Alone Against the North by Adam Shoalts

frontier logging town of Hearst, Ontario, which is nestled on the fringes of the great northern wilderness. The thirteen-hour drive north had been complicated by my injured back, which caused me considerable pain to the point where I was literally choking from back spasms as I drove. But the car didn’t let us down, despite my mechanic’s grave prognosis, and we arrived without much difficulty.
    Bright and early the next morning, we met our pilot on a lake outside of town. His plane was a 1960s-era single-engine DHC-2 Beaver, the standard bush plane of Canada’s North.We weighed our gear to ensure it was under the limit for the long flight to the Hudson Bay Lowlands: it measured in at 165 pounds. Our canoe, which weighed 52 pounds, we strapped onto one of the plane’s aluminum pontoons.
    We would have to fly more than five hundred kilometres due north across vast wilderness to reach our expedition’s starting point, an isolated lake situated some seventy kilometres south as the crow flies from the shore of Hudson Bay. The roar and vibration of the plane’s engine rattled us inside the cockpit; talking was only possible through the headsets. Brent, who was sitting behind me, complained that the noise of the engine was giving him a headache and kept his head down and ears covered for the duration of the flight.
    From the co-pilot’s seat, I was taking in the vast wilderness below us. Immense boreal forest, interspersed with meandering black rivers and island-studded blue lakes, dominated the first stretch of the flight. Gradually, as we flew farther north, the landscape began to change: trees became sparser and smaller as the boreal forest thinned out into the open muskeg and innumerable ponds and beaver meadows of the Hudson Bay Lowlands. I knew all too well that every one of those waterways made excellent breeding ground for mosquitoes. Sandy eskers, an elevated ridge of gravel and sand left by retreating glaciers thousands of years ago, occasionally snaked across the landscape. But mostly it was a dreary swampland of stunted trees and countless small ponds, lakes, and rock-strewn creeks. The rainy weather we were flying through served to make the swampland below appear even drearier.
    We were headed to Hawley Lake, named after explorer and geologist James Edwin Hawley. From there, Brent and I wouldveer off into unexplored territory. I had read Hawley’s dry report from the 1920s on the geology of the area, as well as reports by the handful of other Geological Survey explorers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who had been active in the Lowlands. Those explorers had come here in search of mineral wealth. But, until recently, virtually no mineral extraction had been undertaken anywhere in the Lowlands, leaving it a nearly untouched wilderness. That changed in 2006 when De Beers, a South African diamond conglomerate, began mining for diamonds near the Attawapiskat River. The controversial project was vehemently opposed by the few environmentalists who knew of the plans. They argued that it was a travesty to put an open-pit mine in the middle of pristine wilderness. But the project was approved, ostensibly on the grounds that it would generate prosperity for the province and particularly for the community of Attawapiskat, a small, impoverished Cree reserve situated some ninety kilometres downriver from the mine site.
    â€œWe’re going to pass near the diamond mine on the Attawapiskat River soon,” mumbled the pilot into his headset a few hours into the flight.
    We didn’t pass near enough to see the mine; the thick cloud cover and rain prevented us from spotting it in the distance. That was fine by me: I had no real desire to see another environmental tragedy inflicted on Canada’s wilderness for limited short-term material gain—especially on a river I had once paddled. Wes and I had canoed together on this very river as teenagers after high school.