It was obvious that this was the only sensible course of action, the huskies snarling and yelping at the ends of their chains, lips drawn back, teeth sharp and long. But Doug wasn’t known for doing what was sensible. He’d been the first to see the pack, each dog tethered outside its wooden house about fifty yards back of Nick’s cabin. With a cry of “Puppies!” Doug had run along the path to the animals, and they’d surged out to meet him, stopping only when their chains pulled them up short.
“They’re like wolves,” I said.
Nick nodded. “Sled dogs, boy. They ain’t pets. They do what I tell ’em cause they’re scared of me. The wife can calm ’em, and my daughter some. But any of us was standing in among ’em and fell down, well now...” He spat on the mossy ground. “...you could use what’s left to bait a hook.” Then he walked back to the cabin, leaving Doug, Ian, Jerry, and me watching the dogs warily. Rick, who was scared of dogs, looked on from farther back.
Nick’s cabin was on a piece of land carved out from the endless forest of jack pine, spruce, and fir at the point where the Moose and Abitibi Rivers merged. From there the Moose flowed on alone, quickening past Moosonee and Moose Factory until it emptied into James Bay. Moosonee was where we were heading, on a two-week canoe trip that was the greatest adventure we’d had in our short lives. Seven of us were school kids, aged thirteen, like Jerry and me, to sixteen, like Doug and Rick, with whom I shared both canoe and tent. The other two were teachers, both keen and seasoned canoeists, who brought students out each summer for a wilderness education. Mr. Walker organized and led the trips, and Mr. Bishop, whom everyone called Bish, was second in command.
When I think back on it now, it seems unlikely that parents would let their children do such a thing these days. It was different back in 1970, long before cell phones and GPS. We set off without a life jacket among us. Nobody’s parents seemed to mind. They were told where we were going and when we’d be back, and that was that. We’d go days without seeing another person. There was nothing but the forest, so dense that you knew it’d take you only a few minutes to get lost for good.
The food was mostly freeze-dried because packets were easier to lug on portage than cans. The stuff tasted awful, though, and I imagine everybody was as hungry as I was most of the time.
There were a few tins. Mr. Walker would pack Irish stew as a special treat, and there’d be a couple of cans of syrup, doled out sparingly on pancakes. And there was always tinned ham.
Once, a bad storm blew up and kept us stuck in our tents for twenty-four hours. We huddled inside listening to the rain and the flapping canvas. There was no way to cook, so Mr. Walker gave each of the three tents a tinned ham and a tinned pound cake. I never could stand tinned ham with the slimy jelly that covered it. No matter how hungry I was, I wouldn’t eat that. I auctioned my share off, Doug paying me a quarter for it, and I survived the day on my piece of pound cake. I was glad to have the money because every so often we came across a fly-in fishing camp and we stocked up on candy then, dipping into the small amount of tuck money that each of us was allowed. An extra twenty-five cents offered increased possibilities. I didn’t want to be caught short when we got to Moosonee, either, where we could eat what we wanted. Everybody must have had the same images in their minds: feasts of hamburgers, French fries, milkshakes, and chocolate bars.
Cash aside, the whole storm episode was thrilling. We talked about the Maple Leafs and the Argonauts, speculated about girls — although Doug did so with the conviction that spoke of applied knowledge — and shared ghost stories and dirty jokes that I laughed at, although I didn’t always understand. Besieged by the lightning and thunder and the determined wind, we were united by the heady blend of the knowledge that disaster could strike at any second and the certainty that all would be fine. Good as the storm was, though, it wasn’t a patch on the bears.