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FOURTEEN

RIVER OF FIRE

It is with our passions, as it is with fire and water; they are good servants but bad masters.

— Aesop (620–560 B.C.)

“Let’s get the hell out of here NOW!” Hodding was yelling at Andy to get back into the canoe. “LOOK AT THE FIRE … WE’VE GOT TO MOVE OR WE’RE TOAST!”

Russell and I were two hundred metres beyond in our canoe taking pictures of the fire while Andy had pulled his canoe up to shore at the end of the rapids to take a piss … that’s when we heard Hodding screaming at the top of his lungs to get moving.

“Christ, this is bad,” I thought aloud. We had just finished running Nine Bar Rapids, a notorious 3.5-kilometre-long, hair-raising rollercoaster ride — a gnarly class 3 or 4 canoe eater. We ran the left side, eddying out twice to scout bends, and finished by dropping over a two-metre ledge, very nearly getting stuck in the hydraulic backwash. It was a fifty-foot drop — the type of rapid you can’t scout — and wide, with no discernable channel, steep enough to obscure what you were running beyond a quarter of a kilometre. If that wasn’t enough to get the adrenalin flowing, the entire north shore of the river was being engulfed in a conflagration the size of Prince Edward Island.

Russ and I sat in our canoe, completely enthralled by the towering flames that crowned at least two kilometres of river horizon, forming the leading edge of the wildfire. That’s when we heard the roar — or rather felt it — above the din of the rapids. It sounded like a powerful freight train barrelling toward us, and we were standing on the tracks. The fire was consuming boreal forest at an alarming rate, moving almost twice as fast as we could possibly paddle. It wasn’t the explosive flames so much as the threat of smoke engulfing us before we could get downriver to safety. We had been dodging wildfires for days, so bad at times that we had to brush burning and smoking debris off our clothing and canoe spray-skirts; we ran rapids while the shore vegetation burst into columns of fire and smoke, keeping just far enough offshore where it was safe. In places the fire had jumped the river and was burning on both sides. The current pull of the Seal was strong, drawing us further into the fire at a steady twelve kilometres per hour. But each day the wind miraculously carried the thick smoke straight up or away from the river, allowing us to sneak by unscathed. At worst, we had to tie wet bandanas across our faces to make it easier to breathe.

And now, sitting in our canoes dumbstruck, with the fire burning so fiercely, the air became saturated with burnt debris; a wall of black smoke descended on the surface of the rapids, just upstream, rolling toward us like a billowing, flowing tsunami. It was one of those moments when you feel that whatever you do would be futile. We had pushed our luck … and now our luck had run out.

We paddled hard to keep just ahead of the deadly wall of smoke and to avoid being showered with scorched spruce needles. The river became a greasy pool of soot; the sun was blotted out and the day was transformed into an eerie orange twilight. Luckily, the rapids trailed out in a long series of swifts and shallow riffs that gave us just enough speed to outrun the fire. We paddled for our lives.

There was an Environment Canada water-monitoring shed about three kilometres downriver from Nine Bar Rapids and we headed there to catch our breath. Once inside the cabin we sat for only two minutes before hearing a volley of explosions. Not far from the confluence of the two channels around Great Island, about a kilometre from Nine Bar, was a 1950s mining camp. The company had shut down and left the camp intact, including having abandoned a fully stocked dynamite shed. We had originally planned to explore the camp for artifacts but the fire thwarted our side trip; now the camp was being razed, remnant blasting caps and charges were igniting, adding sharp retorts above the low rumble of the not so distant fire. We weren’t safe here; boats, motors, monitoring equipment would all perish in short order. There was a cabin journal on the table, signed by the canoeists who had paddled the Seal River over the past ten years, and probably the most irreplaceable item there. I grabbed it on my way out the door. The fire was catching up to us; I could feel the hot breath of it, the smell of it, and the pervasive tension caught us up once again as we climbed into our canoes.

Leaning on our paddles, we distanced ourselves from the fire, covering another eight kilometres before we felt that it was safe enough to pitch camp. All of us were white-faced and exhausted. Clear of the smoke, which now painted an ominous scene to the western horizon, looking strangely like a nuclear oblation, we realized that we were finally outside the gauntlet of wildfires that seemed to be consuming all of Manitoba’s northern boreal forests. Perils that still lay ahead, like “Deadly Rapids,” and “Deaf Rapids,” polar bears, and the run down the Hudson Bay coast would now seem anti-climactic in comparison to what we’d been through already … or so I thought at the time.

I was to guide a writer and photographer from Men’s Journal magazine on a classic Canadian wilderness canoe trip for a feature story to be published in the spring of 1995. The magazine was the most recent published by Rolling Stone out of New York City and the editor wanted the river article to appeal to the new genre of amateur outdoor enthusiasts … the executive jocks with their BMWs, six-figure incomes, and cottages up in the Adirondacks. I envisioned myself wearing a tuxedo while serving Arctic grayling on the lid of my wannigan.

Hodding Carter, writer and part-time postmaster from Thermond, West Virginia, and Russell Kaye, a downtown Brooklyn photographer, had no canoeing experience whatsoever. My assistant, Andy Peppal, was a canoe guide from Camp Keewaydin in Temagami. Andy had problems — serious social-dysfunctional problems as it turned out; but as a favour to his brother, and because Andy had participated in the environmental movement to save Temagami’s old-growth forest, I had offered him a guiding job. All this added to the complexity of the trip. I worried more about Andy than having to train neophyte paddlers; I was used to introducing novice adventurers to serious whitewater, but Andy remained a loose cannon. He was a stoner, a sociopath … but my peers had pleaded with me to take him along, dry him out a bit, give him some responsibility.

Manitoba’s Seal River would be the assigned trip. It was the province’s wildestriver. Unlike the Nelson and the Churchill, which had been dammed for hydropower, the Seal remained unscathed, virtually untrammelled and pristine. The Seal rises at Tadoule Lake, a thousand kilometres north of Winnipeg, and flows through a road-less wilderness to Hudson Bay. The upper reach flows through boreal forest and sand eskers, through the Big Spruce River Delta, and accelerates into dramatic rapids at the gorges at Great Island. Traversing the “Land of Little Sticks” or the transitional boreal treeline, the lower reach flows through subarctic tundra. Boulder fields and wide, complex rapids terminate in a broad estuary at Hudson Bay, forty-five kilometres north of Churchill. The Chipwyan, or Sayisi Dene People, lived in the small community of Tadoule, with a population of 250; it is the only settlement for two hundred kilometres.

Canada Parks had also contributed to the expedition which would help initiate a comprehensive river survey that would last four years and cover over 3,500 kilometres and nineteen wild rivers. The Seal was indoctrinated into the Heritage River System in 1992, for natural heritage values, including its boreal/arctic transitional ecosystem, glacial and river processes, and wildlife. Freshwater seals were abundant and travelled as far as two hundred kilometres upriver, while polar bears ranged the coastline of Hudson Bay. The estuary of the Seal held the highest concentration of beluga whales in the world. The Seal had it all, from human heritage and archaeological potential, to outstanding wilderness recreational attributes. Only a handful of people descend the Seal each year.

Andy and I met Hodding and Russell in Thompson, our start point. Only Andy had been out most of the “packing” day drinking Finesse hairspray with the local bottle suckers in behind the legion. Andy temporarily shaped up after a stern shake down, and we met with a local Chipwyan guide, Tom Ellis, at the Burntwood Diner in downtown Thompson. Tom was a fountain of knowledge about the cultural features along the Seal, but he was concerned about our intentions of sailing down the coast of Hudson Bay to Churchill. “Don’t cross Button Bay,” Tom warned. “People have died trying; Tu Cho (Dene word for “Big Water” or Hudson Bay) is too powerful.”

It was tempting, Tom had told us, to cross the twenty-kilometre Button Bay instead of following the coast around to Churchill. We were well-equipped to do the trip, even to sail down the coast if we lashed the canoes; but we also had the option to get Jackie Bastone to pick us up in his Bay boat at the Seal estuary.

“Watch the polar bears at the coast,” Tom added. “The rangers tag the bears that drift into Churchill, the bad ones, and fly them out and drop them off at the Seal.”

Something else to worry about.

We boarded Skyward Aviation’s “Bandit,” a twin-engine E-110 Bandeirante. It would take just over an hour to make the three-hundred-kilometre trip north to the Dene village of Tadoule. Once in the air, we could immediately see the smoke haze from at least a dozen wildfires burning — all out of control. If the smoke gets bad enough, the government will evacuate a reserve, elders and children first, as they were now doing at North Indian Lake, and as they would do in two days time at Tadoule while we were there. The burnt spruce smell clung to our nostrils as the Bandit pitched through a wall of smoke against a strong northeast headwind. I felt like throwing up.

I looked out the window and tried to concentrate on the land and lakescape below. It resembled a mosaic puzzle of sand eskers and patches of spruce and fenland interspersed with the lakes that comprised at least half of the puzzle. We had entered the northwestern boreal uplands region of Manitoba where the land was in a state of transition between the boreal forest and the arctic tundra, a bio-region that extends far into the Northwest Territories and envelops sections of the Coppermine, Thelon, Kazan, and Dubawnt rivers — Land of Little Sticks — Canada’s Subarctic.

It seemed that most of the town of Tadoule came out to greet the plane. In all-terrain vehicles and battered pickup trucks they descended on the airport, vying to get a job transporting our gear down to the waterfront, a kilometre away.

We met up with filmmaker Alan Code and his wife, Mary (a Dene Native), who together had recently produced a video about the Seal and the Sayisi Dene history. Long before white European imperialist influence, the Edthen-El-Deli Dene, the most eastern of the Dene People, or “caribou-eaters” (an ethnological/anthropological label; the Sayisi Dene prefer to be known as “the People Under the Sun”), travelled the barren grounds along the ribbon-like eskers, following the caribou migrations. The great caribou herds have since changed their travel patterns, much to the dismay of the Sayisi Dene. Some believe it was the interference by mining prospectors and activity close to the river crossings in the fifties and sixties, or government caribou tagging surveys carried out at the same time that precipitated the change. Whites blame the Dene, along with the Inuit people, for overhunting, killing thousands of caribou and not stopping the hunt until they ran out of bullets. The Dene believed that the caribou “belonged” to them and any mass slaughter was vindicated by years of hardship and starvation endured by the people. The caribou hunt took precedence over the fur trade, much to the chagrin of HBC factors at Fort Prince of Wales in Churchill, who had trouble conscripting the Dene as trappers.

The government finally herded the Dene together in the 1960s and forced them to live in a shack town near the Churchill dump. It corresponded with the period of prospecting taking place along the Seal watershed; with them removed from the scene, mining companies didn’t have to worry about potential conflicts that may arise from their activities near caribou runs.

But without connection to the land, ostracized by the whites in Churchill, and left to fend for themselves, the Dene people almost slipped into oblivion. Wracked by poverty, abuse, and suicide, the elders made a motion to move back to their homeland of their own volition, without compensation or support from the Manitoba or federal government. The new village was built on an esker at the northeast end of Tadoule Lake, a string of plywood and board dwellings strung out with no particular pattern to the village.

The Dene are a fiercely proud people with close ties to the land around them. The men still engage in traditional “hand games” and talk about the old days, the caribou hunt, and of battles with their enemies, the Inuit and the Cree. The paltry few canoeists who paddle the Seal usually spend little time at the village, choosing to move their gear and canoes down to the lake as quickly as they can. The Dene are gregarious, if given the chance, and enjoy talking with outsiders — except once, perhaps, when an elder followed a couple of kayakers to the lake and placed a curse on them, thinking they were Inuit enemies.

Alan had invited us to stay a few days and partake in a traditional ceremony performed by three visiting Navajo healers. The Navajo and Dene have anthropological roots, sharing the same language and beliefs even though they live thousands of kilometres apart. Hodding and I helped cut and peel twenty-foot spruce poles to be used in the sweat lodge ceremony. Unfortunately, at that time the government was evacuating elders and children because of the fire, now only two kilometres away. Ceremonies were postponed but I did manage to persuade the Navajo healers into giving us a private one instead.

Hodding and I were able to track down the Navajo healers who were staying in the village guest house near the lake. Russell and Andy had wandered off along the esker to the north to see how close the fire was to the village. It was dusk by this time and no light was coming from the shack, except for the incident glow from a TV accompanied by the sound of laughter. The three healers had been watching a movie, Robin Hood:Men in Tights, and eating a late dinner of microwave entrees. The TV was quickly turned off when they saw us at their door.

A couple of packages of Borkum Riff tobacco and fifty dollars cash weren’t enough to buy us a couple of buttons of peyote, but it was sufficient to procure a water ceremony. The Navajo men cleared the floor and set down a beautifully ornate wooden box. It contained the healer’s religious items; eagle feathers, various smudges, polished stones, and ornamental bones were laid out in front of the eldest of the three Natives. He handed Hodding a Styrofoam cup and asked him to go to the lake and bring it back filled with water. When he returned, the shaman was already chanting and waving the smoke smudge around the room. Hodding and I sat cross-legged, watching and listening while the Navajo blessed the water in the cup. He blew smoke into the container and said something in Chipwyan then handed Hodding the vessel.

“Drink a quarter of this,” the healer said. After Hodding was finished, I drank a quarter cup and set it down on the floor.

“Take the cup and make sure your friends drink the water,” the Navajo elder told us. We left carrying half a cup of blessed water, looking for Russell and Andy. By the time we found Russell, who had been out photographing a hand-game at the community centre, there was only a mouthful of water left in the cup. Andy had disappeared. Russell was glad to have had the ceremonial water; the angst and uncertainty of travelling in the Canadian wilderness was helping him to establish a more spiritual footing. A fourth member of our party had been left out and I hoped that it wasn’t earmarking some kind of future dilemma or incident.

Alan had told us that the private ceremony was a good idea. It also showed the Dene our respect for both their culture and the power of the river — a custom I learned to accept with devout seriousness over the years. The Seal is a complex waterway with many dangers, and we knew we would be heading into Manitoba’s worst wildfires. For me the trip was particularly unnerving — I would later learn that Andy had managed to pimp some dope from the Dene police constable, and later when the going got tough, Andy would get stoned.

It was a 385-kilometre paddle from Tadoule to Churchill, with an elevation drop of nearly three hundred metres. Eighty percent of the forty-two rapids would be technical runs, some over ten kilometres long, with a variable current of five to fifteen kilometres per hour. We were heavily loaded: three weeks of provisions, “traditional” gear including two wannigans and a reflector oven, and close to seventy-five kilograms of photography equipment Russell had brought along. The seventeen-foot canoes were rigged with detachable spray covers; these would be indispensable on the bigger rapids or if we chose to sail down the Hudson Bay coast. Because of the steady current and voluminous rapids, most Seal River adventurers have been using motored rafts and not canoes.

Unlike Canadian Shield rivers to the south, the Seal’s water flow peaks in June instead of April or May, and recedes quickly after that, generally exposing shallow, bouldery rapids. The prevailing wind is also out of the north and east, making travel down the Bay coast particularly hazardous. Alan also warned us not to cross Button Bay as we pushed off from Tadoule against a stiff southeast wind. It was early July. The water was cold … the lake ice having just melted off. The wind had an Arctic edge to it and whipped against our faces for three days, eventually forcing us to lie up on Negassa Lake after being pushed back by metre-high waves. We were forced to pitch camp on a tiny beach in a recent burn. The only wind protection was the shelter we made of an overturned canoe and a rain fly. But it was sufficient enough to keep a fire going, eat fresh-caught lake trout, stay dry, and smoke our pipes.

The river was swollen with winter melt, heaving the rapids into furious standing waves, some over two metres high. Mosquitoes and black flies assaulted us at every moment while not on the water, and during the day there was no respite from the scourge of horseflies that would bite at any exposed flesh whether we were on the water or not. The Dene kids called them “bulldogs” and would eat them as candy. At the village, they showed me how to dislodge the gel-sac by squeezing the abdomen (after pulling off the wings), then licking the sweet bubble of nectar from the carcass. Horseflies are basically nectar-eaters when they aren’t sucking the blood of animals.

For Russell, who had never done anything like this before, it was traumatic; assault after assault from all forces of Nature with no reprieve. He was having a tough time of it, mostly because of his inexperience and lack of confidence. Hodding was born with a joie de vivre and took everything in stride, complained about nothing, and worked hard at learning the skills. As Russell became adept at paddling strokes and camp chores, he relaxed more into the trip and was able to concentrate on his photography. Andy had gone into his own self-indulgent world; he was no longer an assistant to me, countering any decision I made about route selection, safety considerations, or respect for needs other than his own. He began rooting through the food packs and treating Hodding and Russell to treats that were supposed to be saved only for morale boosters at the end of, or during, hard days of travel; or he would argue about what meals to prepare for dinner, disregarding the strict adherence to the expedition menu. During an expedition, the allotment of food is carefully organized and rationed each day; Andy broke the cardinal rule of guiding by challenging the leader, stealing specialty foods, and disrupting the menu plan.

Andy had already used up his insect repellent and was bumming it off the rest of us. Refusing to wear a protective bug-jacket and just a pair of cut-off shorts, Andy relied on the heavy lathering of DEET-laden bug dope on all his exposed skin. DEET (N, N-Diethyl-meta-toluamide) is a harmful chemical absorbed into the bloodstream and has the ability to melt plastic. Prolonged use can cause behavioural problems, poor muscle coordination, neurological disorders, and brain cell death.

During this time, while trying to impress Hodding and Russell with his cavalier presence, Andy’s flesh had reacted to too much insect repellent and was breaking out in blisters and running sores. This wasn’t enough to dissuade him from over-applying the repellent; however, he did sport the best tan of us all. The rest of us kept covered, either with heavy canvas clothes and bug-jackets, or our wetsuits when we were running whitewater. It was getting increasingly more difficult to abate Andy’s actions in front of the others; he used them as a shield and an audience. I didn’t want Andy’s personality disorder to be the theme of the magazine story, yet he demanded everyone’s attention, mostly the curiosity of the clients or through admonishments from me. Andy was the only one who didn’t partake in the Dene ceremony at Tadoule.

Samuel Hearne was commissioned by the Hudson’s Bay Company out of Fort Prince of Wales (Churchill) to explore the barrenlands in quest of the fabled copper mines that were said to exist “twelve to twenty-four months near a permanently frozen sea.” Both his 1769 and 1770 trips were unsuccessful. However, he did spend considerable time camped on Shethanei Lake (with his bevy of young Dene girls to keep him warm) and gave us our first European account of the Seal River. We camped on one of Hearne’s wintering sites, adjacent to a glacial hill, while the pall of the distant fires created an eerie glow that was nothing short of supernatural.

There was a deep lagoon or runnel about a hundred metres from our pitched tents, forming a levee between the lake and a bog marsh. Several caribou runs led away from the camp in no particular pattern, and it was soon evident that one could easily get lost trying to follow any one of them. But the most noteworthy geomorphological feature of Hearne’s campsite environs was the prominent rock mound that rose at least thirty metres above the treetops and was situated an easy five-minute walk from camp. It was obviously a drumlin of sorts; not the type composed of gravel and clay, but of blocks of granite piled helter skelter, forming hundreds of cave-like hollows and caverns that would be choice enclosures as black bear dens. Some of the rocks were unstable, precariously balanced, requiring some climbing skill and sure-footedness to gain access to the summit and the spectacular view. A scattering of dwarf birch had commanded a foothold in the soil-less environment, testimony of the obstinate and determined nature of the tundra life forms.

It was a rock-hound’s Mecca. Literally hundreds of rock types and minerals lay exposed; biotite schists, sandstones, quartz, and conglomerates, both along the beach and all over the drumlinoid hill where we now stood. Minute specs of mica sparkled iridescently in the early evening sun, which had finally cleared itself of the thick strata of cloud that had dominated the sky all day. There was clearly a strong energy here — perhaps a spiritual energy as there often is at these strange places. I was convinced that the striking oddity of this geological structure would have been some type of ceremonial gathering site for the early people.

Andy had brought the skull of a caribou with him to the top of the hill. He had discovered the skeleton along one of the trails behind the campsite. We all agreed that it should stay where we stood and be used for a ceremony later that evening. We found a cleft in the rock where we could all sit out of the wind, and the skull was perched on the highest boulder.

The strange band of open, clear sky did not move out of the horizon all that day, contrasted by the weight of a leaden and bleak sheathe of cloud. We had almost forgotten about the fires and wondered whether Allan and the remaining village men had been evacuated. The evenings were deliciously long, and it was hard to stay still, to relax after a hard day’s paddle. We were deep into conversation, sitting by the campfire, when the hue of evening light changed abruptly. Andy and Hodding ran to the beach to view the setting sun but Russell and I were already half-way to the drumlin hill, cameras in hand, and my medicine bag over my shoulder.

That’s the peculiar thing about nature photography; the incident light is only temporary, fleeting, and always remarkable. Always, there is a moment of hesitation and the difficulty of choosing to see something special through the clarity of your own vision, rather than through the limited scope of a camera lens. With the latter, there is something lost of the magic and also a prevailing sense of urgency to capture the moment on film.

As the sun set across Shethanei Lake, the tops of the spruce trees facing the light glowed brilliant orange, as if suddenly splashed with fire. We couldn’t climb the pile of boulders quick enough getting to the top, each rock glowing like a hot coal. But it was just the ambient light of the sun, projected oddly through the haze of smoke over Tadoule, natural, yet amorphous, casting such brilliance over the landscape. It seemed to have a spectral purpose.

Andy and Hodding reached the top moments after we did, and the four of us stood, mouths agape, and looked out over the chromatic sea of spruce, transformed from a monotonous green to crimson splendour. The esker sand ridges across the lake resembled red snakes, uncoiled and peaceful.

For less than half an hour, Shethanei was suspended in colour animation, the intensity ebbing as the sun set just before midnight. We quickly gathered in the depression chosen for our ceremony. I placed some tobacco in the caribou skull cavity, lit a smudge stick of cedar and sage, and wafted the four of us in a liberal cleansing of sweet smoke. Everyone took a caribou tooth for good luck. The homily was simple and heartfelt, and we finished the ceremony by placing the caribou skull on top of the rock again. It was a profound experience, timely, purposeful, and symbolic.

Shethanei Lake to the Dene refers to “the hill going into the lake.” A large esker literally disappears into the north shore narrows and reappears on the side of the lake we were camping on. The size of the lake was daunting but we enjoyed an unusual calm for the next three days. The time we spent at Shethanei was an almost surreal experience; the serpentine eskers, golden spires of dune-sand, rose above the spruce veld and would catch the fading rays of the evening sun. The full darkness of a deep summer night, so familiar in southerly regions, was never attained, and the fires raging in the distance created a numinous haze around the sun and permeated the landscape in an illusory glow.

Midnight treks along the eskers afforded an unprecedented look at the surrounding boreal landscape and animal activity, as well as an opportunity to explore the boreal bioregion away from the river. On one occasion I came face to face with a tundra wolf as I stepped over an embankment into a sand blowout (depression on top of an esker). We shared a moment of uncertainty, neither of us moving until I made a motion to unsling my camera. The wolf bolted, paused briefly to look back at me, and then disappeared.

Pioneer lichens and mosses grew over the eskers in circular and polygonal mosaic designs in a struggle to stabilize the eroding dunes, while scattered clumps of dwarf birch and jack pine clung to the edges of the sand world with a fierce tenacity, subject to the almost incessant winds and interminably long winters. The vista from the eskers offered an unrestricted view over the endless plain of black spruce and tundra bog.

One of our campsites had a park-like landscape with a long, low esker snaking inland away from the lake. Copses of birch trees decorated an almost golf-course-like tended lawn. After abandoning the eskers as a travelway, this was a place where the Dene would come in the summer to cut birch bark for their canoes. Beneath a large spruce, partly protected from the elements, was a neatly stacked pile of birchbark rolls, obviously intended to be picked up at some time by Native canoe builders. It was either forgotten or purposely left behind nearly a century ago.

It was a 240-kilometre paddle to the Bay from Shethanei, dropping seven hundred vertical feet in a long series of steep-pitched rapids. We stopped briefly at the junction of the Wolverine River (“Nah yah eye desay” to the Dene, or “River that drains soaked-through Lake”), and we caught our first Arctic grayling at the foot of the rapids. It was here also that we spotted our first harbour seals playing near some centre channel boulders, eyeing us curiously, or sunning themselves on the rocks, blending inconspicuously against the grey of the stone.

Fires were looming downriver and it was decided that we’d stop at the base of a thirty-metre-high esker and pitch camp. From the apex of the dune I could get a protracted view of where the fire was spreading, plot its movement on the topo map, and chart which direction the smoke was blowing. Since leaving Shethanei Lake we had been following the sheer-line of smoke, managing to keep it out of our faces by less than half a kilometre. Tomorrow could be different; the fire was following the south shore of the river and if the wind came up, the possibility of it jumping to the opposite side was likely — if that happened we would either have to hold up or try to get in front of the inferno. It was the smoke we were worried more about than the actual fire.

It had been unseasonably hot the past few days, in marked contrast to the first three on leaving Tadoule. That evening we feasted on grayling and fresh-baked cornbread, under the shadow of the esker behind us and the auspicious cloud of smoke downriver. I had knots in my stomach and tried to weed them out by walking the crest of the esker alone while the others sat at the camp. Everyone was getting along, and for now Andy seemed to have straightened out, at least enough so that I didn’t have to keep such a watchful eye on him, and he would follow my lead closely while running rapids, or carry out chores on his own without me grilling him.

I walked for several kilometres. It was easy going and my legs seemed to flex on their own, one step at a time, mind racing, thinking about the past week, what lay ahead, and how crazy this whole adventure was. The esker trailed off to the north, a natural trail that was not hard to follow without actually paying much attention; that was the lure of it — you were drawn onward by the simplicity of it, away from the river noise, the promising quiet, the aloneness. Like any trail, you were compelled to follow it to the end; but here it seemed to go on forever. If it ended, it just retreated into the landscape temporarily, and you could see it surfacing a short distance away, the yellowed back of a sand serpent. Twilight added to the spell, and there was no rush to get back, to beat the waning sun and expected darkness. There were wolf dens dug into the side of esker mounds, the history of meals displayed in a variety of bone fragments covering the entrance path. There were grave sites with weathered pickets bleached grey by sun and pitted by weather, scattered about, the dead now long forgotten, and places where animal bones mingled with those of humans … life and death along the trail.

In the morning, we didn’t have to paddle very far before getting a good view of the fire burning along the river’s edge. With the current pulling at ten kilometres per hour, interspersed with long sets of rapids, we had little chance of backtracking if the fire and smoke proved to be intolerable. We had played our cards, or rather I had dealt out everyone’s hand because I held the deck, betting that the winds had forced the smoke to rise vertically — and it did — instead of hanging in a deadly shroud over the Seal.

At one point we stopped along the shore at the head of the blaze in order to get some photographs, but the intense heat seared our bare skin and showers of glowing sparks and airborne cinders fell like rain on top of the canoes, forcing us to retreat further down the river. Each dry spruce at the leading edge of the fire would literally explode into a ball of fire, sending a plume of black smoke skyward, adding to the conflagration — an entity that moved with the sole purpose of destroying whatever lay in its path. At least it was safer to stay out toward the centre of the river, away from the flames and the heat, playing the rapids cautiously as we rounded river bends not knowing what waited for us ahead.