Oliver's Twist (16 page)

Nonetheless, standing watch on the sandbank and gazing upriver into the midnight sun for much of the night, I was gripped by a terrible foreboding. By morning, I was sick with worry and guilt. I tried to paddle upstream to look for the two men, but the powerful Nahanni current made any serious
progress impossible. What to do? David Silcox and I decided to head downriver and find help while the remaining six stayed behind in case the lost men showed up.

By pure happenstance, Silcox and I came upon a powered raft, property of the Parks Department, hidden in a cove. We commandeered it and headed back upriver. We found Gow and Buchanan just breaking camp about ten miles above us, in fine form except for mild hangovers. They had made a frying pan out of green boughs, cooked up bacon and toast, and finished a forty-ouncer of Scotch. Despair vanished with the morning mist, replaced by exhilaration. I was even able to join in the laughs when Gow accused me of being the lost one for having sailed past the camp location we'd agreed upon as our destination. Lesson learned.

On these outings, encounters with our fellow men were rare but always memorable. On the Yukon River in 1975, Tim and I had pulled ashore to make necessary use of the great outdoors when we noticed a long-neglected, lopsided log cabin in the woods. Curious about its story, we toured the premises, which still held a store of pots and dishes and boasted tattered chintz curtains. Perhaps a hunter or two had used the cabin during the season, but it had obviously not been permanently occupied for many years. When I idly pulled up a loose floorboard, I found beneath it a bundle of letters—as many as a hundred.

They were a man's love letters, dating from the years following the gold rush to the First World War—nothing steamy, just simple declarations of obvious affection in a somewhat-stilted Victorian style. The notes held the details of the writer's daily life, his poor health, and his abiding regard for his female friend and former companion. They were all signed by
Herb
and
addressed to the postmaster in a long-abandoned gold rush town on the river near Dawson City. However, the postmaster was clearly a postmistress. The letters referred to her work carrying the territorial mail on foot and by dogsled up and down the river. I considered taking some of the most affecting correspondence with us, but thought better of it. Too much like grave robbing.

But I did note the name of the intended recipient on the off chance she might still be alive sixty years later. I asked after her at the museum in Dawson. Sure enough, she was living at her home on the outskirts of town. When we arrived at the small, neat house, we found that a faded white cross was nailed to the door. An old gal with a sharp, lively eye opened the door a crack. We told her our story and were invited in for tea. As she made for the kitchen, she laid the old single-shot pistol she'd been carrying on the sideboard.

The cross on the door was in honour of Herb, who had been dead for years. No other man ever courted this woman. He had come up from Seattle in the years after the stampede when many people were still taking out enough gold to make a living. She and Herb had been together for a few years, but the easy handmining went dry and he moved south. She never saw him again, nor forgot him.

We were paddling the Snare River in the Northwest Territories in 1977 when we came upon a man in a vague brown uniform sitting on the river's edge, his back turned to us while he studied a cluster of log buildings that might have been hit by a tornado. We shouted a greeting and he swung around, startled, a semi-automatic rifle cradled in his arm.

Hungry grizzly bears whose normal seasonal diet of caribou had been affected by a recent decimation of the herds had
besieged this tiny Dogrib village. The evidence of the animals' strength was astonishing. The bears had torn the roofs off sturdily built log homes. In the wrecked storehouse, five-pound cans of food were flattened and punctured clean through by the bears' teeth. The footprint of one beast, captured in spilt flour, was a foot and a half in breadth.

Something was clearly wrong with these animals, since grizzlies are usually shy creatures. The game warden was waiting to kill them if, as expected, they returned. Yet he himself was an odd character. From Florida originally, he was a naturalized Canadian who had served two tours as a Green Beret in Vietnam. No doubt he had seen a lot of death there, and now he was here, killing grizzlies alone. Clearly this was a man who had come to the end of the continent to escape something. The encounter led to later reflection that there are hungry bears inside many of us too, their savage appetites making demands that are hard to resist, regardless of the consequences.

In 1979, I invited Pierre Trudeau to join us for a three-week trip down the Hanbury and Thelon rivers in the central Barren Lands. Trudeau was smarting from the first defeat of his political career at the hands of Joe Clark, and I thought he might find solace and distraction in those lovely and remote rivers. He was an experienced paddler and we had no qualms about his abilities, though his well-known cool demeanour and recent public setback gave some of us pause as to the quality of his company.

Trudeau and I had a mutual friend in Eric Morse, a much-admired guru to generations of wilderness canoeists, whom I had met when I moved to Ottawa in 1974. Morse was in his seventies then, but still tripping with his wife, Pamela. He was a serious scholar of northern travel, paddling, researching, and
writing books on the canoe routes of Arctic explorers and fur trade voyageurs. The son of a colonial administrator in India, Eric had an Old World charm combined with a sharp wit. I spent many delightful hours with him at his habitant-style home—canoe in the front yard—in the Gatineau Hills north of Ottawa and on a number of Ontario rivers.

For twenty years, Eric led a group of close friends, most of them senior public servants, on Arctic canoe trips. When he was justice minister, Trudeau joined one expedition on a voyage down the Coppermine River. It was at a party at the Morse home that I approached the uncharacteristically subdued former prime minister with the suggestion that he get away from the political scene for a time and come canoeing with us. He was intrigued when I proposed that he team up with Jean Pelletier, son of his oldest friend, Gérard, and he soon accepted.

Trudeau asked for no special treatment, nor did he receive any. There was no security detail and no retinue of assistants, and he seemed happy to be free of both. However, it was not possible to forget whom we were travelling with. At every airport on flights from Ottawa to Yellowknife, Trudeau was received like a rock star.

The trip under way, it soon became apparent that Trudeau's natural leadership ability was not confined to the political arena, yet he never exerted an assumed authority or displayed any arrogance. Whenever he felt we should do something, he outlined his reasons carefully and put them to the group with no attempt to force his view. Once a course of action was agreed upon, however, Trudeau could be tough and unyielding. Though light conversation was not his forte, he enjoyed a good laugh at clever comments or casual mishaps
along the way. He was careful never to mock anyone who did not find his own situation humorous, and he was also not one to laugh at himself.

Trudeau did the dishes, went for firewood, and helped drag canoes around with everyone else. As a wilderness traveller, he was always disciplined and well prepared. Around the campfire at night, he was quiet and thoughtful, taking only one drink at our evening happy hour. He joined in our conversations, political or otherwise, but would never reveal anything of a personal nature. One of Trudeau's most admirable qualities, as a politician and a man, was a complete lack of bitter or vindictive feelings toward anyone. On that journey, he scolded a member of our group for an unflattering personal assessment of one of his political opponents. “Confine your attack to the policy, not the personality,” Trudeau admonished.

We had two uneasy moments on that trip. The first came on a day almost too hot to paddle, when we were drifting lazily with the current. For a while a herd of migrating caribou joined us, hundreds of animals swimming all around us as they forded the river at different crossing points. Occasionally they bumped our canoes, but paid us no more attention than they would floating logs.

The canoes were strung out in line, Trudeau in the foremost with mine close behind. Soon we came upon a group of grizzlies sitting quietly on their haunches on the shoreline. They were obviously trailing the herd and happily digesting a meal of the last straggler they had picked off. To my astonishment, Trudeau pulled up onshore, leapt from his canoe, and trotted toward the big bears that, seeing the former prime minister descending on them, shook themselves and bolted away to a nearby ridge
where they sat down again. Trudeau made to follow. I grabbed my heavy-calibre revolver from my day pack and bolted after him. By the time I reached the ridge, the bears had torn off across country, leaving their pursuer alone and apparently disappointed. I was angry and pointed out that his recklessness could have risked the lives of us all had the bears turned on him and others tried to come to his aid.

“Well,” he asked, “how many bullets do you have in that gun?”

“Six,” I replied.

“No problem,” he said.

There had only been five grizzlies.

The other awkward exchange came a few days later. Before the invention of portable satellite positioning gear, navigating by map and compass through the Barren Lands was a chore. On lakes, in particular, where there are few major landmarks, everything looks pretty much the same at water level. We were canoeing through myriad lakes on our way toward the outlet of the Hanbury and had stopped for lunch at the intersection of two, each beckoning in a different direction. I had plotted out a course days before, and even though the compass reading can sometimes appear questionable I had learned never to override it. When lunch ended, Trudeau headed off without comment in the wrong direction. The others followed without question— that charismatic attraction still at work—as I stood sputtering on the shore, warning them of their error. Tim Kotcheff and I stayed on the shoreline while Trudeau led the group five miles down to the end of a sucker bay. Heavy winds and a sharpedged rain blew in and hit them in the face as they began the hard paddle back to us. As Trudeau rounded the corner to turn
into the correct lake, he muttered a line from a then-popular television satire, “Sorry about that, Chief.” When Trudeau was out of earshot, someone remarked that as prime minister, he was always leading in the wrong direction but everyone followed him anyway.

Doubtless Trudeau's legacy as a nation builder will be long debated, but his reputation as a fireplace builder is unquestioned. On reaching any campsite, his routine was the same: After assisting his canoe partner with the setup of their tent, he devoted himself to the construction of our cook fire. These were no flimsy, thrown-together structures; Trudeau had the heart of an artist and could probably have become a successful architect. Rocks were carefully chosen, sometimes chipped, and shaped to fit. Sand was the mortar that held all the elements together. Some fireplaces were two-storey jobs with warming ovens complete with doors. Before pots and pans were allowed to rest, a glass of water was placed on the grate to be certain the cooktop was precisely level. Another curious habit of Trudeau's was his need to wash the dishes twice over when he took his turn at dish duty. Once was not enough for this most meticulous of men.

Trudeau was intolerant of the quick and shoddy work of others. I once made the mistake of doing him a favour, or what I thought to be a favour. Without his noticing, I built a perfectly serviceable fireplace while he was still setting out his personal effects under canvas. He walked down to the circle of canoes we always set up around the camp kitchen and gazed with evident contempt at my efforts. Wordlessly, Trudeau swept the whole thing aside with his boot, dropped to his knees, and began to fashion one of his own designs. At this site he discouraged all pretenders by including a chimney.

Even when he was hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, Trudeau never let go of his sense of who he was or his position in the eyes of the country. Once, when the weather turned so ugly we considered calling in a plane and quitting the trip early, Trudeau would have none of it. Ignoring the rest of the group, his reasoning was simple: “They”—whoever “they” were—“will say I could not do it,” he told us. We stayed.

As it happened, there was some criticism of the trip planning on the Hanbury adventure, criticism directed at me as the official organizer. Talk of a canoe group leadership convention arose, but Trudeau was supportive. “Pre-empt them,” he advised. “Quit and no one else will want the job and they will beg you to come back.”

Two days later a float plane passed low over our group. Trudeau looked up at the circling aircraft and pronounced: “The Clark government has defeated itself and they are coming for me.” These were ironic and amusing comments at the time, of course. Except that six months later, the universe unfolded just as he had described.