Sixty Degrees North (10 page)

The highway carried few vehicles. Every ten minutes or so a pickup went by, or sometimes a truck, and once a yellow school bus appeared like a daydream, then was gone. The hours passed, and morning became afternoon. We stopped for lunch at High Level, with its ugly strip of motels, bars and fast food restaurants, then the insect-choked gas station at Indian Cabins. At half past two we crossed the sixtieth parallel and the border into the Northwest Territories. Only three of us remained. For mile after mile nothing changed, the view appeared identical. We turned a corner and we might as well not have moved. It was as though there were nowhere else left but the forest.

The Greyhound reached Hay River, the end of its line, at four p.m. The tiny, dusty depot seemed intensely hot, and a shock after the air-conditioned coach. When the time came for the minibus to depart fifteen minutes later, I was the only passenger taking the 170-mile trip southeast to Fort Smith. (In the north, distances between towns are often so great that it makes more sense to measure them in hours than in miles. This would be a three-hour journey, with no stops
between here and there.) My driver, Andrew, insisted that I come and sit up in the front with him so that he could ‘give me the tour'. As we set off, Andrew explained that he was partially deaf, so I would have to speak clearly and face in his direction. This partial deafness also required him to talk just a little too insistently throughout, as though he suspected I might be doubting every word he said.

We began the drive with the kind of tales I had been hoping not to hear. For my entertainment, Andrew recounted in detail the stories of two fatal bear attacks in the region. The first of these was a driver who had crashed his vehicle on this very road, then attracted the bear's attention by lying at the roadside bleeding. He was found too late, halfway through being consumed. The second attack involved a couple from Hay River who were camping beside Great Slave Lake. Needless to say, they never came home. It seemed there were a lot of bears around here. In fact, the last time Andrew made this trip he'd seen six of them between the two towns. I tried to look impressed, or at least unafraid, but it was hard. I was thinking about the little tent in my bag, in which I'd intended to sleep.

‘I'm a bit nervous about bears, actually,' I admitted. Andrew turned to me, unsure whether I was joking or not. ‘Oh, you don't need to be nervous,' he said, when he saw that I was serious. ‘You'll be fine.' While this reassurance was not entirely adequate, I was relieved to learn that the animals in this area were black rather than brown bears. Smaller, less aggressive, more easily deterred, they were a safer kind of bear all round. And though they did kill people once in a while, it was rather more unusual an occurrence than Andrew's stories might have led me to believe. As he said, I would probably be fine.

When Andrew pressed his foot to the brake, he was mid-sentence and mid-sandwich. ‘Buffalo,' he spat, pointing up ahead. The animals were impossible to miss. A group of six,
some standing, some rolling in the dust at the roadside, the creatures were enormous, and unconcerned as we slowed almost to a stop just a few metres away. They were strange beasts – their back-ends like cattle, but their front halves and heads like something else entirely: broad, dark, woolly, bearded and horned, they looked like relics of another age. The adults stood well over six feet tall at their humped shoulders, with the large males weighing in at up to a ton. The youngsters were lighter in colour, and not dissimilar to the calves of domestic cattle. These wood buffalo are the largest land mammals in North America, one of two subspecies of the American bison that once roamed the Great Plains in their tens of millions, and which were slaughtered almost to extinction.

For most of this journey from Hay River to Fort Smith we were driving through Wood Buffalo National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and, at 17,300 square miles, the second largest protected area in the world, after Northeast Greenland. The park was established in 1922 to help protect one of the last existing herds of free-roaming wood bison, and today there are around 5,000 of them in the area. Like many large animals, the bison appeared weighed down by their own bulk, and seemed to live at a slower pace than other creatures. They lumbered unhurriedly across and alongside the road, apparently oblivious to the vehicle in their midst. Flies clouded around their backs and heads in thick, sickening swarms, but even their short tails swished and swatted the insects at half speed. Over the next hour we saw another thirty or forty bison, some in groups, others alone, and each time they were somehow unbelievable. And then there was something different.

A black mark beside the road, a hundred yards ahead. A boulder-sized shape that came to life as we approached. A shape that lifted its head, unfurled itself, and became a bear. This time it was me who alerted Andrew. The bear stood and
watched the vehicle as we slowed down. It was not a large animal – perhaps only a year or two old – but it seemed confident, and held still for a long time, not moving until we'd drawn up almost alongside it. The eyes peered at us, perhaps assessing the threat, and we stared back, safe within our box of glass and metal. But at the precise moment we came to a stop, the bear turned, moving without much haste back into the forest. We drove on in silence.

Andrew dropped me at the campsite just outside Fort Smith. There was no one else around. I wandered among the lanky jack pines looking for a flat, sheltered spot on which to put up my tent, then struggled, in bursts of rage and frustration, to put the pieces together and press the pegs into the ground. A difficult job was made harder by mosquitoes and exhaustion, and I scratched at my face and neck, half-hallucinating in the warm, evening air. I was weak and dizzy, and my eyes hurt when I tried to concentrate. It had been almost forty-eight hours since I last slept. Fatigue flooded over me as I crawled inside the tent and lay down with my head upon my jacket. A slight nausea rose too, as though to engulf my whole body, then it slipped away like a sigh and was gone. I felt entirely alone, then, yet too tired to be lonely. I felt exhilarated, briefly, to be there in the forest. And then I was asleep.

Moving through this country has always been difficult. Dense forest, boggy ground, extreme temperatures and hostile insect life: the early European travellers found their way slowed by innumerable dangers. The most convenient means of travel, historically, has been to step off the land altogether and to get on the water, and lakes and rivers have long been the highways of the north, reliable for paddling in summer and for sledging and walking in winter. In 1789, the Scottish-born explorer Alexander Mackenzie
was searching for a northern route to the Pacific Ocean, but found something else instead. Making his way from Lake Athabasca, in what is now northern Alberta and Saskatchewan, north along the Slave River to the Great Slave Lake, then onwards along a second, much longer river to the Arctic Ocean, he opened up what was to become one of the great Canadian trading routes. That second river, which he named ‘Disappointment' upon reaching its end, is now called the Mackenzie, and is the longest river lying entirely within Canada.

That route to the Arctic was to become immensely important over the next two centuries, providing a reliable means of reaching northern communities for the missionaries and traders who travelled the region. The great advantage of this particular route was its simplicity. Over the entire 1,500 miles between Lake Athabasca and the Arctic, there was only one major obstacle to transport. Halfway along the Slave River, just as it crosses the sixtieth parallel, four huge sets of rapids churn the water into a riotous wash of foaming white and brown. High waves, deep holes and hidden rocks combine to make much of this seventeen-mile stretch entirely impassable by boat.

Today, sections of these rapids provide some of the most challenging and exciting water in the world for kayakers and canoeists, but in the past travellers had to do their best to avoid the danger. That meant getting out of the river. Since before the first Europeans ever reached this place, a series of portage routes existed, and these were gradually developed as people made the journey more regularly. By the early nineteenth century, larger vessels had come into use, and they too had to be hauled out, requiring incredible effort. This was particularly true at Mountain Rapids, where the portage involved a precipitous climb of 75 feet, then an equally steep descent back to the river. A winch system made it possible, but certainly not easy. The travellers, however,
had no choice; the river was simply too treacherous to follow. And for any voyager who might have been tempted to risk the water, there was a constant reminder of the potential dangers. For below the first three sets of rapids – today known as Cassette, Pelican and Mountain – lies the last, called then, as now, the Rapids of the Drowned. The name, coined after an accident in 1786 in which five men lost their lives, served as both a memorial and as a warning to others.

During the late nineteenth century, the Hudson's Bay Company established two small settlements on the west bank of the river, one at either end of the portage system. At Cassette Rapids was Smith's Landing (now called Fort Fitzgerald), and on a high bluff overlooking the Rapids of the Drowned was Fort Smith. When the shorter portages were eventually succeeded in the 1880s by a single, seventeen-mile trail, and steamboats began to operate on either side of the rapids, a new simplified era of transportation began. The country opened up, and changed forever. The north became accessible to anyone who wished to go there, and Fort Smith, in effect, was its gateway. The town grew rapidly. Freight companies appeared and prospered; labouring work and other employment was in plentiful supply. By 1921, it had become the administrative centre for the entire Northwest Territories.

It was a short walk along the highway from my campsite to the town. The air was hot and humming with insects, and I clung close to the shadows at the forest's edge, keeping out of the sun. A single vehicle passed as I walked – an old grey pickup heading west towards the airport. Other than that, the road was empty.

The first houses were large and set some way back from the road, behind wire or wooden fences. The street was wide and edged with dust and gravel, with deep ditches on either
side, and a yellow-stained pavement. Some of the gardens looked unkempt, but not uncared-for, and the air smelt of pine, flowers and early summer soil. From behind one house, two small dogs came bounding, yapping fiercely as I passed, but neither would venture further than the open gate.

I had no map, and no idea where I was going. I had no plans, other than the one my stomach had made for breakfast. I followed McDougal Street, vaguely expecting a town centre to emerge, which it vaguely did: a crossroads – McDougal and Breynat Street – with Wally's drugstore on one corner, Saint Joseph Cathedral on another, and a few wooden benches on which to sit and watch the traffic. Crowded close around this junction were a library, two supermarkets, the fire station, town hall, hotel and red-brick post office, and a shop selling flowers, chocolates and coffee. Trees were lined up neatly on the lawn outside the cathedral, and extravagant hanging baskets dangled like cherries from the street lamps. On impulse I turned right onto Portage Avenue, then stopped at Kelly's gas station for something to eat and drink. I sat down in the sun with my juice and sandwich, and was joined by a gang of hungry wasps.

Virtually all of this town is squeezed into a slim stretch of land between the river and Highway 5. ‘Smith', as it's referred to by residents, is home to around two and a half thousand people, but feels larger because of its isolation. It has the amenities of a much bigger place. There is a college here, a primary and a secondary school, a leisure centre and a golf club, a local paper, a few places to eat, a few bars, some churches and a museum, though very few tourists this early in the summer. The town also has a beguiling openness. People smiled and said hello to me as they passed. If I saw them a second time I was offered another smile and a nod of recognition.