How bloody huge the north country is! Right now we’re only in mid-Saskatchewan and there’s still more than 400 miles of un broken forest between us and its northern border. After that there’s still Keewatin – another 600 miles of tundra before you reach the Arctic Ocean.
There’s hundreds of thousands of caribou up there, but so few people you might not see anybody else for months on end. A little bunch of Eskimos out on the barrens. A slightly bigger bunch of Chips [Chipewyans] where the forests thin out. And a handful of white, Cree, and half-breed trappers is all. It’s full of big lakes and rivers the boys say are ideal for canoe travel in summer and dog-sledding in winter.
Though neither Carl nor Johnny has personally been much north of La Ronge they know men who’ve gone beyond Reindeer Lake and the northeast end of Lake Athabasca where the forests melt into the tundra. They’re sure that if they can get themselves and an outfit into Cree Lake, which is halfway to Athabasca, they’ll find themselves in a trapper’s Eldorado.
Their enthusiasm was infectious, and I was receptive when Johnny suggested that next summer the three of us might make a canoe trip from la Ronge to Reindeer Lake, and even on out to the edge of the barrens.
According to what some old Chip told Carl there’s supposed to be a canoe route west from Reindeer then south to Cree Lake. The boys would like to check that out. Carl thought it would sure and hell be a lot cheaper way in to Cree Lake than chartering a bush plane. Then he looked at me and added, ”Yep, and more fun too. Might see them jeezly big caribou herds the Indians talk about. Might even see some Huskies (Eskimos). And I’ll bet there’s birds up there nobody’s even heard about….”
The upshot is we’ve agreed to revisit the idea when they get out from Cree Lake next spring. If it looks good we could, as Johnny says, ”just try it on.”
PART FOUR
FINDING
– 17 –
KEEWATIN – LAND OF THE NORTH WIND
I was reluctant to end the canoe trip. Short as it had been, it had brought me comfort and I was beginning to have hopes of a brighter future.
This mood was not fated to endure. On arrival back at Stennarson’s Post, I found some disturbing letters awaiting me. One, from my mother, informed me Angus was ”in a state of gloom and doom because he feels he has failed you in your time of need.” Helen went on to beg me to come home immediately and reassure my father.
A letter from Angus himself gave no indication he was troubled, but did contain a dire warning as to Helen’s state of being. ”Although your mother is very brave about it, your departure after such a brief time here is eating at her heart. I cannot answer for her health if you stay out west much longer.”
This was such potent stuff that within twenty-four hours I had decided to cut short my journey and return to Richmond Hill.
Guilt was not the only factor. I was becoming uncomfortably aware that dedicating myself to science might not, after all, relieve the darkness of my spirit. On my final day at Stennarson’s Post I wrote in my journal:
Do I really want to spend the foreseeable future killing every interesting animal that comes my way? Surely to God I’ve had enough butchery. I know it’s necessary for science but what a bloody messy, dreary way to spend one’s life.
And there was something else. A remark in Angus’s letter that he might be re-thinking his decision about Scotch Bonnet, suggested she might be available to me after all.
My departure from Montreal Lake was not easily accomplished. I was loathe to give up the beginning sense of belonging somewhere. Gus and the Moiestie clan (whom I had begun to think of almost as my own) did not make the parting any easier.
Gus staged a two-days-two-nights farewell party. With good reason I can’t recall much about it but I remember Frank Nelson’s sardonic parting toast:
”Here’s big drink to best goddamn doctor we never had up here!”
Lulu and I made our way back to Ontario via the all-Canadian route which was still very much under construction. It took us three days to claw across the ancient Shield country north of Lake Superior and we broke most of Lulu’s springs and all her shock absorbers doing it.
By the time we pulled into my parents’ driveway in Richmond Hill, I had been absent eleven weeks in search of a place and a time that, I now had to accept, was lost to me forever.
There followed some days of overwrought emotion at the end of which my parents made a concrete offer. If I would agree to attend university, they would, upon my graduation, give me Scotch Bonnet together with their blessings to sail her anywhere in the world I might choose.
”Think about it,” Angus insisted. ”While at university you’d still have your summers free for chasing birds or whatever else you might want to do.”
Helen hammered the nail home.
”We’re getting on, my darling. And we do so want you to have a decent chance at life after all you’ve been through. We can be at peace if you find that.”
My ungracious reply was that university would be a waste of time since I no longer really wanted to become a scientist and had no alternative profession in view.
”If I did enrol I might or might not even stick around to graduate. I’d be just ‘time serving’ as they say in the army. But I’ll think about it.”
Afraid of where my thoughts might lead me, my parents provided a distraction. They invited my western cousin, Helen Fair Thomson, to come east and join us for a late-summer cruise aboard Scotch Bonnet on the Bay of Quinte. Although Helen Fair was a few years my junior, we had been good companions during summer holidays spent at our grandparents’ cottage in the Gatineau country.
Now she accepted the invitation with alacrity. On August 5 she joined us in Toronto and we set sail to the eastward.
My parents had stocked Scotch Bonnet with the best of everything. The sun shone, and a brisk westerly breeze sent her scudding down Lake Ontario with a bone in her teeth. Had we been setting out on a tropical cruise, things could hardly have been more idyllic.
Having reached the sheltered waters of the bay, Helen Fair and I used the dinghy to explore remote coves, go sunbathing on empty beaches, and swim wherever and whenever we wished. My parents kept very much in the background. Angus busied himself working on the vessel’s gear, while my mother outdid herself in the galley.
I will never know what my parents had in mind. Were they simply hoping to distract me from my inner turmoil, or did they secretly hope that ”something might come of it”? Although Helen Fair and I were first cousins, marriage between first cousins was not absolutely forbidden.
Nothing was ever said or even intimated until one day my parents told us they had been invited to spend the night at a friend’s cottage some miles distant from where Scotch Bonnet lay at anchor in a snug and private little cove. Did Helen Fair and I think we would be able to manage on our own? We thought we would. And sent them on their way.
That night she and I went to bed separately but we ended up in her bunk. Since I had not brought along any contraceptives and was mortally afraid of the consequences, restraint prevailed.
I don’t know what she thought about it at the time but a few days later when I saw her off on the train taking her home to Calgary, she eyed me quizzically and said:
”I guess they taught you how to fight in the army, Farl. Too bad they didn’t teach you some other things as well. Thanks for the memories.”
Early in September I enrolled at the University of Toronto – in a course that, if I managed to stick it out for three years, would see me graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree in nothing specific. I lived with my parents in Richmond Hill that winter, commuting to classes in downtown Toronto in Lulu Belle, and spending a lot of time thinking about my experiences at Montreal Lake and about the country to the north of it. The northern virus was working in my blood.
I found little incentive to socialize with my peers at university. For the most part they were my junior by several years, and the war separated us as if we belonged to a different generation. Th
ose who were war veterans, were mostly married (some already supporting children) and wholly committed to scholastic drudgery in their attempts to regain lost places on the economic treadmill. Neither did the city have much to offer me in the way of a social life. Unattached young women were few and far between and those still available wanted relationships leading to secure futures, which left me out of the running.
Grey days enshrouded me, so I did as I had done so often in the past – I sought comfort in a world of my own contriving. As winter closed in upon southern Ontario, I journeyed north in books and in imagination. Vivid memories of the great caribou migration – la foule – which I had seen on my trip to Churchill in 1935 came crowding back and I became somewhat fixated on caribou. I began to read everything I could find about the Barren Lands species, about the country they lived in, and about the other beings who shared their world.
I learned that the so-called Barren Grounds, or Barren Lands, encompassed nearly two million square miles (which is to say, most of Canada north of timberline) and that these vast tundra plains and the thin taiga forests immediately to the south provided sustenance for a plethora of living creatures. I was astonished (and delighted) by how little was actually known about the country or about the aboriginal inhabitants, the Peoples of the Deer as I thought of them. It appeared that very few outsiders had travelled through these vast reaches of taiga and tundra. One region in particular drew my attention: the interior of Keewatin territory. With the adjacent reaches of Manitoba and Saskatchewan it amounts to nearly three hundred thousand square miles, yet as late as 1947 much of it had not even been mapped.
I could find few accounts of Europeans having explored it, though, between 1770 and 1772, Samuel Hearne, a Hudson’s Bay Company trader, walked more than 2,500 miles in the company of Dene Indians through the northernmost taiga and over the sprawling tundra from Churchill to the mouth of the Coppermine River, then walked all the way back again.
The next intruder of record was a young geologist, Joseph Burr Tyrrell, who was hired in 1893 by the federal government to fill in some of the enormous gaps still existing in the map of northern Canada. Joseph and his brother James were paddled by a party of Mohawk Indians (none of whom had ever seen the Barren Lands before) from Lake Athabasca north to the unknown headwaters of the Dubawnt River and through mighty Dubawnt Lake to the Thelon River and Baker Lake, where the party turned eastward and made its way to Chesterfield Inlet and the salt waters of Hudson Bay.
With winter fast closing in they then paddled south until rapidly forming winter ice drove them ashore and they were forced to make the rest of their way to Churchill (the nearest outpost) on foot. From Churchill they snowshoed eight hundred miles to Winnipeg, which they reached on January 2, 1894, having completed one of the last truly great voyages of exploration in North America.
There was, however, still much uncharted, so in July of 1884 Joe Tyrrell was back at it. This time he canoed to Reindeer Lake in northern Manitoba, and on to the headwaters of the unexplored Kazan River, following it through the Keewatin Barren Lands almost to Baker Lake. By this time winter was again upon him. Tyrrell had to break east to the coast and for a second time endure the agonies of a winter canoe voyage on Hudson Bay.
During the 1893 journey Joe and his brother encountered caribou in such abundance that, as James wrote, ”the deer could only be reckoned in acres and square miles.” Joe estimated that one particular herd contained as many as two hundred thousand individuals.
In addition to meeting the fabled la foule, the Tyrrells discovered a people unknown in the south – a thousand or more inland-dwelling Inuit living along the Kazan and Dubawnt river systems. These were truly a people out of another time for not only had most never seen a white man, they knew little or nothing about the sea and the sea-mammal culture that underlies most Inuit societies. They took their sustenance almost exclusively from tuktu – the caribou. They were still living largely unaffected by and mostly unaware of our world. Engrossed in the task of mapping the route and studying the geology of the country, Joseph Tyrrell had little time to spare for the people he had ”discovered.” Nevertheless, he was much impressed by them and James, the more romantic of the brothers, wrote that he would have liked to have lived with ”the Caribou Eskimaux” long enough to have understood why they seemed to be ”so happily content with their simple life.”
Late in December I made a momentous decision. I would seek out the caribou again, hoping the search would lead me to the people of the deer … if any such still existed.
Uncertain how to get myself there, I asked Jim Baillie if he knew of any upcoming expedition heading into Keewatin Territory. One day in mid-February Jim called me.
”I’ve just heard from a zoology prof in the States who wants to spend a summer on the Barrens collecting whatever he can find. He’s looking for a Canadian associate. There’s no pay, but if you went with him we’d buy any specimens you could collect, at our usually princely rate.”
Pursuing this lead, I eventually found myself constituting half of something called the Keewatin Zoological Expedition. The other half was Dr. Francis Harper, a scientist of my father’s generation, later described to me by one of his peers as having ”a strong antipathy toward socialism, labour unions, and civil rights.” He hardly sounded like my cup of tea, nor was I thrilled to learn that his expenses would be covered by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, whereas I would be expected to pay half the expedition’s costs out of my own pocket. Nevertheless, I concluded that if I was to get to the Barrens at all that summer I had better take what was available.
We planned to fly into central Keewatin in a ski-equipped plane before the spring thaw began, then establish a base camp at some suitably remote place where Harper and I could spend the summer collecting animals and plants.
This, at any rate, was Harper’s plan. I, however, had no real desire to devote my time to enlarging collections of bird and mammal mummies. I wanted to find and travel with the caribou; hoping to meet any remaining people of the deer and to learn what I could about the lives of both.
On May 17, 1947, Francis Harper and I boarded the northbound Muskeg Special to Churchill. There I arranged with a bush pilot to fly us some 250 miles north and west to a little-known lake Samuel Hearne had visited almost two centuries earlier, called Nuelthin-tua – Sleeping Island Lake – by the Chipewyans. Here we hoped to find the cabin of a white trapper who was reputededly in touch with survivors of the so-called Caribou Eskimos.
Luck was with us. Against heavy odds, we located the cabin and managed to land on a still-frozen arm of Nueltin Lake, as it is now called. The cabin, at the mouth of Windy River, was then inhabited by three half-Cree, half-German brothers, the oldest of whom was twenty-one-year-old Charles Schweder. The brothers were very surprised to see us but, like all northern people, they made us welcome.
Thereafter, while Harper busied himself shooting and trapping whatever wild creatures came within reach, Charles and I embarked on an epic canoe journey of more than a thousand miles that took us north to the country of the inland Eskimos; then south to the trading post at Brochet, on Reindeer Lake; then back to Nueltin; and finally east to Hudson Bay, and so eventually to Churchill.
We encountered many caribou during our travels but also grim evidence that their numbers were in steep decline. For years white trappers had been slaughtering them for human and dog food, and using them as bait for traps and sets. We also met most of the few remaining Inuit people of the deer (Ihalmiut – People from Beyond – they called themselves) and visited some of the surviving Idthen Eldeli, the Chipewyan people of the deer.
That summer was a transcendental experience during which I developed a consuming desire to learn more about the peoples of the deer and, if I was lucky, about their inner world. I also became deeply perturbed and angry at the way the indigenous peoples and the other natural denizens of tundra and taiga were being savaged by my kind – by the interlopers.
By summer’s end I was ser
iously considering dropping out of university in order to spend the coming winter roaming the tundra by dog team with Charles and his brothers. Then, when summer returned, I could canoe the countless lakes and rivers getting to know the deer and the deer people with a view to – perhaps – championing their cause.
Although this was no more than a half-formed notion, the idea of becoming a defender rather than a destroyer was irresistibly attractive. But if I intended to become a self-appointed champion of the Barren Lands, I had better have some allies.
Returning to Toronto in mid-September I resumed sporadic attendance at university, while spending much of my time trying to organize a new expedition to the Barren Lands – one that would include a photographer and a trained biologist.
I persuaded Andy Lawrie to come along as the ”expert biologist,” at least through the summer of 1948; Bill Carrick, another pal from the Toronto Ornithological Field Group, agreed to bring and man the cameras.
Against the odds (for I was without standing in the scientific world), I managed to persuade the prestigious Arctic Institute of North America to provide a grant-in-aid of a thousand dollars, a formidable sum in those days and one that would go a long way toward covering outfitting and transportation costs.
All in all, things were looking rosy. They became even rosier after I met a classmate in Botany 2A who was unable to see anything through a microscope and was effusively grateful when I described for her the things she could not see for herself.
Frances Thornhill was a blond, blue-eyed, twenty-three-year-old veteran of the Wrens (Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service) recently demobbed and, like me, now enrolled in a pass arts course to, as she wryly put it, ”pass the time away” until something better appeared. She too was ill at ease in the university milieu. Not surprisingly, we drifted together, and I soon found myself in courting mode.