Northern Borders (40 page)

We reached Tree Line Lake on the twenty-sixth of July, and the following morning we started up the dreaded Rivière de la Mort. At first it wasn't too bad. But a day north of Tree Line, the river ran through a series of deep gorges full of swooping white-water cascades, and we spent most of the next week portaging around the rapids. More than once I thought of Mr. Snowball's macabre story of the Toronto woman who'd lost her husband and scrawled his fate on the rocks with her lipstick before vanishing herself, like my grandfather's blue-eyed Beothuks.

One sunny afternoon as we were paddling across a rare stretch of quiet water, I saw an island covered with black spruce trees hanging in the blue Labrador sky, a mile or so away. As we approached it, it appeared and vanished several times before eventually resolving itself into an ordinary ground-level island like any other. For the remainder of that day and the next, we traveled through a land of
amazing illusions, caused, my grandfather explained, by heat waves reflected off moisture in the rarefied northern sky. Distant waterfalls lifted majestically into the air, lakes tilted themselves on edge and floated across the horizon, violently-colored rainbows covered half the firmament. At dawn and dusk, when the air was clearest, an upside-down snowy peak hovered in the sky far off to the north.

“What in the hell is that?” I wondered.

“No Name Mountain,” my grandfather said. “Its mirage, anyway. Drink your tea, Austen. That's real.”

My grandfather took each new illusion in stride. He had seen Labrador's witch mirages before, and his mind was elsewhere, as it had been for weeks. I, for my part, felt more strongly than ever that, day by day, I was entering a different realm from any I had ever dreamed of.

 

“What I'm going to tell you now is between you and me, no one else,” my grandfather said. “When I'm gone, you can inform anyone you please. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

It was full dark, and we had just zipped ourselves up inside our tent, near a well-worn caribou crossing on the Rivière de la Mort where, decades ago, the small band of Indians my grandfather traveled with had established their base camp. We'd arrived just before dusk and, to my sharp disappointment, found no trace at all that anyone had ever been here before us, though my grandfather had assured me that this was the right spot.

Now as we lay side by side in our sleeping bags near the age-old caribou ford, a hundred miles and more from the nearest human settlement, my grandfather's voice sounded strangely remote. It was almost as if he were speaking not just about the long-ago past, but from it.

“There was a girl,” he began. “The oldest daughter of the blue-eyed chief. She was a year or two younger than me, maybe nineteen or twenty. Her Indian name was impossible to get your tongue around unless you were Beothuk, but it meant “mirage.” So that was what I came to call her—Mira.

“This Mira was a very handsome girl, Austen. She had the same blue-gray eyes as her father and hair so dark it glinted blue in the sunlight. She could stand in her moccasins and look me right straight in the eye, and I'm six feet, one-and-a-half-inches tall, or was then. She didn't speak more than a few words of English. None of the tribe did. But she was as smart as a whip, and as good-natured as she was headstrong, and as headstrong as she was good-natured, and from the moment I first laid eyes on her I knew that this was the gal for me. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“We lived together like man and wife for the better part of a year,” my grandfather said in that remote voice, as if he were speaking more to himself now than to me. “She's the reason I stayed here with the Indians after the rest of the survey party went home.”

I waited for him to continue but he did not. His story seemed to have ended as abruptly as it had begun. A minute or two passed. Finally I couldn't bear the silence any longer. “So what happened, Gramp? What happened between you and Mira?”

But except for the deep, rasping breathing of my grandfather, and the murmur of the river at the ancient animal ford, the night was silent.

 

I woke up smelling campfire coffee and frying trout, which my grandfather had caught minutes earlier. Although he said little as we ate, and his face seemed as determined as ever, he seemed somehow more reposed now that he had at last told me about the Beothuk girl. Immediately after we finished eating he got our collapsible shovel and a large waterproofed canvas sack from the canoe and told me to follow him.

As the Labrador sun came up, huge and red through the mist, we climbed a ridge overlooking the country to the north and west. Near the top we came to a beautiful spruce glade ankle-deep in bright gray, green, and orange mosses. Far below us the Rivière de la Mort lay blue and innocent-looking. In the distance the inverted peak of No Name Mountain glowed pink in the sunrise, like Jay Peak at home in Vermont on a clear January dawn. Here, after a
brief search, my grandfather located a stone cairn about eight feet long and three feet high.

I was terrifically excited. This was the first sign of any kind that the Beothuks or anyone else had ever been here before us.

“What is it, Gramp? Some sort of monument? A lookout?”

My grandfather was staring off at the distant mountains, now right-side up again, and fading quickly from pink to white. He did not reply. But just as I was about to climb up on the cairn to admire the view, I saw something that I had never seen before and would never see again. I saw that my grandfather's eyes were wet. And although here in the moss glade at dawn was where I, too, felt fully the impending tragic loss of the immense and lovely wilderness I had come to think of as my grandfather's personal domain, I knew instantly that he was not weeping for the doomed terrain spread out in all its fresh morning glory below us.

“What happened to her, Gramp?” I asked quietly. “Mira?”

“She died,” he said. “This is where I buried her.”

Then in a voice devoid of everything but a terrible, angry determination, my grandfather said, “I can't and won't leave her here to be buried under all that water, Austen. I can't and I won't. I promised I'd lay her to rest where her spirit could come and see the country she was born in. The lakes and the river and the mountains. The mirages her people named her for.”

My grandfather took a long breath. His eyes were dry now, his gaze the same pale, bleakly-assessing gaze as always. His face was set in the hard, unalterable lines of a man doing a hard thing he neither expected nor particularly wished for anyone else to understand, though in fact I thought I did.

“You go back down to the canoe now,” he said. “I'll be along shortly.”

 

At last I understood my grandfather's abstract moods and his driven, agitated behavior over the past weeks. Yet it was a conundrum to me, an inexplicable wonderment of human nature, that a man as studiously aloof and ironic as Austen Kittredge, a confirmed and self-styled misanthrope, had evidently once been passionately in love. That he might still be in love with Mira, nearly fifty years after her death, was more astonishing still.

Soon enough, however, I had no more leisure to consider this revelation. As my grandfather and I pushed on upstream, the Rivière de la Mort, that lovely blue ribbon that had looked so serene from the high ridge where Mira's cairn stood, transformed itself into an unnavigable torrent. For hour after hour, day after day, we hauled the canoe upriver on tracking ropes, wading chest-deep in icy, rushing water. It was a punishing ordeal for me at eighteen, near the peak of my physical capacities. For a man of seventy-two, even a lifelong woodsman with enormous endurance, it must have been a hellish odyssey, though my grandfather's face remained as stony and inexpressive as the primordial granite outcroppings surrounding us.

We no longer stopped even to catch trout for supper, but subsisted on cold hardtack and boiled beans, washed down with mugs of tea. I fell asleep the moment I was inside our tent, though my grandfather still labored on into the night over his maps. Twenty times a day when a rock rolled under my feet or I scraped my leg on a jagged underwater ledge or towed the canoe around the bend out of a mile-long stretch of crashing white water only to confront another identical rapids, I silently cursed my grandfather and his relentiess stubbornness.

Our way grew worse instead of better. We entered a boreal badlands of violently upthrust ridges divided by tumultuous streams, some sterile of all life, and bare tundra. I understood why the Montagnais Indians had avoided this territory. The weird mirages were not the only reason. The terrain itself was deeply inhospitable to people. My grandfather said it was harder to map because it all looked the same: terrible.

A week above the old Beothuk encampment we came to a dark gorge out of which the Rivière de la Mort poured in a solid, thundering cataract. We spent the morning reconnoitering. Many deep and treacherous side ravines cut into the chasm upriver, with no way to portage out around them. Having no idea what we might encounter, we set out up the gorge that afternoon, tracking the canoe behind us on tow ropes. We had lashed down everything we could possibly secure in the canoe, including the wooden grub box,
inside which my grandfather had packed the canvas sack with Mira's remains.

In the gorge the de la Mort was frigid as a glacial river. Sunlight played on the cliff walls high above us while we forged our way through a perpetual greenish gloom. There was no bankside vegetation to build a fire. In places there were no banks. When the river became too cold to endure any longer, we had to take turns wringing out our clothes while the other held the canoe on the tracking line. It tugged like an enormous fish, eager to escape and leave us stranded without food and shelter, to die in the bush like the feckless expeditionaries in Mr. Donny Snowball's grisly tales. To make ourselves heard over the rapids, we had to shout at the top of our lungs. Soon we stopped speaking altogether.

Once, while I was handling the stem rope, I slipped on a loaf-shaped rock, went entirely under, and lost my grip on the line. Instantly the stem of the canoe swung out at a precarious slant to the torrential current. My grandfather had all he could do to keep it upright, and the weight of the rushing water against the side of the heavily-loaded canoe began to drag him downstream.

“Get the grub box if she swamps!” he shouted. “Get the grub box!”

Whether he was more concerned about losing our food or Mira's bones, I had no idea. As he approached me, struggling to stay on his feet like a man being dragged along by a runaway horse, I grabbed him around the waist. Together we somehow managed to work ourselves and the canoe back into the slack water off the current, where I could grab the stem rope. My grandfather glared at me angrily, but I was not about to apologize for the accident.

“This is crazy!” I shouted at him. “You're going to drown us both.”

“Nobody's going to drown,” he shouted back, and as soon as he caught his breath we started off upriver again.

That evening we camped on a ledge no more than six feet wide. There was no room to set up a tent, no brush for a fire. Even so my grandfather got out his compass, mechanical pencil, and ruler, and spent the last hour of daylight sketching a map of the section of the river we'd come up that day. Fortunately, the night was quite warm.
Except for an occasional lethal-looking glint of heat lightning high overhead, the gorge was as dark as a cavern.

Toward dawn a terrific thunderstorm struck. Lightning bolts seemed to crash off the cliff walls all up and down the gorge. Sheets of rain poured down onto us with a frightening intensity. By daylight, when we set out towing the canoe, the river had already risen a foot.

Ahead through the driving rain the canyon walls sheered straight out of the water. But any thought of canoeing back through the gorge to safety, even if my grandfather had been willing to consider a retreat, was out of the question. No canoe would have survived sixty seconds in that thundering rock-filled maelstrom.

Just when it seemed impossible to proceed, a house-sized boulder that had long ago broken off the cliff overhead loomed up in the rain ahead of us. Between the boulder and the rock wall of the gorge lay a churning backwater about thirty feet in diameter, and somewhat sheltered from the furious main current by the huge rock. In the face of the cliff ten or twelve feet above the surface of the big whirlpool was a fissure, a broken seam where a few stunted black spruces had managed to establish a toehold. Using the stem and bow tracking ropes, my grandfather managed to snub the canoe to two of these small trees.

“We're all right,” he shouted. “We aren't going anyplace.” His hand was on the grub box lashed in the stem, and I had the feeling that he was reassuring Mira as much as me, though I knew that if the ropes holding us to those little spruces broke, or the trees were pulled out by their roots, we would certainly be swept out to drown in the rapids.

Sometime during the afternoon the rain ended. By evening the river had started to go down. But it was noon of the following day before we could proceed, and two more days before we emerged from the gorge, battered and more fatigued than I could ever remember being in my life. I couldn't decide whether I was more angry with my grandfather for jeopardizing our lives for a bagful of bones, or relieved to be out of that hellhole.

The first thing we did after our deliverance was to build a roaring fire. Except to fetch more wood, we didn't move away from its blessed warmth until the following morning.

 

Above the gorge were more impassable rapids, connecting a long chain of wave-swept, north-to-south-running lakes that left us wind-bound on shore for days on end. The mirages, which I thought we'd left behind us, were stranger than ever. Illusory Niagaras hundreds of feet high hovered in the middle distance, so real-looking I imagined I could hear them. Whole ranges of snow-covered mountains, Himalayan in magnitude, reared up along the horizons. One morning an oceanic strait jammed with opalescent ice packs rose into view, stately as a great work of art. My grandfather shook his head and said that Ungava Bay, the nearest arm of the sea, lay a hundred miles away, across the Snow Chain Mountains and the Barrens.