Alone Against the North (28 page)

“Be patient,” replied Mark as he continued to shine a flashlight in the direction of the other boat. Eventually, we heard the sounds of their engine and the light grew bigger. At last they had seen us.

The rescue boat was identical to our own, except that its motor seemed to work just fine. On board were two men from Moose Factory, Thomas and Jeff, good friends of Mark and Tyler. We transferred everything from the disabled boat to theirs, except for my canoe. With rope, the disabled boat was fastened to the working one and towed behind as we headed for the Moose River in the dark. Our rescuers used a GPS to navigate because nothing could be seen in the dark and there were many hazardous rocks, shoals, and sandbars. Towing the other boat further reduced our speed, and we chugged along at a slow pace. As it was, we would be lucky to arrive in Moose Factory before the sunrise.

The wind had died down, and now the surface of the sea was fairly calm. I shivered in the cold night air. Exhausted from lack of sleep—it was well past midnight—I nearly nodded off. Meanwhile, my on-board companions spoke of strange things. They discussed their experiences with unidentified lights in the night sky above James Bay—which they thought might be alien ships—and some enormous tracks found sunk in the moss onshore near an isolated creek, apparently left by some unknown creature.

Suddenly, the boat struck something and we all lurched forward in our seats.

“We're snagged on something,” said Thomas, from the other boat.

Mark and I jabbed paddles over the side into the dark water. To our surprise, it was only knee deep—though the shore was still several kilometres away.

“We're on a sandbar,” said Mark.

The boat's propeller had struck the bottom. Thomas lifted the engine out of the water and the rest of us jabbed with paddles to push the boat into deeper water. But when the engine was started again, we found we were still snagged.

“It must be the engine on the other boat,” said Thomas. “It's hit the bottom.”

Thomas, Jeff, and Mark plunged overboard in their hip waders. It was a strange sight—the five of us somewhere on the immensity of James Bay—struggling to free a stranded boat in the moonlight, with nothing but black water visible in all directions. Thomas, Jeff, and Mark stood nearly knee-deep in the water and attempted to raise the other boat's engine off the bottom, but its hydraulics weren't working and they couldn't free it from the sandbar.

“We need a screwdriver to get the engine off. It's the only way to free it,” said Jeff.

Neither boat had a screwdriver, but I had my old Swiss Army knife—a thoughtful gift from my grandparents for my third birthday, which had served me well ever since. With the Swiss Army knife's slot-head screwdriver we were able to unscrew the
engine, raise it out of the water, and at last free ourselves from the shallows.

It took us several more hours to reach the mouth of the Moose River. The Moose had been a major artery of the historic fur trade, since it connects directly with dozens of other waterways that reach into the heartland of the Canadian Shield. Just as the first faint streaks of orange sunrise appeared on the horizon, we arrived at Moose Factory—a small Cree community situated on an island some eighteen kilometres upriver from James Bay. We were all exhausted from our journey and eager to get home to sleep. I was left at the band office, which also functioned as a sort of museum, where I was told I could make myself comfortable. I curled up on a metal bench near an exhibit of a stuffed polar bear, and I found that I slept soundly beneath the snarling gaze of this deceased predator.

WHEN I AWOKE
several hours later, I still had the feeling that I was bobbing on the boat. For breakfast (or rather brunch), I met with a retired trapper, Sinclair, who had spent a lifetime in the wilderness around Moose Factory. He had heard I was in town and was keen to meet me. We sat down opposite each other at the only diner on the island, located inside the band-owned co-op building. After introductions and small talk, I began to tell Sinclair about my journey. His reticence melted away and he became rather excited as I showed him pictures of black bears, canyons, rapids, and waterfalls on my camera.

“That's a big bear!” Sinclair said, looking at one of my photographs. “You did this all alone?” he asked incredulously, shaking his head.

“My last partner bailed on me, so I've become used to travelling alone,” I explained.

“I've never known anyone to canoe the Again River,” said Sinclair. “My family used to trap on the Corner River. Do you know it?”

“Yes,” I nodded, “but I've never canoed it.” The Corner was a small waterway near the Kattawagami—one of hundreds in the area.

“What made you want to canoe the Again?” asked Sinclair, sipping his coffee.

“Because no one I knew of had ever canoed it.”

“There's usually a good reason for that,” he laughed.

I nodded. “The river is full of rapids and falls, and the upper part is mostly too shallow to paddle.”

The revelation that even Sinclair had never heard of anyone canoeing the Again River was significant. Unlike the dozens of other people I had spoken to about the river—bush pilots, prospectors, trappers, canoeists, old-timers—most of whom had never heard of it, Sinclair was an aboriginal elder with plenty of experience in the area. The fact he had even heard of the river was a testament to his considerable knowledge. But given the thousands of waterways in the James Bay watershed, no one person could know them all. While the lack of written documentation about the Again River had been the basis for my exploration of it, hearing this news from Sinclair made my journey feel a little more special.

After brunch, I wandered around Moose Factory, exploring the town and looking at rusty old cannons lying half-forgotten in an overgrown patch of grass near the river. They were relics
from a bygone era, when a Hudson's Bay Company fort had stood on the island and served as a major centre of the fur trade. As I stood there on the riverbank, I thought to myself with satisfaction that while the glory days of the fur trade were past, the age of exploration was not yet over.

[ 13 ]

CHANGING THE MAP

But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.

—Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness
, 1899

T
HE AGAIN RIVER
had haunted me for years—a nagging obsession that frequently dominated my thoughts. I had expected, or rather hoped, that after I had finally explored this mysterious river, I could banish it from my mind and seldom think of it again. But I found that its spell over me had not yet been broken—not even by canoeing the entire river.

Unanswered questions vexed me. For one thing, I had not resolved the puzzle of how the river got its unusual name, nor had I located the old surveyors' records from the 1930s. More problematic was the question of the waterfalls—I had supposed that upon my return home, I would be able to determine their precise locations with the use of satellite imagery, given that I now knew they existed and their approximate positions—which would allow me to add them to a map of the river.

But the available satellite images were too poor to pinpoint all the waterfalls, including the one I plunged over in my canoe.
I could only detect with confidence the horseshoe waterfall in the canyon and the furious cataract at the end of the same canyon. Even a trip to the National Air Photo Library in Ottawa, where I dug up the original black-and-white aerial photos of the Again River from the 1950s, proved of little use. The old, grainy images revealed no more than the newer satellite ones. And so it began to seem, almost against my better judgment, that if I wanted to precisely map the Again River, I would have little choice but to canoe it again.

The irony of the river's name was not lost on me. Difficult and hazardous as it had been the first time, and eager as I was to move on to new challenges, like a moth to a flame I seemed irresistibly drawn back to it. No sooner had I returned from the wilderness than I began making preparations for a return journey into the Lowlands.

My intention was that a second trip to the Again River would not be a hasty, last-minute venture to satisfy personal curiosity like the mad quest I had pulled off in 2012. Instead, it would be a carefully planned expedition complete with gear that I had previously lacked. Hopefully, I could also recruit a partner, which would make it safer and easier to carry the extra equipment. For the return expedition, besides the equipment that I would need to survey waterfalls, I planned to invest in a tripod and a better camera to obtain high-quality photographs. This time, I would also forgo my woodsman's preference for traditional navigation and instead carry a GPS, so that I could plot each waterfall's exact location. After all, much as I disliked electronic gadgetry, this was a chance to literally change the map by adding waterfalls to it—a fine feather in the cap of any explorer. But more than
that, there was something deeply alluring about the thought of mapping unknown waterfalls.

Ever since the Belgian explorer Louis Hennepin's awestruck description of Niagara Falls first appeared in print in 1683, explorers' tales of finding unknown waterfalls have captivated imaginations. In 2003, for example, the rediscovery of a single waterfall in a park in northern California made headlines in
National Geographic
. According to
National Geographic
's story, a park ranger “discovered a giant waterfall that had languished unseen for decades because of rugged territory and inaccurate maps.” The waterfall in question was not entirely unknown—rumours of its existence had circulated for years, and it was even marked, albeit inaccurately, on an old map from the 1960s. That map had led the park rangers on an initially futile search for the phantom waterfall. Undeterred by their failure to find it, they next turned to aerial photographs, which revealed a white blur about a kilometre from the spot marked on the map. A second hike into the remote area finally revealed the long-lost waterfall. The ranger and his colleague were credited with the discovery, even though they reported that the area around the waterfall had been logged decades earlier. But the loggers and other occasional hikers in the area had never properly documented the falls, and at least according to geographers, documentation is the essence of exploration and discovery.

In contrast, the multiple waterfalls hidden along the Again River's torturous course were infinitely more obscure than the California waterfall. There was never any logging anywhere near the Again River; no maps of any kind had ever shown waterfalls on the river's course; and the river was not part of an easily
accessible park where hikers need only stray a few kilometres off established trails to glimpse a hidden waterfall. Accustomed as I was to travelling hundreds of kilometres from the nearest road or town, it seemed ironic that the unknown California waterfall was located a mere three kilometres from an existing trail and only twenty-four kilometres from the park's headquarters—all of this in a state that is home to thirty-eight million people. But the rediscovery of the California waterfall is a testament to how even in the twenty-first century, rugged wilderness and thick forest can conceal all sorts of features as well as the fact that the world has not been as thoroughly explored as many might assume.

The Royal Canadian Geographical Society's Expedition Committee was quick to approve my plans and offer me funding for a return to the Again River. The Committee knew that there was something special about finding unmapped waterfalls, particularly on a river in the Hudson Bay drainage basin where waterfalls are much less common than in mountainous terrain. In the Rockies, for example, undoubtedly dozens of unknown falls are located on isolated streams waiting to be discovered. The objective for the new expedition was to carefully photograph the waterfalls, measure their height, and record their precise locations. I would get underway the following summer, when the Lowlands would be free from the grip of its long, harsh winter.

In the meantime, I was busy speaking at schools and other venues about exploring, snowshoeing around the woods in preparation for a winter expedition I was planning, and tracking down explorers' papers as part of my doctoral research. My quest for old explorers' records, which took me far and wide, at last bore
fruit. I found buried in some tedious records the secret I had been looking for—the origin of the Again River's peculiar name. I had finally located the surveyor's account from the 1930s—which was, as far as I knew, the only written description of the Again River in existence beyond my own.

The description was made in 1931 by Shirley King, an Ontario Land Surveyor, who along with his Quebec counterpart J.M. Roy, had led expeditions to survey the northern part of the provincial boundary in the summers of 1930 and 1931—something that had never been done before. Their challenge was to survey a perfectly straight line through difficult terrain and unexplored wilderness all the way to tidewater on James Bay. King wrote of their preparations: