Readers may recall that in my first blog post, I mentioned my father, the erudite hermitic archaeologist, and promised to recount his Adventures in the Canadian North. Today, after he had finished cutting up bits of wood with a chain saw, I sat down and interviewed him over explosively strong coffee. We went on until my hand cramped, but this is an incomplete history- more will be coming shortly. The world he describes is already fading, but I hope to preserve these stories so that one day my children can read them and imagine a time when the glaciers hadn’t been paved over. I give you part one of Dave in The North, the chronicles of an intrepid little Scotsman in the Tundra.
In 1973, David, then only twenty-two but with four years of Ottawa-based archaeology under his belt, walked into an ugly brown building in Bells Corners which at that time held the offices of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and asked for a job. At that time, there wasn’t a lot else to it. He was to be doing field work – active research missions commonly called ‘digs’, unearthing and cataloguing old tools, bones, and remnants of houses, any evidence of the lifestyles of ancient indigenous groups.
Not long later, David drove from Ottawa to the Yukon, accompanied by Keith A, Carol M, Pamela G, Jeff H, Jeff L (known to all as ‘Ernie’, for no apparent reason), Dick and Heather M (David’s boss and his wife, newly married at a spectacularly drunken ceremony), and Heather’s nephew ‘wee Ian’. It took five or six days to reach Whitehorse to pick up supplies, and during that time the group read ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, which is a very very good road trip book. From Whitehorse, they boated across Kluane Lake to reach their Gladstone dig site. Kluane was mountainous and stunningly beautiful, with massive glaciers visible on the horizon.
Kluane Lake in high summer, at about 11:00 PM.
That summer was productive and fun, but not greatly eventful. Halfway through it David began to see double and had to be Medevac’d out at great cost. It turned out there was nothing wrong with him, except perhaps that the Tundra bug had bitten him – one summer would not be enough.
The second summer, the summer of 1974, was the summer of the bear.
Dubawnt is marked with a red dot. God, did you know there were that many lakes? There's millions.
This time, David went into the true Arctic, accompanied by Chuck A, Jane S, Midge and Brian G, their young children Charlotte (eight or nine) and Bruce (no more than two), and a pair of squeamish wildlife biologists. The team flew out to Baker Lake, where they chartered a semi-amphibious plane called a Grummond Goose , and flew it to Grant Lake, just north of Dubawnt Lake. Dubawnt Lake is massive, well north of the treeline, always somewhat frozen and completely uninhabited. Apart from two or three parties of canoes, the team encountered nobody at all.
In summer, canoe is still one of the best ways to get about up north.
At Grant Lake the team found a good, well-stratified research site (when material is stratified into distinct layers, rather than having been jumbled up, an archeologist can determine what period an artifact comes from much more easily). They camped half a mile from the site, for reasons nobody seems to have been clear on at the time, let alone after 30 years’ retrospect.
A photo from an actual research site at Grant Lake, acquired illegally from the Museum. Tell no-one.
At camp, they had a food tent, several sleep tents, and a radio tent with a WWII-vintage radio, set up on top of a hill in hopes of getting an elusive signal. Cooking was done with a naptha-burning Coleman stove, and a hole dug down to the permafrost yielded basic refridgeration. Food was a concern, since the nearest town was god knows how far away. The group lived mostly off canned or preserved meats – David remembers an entire Prosciutto, which was an unfamiliar object at the time – as well as canned butter and bacon, jam, and bannock. In later years, when David’s dig teams had Inuit members (Inuit have carte blanche to hunt up north), they would supplement their food supplies with caribou, who often wandered into camp in small herds, dazed by the flies.
I think my dad may have taken this picture. Not sure.
Northern Canadian summers are plagued by millions upon millions of blackflies. There’s a jaunty old folk song about it that goes like this:
Blackflies, the little blackflies
Always the blackflies, anywhere you go
I’ll die with the blackflies pickin’ my bones
In North Ontar-i-o-i-o
In North Ontar-i-o.
Always the blackflies, anywhere you go
I’ll die with the blackflies pickin’ my bones
In North Ontar-i-o-i-o
In North Ontar-i-o.
That about captures the feeling of it, but keep in mind, the flies only get worse as you head north, and David’s team were in Nunavut, not Ontario. The team would wear baseball caps just to keep the flies from actively tearing their skulls apart, and long-sleeved shirts with elastic bands at the wrists. Every night, peeling off the bands, David would find a black smear across his wrists. It was too hot to wear bug hoods, though some did anyway. The flies would bite until blood seeped from the team’s ears and their eyelids swelled up. They practically drank 95% deet Off! bugspray like water. One of the wildlife biologists refused to leave his tent for fear of the flies. Every night, after sealing up his sleep tents, David would burn a length of mosquito coil, which stupefied all the flies. Then he would go around the tent and gush each one with his thumb. It took ten minutes to get them all.
Some Nunavut Tundra in summer. No trees, but lots of moss and wildflowers.
Despite the flies, the group hiked almost every day. The landscape was spectacular. Nothing grows taller than about four feet in the Tundra, thanks to holwing winds, deep snow and bitter cold. It is a landscape as alien as the Moon, but one with a savage beauty to it. The team saw Caribou almost every day. Once, a group of canoers passed by and stopped to camp the night, and as David was showing them the research site, one of them said, “Look, you’ve brought your dog along!” Looking up, David saw a lone wolf sitting on the crest of a hill not far away.
Wolves were a rare sight in the summer, but would hang around the camp hoping to steal scraps. They weren’t dangerous.
But wolves are hardly the only thing up there.
One day, at about 11:30 in the morning, while David and his colleagues were working, Brian G’s young daughter Charlotte approached the group. “Daddy,” she said, “Mummy says there’s a bear at camp. You have to come back.” After a few minutes’ bewilderment, Midge G arrived with the two-year-old Bruce to confirm Charlotte’s story. But the team had no gun with them – it was up in the radio tent, on the crest of the hill. This was a stupid place to leave it, and in later years David would make sure there was always a gun with the team at the research site.
Approaching camp, they immediately saw the bear. He was a grizzly bear (the biggest kind, except for polar bears. Remember than fact.), a big old male, and he’d ripped down one wall of their kitchen tent and eaten all their flour. Brian G went to fetch the gun from the radio tent, only to find that it had no bullets – they were down in the sleeping tent with another, smaller gun. In camp. Where the bear was.
A very nervous Brian G managed to get down into the sleeping tent without pissing off the bear, got the gun and bullets, and brought it back, while the whole team watched and chewed their lips. David was quite a good shot. (His father Alex had been a truly crack shot, and it’s through Alex that I learned to shoot, though I never got good at it. Somewhere there’s a picture of me at fourteen, in the Wasatch mountains, with a Glock 9mm in my hands. ) Somebody loaded the bigger gun and handed it to him, and the team went down to the camp en masse, yelling and firing shots. They drove the bear out, but he didn’t go far – only about two miles out, so that they could still see him. He dug a deep pit and lay in it, his dark furry belly jutting out, and fell asleep. “Look,” they would say, pointing at the dark shape on the horizon, “there’s that damn bear.”
They repaired the kitchen tent wall with a sheaf of clear plastic. The sun, David remembers, hit the plastic and lit it up, attracting blackflies, who crawled droning up the tent wall like a tiny Panzer division. David gushed them.
Less than two hours after they drove him out, the bear was back. The team formed a line with David and Brian at either end, cradling the guns, and drove him back again. But after two miles, the bear stopped moving. He wasn’t scared any more. These were probably the first humans he had ever encountered. Finally, with the team about fifty feet away, he stopped dead, laid his ears flat, and looked David in the eye.
Back the fuck up.
That, David knew, was the look of a bear about to charge. The group hastily backed up and retreated to camp. They had driven the bear through a lot of marshland, so everyone was filthy. As they washed in the river, Jane S began to scream – there was the bear, splashing through the water towards her.
Brian and David, who were not stupid, still had their guns. They both shot, and after three or four shells, the massive old grizzly fell dead in the river.
The team hauled him out, skinned him, and ate him. He was crunchy. Age had turned him gristly and full of bone. When they couldn’t stand any more bear meat, they dug a hole and buried him. They didn’t tell anyone until their return to town.
The research site was in a game sanctuary. Before they had gone up, their guns had been sealed, so it was obvious that they had been fired since then. At this point, game officers in the north were still all white. These days, they’re native, and much more understanding, but the white game officers tended to be self-righteous and hard to deal with. This one was a real bastard. Even though David and his team had done nothing wrong, having tried twice to ward off the bloody thing, the officer was furious that they hadn’t informed him immediately – how could they have? – and seemed to think they were trying to smuggle the bear pelt out, when in fact they had buried it. He very nearly arrested them all.
In the end, everyone returned home safe, but there is a moral to all this: If you ever have to shoot a bear, save the pelt. Most of us will never get the opportunity to apply such a lesson – but then, we are not wee, intrepid Dave of the North.
Tune in next time for more Northern Adventure!
