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Kattawagami. Do you know it?”
    â€œAh, no. I’ve never heard of it. Where is it?”
    â€œJust a bit farther, roughly another twenty-four kilometres past the Kattawagami.” I knew this because I had measured the distance between the bridge over the Kattawagami and the creek via satellite image ahead of time, and then kept track of the distance on the truck’s odometer once we had passed the bridge.
    â€œFellas, I don’t know this creek, never heard of it. Not sure you guys should go down it. You should stick to the Kattawagami.” Terry was uneasy.
    But I had not come all that way to paddle the Kattawagami, a river plenty of other people had already paddled. The days when paddling something like it would satisfy me were long past. My father, on the other hand, had never canoed any northern river and was starting to become a bit alarmed at the sight of them, as we passed over each bridge on the road north.
    â€œMaybe we should just do the Kattawagami?” he suggested.
    I shook my head. “Let’s stick with our plan. We’re heading to the Again River.”
    â€œThe what river?”
    â€œThe Again. Have you heard of it?”
    â€œNo.” Terry shook his head.
    As we drove deeper into the seemingly endless spruce forest, a wandering black bear crossed the gravel road in front of us. “This is God’s country, I’ve never been this far down the road before,” muttered Terry.
    â€œKeep going,” I said to my father behind the wheel, “everything will be fine.” Fifteen minutes later, we reached a tiny creek shrouded in alder bushes and clouds of blackflies.
    â€œThis must be it,” I said with excitement. My father and Terry looked appalled.

    HUDSON BAY LOWLANDS
    It was raining as Terry drove away in the truck, leaving us by the narrow stream packing a cedar-strip canoe my father and I had made. Shallow and rocky, the creek was only a couple of paddle-widths across, but with a swift current. Amid an onslaught of blackflies, we set off down the dark, swirling waters of the stream into the unknown. It proved barely navigable—choked with rock-strewn rapids that made wading necessary much of the time. Scrubby black spruces and lichen-draped tamaracks hemmed in the waterway, while granite outcrops and boulders as tall as us appeared in places along the banks. It might almost have been called pretty, if not for the swampy muskeg that lay just beyond the fringe of forest skirting the banks and the dismal hum of millions of mosquitoes and blackflies swarming us, enjoying our blood. A gruelling, day-long struggle down the creek brought us to where it joined the swift-flowing Kattawagami River. By nightfall, we reached the shallow waters of a large, weedy lake. On this lake, isolated as it was, stood a lonely, ramshackle hunting cabin that appeared to have been untouched in years.
    For the next three days, we hacked, paddled, portaged, and waded through trackless alder swamps to leave the Kattawagami watershed behind. That was enough exploration for my father. He had nothing to prove to anyone—and to him, the Again River was just a meandering blue line on a map—not an ideal. As darkness fell on the third day, my father announced that he was calling it quits and wanted to turn around. I was disappointed but couldn’t force him to continue. So I had to content myself with having explored Hopper Creek and a certain nameless tributary river that we had ventured up, as well as the alderswamps. My father, in contrast, was cheerful enough with a more leisurely form of exploration around our camps at night. He looked at the hardy trees growing in the acidic soil with an engineer’s appreciation: “170 years old—remarkable,” he would say in a sort of reverie, after having meticulously counted the rings on another black spruce that had toppled over. In his notebook, he compiled a list of all the flora he found growing along