in quest of the fabled copper mines that were said to exist “twelve to twenty-four months near a permanently frozen sea.” Both his 1769 and 1770 trips were unsuccessful. However, he did spend considerable time camped on Shethanei Lake (with his bevy of young Dene girls to keep him warm) and gave us our first European account of the Seal River. We camped on one of Hearne’s wintering sites, adjacent to a glacial hill, while the pall of the distant fires created an eerie glow that was nothing short of supernatural.
There was a deep lagoon or runnel about a hundred metres from our pitched tents, forming a levee between the lake and a bog marsh. Several caribou runs led away from the camp in no particular pattern, and it was soon evident that one could easily get lost trying to follow any one of them. But the most noteworthy geomorphological feature of Hearne’s campsite environs was the prominent rock mound that rose at least thirty metres above the treetops and was situated an easy five-minute walk from camp. It was obviously a drumlin of sorts; not the type composed of gravel and clay, but of blocks of granite piled helter skelter, forming hundreds of cave-like hollows and caverns that would be choice enclosures as black bear dens. Some of the rocks were unstable, precariously balanced, requiring some climbing skill and sure-footedness to gain access to the summit and the spectacular view. A scattering of dwarf birch had commanded a foothold in the soil-less environment, testimony of the obstinate and determined nature of the tundra life forms.
It was a rock-hound’s Mecca. Literally hundreds of rock types and minerals lay exposed; biotite schists, sandstones, quartz, and conglomerates, both along the beach and all over the drumlinoid hill where we now stood. Minute specs of mica sparkled iridescently in the early evening sun, which had finally cleared itself of the thick strata of cloud that had dominated the sky all day. There was clearly a strong energy here — perhaps a spiritual energy as there often is at these strange places. I was convinced that the striking oddity of this geological structure would have been some type of ceremonial gathering site for the early people.
Andy had brought the skull of a caribou with him to the top of the hill. He had discovered the skeleton along one of the trails behind the campsite. We all agreed that it should stay where we stood and be used for a ceremony later that evening. We found a cleft in the rock where we could all sit out of the wind, and the skull was perched on the highest boulder.
The strange band of open, clear sky did not move out of the horizon all that day, contrasted by the weight of a leaden and bleak sheathe of cloud. We had almost forgotten about the fires and wondered whether Allan and the remaining village men had been evacuated. The evenings were deliciously long, and it was hard to stay still, to relax after a hard day’s paddle. We were deep into conversation, sitting by the campfire, when the hue of evening light changed abruptly. Andy and Hodding ran to the beach to view the setting sun but Russell and I were already half-way to the drumlin hill, cameras in hand, and my medicine bag over my shoulder.
That’s the peculiar thing about nature photography; the incident light is only temporary, fleeting, and always remarkable. Always, there is a moment of hesitation and the difficulty of choosing to see something special through the clarity of your own vision, rather than through the limited scope of a camera lens. With the latter, there is something lost of the magic and also a prevailing sense of urgency to capture the moment on film.
As the sun set across Shethanei Lake, the tops of the spruce trees facing the light glowed brilliant orange, as if suddenly splashed with fire. We couldn’t climb the pile of boulders quick enough getting to the top, each rock glowing like a hot coal. But it was just the ambient light of the sun, projected oddly through the haze of smoke over Tadoule, natural, yet amorphous, casting such brilliance over the landscape. It seemed to have a spectral purpose.
Andy and Hodding reached the top moments after we did, and the four of us stood, mouths agape, and looked out over the chromatic sea of spruce, transformed from a monotonous green to crimson splendour. The esker sand ridges across the lake resembled red snakes, uncoiled and peaceful.
For less than half an hour, Shethanei was suspended in colour animation, the intensity ebbing as the sun set just before midnight. We quickly gathered in the depression chosen for our ceremony. I placed some tobacco in the caribou skull cavity, lit a smudge stick of cedar and sage, and wafted the four of us in a liberal cleansing of sweet smoke. Everyone took a caribou tooth for good luck. The homily was simple and heartfelt, and we finished the ceremony by placing the caribou skull on top of the rock again. It was a profound experience, timely, purposeful, and symbolic.
Shethanei Lake to the Dene refers to “the hill going into the lake.” A large esker literally disappears into the north shore narrows and reappears on the side of the lake we were camping on. The size of the lake was daunting but we enjoyed an unusual calm for the next three days. The time we spent at Shethanei was an almost surreal experience; the serpentine eskers, golden spires of dune-sand, rose above the spruce veld and would catch the fading rays of the evening sun. The full darkness of a deep summer night, so familiar in southerly regions, was never attained, and the fires raging in the distance created a numinous haze around the sun and permeated the landscape in an illusory glow.
Midnight treks along the eskers afforded an unprecedented look at the surrounding boreal landscape and animal activity, as well as an opportunity to explore the boreal bioregion away from the river. On one occasion I came face to face with a tundra wolf as I stepped over an embankment into a sand blowout (depression on top of an esker). We shared a moment of uncertainty, neither of us moving until I made a motion to unsling my camera. The wolf bolted, paused briefly to look back at me, and then disappeared.
Pioneer lichens and mosses grew over the eskers in circular and polygonal mosaic designs in a struggle to stabilize the eroding dunes, while scattered clumps of dwarf birch and jack pine clung to the edges of the sand world with a fierce tenacity, subject to the almost incessant winds and interminably long winters. The vista from the eskers offered an unrestricted view over the endless plain of black spruce and tundra bog.
One of our campsites had a park-like landscape with a long, low esker snaking inland away from the lake. Copses of birch trees decorated an almost golf-course-like tended lawn. After abandoning the eskers as a travelway, this was a place where the Dene would come in the summer to cut birch bark for their canoes. Beneath a large spruce, partly protected from the elements, was a neatly stacked pile of birchbark rolls, obviously intended to be picked up at some time by Native canoe builders. It was either forgotten or purposely left behind nearly a century ago.
It was a 240-kilometre paddle to the Bay from Shethanei, dropping seven hundred vertical feet in a long series of steep-pitched rapids. We stopped briefly at the junction of the Wolverine River (“Nah yah eye desay” to the Dene, or “River that drains soaked-through Lake”), and we caught our first Arctic grayling at the foot of the rapids. It was here also that we spotted our first harbour seals playing near some centre channel boulders, eyeing us curiously, or sunning themselves on the rocks, blending inconspicuously against the grey of the stone.
Fires were looming downriver and it was decided that we’d stop at the base of a thirty-metre-high esker and pitch camp. From the apex of the dune I could get a protracted view of where the fire was spreading, plot its movement on the topo map, and chart which direction the smoke was blowing. Since leaving Shethanei Lake we had been following the sheer-line of smoke, managing to keep it out of our faces by less than half a kilometre. Tomorrow could be different; the fire was following the south shore of the river and if the wind came up, the possibility of it jumping to the opposite side was likely — if that happened we would either have to hold up or try to get in front of the inferno. It was the smoke we were worried more about than the actual fire.
It had been unseasonably hot the past few days, in marked contrast to the first three on leaving Tadoule. That evening we feasted on grayling and fresh-baked cornbread, under the shadow of the esker behind us and the auspicious cloud of smoke downriver. I had knots in my stomach and tried to weed them out by walking the crest of the esker alone while the others sat at the camp. Everyone was getting along, and for now Andy seemed to have straightened out, at least enough so that I didn’t have to keep such a watchful eye on him, and he would follow my lead closely while running rapids, or carry out chores on his own without me grilling him.
I walked for several