It's cloudy. It's late. I finish eating and clean the dinner pot in a small puddle between two rocks. Returning to my tent under a rise, enough of a brow to break the wind, I put my pot down in front of the tent. I turn to go on a walk. On top of the small rise sits a wolf. My quick turn hasn't disturbed him. He remains sitting, regarding me as he would any new curiosity in the neighborhood. He is a white wolf. (I don't know why I think it is a male wolf, but I do.) I waver, but decide we may well become acquainted. I walk slowly toward him. As I approach he gracefully rises and trots off, disappearing over the rise, I see him again, watching me. I bow to him and continue walking. Every time I come within forty feet, he trots off. We progress this way across the tundra until he tires of our game. One last time he rises and trots off. He never looks back. My eyes follow him. On the other side of a pond, in the quiet, gray evening light, the wolf changes from a white wolf, into a white shape, to a white spot, then a white speck. He melts into nothing among the ruckus of small and large rocks on the far side of the pond.
Page 38
I begin my tenth night-paddle, approaching Muskox Lake in extreme quiet. Towering cumulus clouds sit at the edge of the horizon, brought to earth by their reflection in the water. In the half-light of midnight a red-throated loon swims along the edge of an ice floe. It paddles smoothly through the water-clouds, like some outrider from Olympus.
A day's-end hush settles over what has been hectic under the powerful sun. The ice is brittle. The slight tremor of the loon's wake loosens innumerable cylindrical pieces that jangle, like pieces of a crystal chandelier. The loon bows; it pokes its head through the reflected clouds and occasionally disappears, slipping effortlessly into the world on the other side of the sky.
Page 73
My companion sounds are the whack of fish jumping and the subtler swoosh of their tails on the surface. Everything except me holds holds its breath, then the loon cries. It swims in the shadow of the opposite shore; a silver thread unravels in the water behind it. Sound upon sound, the cries pile up, a coloratura, then they fade among the shadows. The water, the night, hungrily swallow their sounds.
Page 105
At age twenty-seven, Henry David Thoreau moved a mile and a half from his family's home in Concord to begin his residence at Walden Pond. No man, or woman, has ever worked harder, or more diligently, at turning history, thoughts, walks, friends, and neighbors into literature; nor over a longer period of time. It's no accident that his name is a worldwide beacon for anyone who cares about the natural world. Thoreau invented himself for that purpose.
Pages 148-149
Slowly, like a new taste, the river reveals itself. Am I not living all my own cool opposites? Am I not stitching myself into this night with each needle-like paddle stroke?
The night circles itself. I don't know if I'm waking up or going to sleep. I try to notice the river change color, but miss it. The water turns black, a tarnished solver mirror. Soon the sun, with rays of pale-orange sherbet, tossed back the indefiniteness of the last few hours. I camp, and try to sleep before the sun's heat on the tent forces me awake.
Pelly Lake can't be far ahead. When I get up, I take a walk inland away from where I've camped to see if I can establish my position. I amble for several miles, as much for the sheer pleasure of waling as to find out where I am. I see the hills off to the wast running in a northerly direction. The river opens up to the northeast and turns to the right. I think I see the open water of Pelly Lake, named by Back after Sir Henry Pelly, one of the first governors of the Hudson's Bay Company and the patron of Back's expedition.
As I turn to leave the ridge, I see the oval shape at my feet, half buried in the pebbles and hard clay. I pick up the scraper, a beautiful ancient tool. It's about four inches long. The exposed side is covered with spots of lichen. I dream of finding things like this. Holding it, I try to imagine the first hands that held it, that decided this dusty red stone would do. I think of the hands that held the larger piece of stone this smaller oval was flaked out of. I imagine the woman's hands that used it to soften skins. Was it discarded, or dropped on a march? Is this the tip of a midden belonging to one family, or ten? Ovals and circles, Inuit life revolved around those forms: the kayak, a pinched oval, caches, soapstone lamps, igloos, seasons, sun, moon, circles of myth, cycles of life. Progress isn't everybody's idea of a good time.
If you live in circles instead of lines, you live for repetition, not for novelty and newness. I sit, my legs straight in front of me, and use the scraper to push sand. I run its edge along the palm of my left hand. I regard it carefully. I feel the concentration of the tundra's spirit in it. I think about the drawers and drawers of scrapers in Washington, D.C -- locked up in the dark, occasionally studied, but because of their sheer numbers never individually cherished. I could report my find to them or the Yellowknife Museum. They would add it to the long list of locations they will get to someday, or I could take it in and save them the expense of flying to what may not be a major site.
Or I could take the scraper home with me where it would be lovingly cared for.
I place the scraper by my right thigh. I stand up and dust off my pants and walk away. I will never forget the electric feeling of finding the scraper, holding it, and the pleasure I've had dreaming about the person who shaped it and the one who used it. I leave it on the land, in an oval of time, a concentration of spirit -- as a center of all that moves and all that is still.
Page 168
I start in the afternoon, after a bowl of tea. There is no point in hurrying, as I'd only wear myself out. I remember that a river flowing into Garry Lake had been named last year after Eric Morse. Until his death, the had been the dean of Canadian wilderness canoeing. Before modern canoeing attracted a wide audience, Morse and his friends traveled Arctic rivers. Starting in the 1940s to retrace old Canadian fur trade routes, Eric (and later his wife, Pamela) continued to take long trips. Canada had named a river for him, although a larger one would have been more fitting.
