Far North (9 page)

The next day the canyon seemed to die out at first, but within a few miles we were back under towering walls, and the canyon seemed even more constricted than before. In some places the riverbed was only a couple of hundred feet wide from wall to wall. We steered our way around immense boulders with logs perched on top, left there by floods, I guessed.

The freezing clouds dropped down inside the canyon and clung to the walls and the pinnacles. We were floating now among great blocks of ice that jostled us for position, and we fended them off with driftwood poles we'd picked up along the shore. We were stunned to hear a motor suddenly, the unmistakable drone of an airplane. “Where is it?” I asked desperately, hoping it would appear for a second in the clouds.

“Heading upstream,” Raymond said, pointing where Johnny was pointing. “And it's flying high…it's just about gone…they're going someplace else, someplace where it's safe to fly under
the clouds. They can't fly down in the canyon with these clouds, that's for sure.”

I knew what he was thinking. “Up above the falls,” I said. “That's where they're going to look.” Suddenly I pictured my father inside that airplane. If we had only stayed put…Could our signal fire still be burning, still barely smoking? I knew that was impossible. We hadn't even built it up on the day we took off, we were in such a hurry.

I looked at Raymond. He was thinking all the same things I was. He said, “At least now we know they're still searching.”

But will they ever think of looking down in the canyons, on the river itself? I wondered. How could they ever guess what we'd done?

Around a bend, I looked downstream and gasped. The ice had formed a dam across the entire width of the river. “Look at that!” I yelled to Raymond.

We were suddenly stopped dead in a rising lake full of ice floes. I thought this was the end. Raymond and the old man obviously thought so too. We quit rowing; there was nothing to be done. There was no shore to go to, no way to get around the dam, just sheer canyon walls on both sides. Johnny stood up for a better look, studied
the ice dam for a long time, then sat back down on the moose meat. We both looked to him for some kind of idea, but his face was blank.

Raymond and I talked a little, but then we just sat down on the duffel bags and waited. I could picture what was going to happen now: the river was going to freeze us in solid right here, maybe sometime during the night.

Out of the silence came a sudden shearing crash, loud as thunder. I wondered for a half second what it was, then jumped up and saw that the ice dam had burst. The lake was pouring through a small gap in the center of the dam. Raymond and I both grabbed the oars. “When it starts to take us,” he said, “really hang on!”

It was no more than a couple of minutes before the raft went surging downstream among the tumbling ice floes. From the corner of my eye I saw Johnny getting down low, bracing his back against the moose quarter. I concentrated on the gap that had broken open in the ice dam, no more than a hundred yards ahead. The gap itself couldn't have been more than thirty feet wide, and the river was pouring through it, down onto a steep chute of whitewater below. We had no choice but to push on the oars, line up dead center for the gap in the dam, and take whatever
happened below. “Hang on!” I heard Raymond yell just before we passed through the gap and started down the chute.

Down we plunged, fast, into the very bottom of a deep trough, then rode up, up on the colossal wave cresting below. The raft was slowing as it climbed the wave; I thought we didn't have enough momentum to make it over the very top. We were stalling out, and I realized we were just about to slide back down into the trough.

Raymond could feel it as well. At the same moment, we both pushed on the oars as hard as we could, topped out on the wave, and started down into a series of lesser waves leading to calm water.

I looked around. All three of us were still on the raft. “We did it!” I shouted.

Raymond raised his fist triumphantly. “I can't believe we made it over the top of that thing!”

Johnny was beaming too. I thought, I bet he's never done anything like
that
in his whole long life.

I couldn't help but let my hopes rise. We were moving again, and as far downstream as I could see, it was all calm water. We threaded our way among countless ice floes, many standing up like icebergs.

Midafternoon the canyon opened up onto a wide, forested valley, with a stream coming in from the right that drained mountains standing back at a distance. The left side of the valley was made up of an immense gravel bar below three side canyons that had gouged their way down through a flat escarpment tilting toward the high mountains. A creek ran across the gravel bar toward the Nahanni, entering the river at a dozen places along the shore. I could see the channels picking new paths around ones that had previously frozen shut.

“Deadmen Valley,” the old man said, in English. It was apparent that this was a name and a place he knew.

Some miles ahead we could see the narrow gate where Deadmen Valley ended and the Nahanni entered another, deeper canyon. We knew we had no choice but to stay with the river, enter that next canyon, and hope to squeak on through to Nahanni Butte. But as we were nearing the gate of the canyon, we came around a bend and saw that the ice had sealed the surface of the river solid from one bank to the other and as far downriver as we could see. The river was running under the ice from here on. “This is it!” I yelled.

“Get your knife ready to cut stuff loose!” Raymond yelled back.

In another minute we were swept against the ice. We cut all the tie-downs as fast as we could and started unloading the raft. Ice floes were jamming up against the raft, and water was sweeping across us and freezing. “Which shore do we go to?” I shouted. Johnny Raven was pointing to the right side.

We were throwing everything off onto the ice as fast as we could. As I stepped off the raft with the bigger piece of moose meat on my back, I slipped and fell hard on the edge of the ice, landing on my left side without the chance to break my fall. I watched the meat plunge into the river and disappear under the ice. I looked up and saw Raymond's eyes, and the old man's, staring where the meat had disappeared. Suddenly I realized how bad my left side hurt, where I'd cracked a rib in football.

I stumbled around in a delirium, shuttling gear up to the top of the riverbank and helping Raymond with the heavy frozen moose hide. After that I went back to the raft but found we'd already taken everything off it. I recovered the bowline we'd braided from parachute cord, then watched as the raft buckled and went under the
ice. Then I trudged up the bank and fell in a heap, stricken with remorse that hurt much worse than the pain in my side.

Raymond was starting a fire with birchbark and kitchen matches. “It only makes sense we'd have bad luck with moose,” I heard him mutter. “Leaving all that meat behind.”

T
HE OLD MAN STOOD
on the top of the bank, taking the measure of Deadmen Valley, watching the cold wind bend the trees down. He was scanning the high mountains that had us encircled. What was he thinking? Were we going to stay here now? Our remaining moose meat couldn't have weighed twenty-five pounds. But Johnny had those three bullets. Our lives were in his hands now.

A quick fire and dry clothes, a lean-to and a night's supply of firewood, then darkness. A little dried fruit to eat and the howling of wolves across the river. I was utterly exhausted, and I had a deep ache in my side, pain whenever I breathed or moved. Had I recracked the rib? “Wolves in the valley should mean moose,” Raymond grunted in my direction.

Johnny Raven was looking into the fire as he warmed his hands and feet. He seemed to be letting his mind drift, and I couldn't blame him. How did he keep going? For such a gentle man he was tough as nails.

“This bare ground will make tough moose hunting,” Raymond said, holding out his hands to the fire and stamping his feet. “I wish it would snow about four or five feet—that's when the moose stick to just a few trails so they can get around. Sometimes they stand right in our snowmobile trails—won't even get out of the way.”

“I can't believe we're hoping for snow, but I see what you mean. Could we even get around?”

“We've got the moose hide. Johnny can make snow-shoes now. Tomorrow, I bet he finds some birch and starts making the frames.”

“Without him…” I didn't want to finish my thought.

Raymond finished it for me: “Without him we're dead meat.”

The old man stood up. By the light of the fire, he started stowing what was left of our moose meat in one of the army boxes. Then he picked up the rifle, motioned for us to follow him, and started to walk away. I was confused, and so was Raymond. Where did he want us to go? I wasn't
about to force an explanation from him, that was for sure. I thought of grabbing the flashlight, then remembered it was dead. As the crescent moon disappeared behind the mountains towering over the valley, we walked into the darkness, following his silhouette.

Beyond the firelight the stars were blazing in the brittle, dry air. Even with only a few patches of crusted snow here and there to reflect the starlight, my eyes adjusted and I could make out where I was going. We followed the old man upriver as, from nowhere and everywhere, curtains of iridescent green and yellow light materialized in the night sky, swirling and shimmering and dancing. The northern lights. My father had often told me about them, the aurora borealis. I stopped to stare at the dazzling aurora shifting in a moment from horizon to horizon, returning just as fast, this time like brilliant searchlights. I ran to catch up, and then I walked with my eyes on the eerie lights and their strange, shifting shapes.

Where a small creek, almost frozen shut, reached the Nahanni, the old man turned away from the river and led us into the big trees. Then he pointed, and we could make out a small cabin in a clearing up ahead. The cabin was glowing yellow-green under the light of the aurora, and it
looked like an apparition. Nearby stood a food cache on tall stilts. “Patterson,” the old man said, pointing at the cabin.

“Johnny knew about this place!” Raymond exclaimed. “He must have been here before.”

Johnny Raven fashioned a torch from a rolled piece of birchbark. By its light we lifted the cabin's latch and swung the door open on creaking hinges. We stepped over the doorsill, which was the shaved top of the second log up from the ground. The torchlight fell on a small woodstove in the corner and sections of stovepipe lying on the dirt floor. About thirteen feet square and tall enough for us to stand even in the corners, the cabin had a couple of shelves and a crude handmade table—that was all there was to it. Above the table, the initials
RMP
and
GM
were carved large on the logs, along with the inscription
Deadmen Valley 1927.
The old man pointed at the initials and repeated that name, “Patterson.”

“A trapper?” Raymond muttered to his great-uncle, and the old man nodded his agreement.

“You knew him?” Raymond asked. He pointed at the name, and then looked back to the old man. “You knew him?”

Johnny was nodding vigorously.

We returned to our campfire for the night.
Raymond and I stayed up close to the fire as Johnny wrapped himself in his blanket, lay down, and slept. “At least we have a cabin to stay in now,” I said. “A cabin with a stove—we can stay warm. Do you think that plane will come back, take a look around here?”

“We should get a signal fire going in case it does,” Raymond said. “Maybe build it here and use driftwood, so we can save the wood near the cabin for the stove.”

“I just wish I hadn't lost that meat. You're pretty lucky to have me along, you know. You wouldn't want this to be too easy.”

With a grin, Raymond said, “If I ever do another raft trip, I think I'd want to have you with me. You're pretty good on those oars.” He placed a big chunk of wood on the fire. “Johnny'll get another moose,” he said confidently.

“Do you think Johnny wants us to stay here for the rest of the winter—if no one spots us, I mean?”

“Maybe we'll be able to hike out down the river later, on the ice, once there's no more Chinooks. I just don't know. I think we better just take our cues from Johnny from here on out.”

“You won't get any back talk from me on that.”

In the gray morning twilight we built up our
signal fire by the river, then began moving our stuff. The squat cabin with its thick roof of moss and clay looked as miraculous as before. We broomed the dirt floor clean with spruce branches, brought our gear inside, and moved in. The stove looked to be in one piece. We fitted the stovepipe back together and ran it up through the roof jack. The big roof poles looked sound. The one window had been broken out, but a sheet of hard clear plastic had been fastened across the entire window frame. The window allowed quite a bit of light. “Home,” Raymond announced. It was the twenty-first of November.

We tried a fire in the rusty little stove. It worked, and cheered us up as we warmed our hands.

I looked around the cabin, ending up with my eyes on the rough little table. “This must be the kitchen,” I said.

“Needs a microwave,” Raymond added. “No TV in here either. Next time we should bring a VCR—watch movies all winter.”

“There you go,” I said, with a small laugh that made my side hurt. But in the back of my mind, I was remembering Clint's story about the two brothers who tried to winter in Deadmen Valley, starved to death, and lost their heads to the bears.

The old man pegged the moose hide to the wall with the old nails we found around the place and began scraping the hair from the hide with the sheath knife. He was going to make it into rawhide—babiche, as Raymond called it. Raymond and I sawed three big rounds of spruce to serve as stools. We allowed our spirits to lift for the time being. All that remained of our food was a little flour, baking powder, some beans, a handful of dried fruit, and the box of meat.

Raymond and I fashioned a ladder so we'd be able to reach the food cache behind the cabin, trusting that meat would come to fill it. Like a cabin in miniature on stilts, the old cache was supported by four trees that had been sawed off about twelve feet above the ground. Just under the cache, the stilts were wrapped with stovepipe—to prevent a black bear or wolverine from reaching the cache, Raymond said.

“What about a grizzly?” I asked.

“Grizzlies can't climb,” he explained. “And it's out of a grizzly's reach.”

As Raymond had predicted, the old man took us out right away on a hunt for just the right birch tree. He had us cut a ten-foot log from it and carry it back to the cabin, where he planed it flat on two sides with the ax and began to strip it into
lengths. “The old guys like Johnny always use birch for snowshoe frames,” Raymond said. “It's tough, it'll bend without breaking, and it splits easily when it's cold.”

Around noon the next day it cleared up enough for us to notice the sun making a brief appearance over the bald mountain to the southwest. The temperature was ten below, practically a heat wave. When I returned from building up the signal fire, I found Raymond watching intently as Johnny fashioned a snowshoe frame, bending the green birch strips patiently over his knee, bracing and lashing them temporarily into shape with whittled pegs and fine spruce roots. I watched for a while, until Johnny picked up his rifle, said something to us in Slavey, and slipped into the trees. He returned in the dark—no luck.

On the twenty-fifth of November the warm Chinook returned. By day it would blow through the valley almost at gale force, and by night we could hear it high above, raging on the ridges. The Nahanni opened up in spots, smoking in the cold mornings. The Chinook would alternate with the arctic winds in pitched battles that seesawed back and forth above Deadmen Valley, sending the temperature from forty above to thirty below.

Still no snow. It was not the weather that
Raymond had hoped for as Johnny hunted our side of the river for the moose that should be browsing in the willow thickets. Raymond and I were picking frozen cranberries. Any we could find helped a little. We'd gone through the last of the fruit and the flour, and the ration of meat we were allowing ourselves could barely keep us going. We still had beans. For our only meal of the day, we'd been allowing ourselves no more than one pound total of the moose meat, cooked in with some beans.

When the old man wasn't hunting, he was weaving the intricate babiche lacing to complete the first pair of snowshoes. Raymond and I were making snares, braiding the thin strips of babiche as Johnny had shown us. We set a dozen snares up and down the river for snowshoe hares. Raymond knew exactly how to do it, having snared the rabbits with picture wire when he was a kid. He'd bend a young tree down over a rabbit run and rig the snare below it so it made a circle about four inches across, about three inches above the trail. Then he'd arrange slender sticks like a fence on both sides of the snare and tiny ones underneath, so the rabbit was forced to pass through the circle.

Once we interrupted a chase in the trees above
us. A dark-furred animal the size of an overgrown house cat hunched its back and growled at us as we passed below. “Marten,” Raymond said. In the next tree a red squirrel chattered as the marten glowered at us, growling all the while, trying at the same time to keep its eye on the squirrel. I tried to knock the marten from the tree with a stick but succeeded only in chasing it away.

Raymond was always on the lookout for fresh moose sign, but he wasn't finding any. “All these willow thickets,” he kept saying. “All these moose paths. Old droppings everywhere, but none fresh. I don't understand it.”

The old man showed Raymond that the airplane cable we had salvaged could make a snare too, just like a rabbit snare, only on a bigger scale. “It's illegal,” Raymond said. “But in Deadmen Valley,” he added with a smile, “we might get away with it.” We rigged the snare on one of the more prominent moose paths through the thickets. As Raymond secured the free end to a cottonwood tree, he said, “Man, would I like to get a moose for Johnny. That's the way it's supposed to be. The young men are supposed to bring the first and the best meat to the elders.”

Wherever we went we took the ax with us, for protection. “Nobody walks around in the bush
without a rifle,” Raymond said.

I told him, “That looks more like an ax you've got in your hand.”

“Better than a kick in the knee.”

“Where did you come up with that expression? My mother always used to say that.”

“Old Dene saying,” he replied with a smirk.

“The ax…it's protection from what?”

“Bull moose, cow moose with a calf, or ‘keep out of its way.'”

“I thought grizzlies were supposed to be hibernating by now.”

“Supposed to be,” he replied.

With the ax and the bow saw we made so much firewood for our little stove it looked like we had a woodlot going. We sought out the dead trees and hauled them back in lengths to the cabin and sawed and split firewood endlessly, mixing in green spruce, which split easily in the cold. With the Chinook in retreat, perhaps for good, there was plenty of cold available. We each broke a saw blade sawing too fast. When the second one broke a few days after the first, it scared us. We'd have to baby the bow saw now that we were down to the last blade.

The mercury stayed down around twenty and thirty below at midday. It amazed me that life
could go on. Yet as long as we dried our clothes out overnight, and dried our gloves and mitts and the felt liners from our boots, we were okay. Bundled up in as many layers as we were, we'd become accustomed to it.

The old man made a simple hand-held drum from a small piece of moose hide that he stretched over a birch frame. It looked something like a big tambourine. He'd tap out a simple rhythm with a small padded stick, sometimes chanting on into the night. The drum had a hypnotic effect and helped take our minds from our hunger. Just as we never spoke about the search plane that didn't come back, we never talked about our hunger. It clawed at us from the inside, a private torment.

At least it was warm in the cabin. That small a space was easy to heat if we just kept stoking the fire. After we would regretfully snuff out the candle for the evening, we'd lie on the spruce boughs in our bags and watch the bit of firelight from the stove door playing on the drumskin and the ancient face of the drummer. Each evening old Johnny started with a Slavey formula that Raymond knew and translated as “In the Distant Time it is said…” Raymond explained that Johnny was telling the stories “of when the
world was young.”

“What are they about?” I asked.