Story: Why Not Strap Your Canoe to the Belly of a Beaver

As the pilot unstrapped our Kevlar canoe from the belly of his bush plane, it landed with a thud and a splash in the middle of the cold lake. His last, hardly reassuring words echoed in my mind: “if you’re not at the rendezvous point in six days, we’ll send someone.” It was only after the Beaver revved its engine and streaked out of the water that I truly comprehend the magnitude of our aloneness. My then-boyfriend and I, in the vast middle of a wilderness lake in far northern Ontario—no road, no radio, no people.

Five days on, I know many things. I know that super lightweight Kevlar weighs a ton by the end of a two mile portage. I know beavers can render even high resolution maps useless. I know that rabbits will steal hot mitts, and the razor-like teeth of Northern Pike slice right through a 20 pound test line. I also know that the fading red pictographs on the sheer granite walls of certain magical lakes glow at sunset.

That’s why we’d come: to witness some of the most remote, most beautiful rock art in one of the most beautiful settings the world has to offer. The scarlet image of a mighty Thunderbird, supernatural storm being of Great Lakes Indian teachings. A crimson animal with long antlers and short tail that might have been a deer or an elk or a moose. A red human figure with ruby arms outstretched toward the heavens. Profiles of nine paddlers in a peaked bow and stern canoe. These and other simple outline drawings in red ocher—mineral pigment dug from the earth and ground to powder—dot the steep granite walls of this long and astonishing lake.

Before and during the European fur trade, it was probably small groups of Cree that paddled these northern lakes and rivers, moving camp with the changing of the seasons. As our lightweight Kevlar bobs in the water and I focus my camera, I picture a birchbark canoe of Cree travelers bobbing beside me, hundreds of years earlier, stretching out colored fingers and leaving their painted red thoughts and self-portraits on these sheer granite cliffs. Did they depict an image honoring Thunderbird in hopes of warding off a pending storm whose wrath could have crushed the very birchbark on which they sat?

Like other Great Lakes groups, the Cree were active participants in the fur trade. While mink and fox and marten were all trapped, it was beaver that drove it all. Felt hats made from beaver pelts were all the rage for European gentleman from the 16th to 19th centuries: top hats, bowler hats, tri-corner hats, even many ladies hats were made from the pelts of the North American beaver. Like other Native Americans of the time, the Cree trapped and skinned and hauled and traded furs for the goods that only Europeans had: woolen blankets, bright cotton fabrics, knives and axes and kettles of brass and copper and iron, and alluringly beautiful blue glass beads. Of course it was the beaver who paid the price—hunted nearly to extinction, traders leap-frogged ever deeper into the continent for fresh trapping grounds.

We pitch our camp near the lakeshore, on a gentle tongue of land. Again we fish for our supper—tasty walleye on the menu this evening, a welcome change from the bony and ubiquitous Northern Pike. The sun dips below the flat curve of the earth, and the tall spires of spruce blacken in the dusky foreground. A thin cloak of mist descends over the placid surface of the lake, and the flames of our campfire flicker against specks of quartz in the cliffs beside us. A mysterious place, eerie only because our cacophonous urban lives are unaccustomed to such intense stillness. A charcoal sky filled with bright glitter; the dancing pale green silence of northern lights. The crackle of burning wood; the long guttural call of a loon; the crescendo of a slowly waking owl; an inquisitive shadow moving quietly along the calm cool rock.

In the bright light and growing heat of morning we pack our Kevlar and continue downstream. We meander through a long glade of marshy cattail. We push and pull the Kevlar through a set of rapids we decide we should have portaged around. We eat a lunch of canned spam and crackers at the rocky edge of a tiny island. We paddle awhile alongside a moose swimming through the lake, glide past the ruins of an old trapper’s cabin, and discover yet more fading red pictographs on the long cliff face.

For all their beauty, pictographs are fragile. They grow fainter over time and soon vanish completely. Curious fingers and flash bulbs hasten their inevitable demise. Although Ontario provincial archaeologists have recorded these sites—location and motif on map, scale drawing and film—they will one day cease to exist on those sheer granite walls.

Six days after the Beaver dropped us in the middle of a lake in the vast northern center of nowhere, we hear civilization before we see it—the awful roar of a logging truck careening too fast down a narrow gravel road. We pass the scars of high tension lines that bring electricity to the tiny northern bush towns that are home to many Cree today. We are jolted from the world of loons and glittered skies and propelled once again into the world of clocks and engines. Our pick-up is waiting at the rendezvous point, and we drink cold beer from ice-chilled bottles and recount our adventures, even as that inquisitive shadow calmly retreats into the fading red and quiet sparkle of those sheer and distant granite cliffs.