by M.G. Warenycia

“Monday, May 4, 1981

To Gordon MacDonald,

Ministry of Energy, Mines and Resources

580 Booth St, Ottawa, ON K1A 0E4

Re: Report on Survey of the Fermont-Nitchequon Zone

Dear Mr. MacDonald, Sir:

I regret to inform you that the expedition which was undertaken on behalf of the Ministry under the joint leadership of Dr. Fraser and myself has failed to discover any evidence of the predicted deposits of natural gas, nor of any other hydrocarbon resources in meaningful quantities. Due to the unfortunate absence of Dr. Fraser, I accept, in his stead, full responsibility for the failure of the expedition. All observations indicate that the theory, described in the paper co-authored by myself and Drs. Sacher and Catudal hypothesizing the presence of economically significant natural gas deposits along the passive margin at the confluence of the Superior Craton (Abitibi subprovince), the Nain Province and the Grenville Front was overly optimistic. In our defence, the hypothesis was not unreasonable, given the recent discoveries in the North Sea which are now being exploited profitably, as well as other major gas fields found along similar margins elsewhere in the world. It was entirely plausible that the geologic formations of the Shield would prove fruitful. However, as the Minister is only too well aware, prospecting for gas deposit is, at present, an inexact science, barely more advanced than dowsing (albeit considerably more expensive), not to mention the challenges of operating far from major transportation and supply hubs, under the pressures of the current Energy Crisis. I am afraid you will have to inform Mr. Lalonde that they will have to bite the bullet and cut a deal with Alberta as soon as possible.

If the RCMP needs me to explain certain matters further, my apologies, but I cannot tell them anything more that I have said already. Please disregard the more outlandish claims in some of the telegrams I sent you. Conditions were unexpectedly harsh, and the aforementioned challenges of weather and supplies created a great deal of stress and consequent ill health which may have affected my judgment. I would not be surprised if the testimony of the other surviving members is similarly affected.

Accordingly, I hereby resign from any and all roles and duties assumed with the Ministry and I will not respond to any further offers of employment.

Sincerely,

G. Herzog-Belzer, PhD, KNAW, FRS”

A hastily scrawled post-script to the above letter read: “Gord, as a professional and as a friend, I advise [‘advise’ was crossed out] implore you not to send out any more exploratory missions to the region marked on map. If anyone in the Ministry tries to suggest it at the review, shoot them down. There is nothing there.”

That letter to Gord MacDonald in the spring of ’81 was the product of my fevered brain, troubled by the experiences cryptically referred to therein as well as by the painful task of trying to persuade Gord, who had passionately defended my cause at the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Resources, as they used to call it back then. Gord fought tooth and nail to secure the funding for the expedition which the late Dr. Fraser and myself were to lead into the zone lying between Fermont and Nitchequon. God knows he paid for it. Cabinet made sure of that. Jeopardizing the relations with Alberta, which were already tense because of the National Energy Program? It looked bad. It was bad. And you better believe the folks out in Whitehorse would have liked to see the prospecting grants sent their way instead.

Well, the Albertans could laugh and say their ‘we told you so’s’. I did my best, hanging around the bars by Parliament Hills for a couple weeks after, dropping rumours and fuelling gossip to make sure that they had plenty of reasons to feel smug. Not that I cut a very authoritative figure. I doubt any of those oilmen or the federal bean-counters watched many TVO documentaries; my face wasn’t well known in those circles and it was the ‘Fraser Expedition,’ not the Belzer Expedition. Not to mention, I could tell the bartenders were thinking about their liability before they passed me my first drink. If they’d seen what I’d seen, or felt what I felt, out there…why, they’d have offered it on the house. Of course, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone just to get free drinks.

Our original report is stamped and filed; our expedition branded an abysmal failure – and now there’s probably nobody in the whole Civil Service who remembers the harebrained scheme. Good riddance! It disturbs me, though, that there’s people nowadays who are talking that because they’re taking gas out of the seabed off Labrador that it would be a swell idea to go mining the stuff beneath the glacial flats in the interior. Easier than building platforms, right? The idiots. If you’re gonna mine, you’ll need camps, and they’ll probably be year-round, too…it’s cold but it’s not the high Arctic. And then you got these people on the internet, going into these abandoned mines, ghost towns and the like, hunting the next creepy picture or tape of ‘found footage.’ I saw one blog the other day, some guy and his buddy took their snowmobiles out to one of those collections of silvering shacks among the ice-gorged valleys. They use it as their hunting camp; leave the snowmobiles, gas and stuff in the sheds. I don’t know if they stay overnight. If they did and…well, we wouldn’t know, now, would we?

Take my account for what it’s worth. You’ll see why the official report I submitted, the signed and sealed file mouldering in some battered steel file cabinet that was last opened by a guy who retired ten years ago, is as thin as it is. You’ll ask questions about our mental health, ask if we had to eat spoiled food or bear livers, or if cabin fever might have been affecting our reason. I want to say our judgement was unaffected, but we were eight fit, healthy public servants, and you don’t get cabin fever, even in the depths of winter, if you’re working, outside, for just a few weeks, with congenial human company, at 53 degrees, 17 minutes north latitude. It’s because we were eight – were eight fit, sober, fairly well-educated individuals that the things I saw, heard or thought I heard and saw…experiences is probably a more accurate verb, one that I can use without a risk of lying by accident…it’s because of these factors that I gave the Ministry that perfunctory version of events and kept the meat of our notes in a banker’s box in my study. All now I can’t tell you what to make of it. But I can tell you, since I don’t have anything particular against you, that if you intend on voyaging on a hunting trip for moose or bear, or if some egghead bureaucrat asks you to go prospecting for oil and gas in a location around about 53 degrees north, 68-70 degrees west, don’t. And if you do, keep within the forest, hold to the southern slopes, and, no matter how bad the wind, bear with it and don’t ever pitch your tent in the lee of one of the drumlins…

Consulting the expedition journal – the one I kept personally, not the one I made up afterwards to give to the Minister, I can’t make any more sense of it now than I could then. I can say for certain that the whole wretched idea was launched by a chance conservation I had in the Duke of York pub, at Prince Edward Avenue and Bedford Road, in Toronto, in January of 1981. It was and is a convenient place for U of T staff and students to tie one on, since it’s practically right next to Robarts Library. I was drinking a Sazerac, mostly for an excuse to stick myself among a bunch of living human beings for a moment. The endless winter nights were starting to wear on me and I’d been spending the slivers of daylight in my campus office doing a rush edit for a prick of a publisher. Half the faculty was still on vacation, which didn’t help.

Well, this fellow sits down to me, carrying a Sazerac in each hand, one of which he slides my way. “I can pay my own tab,” I told him. Like I said, I wasn’t in a cheerful mood. This fellow, though – he sure was. French Canadian by his accent, dressed in a herringbone three-piece underneath his overcoat, which he hadn’t taken off. I said to myself, the energy program isn’t working out so smooth as they’re saying on the news. The generous stranger wasn’t put off in the least by the cold reception. Right off the bat, he introduces himself in a funny way:

“I work with the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Resources,” he says, shakes my hand and talks about his job, telling me what a pleasure it is to meet the renowned Dr. Gershon Herzog-Belzer. Takes him a full two minutes before he remembers his name. “Paul Leduc, by the way!” I warmed up when he said he’d read the paper I co-authored with Sacher and Catudal and he was so impressed by it he showed it to his boss at the Ministry, Gord MacDonald. Now, my contribution to the paper he was talking about consisted of reading the rough draft, chatting with those two, and agreeing to lend my name to it, but there was no need to tell Mr. Laduc that, seeing how it was so popular at the Ministry. I had a hunch he was there to do more than praise my paper. Nobody goes and buys drinks for you because you wrote an academic journal article.

The conversation got going and pretty soon there’s three Sazeracs on the table and four Old Fashioneds, because most people have never heard of a Sazerac and fewer like them. Cabinet’s desperate, he admits. A real mess. Trudeau was tying himself in knots trying to get Québec and Alberta to sign on to the Charter and get the Constitution repatriated. It’s hard enough to beg somebody for one favour, but when you’ve got to ask them for another at the same time? This was after the Revolution in Iran, remember, and the second wave of the energy crisis was in full swing. Carter had just lost an election because he dared to tell Americans to put on a sweater, you know, because of the critical rise in the price of oil. Trudeau didn’t want the same thing to happen to him. It’s because he couldn’t take the pot off the fire is why Joe Clark had such a short run. The Revolution settled down, but P.E.T. was barely back in office when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and war broke out between Iran and Iraq, tankers in the Persian Gulf getting hit by missiles…it was clear the headache was going to last a long time, and Paul’s ministry was left holding the hottest of several hot potatoes.

“It’s not all bad,” I consoled poor Monsieur Leduc, who by this time was getting pretty hammered. “That Referendum last year tuned into a much ado about nothing; you don’t have a civil war to worry about anymore.” I was joking, but the Parti Quebecois had at least gone through with attempting to secede from Canada, which had really shaken up the national consciousness. I don’t know if things have fully settled all now.

“Yes, yes, we pulled it off, didn’t we?” My companion’s voice was shaky and he kept mopping his brow. I don’t think he got that I was joking. “That’s, err, what I came to talk to you about. The two things are connected. Oh, I haven’t been stalking you or anything like that. Your colleagues who you wrote the paper with, the French one, he told me you come here sometimes.”

“Yep. Robarts is a block away.”

“Yes…”

“Hold on, two things? What two things? You should slow down a bit with the, uhm…” I pointed to his glass.

He grunted and waved his palm at me. “I mean…the Energy Crisis, which is my daily torture, and the Separatists. Two birds with one stone…with one shotgun blast. Hah!” He pounded the table, drawing unwelcome eyes for a second.

“Easy! So you’re saying you want to, erh, there’s a way to…undermine, I guess? Undermine the Separatist movement, by something to do with your Ministry; something energy-related. What did Catudal say?”

“Your buddy? He looks like he never leaves his office. He’s not the kind of man we need. But…you – you’ve been to…to all over the world! I’ve seen you in National Geographic and on TV. You want to help your country, don’t you?”

I’m not the most patriotic man in the world, but, having travelled widely, I appreciate the boons granted to me by default of my citizenship in the Great White North. And, while I sympathized with the grievances of the Québec nationalists and have profound love for their culture as both an aesthete and an anthropologist – the only genuine peasant culture in all of North America, outside of Mexico – I was uncomfortable with the thought of the city where I grew up (Montreal) suddenly being in a foreign country. I generally approved of the direction Trudeau was taking the country in, whatever the ignorant rubes who pelted his train carriage with rotten fruit might think. If I could help with the situation somehow, I would.

Leduc leaned in till I was breathing in the hot whisky fumes. Speaking in a whisper, he proceeded to outline a plan that was considerably less of a crazy 007 scheme than I’d anticipated. The federal government was caught between a rock and a hard place. The economy was on the rock, in a recession that was lingering like a bad dream. Trying to make the analogy literal, the rock was Québec: Trudeau’s Liberals needed the votes of their traditional heartland in Central Canada, and Premier Levesque, not content to bury the hatchet after losing the Referendum, was doing his damndest to shove a wrench into Trudeau’s Constitutional dreams. As a Montrealer (still am, deep down), I understood why Trudeau moved with kid gloves; he hoped the political turmoil could be resolved without splitting the country into hostile tribes. Unfortunately, there were a lot of voters in English Canada who didn’t grasp this and felt they should just say ‘screw it, leave if you want’ to Québec.

Oil, as it always does, would solve our problems. So he told me and I’m not so much of a tree hugger that I would argue with him. Oil, or natural gas, for that matter, close to the main markets in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal- Québec City corridor; energy that had the dual advantages of not being controlled by the Albertans and providing top-paying jobs to Québecois to suck the wind out of the Separatists’ sails: a thoroughly Federal energy project. Spectacular idea. And, for what it’s worth, I’ll concede that, as far as I comprehend the subject, the seabed gas fields off Labrador do in fact extend inland. The arc of the Precambrian Shield practically declares it on the map; the mineral substructure being identical, once you ignore the couple hundred feet of water on top of the Labrador portion. I wouldn’t doubt that there’s substantial crude deposits underneath those bogs, as well, and, based on how the Alaskan production is competitive at current prices, I don’t suppose the permafrost is a challenge beyond the technology Petro Canada has at its disposal. At the very least, your average Canuck at the pump would be insulated from the shenanigans going on in the Persian Gulf.

But they should be happy I failed. And, anyhow, did they even think of the illogic of using a guy whose training is in anthropology, botany and the biology of tropical fish to headline what was, for all meaningful purposes, an engineering project? I hardly know more geology than we learned, or were supposed to learn, in high school. And, just because many of Mr. Trudeau’s voters have seen me on TVO, it doesn’t mean it has to be my name and face on every out-there project that can remotely be connected to the environment. I know why they did it. If it didn’t work, then I’m the spoiled intellectual who lectures the plebs to put on a cardigan and ride a bicycle whenever their diplomatic colleagues get us on the wrong side of politics in the Middle East (which they inevitably will).

[05/04/1981 Gordon – private – communicate to M. Lalonde – tact – NOTHING IN WRITING] … As you know, it starting with us heading up Route 389 in a gang of crew-cab trucks and cargo vans, on account of someone not being willing to pay for flights for the thirteen of us and our equipment. Our jumping-off point was Fermont, on the QB-Labrador border. If your boss doesn’t remember it, it’s because people have only been living there for nine – count ’em, nine! — years. To be more accurate, I should say it’s only been a permanent official settlement for nine years. The indigenous Naskapi-Montagnais have, of course, been in the area for considerably longer, but they never had any stable settlements in the spot where we were ultimately headed. The newness of the town made the strongest impression on me, the region being otherwise a perfectly unremarkable stretch of transboreal forest; the vast belt atop the middle-northern half of every province where the coniferous forest-sea gradually thins out amid glacial bogs until it merges with the barren tundra of the Arctic. But for the relative predominance of Labrador tea (Rhododendron groenlandicum), you could have dropped me there and told me it was Northern Manitoba or Ontario above Lake Superior, and I’d have no evidence on which to doubt you. It was certainly strange, therefore, to see that the area had undergone none of the chapters in the historical cycle of fish, timber and mining exploitation to which nearly all parts of the country possessing similar ecology have been subjected to. After all, we were in the earliest-settled province in continental North America and we are used to the boreal zones being sites of a past already vanishing as everyone with sane and sensitive souls flees them for the cities where one can live a life with actual socialization – art, cafes and much less cabin fever. I don’t blame them, since unlike the rural villages of Europe and Asia, all the settlements of this vast region were inorganic constructions, thrown up by people already fully formed by the mentalities and habits of elsewhere, for the sole purpose of facilitating some robber baron or Crown Corporation to make a buck off an extractable resource, then abandoned, usually before two generations could be formed in their environment. Lots of folks romanticize such places but, dammit, they horrify me. You’re thinking of escape before you arrive. Really, it is strange; the worse that our textbook histories pretend it’s a normal condition of humanity. Fremont had bars where men drank, played pool and fought, strip clubs where women who, in Toronto, could only have been confronted after downing a bottle of Bright’s, gyrated listlessly for obscene sums that would be pitifully wasted, a couple shops for goods of the rudest practical nature, and nothing else.

Of course, the reason me and Professor Moffat – Barney – were going along for the trip had nothing to do with the labours of the roughnecks. The resources available at Robarts Library which I was able to peruse back home were few and out of date. Regardless, there was plenty to suggest to me that, barren as the territory was and as limited as we were in numbers (your boss might consider sending more than one assistant per scholar on future expeditions), there was a chance I might find something to full an article about. Robarts contained no books specifically about the zone where are endeavour would take place, but the Moisie River – the upper reaches of which pass by Fermont and which is known as the ‘Nahanni of the East’ – occasionally pops up in the accounts of the Jesuits and Protestant missionaries who competed for the souls of the Indigenous population, as well as those of the Hudson Bay Co. Officers and whisky traders who competed in extracting their wealth…I almost said “their money,” but even today, the dollar sometimes doesn’t get you as far as will a can of gasoline, a case of condensed milk, or an offer to haul some firewood. The river, treacherous as it can be (particularly during the spring melt and fall freeze-ups), nonetheless provided the best route from the ‘civilized’ towns along the St. Lawrence into the Labrador interior, a region whose gloomy desolation the fits and starts of successive resource booms have failed to alleviate. Most of the sources I poured through mention the place only as a geographic point passed through or beside, en route to places where more important things are done. However, there was a curious anecdote in a work called “Deux Ans parmi les Montagnais,” or a paraphrase of that, which was the memoirs of a Renard Le Pellerin, a priest and schoolteacher. Written in the style of a Victorian travel journal, it was published in Montreal at the surprisingly recent date of 1940. In it, the priest tells of the dangerous canoe trips, the bad or non-existent roads, and his trials and tribulations attempting to imbue his few and irregular pupils with a rudimentary knowledge of reading, writing, and Catholic theology.

Trained in Switzerland, Fr. Le Pellerin, practiced a habit of long rambles in the countryside, sometimes journeying by canoe into the empty country to the south of what is now Fermont, a habit which caused his parishioners much anxiety, despite the absence of risk of avalanches or other hazards in the monotonous terrain. He scoffed at the dangers of wolves and bears, for which the Winchester he carried was adequate medicine, but it was neither of these wild creatures which concerned his flock, since (so they told and so his observation appeared to confirm) there were no bears or wolves in the area. What caused him to open his ear and put pen to paper concerning the matter was the fact that his casual remark that his own people had always shortsightedly exterminated the most enchanting beasts in Creation was disputed by the native folk, who insisted that even in the times of their grandfathers’ grandfathers no member of the Ursine tribe had ever denned in those parts, and that whatever wolves on might glimpse were simply trekking through. The priest wondered why this should be the case since, as he had seen for himself, the natural environment was undisturbed – unlike the long-cultivated domain of his fellow Habitants. The forest, though not as impressive as those in more favourable climates, had never been despoiled by loggers or (at least back then) mining companies. Berry bushes and edible fungi abounded – in fact, he had filled his canoe with them after his plans to shoot a moose had not met with luck. His native friends had no qualms about devouring the fruit and mushrooms he offered them, which made their aversion to the place all the more strange: clearly, there wasn’t some curse or taboo about the soil itself or its products.

The diary of Sean McDermot, a factor employed by the HBC who travelled into the Coté du Nord hinterland during the waning days of the great fur trade a full century prior to Père Le Pellerin, echoes the Jesuit’s cryptic remarks. Concerning the district roughly west of the Moisie River and south of Fremont-Wabush, the trader writes of having cherished high hopes for his trip, such that, a third of the way from Lac St. Jean, he pulled rank on a south-passing canoe du maitre, persuading its illiterate captain with his deed to a house in Québec City, that the Company required the boat and its crew to return to the interior and delay their furlough. For more than two centuries, the country from the mouth of the St. Lawrence through to Lake of the Woods in western Ontario had been roved over by trapper and trade, voyageur and Indian, all in search of the precious furs on which the wealth of the still-primitive colony was founded. The colony was still mired in the same rude stage of economic development – the days of exporting wheat and wood were still decades in the future – but the furs were running out. The heaver had been hunted nearly to extinction throughout the Great Lakes watershed, and the ploughs and muskets of Habitant and Loyalist farmers had driven the other desirable fur-bearing beasts deeper into the receding forest-sea. When McDermot and his crew portaged amid the network of streams and swamps which on aerial photographs resemble stretch marks revolving around the Precambrian Shield, they reckoned, probably correctly, that they were the first white men to have tread upon that ground. Understandably, the trader anticipated that the area, with its umbrous stands of black spruce and damp slopes covered with rhododendrons ought to be teeming with game – especially the coveted beaver, for whom the mazy wetlands were a virtual paradise. They arrived late in the afternoon, to which McDermot’s journal, incomprehensibly, ascribes the absence of beaver that first day. To his surprise and bewilderment, on the second and third days, they also saw no beaver – nor did they note any rabbits, woodchucks, martins, bear or other fur species. The steams contained pike and char, so the men at least had fish for their camp table, but this did not help the morale of the voyageurs who had been anticipating fun and frivolity on leave in the city and who were unused to performing their wilderness labours without meat in their diet. On the fourth day, two deer were spotted and shot at. One was killed on the spot and carried back to camp for roasting. But the other, despite being struck, was able to sprint off under a burst of adrenaline. All through this period, the crews of all the canoes – perhaps two dozen men in total – were plagued with inexplicable discomforts. Two or three greenhorns aside, these were all hard men, cut from cloth no longer manufactured in our safe and hygienic modern era. The diarist recorded that many – but not all – the men slept poorly. The journey was undertaken in May, and, though the weather can be harsh compared to the same seasons in civilized parts, all would have been used to much worse. The persistent sleep issues became such a problem that it interfered seriously with the progress of the expedition, causing McDermot to remark – notably without any harsh words for his crew – on their failure to get to the subsequent portages at the expected rate. Despite dwelling on the matter through several entries in succession, McDermot never stated the precise nature of the voyageurs’ nocturnal disquietude. At the date he was writing, “hostile Indians” or scouting that presaged raids by rival fur companies were legitimate possibilities, but they were also not things which anyone in those times and in that place would have felt compelled to avoid mentioning. Cryptically, in the entry of May 24^th, 1832, McDermot lamented not heeding the advice of a Cree elder who had settled among the whites, running a provision store in Sept Iles downriver, when he’d started his journey. “I had dismissed the old man’s tale as mere superstition,” he moaned, “creditable only in the childish minds of peasant women and Savages, told to conjure monsters in the minds of fellow travellers gathered round the campfire, that they may be persuaded by their own trepidation to refrain from venturing into certain parts, invariably those most rich in game.”

On a sojourn to Wabush to stock up on supplies and hire a couple heady-duty Ski-Doos to haul ourselves, the ones provided by your recession-afflicted overseers being only light recreational models, I took the opportunity to gather info that might be relevant to my portion of our tasks. Unfortunately, small, rugged frontier communities often take much less interest in their history than do metropolitan intellectuals and novel-readers. At the dismal local library, I found myself alone perusing the stacks, which contained mostly yard sale fiction, encyclopedias and repair manuals for automobiles no longer manufactured. The archives of the town newspaper were the only materials relevant to the remote land itself, and these were written fora public that read mainly for practical advertisements and to have something to argue about at the local watering hole…which I headed off to before it could be decently called evening.

When trying to learn as much as possible about a new place with the minimum of time and sacrifice, my favourite tactic is to seek out a bar, pub, cafe or hotel restaurant, depending on the milieu I mean to swim in – maybe all of them. I further seek out one or more old men, with worn faces and calloused hands and a knowing glint in their eye. I sit myself down beside them – these characters are pretty much always at the bar itself, or at a good window seat. I never buy them a drink first: I let them figure out that I am curious but bored, and that I’m (not to brag) somebody who people pay attention to where I’m from; someone who might share their stories with a wider audience. I let them earn my attention; they won’t dig the tastiest tidbits out of their bag unless they have to do so to obtain the coveted hungry ear. Only then do I buy them a drink.

I bought a half dozen drinks (Crown Royal!), each, for Fred Bywater and George Volant. The former was an Anglo miner and machinist, the latter a Montagnais who somehow managed to survive the mid-20^th century on an industrial-era version of the trapper-fisherman-hunter lifestyle which had sustained his people for millennia. They sat at opposite ends of the bar, each man lost in his own beverage. Their appearance told me that either might be a good source of local lore, so I engaged the barkeep in conversation about dully practical matters – snow conditions, which waterways were navigable in the season, the best local shops for engine parts and provisions, etc. I casually knocked back the most expensive whisky-and-water on the menu (blended in the bottle, I suspect) and nodded, serious but dispassionate, reflecting on how we were on Ottawa’s tab and how I was sorry that sampling rock cores and twiddling with theodolites would not give the CBC the exciting documentary they were looking for. The barkeep agreed passively, as is the nature of barkeeps, although I thought I detected an uneasiness that should hardly have existed in the proprietor of a public house who was raking in a windfall thanks to his new customers from the Big City. Enough scotch and water (even if it’s a lot of water) will put suspicions into one’s head, but I could have sworn that the barkeep’s eyes kept darting into the left and right corners of their sockets, even though he kept his head down over his bottles and rag like it was welded to them…darting towards the two old timers I was consciously ignoring.

“Where, uh, where again exactly did you say you were heading?” the bartender gulped.

Unable to give the precise coordinates off the top of my head, I did better, wiping the bar with a napkin and unfolding a map. “Here, or, I should say, in this general area – we have to move around a bit, obviously, since we don’t know where – or if – we’ll find any of the oil, or, really, any sign that there could be oil down there at all. It’s a crap shoot. I figure, too, with all the gear we’re lugging around, we’ll have to adjust our route as we go, to match the terrain.”

Dammit, the man turned whiter than his bar rag. “Uhhh, gosh, in that case…maybe I can help you fellers out a bit. Been around these parts for a while myself, y’know? He tapped his temple, seeming unconvinced himself. “If it’s oil you’re looking for, you don’t need to go down the Quebec side so far. Or you can go around over the other side, by James Bay. I know they do a lot of mining ‘n power stuff there, last couple years. Or you guys can keep more to the west of where you’re showing, along the highway. Should be easier to move your kit, too. Dunno why you fellers want to make it hard on yourselves when you don’t have to.”

I assured him that we weren’t looking for trouble; we simply had to go where the data indicated the oil or gas would likely be.

“Oil, right, okay, I understand, but…there was some folks…you’re from Toronto, you said?”

“Yes, well, me personally, yes.”

“Well, they were from…Vancouver, and they were prospecting for oil, just like you. Came through here…”

“They were working for the government?”

The rag squeaked in the glass. “Nooo…nope, they were…were working on their own account, I guess.”

“Uhuh. And when was this?”

“Nineteen…forty-something? A year or two before the war, something like that. Anyways, they were looking for oil, like you, but they went more…” the bartender pointed out to a location well outside the basin where we intended to do our exploration – but close enough that Wabush remained the logical depot to purchase supplies.

“Alright.” I was skeptical from the first. “But did they find it?”

From the way he nodded, “sure,” I knew he was luying, which got me thinking, because, what did it benefit him whether we poked around in one patch of dirt or another? “Funny, the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Resources has never heard of these gentlemen you’re talking about, and I think they’d at least want to know if what they’re blowing their money on is going to be profitable or not.” I nonchalantly knocked back another drink. “Not my concern, mind you. I’m only riding along for publicity. My wallet only cares that I don’t break my contract, and maybe I find something interesting enough to get me a spot on the CBC.”

A slightly imbalanced laughter came from my right. There was nothing intimidating in the feeble, toothless chuckle, but it sent the shivers up and down beneath my lumberjack plaids nonetheless. I ignored it. “You’re headed out south a’ town, around Moisie Lake thereabouts, are ya?” It was the old man in plaid and khaki denim overalls, his rubicund visage shadowed beneath a stained International Harvester cap. “I don’t need ta see yer map. If it’s where those folks were drillin’ fer oil back during the war, then you’ll find what yer lookin’ for.” If he wasn’t just egging us on for fun, then the barkeep was telling the truth. “But,” he added, the corners of his lips creeping up his cheeks. “’Course you might find something yer not looking for. Or it’ll find youse.”

“Sorry, excuse me?”

“Don’t mind him; he’s just pulling your leg,” the bartender assured. “After the war, oil was cheap. That’s why nobody stuck around. That’s all. You didn’t believe me?” He could tell. “Still, you could try a little closer to the highway…don’t need to go out into the sticks…”

I hushed the bartender. As much as I treasure the creature comforts of life in a cozy house in the Beaches, or maybe because of it, I’m not above a primal thrill. There’s something about going mano-a-mano against a bear or wolf or shark or something. It’s hardwired into us. “Hold on, why exactly? Bears?”

“Bears?”

“Well, he said something might find us. No need to obfu… – to beat around the bush. So, what are you talking about? I thought grizzlies were extinct in this part of the country and I don’t imagine polar bears come this far south. Or wolves?”

The barkeep was momentarily flummoxed. “Oh, you mean what he’s talking about? Ah, don’t mind old Fred. He’s a shit-disturber. Old Injin’ fairy tales. Don’t let it spoil your drink. But, like I was saying, you’d find it easier to move all your equipment if…”

“We brought rifles,” I mentioned, lest the rustics within earshot take me for a mere city-slicker, full of naïve fantasies about friendly wolves and bears more scared of us than we are of them. “Plenty of ammunition, if we need it. I don’t mind hunting, either, when I get the chance…”

Fred spoke up again, and I noticed his expression had changed and he sounded like he was challenging me, as if, by not acting confused and afraid, I was insulting the dignity of his little town. “I believe you; you can take a wolf, with one of yer cannons, and a guide spotting fer you out in the open, but it’s not so easy like yer thinkin’. The ground plays tricks on yer eyes, eh. Fools ya into thinking it’s flat and open, but you walk a couple yards and then it hides the landmarks you were reckoning by, and yer up and down, and it doesn’t make no sense. The trees look little, eh, but they ain’t so little once you get in the middle of ’em. People get lost out there all the time.”

Ah, yes, ‘the place I live in is tougher than you, stranger.’ Countless times I’ve gotten that. I wasn’t going to play along. “It’s ok, we have maps, a satellite phone, compasses, all of us. And that’s a lot of men; a lot of hands and pairs of eyes.” I finished the watered residues lingering among the ice cubes and felt for cash in my pockets as if I was about to leave. It wasn’t an act. My face must have been irritatingly calm, because Fred stood up in his seat and practically shouted.

“Well, be sure the loopik doesn’t get’cha, then!”

“Come again?” I asked, plopping back down on my seat, as anyone would. “Loopik?”

“Ahhh, for Chris’sake, shut up Fred, will ya?” The bartender scowled with venom you don’t use when just playing around with friends. “He’s only joking. Trying to make an ass of you,” he smiled at me. “Because you’re an out-of-towner, that’s all. You can pay your tab when you leave out or next time you drop into town, doesn’t matter.”

I suspected the only reason he was ushering out otherwise lucrative customers was because the old drunk telling stories was about as immovable as an iceberg. “No, now I want to hear this. Actually, studying and collecting folklore from different places is part of my job, back in Toronto. Go on. What’s this loopik and why should I watch out for it, or him? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything by that name.”

“Nobody has! He’s just making shit up. Can it, Fred, or…” I could tell the bartender’s anger was sincere and therefore I was more intrigued. On the other hand, it is my experience that 75% of what old drunks tell you in remote watering holes is bullshit, on top of which, as you should know, the word for this creature or being, at least as Fred pronounced it, didn’t sound right. Despite the similarity of ‘Innu’ – which it’s now become the fashion to call the Montagnais – with ‘Inuit,’ there’s nothing at all related between the two peoples. They don’t have the same ethnic heritage, they inhabit different areas, and they speak utterly unrelated languages, the Innu being an Algonkian people, like the Indians of the Central Canada cottage country, and the Inuit are, well, Inuit. Eskimos, as we used to say. ‘Loopik’ doesn’t sound like an Alongkian word, made-up or otherwise, though it is plausibly Inuit. How a word presumably derived from an Arctic language came to refer to a concept in the folklore of an Algonkian region, given the lack of friendly relations, or much relations at all, between the two groups, it was a question my mind was spinning over.

“Don’t ask me,” Fred threw up his hands, and I was about to storm off in anger at having been duped, however momentarily, by an inebriated hick. “I never seen one myself, either, and it’s not something folks know how ta explain, supposing they did see it. ‘N that’s if it lets ’em talk at all. Ask George there. He can tell you a whole lot. He’s seen one, y’know, that’s how I know about it – not that I hadn’t heard about it before. But I didn’t believe in things like that, that’s what I mean. If you’d seen uncle Georgie, how he looked when he came into our cabin right as we were sittin’ down ta have our supper, hoho! Can’t turn out a man who asks you fer a meal – folks are hospitable around here. Hehe, but we were scared he was gonna eat the whole spread, and the table to boot! Looked like a starvin’ ghost, didn’t’cha, Georgie? But, honest truth, he hardly touched a thing. Just bread and soup, and he didn’t sleep till almost morning. ‘N neither did we, after the story he told us. Tell ’em, Charlie!”

The gentleman so indicated was an elderly, worn-out and inebriated as Fred. Largely by virtue of his taciturnity, he’d preserved a semblance of dignity that his friend lacked, though. Strange that what seemed to be two old friends should sit across from but not talk to each other, but one sees stranger things in the North Country, especially if one is not looking for them. ‘Uncle’ George’s body language was casual but his visage was grave, whether or not he could walk in a straight line unaided. He was sizing me up.

“Well? Is Fred here just screwing with me?” I asked.

The man’s narrow eyes were there and not there. “It’s a story,” George replied bashfully. “Someone told me when I was a kid. Don’t remember who, ‘cept it wasn’t none of my teachers.”

“But did you see it – this ‘loopik?’ What is it? Is it real?”

He chewed his phrases before spitting them out. “I don’t want to say that. People see a lot of things that aren’t real.” The way he said it was bitter and mocking.

“Okay, but, speaking specifically about this creature…it is a creature, right? Not a ghost or spirit or something?”

“I don’t know. I told what I saw to my father and he says that’s what it was called. He was a trapper, my pops. Good man.” George took another sip.

“Alright, but what is it then? A kind of wolf? Bear? Why are you so afraid of it? How big is it?”

“Dunno. Only ever saw its eyes ‘n its shadow. Never saw it standing up. Only saw it once. Most people only ever see it once. Anyway, if you hear it in the nighttime, get in your boats or your jeeps and go. Go away.”

“Well, if I’m supposed to listen for it, what does it sound like?”

“Like the wind, but an animal. You can hear it sometimes, at night, where you’re going. Between the long hills, in the ravines. It’s a whistling that all of a sudden everything feels no good inside you. Worst is when the sun’s falling, and everything’s all gold and black…”

I was admittedly intrigued, but forgot everything when George very matter-of-factly said, “Never mind. Horse hockey! Made it up after getting spooked by a cat or a seal out mushroom picking one time, and then our kids started to share it and pass it along, like how kids do with things they hear and don’t understand from grown-ups.”

I paid my tab and left. I’d been entertained by the story but it was tainted by the disgust I felt towards myself for having bought into it for a moment.

Winter lingered harsh and long this year, so we had no need to switch to portaging and riding the inflatable rafts we’d brought, and were instead able to race across the taiga on our Ski-Doos. We arrived, earlier than scheduled, in our first prospecting location south of Fermont, between the top end of Lac Jonquet and the unnamed glacial lake which lies barely an hour’s walk west of it. Everywhere the topography bore evidence of the tremendous processes which gouged and moulded rock like the hand of a furious kindergartener squeezing and pulling a ball of Play-Doh. Of course, the transformations at the end of the Pleistocene are responsible for our landscapes further south, but there the retreat of the glaciers has been demurely marked by cities, forests, and the plough. Here, in the North, the rude sculpting of the ice sheets was fresh. You felt like, if you blinked, a mammoth might lumber out from behind a clump of tamaracks. The Woodland Cree have tales, you know, about hunting great woolly bears – several-fold larger than any other bears – that had two great teeth and ‘arms’ growing out of their faces…about hunting them with muskets. Far-fetched, sure, but if you left your desk to go out to these places…you could believe a lot of things might happen, if only because there’s nobody out in those places, and, therefore, nobody to see what you get up to. There’s no need to bury bodies when no one will be walking by for a century or two.

The ground in the hemiboreal zone is nowhere so steep that you can’t pitch a tent, nor is it so flat that its hard to find shelter from the wind. Staking the camp and setting up the machinery was a simple matter, apparently, for those who had to do it. So easy, in fact, that, since we ate on the trail, Mac, the cook, at the request of Barney, delayed started supper as Jim Bouchard and some of the mechanics wanted to hunt a deer or at least some rabbits for Mac to stew up. The oblong glacial hills, or drumlins, covered with a low but rich layer of thick-leaved shrubbery no taller than an unkempt lawn, mixed with feathery grasses and cattails in wetter areas, poking out beneath the snow carpeting their windswept flanks, offered a delectable banquet for non-hibernating herbivores. On the other hand, I was unaccountably tired, as if I’d walked rather than Ski-Doo’d the last six hours, so I confined my activities to circling the perimeter of the campsite, on the lookout for any telltale signs of past Indigenous habitation. I didn’t really expect to find anything in the short window of daylight that remained, but the land surprised me: probably disgorged from the roots of Festuca-topped hummock when a rainstorm eroded the soil, was an arrowhead. It was unmistakeably pre-Contact, since, French or English, the colonists are never known to have used flint weaponry. Indirectly, my find was evidence of the unusual geological activity of the area, which boded well, since ‘usual’ land in Central Canada doesn’t have any oil under it. You see, heavy rains last summer or not, it’s not going to be enough to dislodge, out of fairly level ground, stone tools that would have been interred potentially millennia ago. My fatigue and cynicism evaporated when I brushed off the moist earth and scrutinized it in the rays of the declining sun. Now, I don’t know what you know of Indigenous arts and culture, but this arrowhead was unusual in the extreme. I was second-guessing myself. It had a shape more typical of a spearhead, though, even as arrowheads go, it wasn’t very big – roughly the size and shape of one of the leaflets of an ash tree. Knapped with exquisite care to create a row of fine teeth on each side, it was made of greenish, flint-like chert, the most abundant material suitable for the purpose between the Atlantic and the Great Lakes. Most remarkably, it was not notched to accept fitting into a shaft. Seeing as the natives lacked metal to make ferrules and no screws or bolts could have been driven through it, I had to wonder how someone could spend hours on the arduous task of shaping the stone and yet leave the end product in a form that couldn’t be held securely to an arrow-shaft, much less endure the rigour of thrusting into the body of a moose or mammoth. Then my finger passed, or rather, was detained, in the act of rubbing across its smooth surface. I examined it more closed and observed a slightly discoloured band, matte in texture, where some type of adhesive gum or resin had been applied. That would work, but it was a mystery how someone out in the taiga of eastern Quebec could come up with the idea, while all the other native peoples around him before and since have only used bindings to fasten points to shafts. Impressive, too, was the fact that, in the acidic soil, the binding gum had endured for four or five centuries at minimum. I pocketed my discovery and told noone, but felt much better about our expedition.

My mood was not dampened by supper. The cook was forced to improvise after Jim and his hunting partners failed to come back with any game. The undulating ridges with their extremely dense ground cover should have proved literal breeding grounds for all sorts of small mammals, grouse and the like, but they were not able to bag even a single rabbit. They were not bad shots – quite the opposite – they simply failed to locate game. The sole exception was a whitetail deer which they shot at but failed to kill. Jim had boasted about his marksmanship and tracking skills and put himself out as something of a protector of the rest of the party, embarrassedly explained that the deer had come out of nowhere (“nowhere” being a spruce bog below the slug-shaped hill whose spine they were stalking along). It bolted, he insisted, with the speed whitetails reserve for when they are being chased by a predator or if a hunter has shot and missed. But he didn’t miss. Jim pleaded that they’d followed the blood trail. Ed, a driller, who accompanied Jim on the hunt, sneered that it mustn’t have been a very good hit, since the blood trail was faint; nothing more than scattered drops which petered out among the rhododendrons halfway up the opposite slope. Jim and Ed were the only ones that really cared. When you’re hungry, sitting out under the stars on a cold night, anything hot tastes good, whether freshly killed or poured out of a can.

I shared a large tent with Jacques O’Hara, the geologist and his assistant, an environmental science graduate from McGill. Our quarters were as spartan as the roughnecks’ but it was nice to have a mind to bounce things off of. Despite both being born-and-bred Québecois, only a generation removed from habitant life, neither Professor O’Hara nor his student knew anything of the folklore of the peoples who inhabited or, at least made seasonal use of our work site. Québecois culture is steeped in native lore, intensely syncretic as Catholic colonial cultures invariably are, but the moraines of the Côte-Nord’s interior were isolated from the development of classic Québecois settlement by barriers more daunting than walls or borders, and so, whatever myths the Montagnais who fished and hunted the taiga might tell about it, they would not have entered into the common stock of French-Canadian folklore. I decided not to bring up what I’d been told in the Wabush bar.

Over the next two days, our partly made excellent progress collecting soil and rock cores, more than a few of which, when subjected to our crude field tests, indicated a promise for future oil and gas developments. Moreover, notwithstanding the innumerable tamarack bogs which dotted the landscape, these were nowhere great in extent and could be drained, since the water and granite only thinly covered the granite bedrock – a perfect substrate for a pipeline or freight railway.

Disquietingly, I found myself called upon on account of my qualifications as a biologist, there being no medical doctor or nurse on the team. Nobody was overtly sick, but three or four of the men had been experiencing sensations of fatigue and listlessness, unaccountable in light of their otherwise excellent health and the relatively moderate work and conditions, considering what and where oilmen’s work is. Whether by progressive action or because they simply became brave enough to admit it, soon a third of the men had reported similar problems. These complaints never extended beyond that population however, to indicate the nature or source of the affliction. I ruled out the food and water, since those were the sale for all of us, and anything infectious would have spread. Stymied, I prescribed more sleep and coffee on waking, trusting that we had enough time and government grant money that a small decline in our team’s efficiency wouldn’t matter.

On the third night, we heard the whistling. I say whistling, because it was a stormy, albeit dry night, and there was nothing to persuade any of us out of the assumption that it was the wind…which, incidentally, shot between the drumlins with enough velocity that, as I huddled with book and flashlight in my sleeping bag, I proposed to Professor Moffat that we might want to construct a shack, which we could do as we had some prefab supplies and there was plenty of wood around. If this was going to be the normal weather of the season, our tents would prove inadequate. I know, intellectually, that there’s not much danger in the wind collapsing a tent on you, but, regardless, I was uncomfortable with the prospect of having our temporary homes destroyed in the middle of a pitch-dark night.

On the fourth day, the McGill student pulled up a core from the bedrock that was such that we didn’t bother testing it before we decided that an urgent cable must be dispatched to Ottawa. The core sample cylinder was oily as a fried sausage. First, we attempted to transmit a message via radio. Despite there being relay stations at Wabush, if not southwards over the moraine, we could neither transmit nor receive any signal. Hiking to the top of the drumlin didn’t help and we decided amongst ourselves that some quirk of the local geology must be responsible. The satellite phone, expensive as it was, fared no better, although we reminded ourselves that none of us was very experienced in its operation. Reluctantly, we called it a night.

By the fifth day, no one troubled about the lethargy that gripped about a third – and never more than a third – of the team. After all, with the continued failure of our communications devices, there was a perfect excuse to get back down south for R & R. There being nothing relaxing about sitting in a tent in a frigid wilderness, I busied myself trying to create work for myself. After the excitement of that first arrowhead, I had failed to find a single Native American artifact of significance, though I was keen on it, since the flora and fauna offered absolutely nothing of interest…except, a nagging feeling argued, for their lack of anything exciting. It was a confounding Catch-22: an area so seldom visited by hunters ought to have been turning with the sorts of game long since slaughtered or pressured out of habitats nearer to civilization. Likewise, a place so far from civilization, and nestled conveniently ambiguously near the ill-policed borders of the backwater sections of two provinces was a natural draw for hunters, legal or otherwise. That solitary deer, a prowling fox, and scattered flocks of migratory geese aside, I could not recall seeing any vertebrates at all in the vicinity of camp. Did the petroleum deposits below the surface impart a toxic quality to the vegetation? Yet the oilsands at Athabaska possess rich ecologies…During my promenade on the reverse slope of the drumlin opposite the one on the flank of which we’d pitched our camp, I spotted a rabbit or woodchuck burrow (the two species might of course use dens made by the other). I waited, but no rabbit came out, nor did making noise at the mouth of the burrow cause its inhabitants to emerge at an alternate entrance. The forbes growing in front of the hole were compacted, indicating the passage of a body of some weight – more likely a woodchuck than a rabbit – probably no earlier than that morning. I took my entrenching tool from my backpack and carefully dug atop the tunnel, acting on the knowledge that burrowing mammals often collect small human-made objects and despot them in their homes. These four-legged hoarders often save us scholars precious time searching and digging, through they may cost us many times that in the office as we try to decipher the mishmashed eras and sources of the jumbled items. Unfortunately, the soggy, stony earth did not hold its shape well, and an entrenching tool and enthusiasm are no substitutes for real shovels and layered excavation grids. I soon lost track of the passages as the burrow collapsed in on itself, never having ascertained the identity of its occupants. I managed to scrounge up a couple of small objects, although they were so caked with dirt that they would have to await washing off at camp before identification could be attempted. On the way back, I noted the tracks of a moose, which, as a keystone species, was an important observation, but I was too tired and the sun was too low on the horizon for me to try to follow the tracks.

At supper, the mood was better than it had been the previous nights. We…intellectuals were confident that our energy-mad backers would reward us as they never would for our scholarship, and the roughnecks foresaw another resource boom which they could eat, drink and lech through, saving them from seeking employment as roofers and factory temps in Toronto or Vancouver. The McMaster student (for the life of me, I can’t remember their name) actually believed he’d accomplished something of service to the country. After an unaccustomedly large meal, I took an enamel basin and rinsed off the objects I’d pocketed on my walk earlier. Taking them inside, to examine them by the light of the Coleman lantern, every one proved to be an item fabricated by human hands. This was not in itself odd. Rodents, corvids and other animals routinely take an interest in objects alien to their environment and give them pride of place in adorning their nests. What fascinated me about them was the variety of the periods and origins they represented and the inexplicability of their all being found together. Let me enumerate some examples: gilded metal buttons, French, military, from the time of Louis XV. A copper pipe-bowl, likely a Native trade good, indeterminate date but probably French from the heyday of the fur trade. The cap of a Sheaffer fountain pen circa John F. Kennedy and a flattish carved bead, fashioned from a material whose identity I’d not speculate, but which was neither bone nor horn, nor the tooth of a cetacean, and whose plausible date would have made me dizzy if I dared to contemplate it. These things I recorded in my journal. I could explain neither how they came to be where found or where they were probably initially acquired. Oh, sure, small odds and ends of clothing and personal items, you might say; we lose these things all the time in modern society as well. Fair enough, but in five days of surveying the glacial till – digging it, poking it – we had found no remains of tents, or lean-tos, let alone shacks or cabins left by the sorts of men who could have worn or made the objects in question.

The kerosene flame bred many questions. It answered none. Anyhow, I was hungry.

You’d expect men doing manual labour to have hearty appetites for all kinds of gross delicacies that would turn the stomach of the man who works in a heated office and you’d be correct. Most of us fell like starving hogs upon the drop biscuits, stewed prunes, corned beef hash, and margarine-soaked half-burnt toast et cetera, but Jim and the McGill student were abstemious, which was all the more surprising since theodolites are cumbersome things to lug around and chipping rocks and boring soil cores isn’t exactly light work. The workmen were mostly too busy stuffing their bellies to care. The guys on either side of Jim proffered him choice morsels, as though pointing with their forks would cause him to eat that which he could easily reach with his own. Like me, they chalked it up to illness. His stomach wasn’t used to the kinds of quantities of food necessitated by the North Country. He did seem out of sorts, like one does who is suffering a mild fever. My attention was soon drawn more to the geologist, O’Hara, however. He didn’t say anything, besides a perfunctory wish for recovery and a humble boast about all the work they had done that afternoon. The man’s body language, on the other hand…he was sitting stiff as the table; from his facial expression, he might as well have been a husband in divorce court, forced by the judge to keep his mouth shut while his soon-to-be-ex-wife gives her teary-eyed spiel to the courtroom. It didn’t make a damn bit of sense. Of course, I mentioned the artifacts I’d found in the rabbit burrow, but the consensus, if anyone was listening, was that typical ‘pack rat’ behaviour, common to many small mammals and birds, was responsible. In light of the species of animals that could have made or occupied the burrow, this required a stretch of the imagination, which we all tried to make. I began to think of the objects I’d left behind in the burrow…

Before we turned in for the night, I asked O’Hara about the student’s odd behaviour; if maybe we should call in a bush plane to evacuate him, since we didn’t have the means to look after anybody who was really sick, especially if it was catching (Jim was robust enough nobody worried for him). O’Hara was non-committal. Either way, freezing rain that started around 9:00 pm put aside any chance of a plane coming.

The night was worse than any of the previous. If – IF – you’ve ever been camping in cold weather, you’d know how, in otherwise tolerable temperatures, rain and dampness can penetrate your tent and suffuse your sleeping bag and coat, and the fire, unless it’s a huge proper campfire, will seem pathetically small. Before you say, ‘oh, it’s the woods, such it up,’ ehhh…it’s one thing to curl up sick in your own bed, but if you come down with a flu or fever out out in the real wilderness, it’s no joke. You should be afraid. It was me, O’Hara and the student in the tent. None of us talked but none of us could sleep, either. O’Hara was passing the time reading, with his back turned to me in his sleeping bag. The student glumly watched the tent flap, which looked out obliquely down the slop and at the tail of the drumlin opposite. Occasionally, thunder, or echoes like thunder, rumbled over the taiga. Bored and irritable, I scooted over to sit beside the student, who was an old hand in the woods, though he was no older than my PhD candidates.

“Usually in Toronto – actually in most places I’ve been, thunderstorms are a summer phenomenon,” I said by way of conversation. “But, then, we don’t have the Northern Lights, either.”

There was a contemplative frown on the student’s face; what’s more, there was a trembling in his eyes that should have sent chills down the spine of anyone who knew how unnatural that emotion was in his type which, despite the bookish veneer, was born and raised in a rural town of clapboard houses and apple orchards before he went off to university on a scholarship. “It isn’t – doesn’t happen this time of year in places like this, neither. It’s not supposed to, not that I’ve ever seen. Should still be getting snow, instead.”

“Snow?”

“Sorry, I was thinking…there’s a ski resort in my hometown. The snow makes a funny sound when there’s about to be an avalanche. The locals can always tell. I dunno about you, but this doesn’t sound like a thunderstorm at all to me. It sounds like the snow and ice, rumbling away just before there’s gonna be an avalanche…but there’s not enough snow for that…is there?”

“You think maybe we should have pitched our tents higher up? The wind’s not so bad tonight, and it’s not like we’re obligated by law. Could always just…move it, eh?”

But none of us really wanted to pack up and reset the tent a few metres higher up the ridge, regardless of whether the ground might be a bit dryer. We had staked one tent on a mini plateau of soft earth, because it was easier to drive the stakes (yes, the tent I slept in), and I was mildly envious of the others who had taken the extra time and effort to secure their own tents on the exposed rock, which you obviously can’t just hammer those yellow plastic pegs into. “Right,” I couldn’t neglect to ask, “If it’s not thunder, and we don’t have enough snow for an avalanche, you don’t think, what is it?”

The student was startled. “It’s a thunderstorm. Different latitude; a-seasonal weather patterns. Yeah.” This was unusually technical, compared to his habitual diction. He wanted that I should take him seriously.

I half-heartedly speculated about the importance of our research, which was essentially complete, but it required too much effort for either of us to connect sealed tubes of dirt and alphanumerically labelled rock chips with commuters grumbling slightly less at the pumps. After a few minutes of what must have been deliberate stalling on his part, the student gazed, with the eyes of an unarmed hunter – though he had a shotgun propped just inside the doorway – across the drumlin, up the pale, smooth oval of granite, brighter than the rainy sky surrounding it; up to the ridge where meagre black feathers of larch and spruce tethered the hard, stingy soil with the purple sky. We both absentmindedly drew our jackets close about the collar. Then he hit me with a question: “Not that it’s my business,” he asked with unaccustomed deference, “But you’re writing a paper after this, right? About what we’re doing out here?”

“Yes, well, I intend to. Not sure about it, at this point, though.”

“Fair enough. But you know a lot about, you know, the wildlife, plants, and how places…natural places I mean…how they change over time?”

“You could say that.”

“You heard they say we are headed for another Ice Age, right? I saw a documentary a while ago, with that guy who played Spock from Star Trek. It wasn’t a show though, it was science; there’s a lot of evidence for it. Would that lead to changes in the kinds of animals you see in which places? Changes we could see already?”

“It would, if it were true, but just because Leonard Nimoy on TV says…”

“So that might cause, say, a seal to come down into…like, these areas?” Doubting himself in the same breath, “Still, that’s a long way, and it was an especially cold winter, but the nearest seals are hundreds of miles away…”

“Excuse me, seals?”

“Umm, yeah, seals. I can’t say what kind. Not a big one, though.”

“What?!?”

“Tell you, Doc, I’ve seen every kind of animal in the Bush; hunted most of ‘em, but I never ran into a seal before.”

“You sure? I mean, a seal…What – when was this?” I smelt the air attentively for traces of alcohol fumes.

“Huh, okay, maybe it wasn’t a seal. But that’s what it looked like.”

“When was this?”

“Two nights ago.”

“Two nights ago?!?”

“Yeah. Before you ask, I hadn’t been drinking.” I hadn’t asked, but the thought occurred to me. “I was tired, though; dead tired. And I thought maybe I was seeing things. It wasn’t even nighttime yet; maybe four, five in the afternoon. We were taking down the frame around one of the drills and I’d gone into some bushes to take a leak, right where the slope meets the bottom, eh, and, I dunno, I just looked around like how you do and I noticed it there. Well, I didn’t notice it at first. It’s just my eyes were looking that way, and it was a clump of shadows beside some boulders and a spruce tree, except it moved up, not side to side, like something swaying in the wind would. And it moved too much, and that’s what made me notice it. I wasn’t a hundred percept sure it was an animal, until it opened its eyes.”

“How far away was this thing from you?”

“About…” he gauged the slope. “Seventy, eighty feet? If it was closer, maybe it’s not as big, but…I was tired…and nervous, and its eyes were red.”

“Red?”
“Like when you shine a flashlight in the dark, on the edge of the forest outside your car on the highway sometimes. I didn’t have a flashlight on me, though. It was like they made the light themselves. Anyhow, it was probably because I was surprised; didn’t expect to see it.”

“The ‘seal,’ you mean?”

“I was…mistaken. Never mind,” he enunciated carefully, breathing so as not to compete with the sounds of the wild.

The rain had thinned to a fine-droplet drizzle, and I could be sure enough to sleep, knowing we weren’t about to get washed away in a landslide, so I forgot the desire to relocate to higher, dryer ground. But I would not sleep just then. ‘Pleasure’ is the wrong word for it, but there’s something about sitting cross-legged, preferably on a slightly elevated spot, just thinking, taking everything in, meditating. The Tibetans understand. The fakirs of the Indian subcontinent certainly get it. However, our industrial culture has, until recently, quite literally busied itself with ignorance.

I thought about the disparate objects I’d plucked from the ground and how the dense carpet of sedges and rhododendrons might easily hide a thousand times as many from view. Perhaps even post-holes or charred fire pots related to the hunters who fashioned that arrowhead of green chert that so closely resembled Aborigine spearpoints from half a world away, which no one would ever learn about because their culture happened to have existed in places far outside the zones of major European settlement – nothing more than names on a map until centuries after smallpox and typhoid had scoured the landscape of its inhabitants. The very emptiness of the land led me to muse about what I might discover were I to return with more funding. The ecology is the key…yet what ecology was there to speak of? There was clearly the odd large ungulate passing through, but in spite of the lack of hunters and the untrammelled abundance of forage, it was as if the ecosystem had been cut off at the lower and topmost trophic levels, with no hare, nor grouse, ptarmigan, voles or shrews, nor martins or weasels to prey on them. Nor, I reflected, had I seen a hawk in the sky. The words of the old Indian in the bar in Wabush came back to me and I debated with myself whether he had told his tale of bad places and ill-fated prospectors out of drunkenness or whether he drank to forget something peculiar about these frigid barrens.

I could see it in the student, too. Something gave him the creeps, as well, but neither of us said a thing because neither of us had any idea what it was…the exact same quality of the light and texture, like the landscapes painted by Andrew B. Phin, that draw you in with their quaintness as you study them in the hall after leaving the washroom, then suck you into a world of depressive gloom and well-concealed sin that weighs on you like cold lead as you rejoin your host and, hopefully, other guests in a house or cottage you will never visit again. I had an inkling that made me want to run – no, jump into a helicopter – a sickening thought that I was about to be confronted with the source of the soul-crushing gloom of the painting in the cottage hallway. But nothing happened. There was the rain, and the whistling wind; across the gulch I saw an owl, Strix varus, I reckon, for I saw only the silohuette, perched atop a boulder below a half-skeletonized spruce. The poor creature was probably hoping that the unexpected rain upon the thin, poorly-drained soil would drive a vole or shrew from its den. Shivering myself, I figured it, too, must have been hungry and cold, for it swayed and bobbed on its perch; it must have clambered down and hopped up on the other side of the tree trunk, because it emerged there and I never saw it take flight. But owls, unless one is talking about the long-legged burrowing owls of the prairies, don’t hop about or even walk for transit. There must have been two of them, suffering equally from the cold and starvation. There is no morality in a food chain, but I found myself wishing that something – preferably a pair of rodents – would scurry out so that the unfortunate hunters might have a feast. Since they didn’t make any moves, I supposed the wish went unfulfilled. And…this seems somehow like a bad omen, after later events – I never saw them take wind and leave, although there was nowhere to conceal them, the trees being short and sparse.

“It’s embarrassing. They understand loyalty better than we humans do. A good reason never to get married.” I remember joking to the student. He seemed confused as if he hadn’t seen what I’d seen at all. I told myself it was good the expedition was coming to an end. I couldn’t put my finger on it, because we hadn’t really done much arduous work, besides the guys drilling the cores and the cook, nor had the weather conditions been truly harsh, at least by the standards of northern Quebec. Regardless, something had worn down the mental fortitude of a good portion of the team and it was getting to me, too.

I didn’t sleep much. Ehh, if you only understood, God, that it is normal – you should expect it – that you can ‘read’ the history of a place, whether a fish pond or Amerindian village, in the environment. Like a forensic detective reconstructing a chain of events from evidence. I’m talking both human and animal aspects of things. The great empty spaces on our maps are, as a rule, the richest in species diversity; the most teeming with life – empty of Man, full of everything else. Yet, there, which is still an empty space on the map…Ugh! As sleep overtook me, my mind lost its logical bearings. As you know, I have spent time in some of the world’s most inhospitable regions, full of venomous and predatory wildlife, virulent diseases, and dangerous politics. One assesses the danger and prepares accordingly. It felt…and I know this doesn’t make sense…it felt as though the land itself had it out for us.

Not the taiga, or Quebec; this specific spot…and all the while I hadn’t glimpsed so much as a paw print of anything that could kill a man, and the weather conditions had been annoying, at worst. I was sure – don’t ask me how – that the very hills and berry bushes and scraggly spruces were conspiring towards our doom. You remember what I said, about the Cree having stories about hunting bears the size of longhouses, with ‘arms’ growing out of their faces, though they’d never seen an elephant? Think, too, how the Kwakiut’l out in BC were carving animal masks that looked almost human but for the prognathous jaw, pouting lips, absense of a nose and copious hair. Since that was in later times, ‘experts’ dismissed them as depictions of mythical beings – oh, just like their representations of ravens, bears, eagles and orcas, I guess! — because the non-literate shellfish-gatherers could have had no concept of ‘ape’ or ‘monkey.’ You will be incredulous as I tell you that there was an entire town in Alaska – Portlock? — that was abandoned due to harassment and attacks on residents by large, hairy bipeds. If you assumed it was an old fur trappers’ or prospectors’ tale, I should mention that Portlock was a cannery town, manufacturing food for the war effort. And before you say ‘bears,’ bears don’t throw rocks or bludgeon men to death with logging equipment. We can accept that the Bengalee cannot effectively farm the Sundarbans because of the presence of tigers, despite it being a century since modern repeating firearms were introduced into the country. I reflected on the fact that, whatever technology we possessed, the capacity of our small band of men to control a hostile force in that environment, beyond the northernmost fringe of agriculture, was minimal. We made hardly more formidable prey than…my thoughts turned to the artifacts I’d found…hardly more formidable prey than some 18^th century Frenchman with a musket and hunting knife, or a turn-of-the-century prospector with his black powder revolver. Our flesh was certainly no less succulent…

Think of it! The improbability of sheer coincidence having kept the efficient, destructive hand of Homo europaeus away for so long…The old man in the Wabush bar had been laughing, not because he was drunk, but because he knew something and we city-slickers, with all our degrees and diplomas were blundering into…for the life of us I couldn’t remember what it was we were warned to stay clear of. Sleep got me but not before I decided that we, or at least I, was leaving the next day and if I could not build much of a report on a pile of buttons and pipe-bowls, well, too bad.

From a scientific perspective, I attach little significance to dreams. Under normal conditions, we can dismiss them once the day’s activities have begun in earnest, as the projections of the previous day’s thoughts and experiences, fermented and distilled by the imagination. I don’t claim that my nocturnal reveries that night belonged to a different category, but, night in the cold, star-spangled darkness hundreds of miles from the nearest city, is a different thing from the same in a comfortable modern house surrounded by millions of (mostly) sane, peaceable fellow citizens. Our internal censorship bureau remains active, but its verdicts are much less convincing.

I dreamed – it’s almost shameful to sound like I put stock in this – I dreamed that I was in a small boat, either a canoe or a rowboat of some rough beige material. There were bundles of goods onboard, but, for whatever reason, I felt no desire to inspect them. My coat was also a dull greyish beige, with heavy blue cuffs, and I felt a warm hat upon my head, but I never looked into a mirror. I ‘knew’ – nothing or noone in the dreams said this, but I knew it as by intuition – that it was my job to paddle as far as we could go, taking three or four of the swarthy rough-looking fellows paddling alongside me with me into the lands beyond for a mile or two, leaving the others to make camp. I did not know what I would find, but if I found it, we would stay longer. If not, we would paddle back the way we came. From the context, it must have been beaver we were hunting, but, then, it wasn’t real. The terrain was identical to that which we were actually encamped in. Despite the historical aspect of everyone’s clothes and the canoe, the scrawny forest and rhododendron-covered slopes were no more ‘primeval’ in appearance, although because the sun set on our left, we must have been approaching from the south, not from Labrador. There was a storm, and my small party’s journey of half a league’s distance became a convoluted trek as we exhausted ourselves zig-zagging among similar looking ridges, dry stream beds and spruce and alder groves. Eventually, in the side of a teardrop-shaped hill we found a spot where, sheltered from wind, the trees had grown to more substantial height and breadth, and a cut in the hillside – not quite a cave – offered some shelter for us and a small fire. The storm raged all night. Though we managed to stay warm and dry and were beat to death with fatigue, none of us slept. No man could sleep, hearing those sounds: a strange, whooping whistle. It wasn’t loud but it asserted itself through the wind and rain as if on purpose, to remind us that we are not the masters here. Henri – somehow I knew that he was ‘Henri’ – was frantic, tugging at my collar as I fought for rest. He was yelling something about les yeux, the eyes; le chouan, and the stones, like a preacher on a downtown streetcorner. I slapped him with a gloved hand, as I was entitled to do. When he did not stop, I moved to draw my sword, such was my fury, but…then I saw them myself. First on the hillside, then on the ridge, appearing and disappearing. Red eyes, which glowed – they couldn’t have been reflecting light because we had none. Then, amid what I’d taken to be the outline of a hummock or boulders, they appeared much closer, among the sedges and rocks of the dry streambed in front of us. All the while there was no sign of anything walking or flying towards us. They simply appeared. I tried to make out what manner of creature they belonged to, but it was hopeless. Sometimes they appeared disembodied in the utter blackness, but in one or two instances, there was a silhouette around them, not unlike that of an earless owl or a Scottish fold cat when perched and alert. How big they were – I couldn’t say, depending on if the outline was of one of the creature’s heads or its whole body, but, not very big. I naturally associated them with the whooping and whistling that had scared us…I took a blunderbuss and fired a shot wildly and the eyes and whistling disappeared, but none of us could be at peace, knowing that the beings – whatever they were – lurked around us. At the crack of dawn, we ran and stumbled back to camp to warn the others and flee south immediately. I don’t remember what we found.

After a dream like that, understandably, I woke up in a bit of a bad humour. I was astonished by my watch, which showed it past 8:30 in the morning. Amazingly, O’Hara and the McGill student were still asleep in their bags, as if none of our alarm clocks had gone off. Not being a jerk, I let them sleep and went to go get coffee for myself. The earth was a sponge beneath my boots. The rain had continued all night. I saw that a clump of people had gathered at the tents lower down, on the rocks. Pushing my way through, I asked but got no answer. A second later, I saw they could hardly have provided one. The expedition leader (at least, he saw himself as that), Barney Moffat, was still in his sleeping bag. He was not alive. No inquest was done, but I’ll speak for everyone when I say it’s better to search for your oil elsewhere and leave that God-forsaken snow-desert to itself. I don’t think the expedition’s report included photographs. We didn’t take any. But I can give you a fair description…

Do you garden? If so, do you grow tomatoes? If so, then, I assume you are familiar with the appearance of a nice, ripe beefsteak tomato which has been subject to depredation by M. quinquemaculata – the tomato hornworm? Well, imagine that, but the beefsteak tomato is the torso of a man. What’s more, when all was said and done, it appeared there was a hole in the tent floor as well and – mere coincidence – the tent had been set up atop a natural fissure of about six or seven inches in diameter, pierced through the granite bedrock. This, anyhow, was what we agreed upon in our report. We did not plumb the fissure to ascertain its depth, and, if you have sense, neither will you. Tell your boss that Alberta’s premier is a lucky man, and please forward my cheque to my account at the Bank of Montreal.

Regards,

Dr. G. H. Belzer”

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