#aprilmay2014

Gill Cracknell, executive director of the Yukon branch of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, one of the groups suing the government, spent four or five months every summer in the mountainous headwaters of the Snake River:

“One day when I was sitting up there, looking in a telescope, I spotted a moose about three or four kilometres across the valley, surrounded by wolves. The wolves were ringing the moose, and I realized that she had a little, tiny calf. I watched that moose and calf for three or four hours, until it got dark. The wolves, some would go and lie down, and some would come back, and they’d be trying to get at the calf—but the cow was just defending it at all costs. It was a long way away but it was like, this is unfolding in front of my eyes, and it was an amazing, touching experience—and I never really knew what happened in the end, because it got dark. About a week later a moose and calf came up through our camp, and we just kind of hoped that it was the same pair, but, y’know, you never know.”

Jimmy Johnny is an elder of the Na-cho Nyak Dun nation. He’s been horsewrangling and guiding around the Snake and Bonnet Plume headwaters since 1958:

“It’s precious to our traditional values. For many reasons, but for traditional medicine especially, our berries and roots, and the willows. Some people don’t believe traditional medicine works, but it does. I was taught how to use it, and it’s all out there and I don’t want to see it disturbed. Fort McPherson people don’t want to see the water get polluted from exploration and mining activity. It’s a big worry for me. Because developers have already left a lot of mess out there in the past and I don’t want to see that any more. When I go in there, I can also see signs of the ancient people, the trails where they’d cross into the NWT. It’s unbelievable. You gotta go there someday.”

Chris Widrig leads hunters on horseback through the area, going after Dall sheep, wolverine, moose and grizzlies:

“Sometimes we go one or two days on the horses, 25 hours in total, just to get to the areas where we’re going to hunt. We don’t offer a ritzy lodge or luxurious accommodations, and our clients pay over $20,000 for one trip. What they’re paying for is the wilderness. Sleeping on the ground, riding horses, climbing mountains, calling moose.The headwaters of the Snake River and the Bonnet Plume River, those are the core of our hunting business and also the most pristine area in the whole Peel. If you look at the government’s plan those are probably the most protected areas, but they’re still not fully protected. Roads can be built there and any mining claims in there can be worked. I don’t consider that protection.”

Photo by Peter Mather

Peter Mather is a wildlife photographer who’s been visiting the Peel since the 1990s:

“There’s a site on the Wind River, across from the confluence of the Bear River, known by different names: Stone Dragon, Flood Plain, Sheep Lick, Wolf Fields. It’s a gorgeous 10-square-kilometre flood plain, beneath a gargoyle mountain. On one side is this big clay bulge of a sheep lick. There are 1,000-year-old sheep trails, four inches deep and coming from each direction like a spider web. On the other side of the lick is a wolf den. So, sheep have to make it across all the flat terrain to the sheep lick. Once there, they have a wonderful escape route to small cliffs beside the lick. Every time we stop we see dozens of sheep and often watch them swim across the river, in a single white line. It’s scary though, because the old, abandoned Wind River road goes 30 feet from the sheep lick. And about five years ago, the government gave permission for the road to be opened up again for a mining exploration company. Luckily, they didn’t have the money for their venture.”

Blaine Walden guided canoeists through the Peel for over 20 summers:

“Probably one of my most memorable times was on a Youth and Elders trip with the Gwich’in from Fort McPherson and also some Na-cho Nyak Dun folk. Robert Alexie—a very respected Gwich’in elder—was on that trip, and also Joanne Snowshoe, another well-known elder.They had both spent a lot of their life in the Peel and the whole trip was very special to be on because of all the stories they could tell. As we got to this canyon—it’s not Aberdeen Canyon, but there’s another canyon below the Bonnet Plume that has these really swirly rocks that you’ll see in a lot of photography. That’s an area that Gwich’in used to pass through when they would go up into the Peel in winter and trap, and then build their skin boats and come back down. That canyon at high water is quite turbulent and can be dangerous. It was interesting to see the effect on Robert as we approached it, and how serious he took it. He told us stories about when they were younger and going through the canyon in their skin boats. The men would take the boats through and the women and children would walk around. One time, one of the boats got damaged. They were on one side of the river and needed needles and thread to sew the skin boat, but that was with the women on the other side. The women had this dog along with them, I guess he was a pretty decent dog, and they tied the materials they needed to the dog and the men called the dog and he swam across with what they needed to fix the boat. Just watching Robert’s whole demeanour change—he’s a very jovial fellow—but as we got close he was very serious and worried about the youth with us. We got through safely—the water wasn’t high—and as soon as we were through, it was ‘pull the boat over and let’s have tea!’ It was a celebration that we’d made it through.

I lived in Iqaluit for almost six years. I claim no special status from this. There’s a common suspicion about almost all qallunaat who settle in Nunavut’s capital: we are there to make a buck working for a level of government or a construction company, and we are out of there as soon as we can afford to be. This is mostly fair. We do go there to extract money and career advancement at little risk to ourselves. If we work for them a while, then quit, the territorial government will even pay for us to move back south.

Of all the transient labour that breezes through town, a precious few will set down roots and become lifers. They marry an Inuk and have babies who are landclaim beneficiaries, and build a local business empire, like Bob Hanson or Kenn Harper.

Or perhaps they just so happen to carve out a professional niche for themselves, and they do it for such a long time that it seems like only they could do that particular job. There is only one Matty McNair. Only Jim Bell could be Jim Bell.

The third group consists of people like me. We live in Iqaluit for more than five years. We may affect to be like lifers, but we leave for an offer that seems too good to be true. Sometimes it is.

But we set down tiny shoots, if not roots. We get pretty good at our job. We learn a few Inuktitut words beyond basic pleasantries, like how to compliment a woman on the shape of her backside. We might date an Inuk. We’ll definitely get hammered at the Legion, Storehouse, Nova or Elks (like, a lot). Some of us will go jogging, even though we look kinda silly doing it. Then suddenly, we’re at our own going away party, singing Danzig at karaoke whilst blind drunk, as one last ride. We’ll call The Snack at four in the morning, and pass out before we get even halfway through the giant, 20-dollar poutine that arrives, half cold, an hour later.

I went back to Iqaluit not long ago, for the second time since I left for Yellowknife, after a year and a half absence. The pace of urban growth, breakneck enough when I was there, now seems positively warp speed: new buildings are wedged as infill into spaces that seemed like they’d forever be a litter-strewn pile of rocks, loose stitches in the urban fabric.

I walked along the beach on a crisp, quiet September night. The sky was mostly heavy overcast, but a glint of sunset shone in from the west. The city hummed and the occasional dog barked. It’s just known as The Beach, and it happens to be the only beach in Canada over which the Canadian Coast Guard has jurisdiction. That’s partly because Frobisher Bay has extreme tides, hard currents and poorly charted bathymetry. It’s also because the beach is a port. Sealift vessels barge their cargo to shore from roughly Canada Day to early October. Iqaluit’s port is literally made of sand.

To me, this is evidence that for southern Canada, this place was always an afterthought. The federal government never really wants to be responsible for the territories, and then freaks out in periodic spasms of temporary concern for the Idea of North. Iqaluit was only built in the first place because the Allies hadn’t figured out transcontinental air freight when the Nazis were on the march. It became an outpost of federal administration only by convenience. John Diefenbaker looked North, seeing the resource potential, promising roads and railways, and little else. He followed through, halfheartedly. The current government is much the same, promising grandiose schemes, then balking when they get a look at the estimate.

I thought about this kind of thing a lot when I lived in Iqaluit. I think the exotic status of Nunavut attracts a lot of people who want to say they did it, have it on their CV. Maybe we are like our political leaders: invested in Nunavut, but only to the extent that it benefits us personally.

In the end, it was newspaper fatigue (I’d been working as a reporter for Nunatsiaq News), the remoteness, and the chance—in Yellowknife—to work at a real live magazine. I could not stay in Iqaluit. And in that, I’m just another southern tourist-labourer.

It should probably come as no surprise that the North doesn’t currently have a particular beer style of its own. With no suitable regions to grow the required barley and hops, it’s not exactly a brewers’ paradise. The North does, however, have style, which I believe can be captured and absorbed in a locally-brewed beer. Since I’ve been making my own beer for years, I thought I’d put the theory to the test. And since I used to work in a lab down south, genetically engineering yeast, I’m fully accustomed to trial and error.

My first thought was to use berries for flavouring, or spruce tips, which would deliver a pleasant bitterness. In fact, spruce tips in beer have a long tradition going back to northern Europe; they result in a nice, medicinal flavour.

But for me, berries and spruce tips don’t quite cut it. Too predictable, and a bit bland for the North. This is a hard place. It’s cold, it’s rocky, and what does grow here grows slowly. A true Northern beer requires something robust, complex and maybe a bit swampy.

I propose sphagnum moss.

Moss isn’t very sexy. It’s green, it’s spongy, and it forms thick squishy mats over stagnant water. It’s also ubiquitous across most of Canada’s North, and can be smoked to add flavour to beer. And not just any flavour: sphagnum moss is probably best known for forming thick beds of dead decomposing “peat” on stagnant ponds. In fact, it grows thick enough for an adult to walk on, and can be mistaken for solid ground. Oh, and it’s a great place to hide dead bodies.

Once in a while a hapless animal or per- son will mistake a peat bog for solid ground, fall through and die. In fact, entire preserved human bodies have been retrieved from peat bogs. These bog mummies can be thousands of years old; some even show evidence of being murdered (so much for haplessly falling through peat). So if the smoke and peat aren’t convincing enough, consider this: sipping peat-flavoured beer is more than imbibing; it’s celebrating history, archeology, or forensics or something.

To ferment the beer, I had to break with my sterile, laboratory past. I’ve always made beer with domesticated yeast. In most breweries, the yeasts—which turn the sugar in the sweet liquid called wort into alcohol—have either been grown for many years within the brewery (so-called house strains), or are purchased from commercial suppliers. Then there are the moreaudacious beers—the ones borne of wild yeast and bacteria. The best known of these are almost certainly the lambic beers of Belgium.

Lambic beers are processed in open air fermenters, with the windows open. Yeast and bacteria from outside are then able to fall into the wort and produce the beer. The result is distinct sour and pungent flavours. Interestingly, these beers can take years to reach the desired flavour as different bacteria take turns eating their way through the sugars. The process I’ve described is actually a bit misleading. While wild microbes are allowed to fall into the wort, yeast and bacteria that have taken up permanent residence in these breweries do most of the work. The process is really more like a semi-wild fermentation. Which is why I had that jar out by the Yellowknife River, putting undomesticated microbes to work. Trusting wild microbes might seem haphazard, but that’s how beer got its start. It was, essentially, an accident. Nobody knew what microbes were until about 150 years ago.

Someone recently asked me if I had an special plans for when I decide to try this beer. Did I have, perhaps, something ceremonial in mind? I’m not much for ceremony, but I am one for imagery. I like to imagine that this beer will be imbued with the North; that it will be fierce enough to ward off bears, tame muskox and sate even the most voracious wolverines.

Here it is in the middle of April, they’re up and there’s nothing to scrounge for. There’s still a lot of snow. They can’t even go find frozen berries. Everybody was pretty well trained by that time, so everyone was working alone—there’s not really much that can bother you in April. Maybe in May a bear would come out, be a little bit hungry and check you out. Not this month.

I was just coming to the end of my line. I just had to put up a post and then go on the lake and a helicopter would come get me. I felt like something was looking at me. I turned around and there was this black bear standing right behind me. I had the axe in my hand, and I spun around and hit him in the shoulder and knocked him down beside me. I grabbed him and threw him. He flipped over in the air and landed and was back up, lightning-fast.

I swung with the axe. He ducked, and I swung back again. I took three swipes and the third one he caught in his teeth. I couldn’t take it out, I couldn’t push it in. So we’re having a rassling match here. If he got ahold of my snowshoes, he would have got on top of me and that would have been it. I thought, ‘Geez, I’ve got a flare gun in my pack-sack, a 12-gauge.’ I grabbed it and cocked it and boom, hit him right in the eye. Flipped him right over backwards and the flare bounced off. I reached in, put on another load and bang, this one stuck right on his bum. He was just gonna turn and come back at me when this thing went off and he made this ‘Wooof! Woo-wooooooo!” He turned around and headed off into the bush, a big cloud of smoke with him. Standing there, legs shaking, only then I remember I had a machete right in my pack. 

He took off way out there and I could hear him barking, rubbing himself on the snow. [The flare] is pretty hot. It burns for about 50 seconds, eh. Now he runs back through the bush, and he’s growling at me. He’s half-awake, poor thing; he’d just woken up. This time I had the machete out and the axe. ‘It’s in my favour,’ I said. ‘It’s up to you.’ I was talking to him just like I’m talking to you. [Laughs.] My little skinny legs were still shaking. I chased him into the bush making more noise than him and he took off. I could still hear him barking though. He had a good size cut on his shoulder where the axe hit him, and a big burn mark. I finished [work] there and went on the lake and sat on my pack to get the shakes out. Smoked three or four cigarettes and here comes the helicopter. I told the pilot, ‘There’s a bear back in there, wounded a little bit too. He’s mad. Maybe if we come back tomorrow we’ll bring a gun and take him out.’ Next morning I couldn’t get out of bed. The bear had hit me I guess, but I got so scared I didn’t feel it at all. But there it was, I had a broken ribcage.

‘Oh right on,’ says Irving. ‘If you get any caribou, do you think you can get your wife to make me up some dry meat?’

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘If I get some.’

‘Oh you will, Lawrence,’ says Irving. ‘You’re always shooting something.’

Sure enough, I come back with six caribou. I handed ‘em over to my wife and asked her to set aside a batch for dry meat, then headed back to work at the camp. When I got back home, she’s had it all packaged up in the freezer, said she didn’t have time to make up any dry meat. 

‘Oh no!’ I thought. ‘How am I going to keep my promise to Irving now?’

While I was worrying, I Ski-Dooed around for a bit. I was sledding past a burnt-out forest when I noticed the outside bark of the trees looked a little bit like dry meat. So I stopped in and peeled the bark back. The insides were jet-black and stringy, just like dry meat. So I packed it up in a couple bags and gave it to a friend to give it to the grader.

They were gone for a few days when one of their dogs came back into Fort Good Hope alone, with his pack hanging half down off his back. A couple camping near town found the dog and the wife followed it back to the lake. When she got there, she saw a fur hat on the bare ice. Beside the hat, there was a Copenhagen can. The old lady figured the family must have gathered to chew some snuff and went through the ice. The five of them had all drowned. The old woman gathered the dogs, marked the area, and went back to town, where she told her old man. The old man told her to go back and pass the news around. 

The RCMP went out with special constables and found the five bodies, but they couldn’t bury them—the ground was too hard. So they gathered them together and piled trees on top. My mom was always upset that they never got a proper burial.

A few years later, my dad [Jim Pierrot] camped past that lake. He heard some dogs barking outside a tent on shore and went in to say hi. There were people inside. Though they didn’t talk much, there was a lady with a baby on her back and she was singing it to sleep. The family asked him to spend the night and he said, ‘Okay,’ went down to feed his dogs, returned and went to sleep.