What the Traveller Saw by Eric Newby

Author:Eric Newby [Eric Newby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007392766
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1993-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

Way Down the Wakwayowkastic River

CANADA, 1969

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1969 I received an invitation from John Power, a writer about the Canadian outdoors, to make a canoe trip with him through the wilderness of north-eastern Ontario, paddling down the Yesterday River to the North French, then into the Moose River and down to Moose Factory on the shores of James Bay. ‘I expect a rough go,’ he wrote, and I knew him to be tough, ‘with as many as a dozen portages a day.’

We flew to a place called Timmins with a mountain of gear. Gold was struck there in 1907. In 1964 it became a boom town for the second time when the Texas Sulphur Company made a major ore strike, and prospectors staked every inch of ground with more than twenty thousand claims in a wild mêlée.

When we got to Timmins I still had no boots, because I had just come from Bali. All the shops were shut but eventually I emerged from a cellar to which I had been guided with a pair of bright orange size twelves with steel caps, made especially for the locals, who are always dropping lumps of ore on their toes, by the Gorilla Boot Company – ‘Brutally Strong’.

Then we flew in a tiny Cessna to Cochrane, where there was an 8 p.m. curfew for people under sixteen. The weather was bad: ragged, smoking clouds spread across the horizon and there were violent rain squalls. Below us was the Boreal Forest, the Taiga, which extends without a break in a four-thousand-mile arc from Newfoundland to Alaska.

Next day we flew to what we were told was Rainy Lake on the Yesterday River in a De Havilland Beaver float plane. Down below rivers stretched away northward like steel springs under a mournful sky. But which was which?

At the lake, disembarkation took place on a boggy foreshore and during it the bag containing John’s cameras and an immense back pack fell in the water.

There were four of us now: two Cree Indian trappers and food for an estimated ten-day journey down a river few people remembered anyone descending.

The two canoes had been flown in already, lashed to the floats of a plane. They were 17 feet long, built of chestnut with canvas skins and were not in good condition. One had been gnawed by a bear and the other had been holed in many places and not very expertly repaired.

Out on the lake a loon, a bird as big as a goose which can dive at 90 m.p.h., uttered an awful, demented cackle. It began to rain heavily and it was very cold. ‘Going to snow,’ one of the Crees said.

The Crees were phlegmatic, adept at overcoming disaster. Mine was called Johnny Smallboy. He had been a member of a Canadian tank crew at Cassino. John’s was called Obadiah Trapper Junior. He was five feet tall and weighed fourteen stone, which meant that he was rectangular, and preferred to be called Spike.

The rations, put aboard at Cochrane at the last minute, were notably lacking in substance.

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