Part I: June 1999

Life in the Great Outdoors

I awoke to grayling rising ten feet away in the water. All we were eating was Campbell's Chicken noodle soup and bannock, so fishing was the order of the day. I watched the grayling feeding and noticed they were eating little, black flies on the surface, so I decided to make a fly and catch dinner. Bridge heaved a sigh that said 'whatever', and went for a walk with Boris. I hunted the banks and found a couple of duck feathers floating in an eddy. I stole some thread from the sewing kit and a small hook from the depleted fishing box and set about inventing a whole new species of fly. My first three or four looked as if they had come out of Chernobyl and sank with a splash that put the fish off feeding in a ten-yard radius. I scaled it down, added a bit of tin foil and tried again. The first cast snagged a nice shiny, remarkably stupid 11-inch Arctic grayling. It was like winning the lottery. I cast twice more and each time caught a fish. We all had a fish for supper, cooked over the fire, and they were delicious.

That night we camped at an old wood camp, one of several places along the river that steamboats had stopped to take on wood for fuel. The woodcutters' cabin was still standing and his old horse drawn cart was where he'd left it 60 years earlier. The stove had a mouse nest in it but would work if need be. Walking through the woods we could see where the woodcutter had harvested the trees. New trees were growing slowly; nature was reclaiming the land in her own time.

We stayed at this camp for a couple nights, fed well by the 'provider', my nickname for the homemade fly. Although we loved the fresh fish we always worried it would attract bears. We tried to eat far away from camp and leave no trace of fish anywhere. Even so, the morning we left, bear tracks were all around the canoe 50 feet from where we slept under the stars. And Boris Lock, our super-sonic bear dog, hadn't barked once at night.

The longer we were on the river, the better our canoeing technique and the more we learnt to read the water. We could tell a shallow patch by the rippling water over rocks, we could tell a slow eddy and we knew which side to take a bend so that the current carried us best. Our ears were constantly tuned to the noise of rough water, which we could hear long before we saw it, so we could brace ourselves for an often short but bumpy ride.

Having no map really made the journey exciting and the anticipation of what the river had in store for us in the next 450 miles was a topic of nervous conversation around our campfires. Our only real concern was the Five Finger rapids. We had heard so many horror stories of people drowning or getting stranded there, and we'd never been over a rapid in our lives.

We traveled silently through mile after mile of pristine wilderness. It was like entering the Lost World and finding a perfect paradise. Generally, Boris was really good in the canoe. He would lie quietly in the sun curled up amongst the equipment. The trouble came when we stopped to camp. After long periods of inactivity he was raring to go and would take off into the woods barking at anything that moved, then return to camp and pooh right were we wanted to sit.

Back to Extracts