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
