Yesterday had been daunting and the memory of the
prior day moderated our spirits slightly that morning. We got up and had a breakfast
consisting of hot cereal, raisins, and brown sugar. We found out that the campsite was
indeed truly beautiful and marveled at the nearby waterfall. Some of us even found the
motivation to take a few photographs before getting underway for the day. The trip to our
first portage was downstream on the Bloodvein for a distance of about five miles. From our
maps, the first short and easy portage appeared to be not quite as long as the first one
had been on the previous day. We'd be portaging through a saddle between two small hills
before reaching a small lake. On the other side of the lake was "The Four
Thirty". We planned to stop there after the short and easy portage and break for
lunch before tackling it. It seemed like a good plan.
You know what they say about plans.
Our trip down river was very enjoyable. The weather was cool, the skies clear, the sun
bright. The only thing that was restraining our spirits, and that only slightly, was the
thought of "The Four Thirty". We were still struggling with our canoe piloting,
but we were improving. One of our crew earned the nickname, "Zorro", owing to
the shape of the path his boat was cutting through the water. Nothing like squeezing a
five mile trip into seven, eh? Because of marshy high grass on the narrow channel, we
weren't able to paddle up to the beginning of the trail for our first easy portage.
Instead we had to offload and walk through calf-deep water about one hundred yards in
order to get to the trail. After that it was going to be smooth sailing, or so we thought.
What followed was the most physically demanding and mentally demoralizing experience we
had yet endured. The short and easy portage turned out to be short but monstrous. The
problem was the trail itself. "Moose muck", or so it's called, looks more or
less like dark brown oatmeal. It is treacherous and deceiving. A foot, when placed onto
its surface, might sink in only a few inches not even up to the ankle. It might also sink
up to the hip. The problem is that there is no way to tell in advance of placing one's
foot down what is going to happen. Walking even unladen across the stuff is a real pain.
Carrying eighty-five pound canoes or hundred pound backpacks across the stuff can be
downright dangerous. When you bury up to your hip while carrying a heavy load, it is next
to impossible to avoid falling. If you're lucky, your body will fall in a direction that
does not stress one or both legs with a force strong enough and from a direction strange
enough to do serious injury, the pack won't fall on you or the canoe won't break any bones
when it falls on your head, and you'll be able to extricate yourself, re-shoulder your
load, and continue on without help. If you're not lucky, all of the above and more can
happen to you. For the entire length of the portage, every crewmember repeated the above
scenario every few feet at random. Obviously, we survived the "short and easy"
portage because I am here writing this record. At the time, I would have said that
survival was a sucker bet. We'd gone in expecting "short and easy" and when it
turned out to be gut-wrenchingly hard our crew morale plummeted like a telecom stock.
Since then people have asked me why there are no photographs from this portage or of the
moose muck to show what it was like. There are none simply because it took every shred of
physical strength and determination we all had just to get through it. There was nothing
left for photography. I'm a big and fairly physically strong man, and getting just one
canoe through that portage was all I could do. Ryan, our interpreter, made several trips
and carried the other three canoes plus at least one of the food packs after other members
of the crew had gotten them as far as they could. We all did what we could do, and it was
all we could do. No one was shirking. On the other side of "short and easy" we
broke for lunch. For the first time since we'd landed at Scout Lake, there was utter and
complete silence. We were all thinking the same thing. After what we'd just been through,
how were we ever going to get through "The Four Thirty"? Afterwards we would
still have to paddle another four or five miles in order to reach our campsite for the
night. We all sat in silence, not looking at each other, and ate lunch. We were weary,
discouraged, and already seriously tired of having continuously wet feet. After a time, we
got out the contour maps and started looking at what was ahead of us. Surprisingly, it
didn't look that bad. At least the trail on the map didn't cross very many contour lines
and where we were for lunch was at least forty or so feet above the water level. Maybe
there wouldn't be any more muck. After talking about it for a few minutes, Ryan and I
decided to walk ahead and scout the trail while the others rested. Doing that turned out
to be the best decision we could have made. The trail, although close to a mile long,
wasn't all that bad! There was one section of about two hundred yards that was through the
same sort of marshy swampy grass that had been prior to the start of "short and
easy", but there was only one such spot and it was "only" two hundred yards
wide. It was going to be very difficult for the guys carrying packs but those carrying
canoes would be able to trail them behind themselves as they slogged through it. We made
our way back to the others who were still resting and reported what we'd found. The crew
discussed the options that were available at that time. We arrived at two viable
possibilities. We could attempt to continue on with our original plan or we could camp
where we were and tackle "The Four Thirty" the next morning but doing so would
mean that we'd have to forfeit our plans for a layover day. As a group, we decided to
tackle it. We were starting to act like a crew. As predicted, the marshy stretch turned
out to be murder for the guys carrying the packs, but something was different. Instead of
becoming more demoralized by the hardship, the guys started pulling together, encouraging
each other, helping each other. It was a wonderful thing to get to see. Not quite three
hours later, we were all standing at the end of "The Four Thirty" and feeling
pretty good about it! That is, all but two of us. I went back to look for the two missing
crewmembers, walking back along the trail, pausing every so often to listen for them.
After a goodly distance I heard about fifty feet off the trail to my left the sound of
brush and small tree limbs popping and cracking. I thought at first I'd found our missing
crewmembers who had simply gotten off the trail, but when I turned in the direction of the
sound and looked, instead of humans I saw a rather large black bear. Then I saw the two
cubs. Because I was being quiet, listening for the others, and because she was busily
tearing into a dead tree looking for food, I had walked right up on them and they did not
yet know of my presence. I was all alone. Not good. There were two cubs. Really not good.
At least I'd managed to not blunder myself into a position between mother and cubs. We'd
been told, and conventional wisdom said, that the thing to do when encountering a black
bear was to make oneself look as large as possible and to make a lot of noise. With a
mother and two cubs, though, that didn't seem like a good idea. Instead, I stood still,
avoided eye contact, and tried my best to impersonate a tree. When she finally caught my
scent, she stood up on her hind legs and took a look around. That's when my heart stopped.
I was close enough to count the whiskers on her snout, and she was looking for me. Whether
she ever saw me or not, I don't know because in the next few seconds she dropped back down
to all fours and she and her cubs galloped off through the underbrush in the opposite
direction. Whew! Not too much later, the two missing crew members appeared on the trail
and we strolled (loudly) back to the end of the portage. We learned later that "The
Four Thirty", aka "The Beast", in fact consisted of two sections and the
segment that we thought was "short and easy" was the most difficult part of it.
Duh! The five mile paddle to the camp site was completed without incident, and we arrived
there exhausted but simultaneously feeling invincible. Maybe we were going to survive
after all. All in one day we beat the hardest portage we would encounter on the trip, got
to camp with enough daylight left for us to set up camp, have supper, clean up afterwards,
and spend some time resting and relaxing before dark brought out the mosquitoes and put us
into our tents. What had started out as the worst day turned out to be one of the best. |
