On Top of The World

Hayes River, Canadian Northern Coast

by Will Lange ’57

AT FIRST GLANCE, it’s just a photograph of a man sitting in a canoe with some islands in the background. The canoe is beached, the photographer standing on the shore. It’s a colorful shot — a red canoe with a yellow spray cover, the man in a red wool shirt and an orange life jacket. Behind him the sea and sky are gunmetal gray; between them the far-off rocky shore is as black as coal. Ideally, pictures should tell stories. This one does not appear to — except, perhaps, for someone who was there.

A topographic map lies flat on the map table in my office. There are no towns on it at all, and no way of knowing what piece of the earth it depicts, without noting the latitude and longitude and referring to a larger map. A piece of river runs across the map, with several tributaries flowing into it. The only name on the map is printed beside the main river: “Hayes River.” At one point the river appears to narrow, and a few contour lines crowd in beside it. Small black bars cross the river, a lazy or overwhelmed cartographer’s way of showing rapids. The river makes a sharp left turn between two black bars, then widens briefly below the second. Nothing at all significant about that spot — except again, perhaps, for someone who was there.

Every other year, the Arctic Division of the Geriatric Adventure Society spends the summer at home instead of traveling the North, seeking “a crater deep and vast, ungained, unguessed of men”— the radium mine that, according to Robert Service, is the source of the northern lights. This is one of those years at home. I work each day with very little else on my mind but whether the lawn can go another day or two without mowing, and how I’m going to get that big, dying ash tree down without flattening my wife’s garden or killing her husband.

But evenings, when I step into the office, there’s that photograph facing me from the wall opposite the door.My canoe partner took it. In deference to the limitless background, he set his camera on “panorama” and later blew up the result to about two feet wide and a foot high.We had just completed a long saltwater crossing at the mouth of an inlet and were safe again, cruising along the coast looking for a freshwater stream and a campsite. The shore in the distance is actually a string of black granite islands, the weathered top edge of an immense diabase sill. The shore where our canoe rests is of pink feldspar; the water between fills a dramatic fault line. In early spring, the pregnant cows of the Bathurst caribou herd cross the ice to calve here on this near shore. Then, before the ice disappears in June, they lead their gangly calves back across the inlet and begin their slow summer migration southward toward the trees. For centuries the local Inuit intercepted them here with kayaks and spears.

There are still two tiny hamlets here, but the caribou are hunted nowadays with rifles and snowmobiles, and the kill is limited by Canadian government quotas. Out on one of the islands is a bronze plaque dedicated to T. G. Street, a young Canadian who died in 1912 “protecting his friend.” His friend, a conspicuously imperious American named H. V. Radford, had been threatening and beating their Inuit guides.When Radford reached for his rifle, both of them were stabbed to death. A Canadian Mountie, investigating some years later (it took him two years just to get there, by dog sled), confirmed the homicides, but a court deemed them justifiable.

View Page: 1 | 2