Down the Wild River North by Constance Helmericks

Author:Constance Helmericks [Helmericks, Constance]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO022000 Biography & Autobiography / Women, BIO023000 Biography & Autobiography / Adventurers & Explorers
ISBN: 9781935347897
Publisher: Epicenter Press
Published: 2017-10-18T07:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

The incredible diversity of infinity itself is well demonstrated when you follow a river. You meet endless new arrangements of the age-old materials, endless possibilities for learning and delighting the soul. Along a river minor miracles happen every day. Yet the river is quicksilver: it can’t be held in your hands. You can only borrow a river a little while from eternity.

“Kapackta, packta,” sang the staccato motor as we left the Peace River—the Peace which drains an area of 119,000 square miles—and started following the muddy Catfish Channel away into the eastward swamps.

The channel was about a hundred yards wide, throwing the barking echo back, and it seemed like dead water. After a while I said we should stop to examine some branches drooping into the water from shore. Each branch end made a little silver trail on the water’s dark surface. When we cut off the motor we drifted turgidly forward.

“This is it!” I cried jubilantly. “This has got to be the Catfish. Look at the water levels, very stable, no silt on the trees. Yes, we are heading for Lake Athabasca.”

Jean was feeling the water with her hand. She commented that there are so many sloughs of dead water in this country that are not marked on any map that it would be downright easy to get lost far out in the swamps and get yourself into a lot of trouble if you didn’t watch out.

After a couple of hours, we saw High Rock Ranger Tower around a bend. The summer fire warden and his pregnant young wife—all the women of the frontier were always pregnant—with their small child were living here in a tiny cabin. The duties of the ranger were to climb a path up High Rock and go hand over hand up a slippery vertical ladder four times a day to make his fire “scheds.” His wife in the cabin below could not have climbed the ladder to call out had an accident occurred. However, if the ranger missed a few of his schedules someone would fly in to see what was the matter.

We pitched our tent beside them for the night. We brought with us fresh meat and potatoes from the Mills, and candy bars and canned juices. We always traded goods with people like that. They had only two cans of milk left for the child. Their fishnet in the slough caught only muddy, whiskery suckers called “catfish.” And the snap beans from their tiny garden plot were few. Ten days from now they would be evacuated by boat and float ship, as the fire season was nearing its end.

In the morning, although adjacent Lake Berril was nearly heaving itself out of its banks in a high wind, I decided that we could push onward. We followed the sheltered swamp channel as it wound through scattered, dwindling spruce stands.

“My feminine intuition tells me,” I said to Jean, “that these spruce stands may give out and leave us in the swamps with no dry ground to sit on, and no fuel.

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