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Then one evening the big canoe returned. It was very low in the water, and when Johnny and Carl ran it up on the landing beach I saw that four bulging packsacks occupied most of the cargo space. I did not ask about their contents and nothing was volunteered.

My companions were now ready to take life easy for a few days. Both were good cooks and we had some wonderful fish dinners after which we would sit around drinking tea and yarning.

Carl and Johnny had many stories to tell about the ”real north” – stories that brought back vivid memories of my visit to Churchill with Uncle Frank. I found myself hungering for that distant world of caribou, polar bears, Inuit, and untrammelled space I had barely glimpsed. One night I wrote in my journal:

Their enthusiasm was infectious, and I was receptive when Johnny suggested that next summer the three of us might make a canoe trip from la Ronge to Reindeer Lake, and even on out to the edge of the barrens.

I
was reluctant to end the canoe trip. Short as it had been, it had brought me comfort and I was beginning to have hopes of a brighter future.

This mood was not fated to endure. On arrival back at Stennarson’s Post, I found some disturbing letters awaiting me. One, from my mother, informed me Angus was ”in a state of gloom and doom because he feels he has failed you in your time of need.” Helen went on to beg me to come home immediately and reassure my father.

A letter from Angus himself gave no indication he was troubled, but did contain a dire warning as to Helen’s state of being. ”Although your mother is very brave about it, your departure after such a brief time here is eating at her heart. I cannot answer for her health if you stay out west much longer.”

This was such potent stuff that within twenty-four hours I had decided to cut short my journey and return to Richmond Hill.

Guilt was not the only factor. I was becoming uncomfortably aware that dedicating myself to science might not, after all, relieve the darkness of my spirit. On my final day at Stennarson’s Post I wrote in my journal:

And there was something else. A remark in Angus’s letter that he might be re-thinking his decision about
Scotch Bonnet
, suggested she might be available to me after all.

My departure from Montreal Lake was not easily accomplished. I was loathe to give up the beginning sense of
belonging
somewhere. Gus and the Moiestie clan (whom I had begun to think of almost as my own) did not make the parting any easier.

Gus staged a two-days-two-nights farewell party. With good reason I can’t recall much about it but I remember Frank Nelson’s sardonic parting toast:

”Here’s big drink to best goddamn doctor we never had up here!”

Lulu and I made our way back to Ontario via the all-Canadian route which was still very much under construction. It took us three days to claw across the ancient Shield country north of Lake Superior and we broke most of Lulu’s springs and all her shock absorbers doing it.

By the time we pulled into my parents’ driveway in
Richmond Hill, I had been absent eleven weeks in search of a place and a time that, I now had to accept, was lost to me forever.

There followed some days of overwrought emotion at the end of which my parents made a concrete offer. If I would agree to attend university, they would, upon my graduation, give me
Scotch Bonnet
together with their blessings to sail her anywhere in the world I might choose.

”Think about it,” Angus insisted. ”While at university you’d still have your summers free for chasing birds or whatever else you might want to do.”

Helen hammered the nail home.

”We’re getting on, my darling. And we do so want you to have a decent chance at life after all you’ve been through. We can be at peace if you find that.”

My ungracious reply was that university would be a waste of time since I no longer really wanted to become a scientist and had no alternative profession in view.

”If I did enrol I might or might not even stick around to graduate. I’d be just ‘time serving’ as they say in the army. But I’ll think about it.”

Afraid of where my thoughts might lead me, my parents provided a distraction. They invited my western cousin, Helen Fair Thomson, to come east and join us for a late-summer cruise aboard
Scotch Bonnet
on the Bay of Quinte. Although Helen Fair was a few years my junior, we had been good companions during summer holidays spent at our grandparents’ cottage in the Gatineau country.

Now she accepted the invitation with alacrity. On August 5 she joined us in Toronto and we set sail to the eastward.

My parents had stocked
Scotch Bonnet
with the best of everything. The sun shone, and a brisk westerly breeze sent her scudding down Lake Ontario with a bone in her teeth. Had we been setting out on a tropical cruise, things could hardly have been more idyllic.

Having reached the sheltered waters of the bay, Helen Fair and I used the dinghy to explore remote coves, go sunbathing on empty beaches, and swim wherever and whenever we wished. My parents kept very much in the background. Angus busied himself working on the vessel’s gear, while my mother outdid herself in the galley.

I will never know what my parents had in mind. Were they simply hoping to distract me from my inner turmoil, or did they secretly hope that ”something might come of it”? Although Helen Fair and I
were
first cousins, marriage between first cousins was not absolutely forbidden.

Nothing was ever said or even intimated until one day my parents told us they had been invited to spend the night at a friend’s cottage some miles distant from where
Scotch Bonnet
lay at anchor in a snug and private little cove. Did Helen Fair and I think we would be able to manage on our own? We thought we would. And sent them on their way.

That night she and I went to bed separately but we ended up in her bunk. Since I had not brought along any contraceptives and was mortally afraid of the consequences, restraint prevailed.

I don’t know what
she
thought about it at the time but a few days later when I saw her off on the train taking her home to Calgary, she eyed me quizzically and said:

”I guess they taught you how to fight in the army, Farl. Too bad they didn’t teach you some other things as well. Thanks for the memories.”

Early in September I enrolled at the University of Toronto – in a course that, if I managed to stick it out for three years, would see me graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree in nothing specific. I lived with my parents in Richmond Hill that winter, commuting to classes in downtown Toronto in Lulu Belle, and spending a lot of time thinking about my experiences at Montreal Lake and about the country to the north of it. The northern virus was working in my blood.

I found little incentive to socialize with my peers at university. For the most part they were my junior by several years, and the war separated us as if we belonged to a different generation. Those who were war veterans, were mostly married (some already supporting children) and wholly committed to scholastic drudgery in their attempts to regain lost places on the economic treadmill. Neither did the city have much to offer me in the way of a social life. Unattached young women were few and far between and those still available wanted relationships leading to secure futures, which left me out of the running.

Grey days enshrouded me, so I did as I had done so often in the past – I sought comfort in a world of my own contriving. As winter closed in upon southern Ontario, I journeyed north in books and in imagination. Vivid memories of the great caribou migration –
la foule
– which I had seen on my trip to Churchill in 1935 came crowding back and I became somewhat fixated on caribou. I began to read everything I could find about the Barren Lands species, about
the country they lived in, and about the other beings who shared their world.

I learned that the so-called Barren Grounds, or Barren Lands, encompassed nearly two million square miles (which is to say, most of Canada north of timberline) and that these vast tundra plains and the thin taiga forests immediately to the south provided sustenance for a plethora of living creatures. I was astonished (and delighted) by how little was actually known about the country or about the aboriginal inhabitants, the Peoples of the Deer as I thought of them. It appeared that very few outsiders had travelled through these vast reaches of taiga and tundra. One region in particular drew my attention: the interior of Keewatin territory. With the adjacent reaches of Manitoba and Saskatchewan it amounts to nearly three hundred thousand square miles, yet as late as 1947 much of it had not even been mapped.

I could find few accounts of Europeans having explored it, though, between 1770 and 1772, Samuel Hearne, a Hudson’s Bay Company trader,
walked
more than 2,500 miles in the company of Dene Indians through the northernmost taiga and over the sprawling tundra from Churchill to the mouth of the Coppermine River,
then walked all the way back again
.

The next intruder of record was a young geologist, Joseph Burr Tyrrell, who was hired in 1893 by the federal government to fill in some of the enormous gaps still existing in the map of northern Canada. Joseph and his brother James were paddled by a party of Mohawk Indians (none of whom had ever seen the Barren Lands before) from Lake Athabasca north to the unknown headwaters of the Dubawnt
River and through mighty Dubawnt Lake to the Thelon River and Baker Lake, where the party turned eastward and made its way to Chesterfield Inlet and the salt waters of Hudson Bay.

With winter fast closing in they then paddled south until rapidly forming winter ice drove them ashore and they were forced to make the rest of their way to Churchill (the nearest outpost) on foot. From Churchill they snowshoed eight hundred miles to Winnipeg, which they reached on January 2, 1894, having completed one of the last truly great voyages of exploration in North America.

There was, however, still much uncharted, so in July of 1884 Joe Tyrrell was back at it. This time he canoed to Reindeer Lake in northern Manitoba, and on to the headwaters of the unexplored Kazan River, following it through the Keewatin Barren Lands almost to Baker Lake. By this time winter was again upon him. Tyrrell had to break east to the coast and for a second time endure the agonies of a winter canoe voyage on Hudson Bay.

During the 1893 journey Joe and his brother encountered caribou in such abundance that, as James wrote, ”the deer could only be reckoned in acres and square miles.” Joe estimated that one particular herd contained as many as two hundred thousand individuals.

In addition to meeting the fabled
la foule
, the Tyrrells discovered a people unknown in the south – a thousand or more inland-dwelling Inuit living along the Kazan and Dubawnt river systems. These were truly a people out of another time for not only had most never seen a white man, they knew little or nothing about the sea and the sea-mammal culture
that underlies most Inuit societies. They took
their
sustenance almost exclusively from
tuktu
– the caribou. They were still living largely unaffected by and mostly unaware of our world. Engrossed in the task of mapping the route and studying the geology of the country, Joseph Tyrrell had little time to spare for the people he had ”discovered.” Nevertheless, he was much impressed by them and James, the more romantic of the brothers, wrote that he would have liked to have lived with ”the Caribou Eskimaux” long enough to have understood why they seemed to be ”so happily content with their simple life.”

Late in December I made a momentous decision. I would seek out the caribou again, hoping the search would lead me to the people of the deer …
if
any such still existed.

Uncertain how to get myself there, I asked Jim Baillie if he knew of any upcoming expedition heading into Keewatin Territory. One day in mid-February Jim called me.

”I’ve just heard from a zoology prof in the States who wants to spend a summer on the Barrens collecting whatever he can find. He’s looking for a Canadian associate. There’s no pay, but if you went with him we’d buy any specimens you could collect, at our usually princely rate.”