That apart, a wonderful book, the tale of a canoe journey north to Nueltin Lake, more or less in the Arctic, more or less on the 60th parallel, in the summer of 1939, just about the time when war was breaking out in Europe. A time before the conveniences of modern canoeing & camping life had been invented and when the serious traveler had to be prepared for some seriously hard work and some serious discomfort, not least from the thick swarms of biting insects one attracted. To the point where Downes agreed with his companion for most of the trip that in the event of a serious accident to one the other was to abandon him. Out on the margins there was no help to be had and nothing much to be done - and no point in one taking the other down with him.
The terrain, say to the north of the splendidly named mining town of Flin Flon, was covered with lakes large and small. There were canoe routes threading their way through this lot, but on the ground they could be very hard to find. Which kink of the lake shore was the river, out of the hundreds of kinks available? One could spend a lot of time searching. And when you found the river you might be going upstream or downstream, but either way there would be plenty of rapids and worse. Sometimes you would chance it - bearing in mind that loss of canoe & stores could quite likely prove fatal - and stay on the water. Sometimes you would carry canoe & stores around the obstacle, a carry round - aka portage - which might be a mile or more long and which might be over very rough & unpleasant ground. At which point one wonders about the strength of the attraction which drew people to put up with it all, people who did not have to, unlike the indigines. Presumably not so very different from whatever it is which pulls people up high mountains and into other icy wastes.
Downes managed all this with no more than feeble maps - some hand drawn from memory - and a compass. No mention of the sextants carried by our chaps down in the Antarctic, many of whom had a naval and so sextant background. I associate to the other puzzle, of people more or less freezing to death in atrocious conditions but still managing to take and compute their star sights - this before the invention of calculators, let alone satnav.
To my surprise, it seems that a lot of the forest, up near the edge of the tree line, was burnt out, the result of summer fires set by lightning. One was, for a fair bit of the time, paddling through scorched earth.
I was rather pleased, having been bothered by the wind on our very modest little canoe journey on Simon Pond, far to the south, that canoeists up north were often wind bound and had to wait it out on the lake shore until the wind died down.
Despite the wilderness, they were not, however, completely alone. There was a sprinkling of whites, mainly traders or trappers, Crees, Chipewyans and Eskimos. Crees to the south, Eskimos to the north and the Chipewyans in between, with three languages and with none of the three groups getting on very well with the other two. Downes and his companion did not usually go many days without bumping into someone or other - but maybe they had chosen their route with that in mind. And it was long enough ago for the old customs to still be more or less intact - even if some of them had moved up from paddles to outboard motors.
One thing which all three groups really liked was gambling. To the south the Crees had learned about poker but the rest of them played an ancient version of spoof - a game I was taught maybe 20 years ago when the East Street King's Arms still had a public bar, and which I used to play intermittently for some years after. The Canadian version was usually played to the beat of a drum, with the beat picking up as the night wore on, as the excitement mounted. The stakes, I think, were sometimes large: dogs, canoes, wives, in fact, anything to hand.
A splendid book, a wonderful amalgam of travel story, nature, geology and anthropology notes. And he does not come across as being in the least condescending about the subjects of these last; he really seems to get on with, like and be liked by them. Even spoke the lingos a bit.
With the book much better than the raw diaries on which they were mainly based, if the small sample at the end is anything to go by. One needs a bit of craft to make the diaries into a story; it doesn't just happen all by itself. A worthy addition to my small collection of books about the aforementioned icy wastes.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/dalhousie.html.
Reference 2: gmaps 60.185234,-99.599304 (but you might need to zoom out a bit to see anything of interest). While the mighty google does include lots of pictures of this still remote area, the map breaks down a bit in that some of the boundaries of some of the lakes are conventional, polygonal, rather than properly mapped. Maybe the story is that these lakes move around a lot as the the water level moves and it is not always clear where the lake stops and the land starts. But what the map does seem to show is the echo in the lakes of the movement, in times gone by, of the Laurentide Ice Sheet around the Hudson Bay.
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