Alone Against the North Read Online Free PDF Page A

exhausted the published record and finding next to nothing, I resolved to explore this mysterious river, of which no one apparently knew much of anything. Whether someone had canoed the river and left no record of their journey was of course no concern of mine. My objective was simple enough: to make the first detailed exploration of and substantial published account on the Again River in history. The idea alone—the first in history—was positively intoxicating.
    While there were no written records to assist me in my planned exploration of the river, maps and satellite images were available. These enabled me to plan a provisional route through half-a-dozen lakes, partially down a parallel river, up a nameless creek, and then overland to reach the Again’s isolated headwaters. It was a circuitous and difficult route that would entail upstream travel and nightmarish portages through presumably impenetrable swamp forest. Of course, nothing less could be expected. Topographic maps, however, can still be inaccurate or incomplete. Waterfalls and rapids might be omitted; streams that are drawn on the map might not actually exist. This, I knew, could well prove the case with the Again River.
    What I did know about the Again, on the basis of blurry, low-resolution satellite images and old topographic maps derived from black-and-white aerial photographs snapped in the late 1950s, was that it measured some 107 kilometres in length. It wasn’t surprising that the Again had attracted little attention: it’s too small and marginal to be of much interest to most wilderness canoeists, particularly since the Hudson and James Bay watershed contains many dozens of larger, more navigable waterways. For example, the Albany, the longest river in the Hudson Bay Lowlands, extends over a thousand kilometres. I could be certain that the blackflies and other bloodsucking insects would be horrible, since the Again snakes across the southern reaches of the world’s third-largest wetland, the Hudson Bay Lowlands. In terms of political geography, the Again meanders back and forth across the artificial Ontario–Quebec boundary, with a total of approximately 63 kilometres of the river within Ontario and 44 within Quebec. I could tell from the black-and-white aerial photos and topographic maps that I would encounter many rapids. The river might also possibly contain waterfalls, but how big and dangerous they were as well as their precise location were unknown.
    My intention was to make the expedition as comprehensive as possible. The primary objective was geographical: I would make the first published description of the river, creating a canoeing guide of the sort that exists for other wilderness waterways. I would also keep a record of the wildlife I encountered and, with luck, photograph them. There was also the mystery of the Eskimo curlew to consider, a rare bird believed to have gone extinct. The last confirmed sighting of thismedium-sized brownish shorebird, a member of the sandpiper family, had been in the 1960s. But there had been an unconfirmed sighting in 1976 by an ornithologist in southern James Bay, an area I intended to pass through after exploring the Again. In terms of archaeological exploration, I would keep an eye out for any artifacts that could shed light on the unwritten history of the river. Ancient pictographs and petroglyphs—rock paintings and carvings—were a speciality of my academic research. Finally, I would make what inquiries I could in the Cree communities on James Bay concerning the existence of the Again River to ascertain as far as possible if any individuals there knew anything of it.
    Finding this little-known river and exploring it was a chance for adventure and old-fashioned discovery, or so I hoped.
    A FEW MONTHS LATER I was in a pickup truck, travelling along a bumpy gravel road, winding through monotonous boreal forest, heading toward the point where I would leave civilization