Far North (8 page)

I
T HAD BEEN ALL
we could do to get the old man to leave that moose behind and get on the raft. Old Johnny must have been thinking we'd wait until the following day; he'd only roughed out the semblance of oars. But the Chinook winds seemed to be letting up and we were in a panic to get going.

We had a couple of hundred pounds of meat on the raft and even the moose hide, which Johnny had insisted upon, but we'd broken the old man's heart leaving so much of the animal behind. Raymond felt awful about it. “Johnny'll never have any luck with moose again,” he muttered on our last portage around the falls. That's when Raymond walked to the edge of the cliffs at Virginia Falls, right out over the brink, and heaved his electric guitar into the maelstrom. Raymond's
mouth was like a jagged scar on his face.

By the time we finally pushed off and started down through choppy water into the painted canyon, the stony slopes of Sunblood Mountain were glowing blood-red in the late sun. It was the sixteenth of November. Each of us was wearing a pair of Raymond's gym shoes, having crammed our winter boots and Johnny's tall moccasins into our limited dry storage along with changes of clothing, our sleeping bags, and Johnny's blanket.

The river narrowed between cliffs that were splashed with reds and yellows, and the raft was funneled into a train of high waves. Standing at the oars, struggling to try to get control of the raft, Raymond and I were barely managing to stay on our feet. It looked like our oarlocks were going to work well enough, but we'd have to figure out better what we were trying to do with the oars if we were going to actually control the raft, as heavy as it was.

Every time the raft wallowed through a wave, the entire deck was awash with water. At the back, the old man was sitting atop the bigger piece of moose meat, the better part of a hindquarter, hanging on to the cord that tied the meat down. The army boxes and the rest of the gear was lashed down toward the front. My feet hurt so
much with the cold I wanted to scream. The water temperature couldn't have been but a few degrees above freezing. I had to tell myself that our feet would be okay despite the pain, as long as the air temperature stayed above freezing too.

As we rounded a bend I glanced back and saw the falls vanish. Bigger than life one moment, the central fact of our lives, gone the next. Another bend in the river and Raymond gave a shout. He was pointing toward a driftpile of jumbled logs at the tip of an island in the middle of the river. Then I saw he was pointing at a piece of metal just above the waterline. A piece of the Cessna, I thought.

“Let's get to shore!” I yelled, and we spun the raft sideways in the current, rowing as hard as we could for shore. The island was slipping by despite our efforts. It looked as if we weren't going to make it, but finally we were able to reach calmer water, and we beached at the bottom tip of the island.

My feet hurt with each step as we hobbled back up to the big driftpile. I was afraid of what we might find there, but I knew we had to look. I walked out onto a log that was sawing up and down with the current. It was a piece of wing that was showing. A length of cable stuck out of both
ends and trailed in the water. There was nothing else to be seen.

I turned to go, but now the old man walked out onto the log, and he squatted down and began to yank on the cable, trying to free it. “We're losing daylight,” I fretted.

The old man persisted. I didn't want to yell at him.

All three of us pulled on the cable together, and it tore free, about fifteen feet of it. “I suppose it will come in handy,” I said. “It's a lot stronger than parachute cord. Let's get going!”

Once we got back into the current, the rapids never let up. We lurched and spun, sloshed and wallowed through miles of canyon lined with slabs of rock fallen from the cliffs and pinnacles above. We struck a few rocks that decided to let us by and barely avoided several boulders that would have thrown us all into the river had we breached on them. We rounded a bend and Raymond yelled, “Sweeper!” Barely, just barely, we managed to avoid a tall spruce tree that had fallen into the river yet remained rooted to the bank. By now the day was going dim and we had nowhere to land. I began to wonder if we were going to be trapped out on the river by the darkness.

It was all but dark when the canyon walls gave way on the right, where a creek was splashing into the river through a gravel bar. We were exhausted by the time we worked the raft to the shallows, but pleased at how well we were working together now. We had so much more control of the raft than before.

Fortunately, the beach was littered with driftwood. We built up a fire. It felt good to get into some dry clothes, especially dry boots. We erected a framework of poles all around the fire to begin the slow process of drying our wet clothes without burning them. “How far do you think we came today?” I asked Raymond. “It felt like a lot of miles to me,” I added hopefully.

“Pretty far,” Raymond said.

I pressed him. “What I mean is, if it's about two hundred miles from the falls to Nahanni Butte, how many do we have behind us?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe ten klicks—six miles or so?”

All at once the wind turned around and started blowing from a different direction. I was worried enough to dig out the compass. Clint had said the Chinook blows from the west. This wind was blowing from the northeast. The old man saw me looking at the compass. He knew exactly what I
was thinking. I felt sick, knowing what this meant. There was no doubting that this was air coming down from the Arctic Ocean, not the Pacific. Johnny Raven knew his directions without a compass, and he'd already figured out that the Chinook was over.

Johnny offered me some rose hip tea. It tasted warm and good, but it did nothing to calm my fears.

The old man spoke at great length around the campfire that night, telling a long story to Raymond, who couldn't understand him. Even so, Raymond was listening, listening intently as if he understood every word. I think it helped him somehow to calm himself down.

Remembering how fast the river could freeze up, I was too nervous to sleep. I could still feel the rumbling of the falls through the ground. I kept seeing the plane crashing against the rock, Clint being thrown into the whitewater. I kept wondering if my father was still searching. I thought he would be. But how could he find us down here?

By morning my worst fears were realized. The river was running cakes of hissing, colliding ice. The Nahanni had dropped several feet as water had formed ice, leaving the raft stranded a hundred feet away from the water across a beach of
gravel and ice. Raymond came up from behind me. I could see it in his face, the enormity of our mistake. I said, “Is there any way we can go back to where we were? Do you think there's a trail upstream? Maybe we could hike back?”

I felt sick to my stomach, waiting for him to speak. He chewed on his lip, shook his head. “There's no trail. Like you saw, the canyon is straight up and down. I remember that canoe guide telling me that the only place there's a trail along the river is the portage around the falls.”

“I feel so bad,” I said. “I talked you into this.”

Raymond shrugged. “Too late now,” he said. “We better get the raft unstuck and get it back to the water. It's a race with the ice now. The sooner we get going, the better our chances.”

We could only manage to drag the raft a few feet at a time. The old man wanted to help us, but Raymond wouldn't let him. It took an agony of effort and precious time before we were able to drag it all the way to the river.

We started downriver again, this time wearing our winter boots. Even if they were going to get wet, we knew we needed some insulation on our feet now. We just had to hope that the air temperature didn't get low enough for frostbite.

Around the bend we encountered a break in
the canyons where steep forested mountainsides met the river. There was hardly any current for miles, no whitewater at all but plenty of sweepers. Our feet were staying warm and dry. We pushed hard on the oars to try to gain any speed compared to simply floating. The river split and meandered among islands below the mountains that rose and rose until they vanished in swirling clouds.

We kept pushing along with the hissing ice as the day froze into a changeless gray. As we rounded a bend we heard whitewater. The old man gave a quick cry, and then I saw the river up ahead rushing in a line of waves straight up against a rock wall fifty feet high where the river was making a sharp left-hand turn. To the right, there was an enormous whirlpool where the water that hadn't made the turn was swirling in a vicious circle. All the current in the river was rampaging straight toward the wall. “We gotta pull left!” I yelled to Raymond. Our only chance to avoid crashing into the wall was to try to break out of the current and cross into a lesser whirlpool on the left side.

We rowed with all we had. But the current was too strong and the raft too cumbersome, and we were being swept right down the current line
toward the wall.

As we neared the wall I saw that the force of the river had undercut it, and we were going to be pushed under that overhang. In an instant, all three of us threw ourselves down on the raft, and I heard an oar shatter. It was mine—I saw the sharp broken shaft pass right by my head. Now the raft was spun around and wedged in against the wall, pinned, with the river streaming up against us. I knew the raft couldn't stay together long under this much pressure. Raymond and I scrambled across the raft and tried to push off the cliff with our legs. I caught a glimpse of the old man scrambling for something to hang on to.

I don't know what it was that freed us, but now we were bumping down the cliff under that low overhang. The raft was spinning; suddenly we both realized that the old man was missing.

“Johnny!” Raymond yelled, and we looked all around, but he was nowhere to be seen. Without a life jacket, I realized, he didn't have a chance.

The raft was bumping alongside the wall again, and still we couldn't see him. The wall ended, and the raft lumbered into the last part of the rapid. Suddenly I spotted the thatch of white hair and Johnny's face bobbing in the waves, barely behind the raft. I gave a yell, and Raymond saw him too.
Raymond lunged across the raft and reached, grabbing the old man by the parka hood, as the raft drifted into the slow water below the rapid. We hauled Johnny back onto the raft, where he lay on his side, barely breathing. “He must've been caught under the raft,” Raymond said. Johnny's cloth parka was freezing solid as we watched. I thought he was going to die right there before we could get him to shore.

Trying to do what we could with one oar, it must have taken us a mile before we were able to reach some shallows. I jumped out with the braided parachute cord we were using for a bowline and dragged the raft a little closer. Raymond and I were shaking violently from the cold; the old man was beyond shivering and had a glassy look in his eyes. Raymond stripped Johnny's clothing off for him. I was shocked: the old man was nothing but skin and bones.

Raymond spread out the blue tarp and helped Johnny into a sleeping bag while I fumbled with frozen fingers, trying to get a fire started. At last I succeeded, and we ran around in our wet boots collecting driftwood to add to the fire. Finally we could change clothes and start to dry out our boot liners. It took hours for Johnny to come around. We'd been within a thread of losing him.

I said to Raymond, “Johnny was right all along, and you told me we should listen to him. This is all my fault. I'm sorry.”

Raymond shrugged. “‘Sorry,' that's famous last words.”

“Well, I mean it,” I told him.

His dark eyes flashed, and he said, “It was just as much me as it was you. I should've known better. It's because I don't know anything. I don't know hardly any more than you do about winter out on the land. I got scared.”

“So what do we do now?”

“Make a new oar, I guess.”

Raymond found a birch and started working on the new oar. We had to spend the night there, huddling by the fire. As we put out into the ice-filled river the next day, I said to Raymond that I couldn't get over how Johnny could have survived that swim. Raymond said, “He spent most of his life out in the cold. Those old people are used to it. That nurse in the hospital in Yellowknife…” He laughed.

I was amazed he could laugh about anything, given our circumstances.

“When I came to the hospital to get him, she said he was the hardest guy to give shots to that she ever met in her life—it was really a challenge
to get through his skin.”

“No kidding?”

“She said she had to ram that needle, at just the right angle….” Raymond pointed at his own backside, and laughed. “She said his skin was tougher than moose hide. ‘From being out in the cold so much of his life,' she explained. She was Dene herself—she knew.”

That night we camped at the mouth of a creek that joined the Nahanni from the right side. We spent the night huddling close to the fire, dozing off a little, but we had to keep the fire going, and every so often we had to go down and push the raft into open water. The shallow water was icing up fast, and we knew the raft could get locked in solid if we didn't watch it.

The next day we entered a much deeper canyon. This one towered thousands of feet above us, pitted with caves and broken every mile or two with forested draws that came all the way down to the river. At one point the river narrowed and passed between a sheer wall on the right, which rose a thousand feet or more, and a massive stranded pinnacle on the left that had trees growing from its top.

All the time, our channel of free water in the middle of the river was shrinking as the ice cakes
coming down the river adhered to the ice growing along the shores. We pushed on, rowing as hard as we could down the narrowing passage. The river swung slowly through the canyons, bend after bend. Unlike us, it had all the time in the world.