river. Rope in hand, wading with my canoe in the dark, swirling waters of this new river, I felt a mixture of trepidation and excitement as I left the Sutton behind and strayed into the unknown.

  [ 7 ]

  NAMELESS RIVER

  The unknown is generally taken to be terrible, not as the proverb would infer, from the inherent superstition of man, but because it so often is terrible. He who would tamper with the vast and secret forces that animate the world may well fall a victim to them.

  —H. Rider Haggard, She, 1887

  THE FOREST HUMMED with the beating wings of millions of mosquitoes. I had never seen such an eerie landscape—a wilderness of crooked spruce and tamaracks, contorted and twisted by the unforgiving winds, their branches draped with cobwebs of hanging lichens, and the forest floor cloaked in green moss. The grey skies and drizzling rain added to the general gloom. Most of the stunted trees stood little taller than me—though here and there were comparative giants, centuries-old black spruce that rose like ghostly sentinels above the land. The uneven ground was laced with foul pools of black water, breeding grounds for legions of mosquitoes. It was undisturbed, ancient forest with no signs of humanity.

  Having journeyed some ways up the Aquatuk, I made my lonely camp on a slight prominence, beneath some spruces. As I moved through the woods, it was with a vague feeling of uneasiness, as if I shouldn’t disturb this primeval place. Perilous as my journey up the Sutton had been, it had an air of familiarity about it, and I had the work of past explorers to guide me. In contrast, the Aquatuk looked and felt like virgin territory, a place untouched by the outside world. Its waters were swift, surprisingly deep, and guarded by rapids larger than anything I had encountered on the Sutton. In some places, the shoreline was thickly treed with palisades of black spruce. They seemed to frown upon me as I fought my solitary way upriver. In other stretches, sandbanks rose high above the river, crowned with scraggly trees. Though I saw many birds—eagles, sandpipers, waterfowl—I saw neither caribou nor moose, and, as a consequence, was left with an intense feeling of isolation. Nowhere did I find any trace of a human predecessor—not a chopped stump, ashes from a long-ago campfire, or so much as a hatchet blaze. Old Terry O’Neil, if he could have seen me now, would doubtless have shaken his head and deemed it all “God’s country.”

  I found myself glancing over my shoulder every so often, as if I half-expected some supernatural thing to be stalking my steps. For the first time, the silence began to weigh on me. I tried to break it by talking to myself, but that didn’t help. The sound of my own voice echoing against the immutable silence of the wilderness seemed like a violation of an unwritten law. So I kept quiet and trod lightly, feeling almost as if I had entered the confines of some ancient temple, where to disturb anything was to awaken an unnatural power.

  That evening, I made a smoky fire from wet wood, since the forest was sodden from the rains. Sitting by my sputtering fire in the fading light, I could well imagine the unholy terrors aboriginal people believed inhabited the northern forest. A “thing” scarcely spoken of, and only then in hushed tones, was said to prey upon solitary wanderers who dared venture into these remote lands. I had heard whispers of it on my travels and read about it in old explorers’ journals—a hideous, giant manlike creature, called the Witiko, or wendigo. It could, so it was said, possess the minds of lonely travellers, making them slowly turn mad, and finally overwhelm them with an insatiable craving for human flesh. For centuries, explorers and fur traders had noted their native counterparts’ fear of this grim monster. In 1790, Edward Umfreville, a Hudson’s Bay Company trader, confided in his journal that “there is an evil Being” that natives call the “Whit-ti co.… They frequently persuade themselves that they see his track in the moss or snow, and he is generally described in the most hideous forms.” In the 1930s, the woodsman Grey Owl had warned that “The Windigo, a half-human, flesh-eating creature, scours the lake shores looking for those who sleep carelessly without a fire, and makes sleeping out in some sections a thing of horror.”

  As I watched the shadows cast by the flickering light of the fire, the memory of my first “encounter” with a wendigo years earlier came to mind. Wes and I were canoeing the remote and challenging Otoskwin River, some 400 kilometres north of Lake Superior. After a fortnight in the wilderness, we reached the isolated Ojibwa reserve of Neskantaga, population 265—a place accessible to the outside world only by airplane or a long and perilous canoe journey. As it was, our journey had been plagued by singularly adverse weather—incessant rain, unseasonably cold temperatures, lightning, and hail storms. Our appearance on the remote reserve created something of a stir—visitors of any kind were rare, and for two youths to have canoed there alone was unheard of.

  The long-suffering community was beset by alcoholism and astonishingly high rates of suicide. Despite the grim conditions, we received a warm welcome. One individual, a man in his thirties named Randy, took a particular interest in us. He invited us to accompany him into the woods one night to howl for wolves.

  The pale glow of a half-moon illuminated the old trail we followed that night through the forest, casting eerie shadows against the moss-cloaked ground as we trudged onward. Randy led the way over s
everal thickly forested hills and down into a sort of level plain filled with pine, poplar, spruce, and birch trees.

  “This is where the pack usually hunts,” he whispered to us as we neared an ancient pine that had toppled over. The three of us halted beside the pine, while Randy glanced around. “We’ll try howling,” he whispered. “Usually they respond to the howls pretty good.”

  Wes and I watched as he cupped his hands around his mouth, pointed his head toward the moon, and howled loudly.

  “You guys howl too,” Randy whispered, motioning to us to do the same.

  Wes and I had howled for wolves before, so we readily tossed our heads back, cupped our hands to our mouths, and howled at the half-moon. For the next minute, we all howled together, then paused to await a reply.

  Just when it seemed that no wolves would be heard on that night, a chorus of wild cries that sent shivers down our spines echoed from out of the darkness. Randy smiled and said, “The pack has arrived.”

  When the wolves’ howling abruptly ceased, we responded with more of our own, which encouraged the unseen animals to venture closer. They responded with yaps and more howls. This exchange continued for several minutes before the pack apparently lost interest in us and moved on through the woods.

  As we turned to leave, Randy, who had taken a keen interest in our journey, asked something peculiar. “Did you …” he began, before hesitating a moment, “see anything strange on your journey here?”