of the cases, sat me on a motor next to a reeking gas drum and gunned his engine. As we sped across the bay and the trees of the opposite shore rushed towards us, anyone could tell that we weren’t going to make it. At the last possible moment the pilot cut the power, cursed loudly and taxied back to his base. Here, at the small dock, he unloaded one or two bulky parcels (but not the booze) and asked me to lean over the cockpit for takeoff so as to get more weight forward. When we headed out again, my heart was in my mouth. As before, there was the furious roar as we picked up speed and shot out across the water. The pilot kept rocking the plane to help free it from the suction on the floats, and at the last second, when it seemed a crash was certain, he yanked the thing up and over the menacing border of pines. “We made it,” he said with a big grin. I was too weak even to agree.
It was a very bumpy flight, and as the air grew warmer and the fumes of the gasoline I was sitting beside became stronger, I began to feel very ill indeed. To make matters worse, my ears were blocked with the change in pressure. Just when I thought I couldn’t take it any longer, a small cluster of cabins and teepees appeared on the edge of a lake ahead, and in a few moments we had touched down at Cat Lake to discharge half of our cargo. The entire dock was crowded with Cree who had come to shake hands with anyone on board. My leg was seized in a viselike grip by a big husky dog putting the bite on me, and there were howls of laughter at my predicament. One man eventually released me, saying, “He’s just trying your leg out for size—he does that to every newcomer.”
After what seemed like an eternity, we took off again, and the pilot thrust a large, wrinkled map onto my knees, pointed to a spot between Cat Lake and Hudson Bay and said, “Start looking out for a big lake on the horizon.” I looked at the map then out the window. The whole face of the earth seemed to have turned to water since there were hundreds of lakes, muskeg ponds and rivers, all gleaming in the westering sun.
We eventually spotted what he said was Big Trout Lake on the horizon, thanks more to good luck than to my ability as navigator. The pilot chuckled as he prepared to give the Hudson’s Bay post manager a good scare. I could just make out the settlement on the end of an island in the most northerly quarter of the 75-kilometre-wide expanse of the lake when suddenly he put the plane into a steep dive. Skimming along barely thirty metres above the water, we did a wide circle out over the muskeg and then roared over the tiny community from behind. We just missed the wires of the Department of Transport (or DOT, as it was called) weather station and the flag of the Hudson’s Bay Company store as we buzzed the place for several runs. The Cree streamed out of their teepees and log shacks, waved frantically and ran for the main dock. I was later to learn that everyone who could move always met the plane, even though there was seldom anything on it for any of them. After I had been there a few weeks and grown hungry for mail, I generally led the pack myself, trying not to trample anyone in the rush.
By the time we had taxied over and tied up, the dock was crammed with the welcoming party, and many others sat on the bank. It looked like the audience for an outdoor concert. Babies wailed in their tikinagans (a board with a pouch on it into which the baby is laced and then carried on the mother’s back; it is packed with dried moss, which is changed as often as necessary). Several huskies fought each other while I again shook hands with everyone in sight. “Watchy,” they all said. So I repeated it. The word, which is spelled differently all over the North, can mean either hello or goodbye, so it’s very useful. Apparently it was derived from the earliest days when the fur traders would greet one another with the words “What cheer?” Another sign of the impact of earlier times was the somewhat unusual uniformity of dress. All the men and boys wore old country–style tweed peaked caps, and all the women and girls, even the smallest toddlers, wore brightly coloured kerchiefs or scarves tied tightly under their chins.
Suddenly I was hailed by a very English-sounding male voice. A wiry-looking man in his mid-fifties, wearing a battered old fedora and a collarless shirt bulging out from under a pair of wide suspenders, was paddling his canoe towards the sandy shore beside the dock. It was Rev. Leslie Garrett, the Anglican missionary with whom I was to stay for the next three months. Garrett’s weather-beaten face, enormous eyebrows from under which sparkled a pair of the bluest eyes I have ever seen, and baggy, black pants gave him an aura of eccentricity. Some in Sioux Lookout had warned me he was “bushed”—the term used for those who become a little strange from too much solitude—but I was to find him much saner than his critics. He was one of the strongest men I have ever met. He pulled the large freighter canoe onshore with ease, plucked my duffle bag from me and tossed it in, and then nearly crushed my hand in his grip. His enthusiastic smile rearranged the weathered creases in his countenance in a most attractive way as he said: “I’m Garrett— welcome to Big Trout.”
He handed me a paddle and pointed to the bow position while he climbed in at the stern. I hadn’t been in a canoe often, and I felt every Cree eye on the island watching me as we headed off to the mission dock a short way along the shore. (The next day, just when I thought I was getting the hang of it, I capsized off the end of the Hudson Bay dock and sent several men nearby into paroxysms of laughter.) As we passed by part of the village, it surprised me to discover that while the majority were living in simple one-room log cabins, there were a dozen or more families still living in teepees for their summer home. It gave me a thrill to see the smoke curling up from the hole at the top where the spruce poles intertwined. The silhouette of the teepees against the sky made me feel as if I were living in a movie about the Old West.
The problem with teepees, I was to discover, was that they were never intended for people well over six feet tall. If I stood up in one, my head was up where the racks of fish were curing in the ascending smoke. In a seated position, sometimes on a wooden box but more usually on the floor of spruce branches, one had to lean forward like a yogi to allow for the slanting canvas walls. Since it is impossible to sweep the floor in such accommodation, the family would simply move to another site, spread fresh branches and voilà!—the housecleaning was done. It was fascinating to observe that while there was nothing that we would call furniture as such, there was generally a guitar around and one or two radios. The beds were robes of rabbit skins laid on the floor, and the babies rocked gently in little hammocks suspended from the saplings forming the frame of the cone-like dwelling.
The simple log cabins of the rest of the community sometimes had slightly more elaborate fittings, but not always. They were invariably surrounded closely by a solid fence of peeled and sharply pointed poles to keep out wandering huskies and to serve as a drying rack both for any washing and for clumps of moss destined to serve as baby napkins and in general as “the Kleenex of the North.” It’s worth noting that this sphagnum peat moss—which lies in a deep carpet all through the boreal forests of the Canadian North— was put forward by a Manitoba company as a potential ally in the frantic attempts to clean up the disastrous oil that spewed into the Gulf of Mexico in the summer of 2010. Acknowledged as the worst oil spill in American history, the well churned out thousands of barrels of oil daily for months. The peat moss, according to its promoters, can float on the ocean’s surface, suck up oil and then, when saturated, be easily removed for burning or burying in a landfill. It’s cheap, exists in almost limitless abundance, and quickly and safely degrades into the environment.
Garrett’s mission house was a simple building set beside the white frame church where lengthy services were held on Monday, Wednesday and Friday nights, as well as twice on Sunday, all summer long. Since at that time the residents spent the long months of winter out on their remote traplines and only came together in the spring to sell their furs, renew their trapping equipment and spend the summer fishing and socializing, they felt they had a lot of churchgoing to make up for, and make it up they did.
The mission house itself was much like a plain farmhouse. The largest room was the kitchen, with its polished linoleum floor, huge wood stove for both warmth and cooking, and generous table where, apart from porridge in the morning, I ate what seemed to me better than gourmet meals (fresh-caught lake trout, pickerel and whitefish). Christine Garrett was a rotund, happy Ojibwa woman whom Garrett had married some years after his first wife died of typhoid fever. She baked wheaten bread about three times a week
