We eventually spotted what he said was Big Trout Lake on the horizon, thanks more to good luck than to my ability as navigator. The pilot chuckled as he prepared to give the Hudson’s Bay post manager a good scare. I could just make out the settlement on the end of an island in the most northerly quarter of the 75-kilometre-wide expanse of the lake when suddenly he put the plane into a steep dive. Skimming along barely thirty metres above the water, we did a wide circle out over the muskeg and then roared over the tiny community from behind. We just missed the wires of the Department of Transport (or DOT, as it was called) weather station and the flag of the Hudson’s Bay Company store as we buzzed the place for several runs. The Cree streamed out of their teepees and log shacks, waved frantically and ran for the main dock. I was later to learn that everyone who could move always met the plane, even though there was seldom anything on it for any of them. After I had been there a few weeks and grown hungry for mail, I generally led the pack myself, trying not to trample anyone in the rush.
By the time we had taxied over and tied up, the dock was crammed with the welcoming party, and many others sat on the bank. It looked like the audience for an outdoor concert. Babies wailed in their tikinagans (a board with a pouch on it into which the baby is laced and then carried on the mother’s back; it is packed with dried moss, which is changed as often as necessary). Several huskies fought each other while I again shook hands with everyone in sight. “Watchy,” they all said. So I repeated it. The word, which is spelled differently all over the North, can mean either hello or goodbye, so it’s very useful. Apparently it was derived from the earliest days when the fur traders would greet one another with the words “What cheer?” Another sign of the impact of earlier times was the somewhat unusual uniformity of dress. All the men and boys wore old country–style tweed peaked caps, and all the women and girls, even the smallest toddlers, wore brightly coloured kerchiefs or scarves tied tightly under their chins.
Suddenly I was hailed by a very English-sounding male voice. A wiry-looking man in his mid-fifties, wearing a battered old fedora and a collarless shirt bulging out from under a pair of wide suspenders, was paddling his canoe towards the sandy shore beside the dock. It was Rev. Leslie Garrett, the Anglican missionary with whom I was to stay for the next three months. Garrett’s weather-beaten face, enormous eyebrows from under which sparkled a pair of the bluest eyes I have ever seen, and baggy, black pants gave him an aura of eccentricity. Some in Sioux Lookout had warned me he was “bushed”—the term used for those who become a little strange from too much solitude—but I was to find him much saner than his critics. He was one of the strongest men I have ever met. He pulled the large freighter canoe onshore with ease, plucked my duffle bag from me and tossed it in, and then nearly crushed my hand in his grip. His enthusiastic smile rearranged the weathered creases in his countenance in a most attractive way as he said: “I’m Garrett— welcome to Big Trout.”
He handed me a paddle and pointed to the bow position while he climbed in at the stern. I hadn’t been in a canoe often, and I felt every Cree eye on the island watching me as we headed off to the mission dock a short way along the shore. (The next day, just when I thought I was getting the hang of it, I capsized off the end of the Hudson Bay dock and sent several men nearby into paroxysms of laughter.) As we passed by part of the village, it surprised me to discover that while the majority were living in simple one-room log cabins, there were a dozen or more families still living in teepees for their summer home. It gave me a thrill to see the smoke curling up from the hole at the top where the spruce poles intertwined. The silhouette of the teepees against the sky made me feel as if I were living in a movie about the Old West.
The problem with teepees, I was to discover, was that they were never intended for people well over six feet tall. If I stood up in one, my head was up where the racks of fish were curing in the ascending smoke. In a seated position, sometimes on a wooden box but more usually on the floor of spruce branches, one had to lean forward like a yogi to allow for the slanting canvas walls. Since it is impossible to sweep the floor in such accommodation, the family would simply move to another site, spread fresh branches and voilà!—the housecleaning was done. It was fascinating to observe that while there was nothing that we would call furniture as such, there was generally a guitar around and one or two radios. The beds were robes of rabbit skins laid on the floor, and the babies rocked gently in little hammocks suspended from the saplings forming the frame of the cone-like dwelling.
The simple log cabins of the rest of the community sometimes had slightly more elaborate fittings, but not always. They were invariably surrounded closely by a solid fence of peeled and sharply pointed poles to keep out wandering huskies and to serve as a drying rack both for any washing and for clumps of moss destined to serve as baby napkins and in general as “the Kleenex of the North.” It’s worth noting that this sphagnum peat moss—which lies in a deep carpet all through the boreal forests of the Canadian North— was put forward by a Manitoba company as a potential ally in the frantic attempts to clean up the disastrous oil that spewed into the Gulf of Mexico in the summer of 2010. Acknowledged as the worst oil spill in American history, the well churned out thousands of barrels of oil daily for months. The peat moss, according to its promoters, can float on the ocean’s surface, suck up oil and then, when saturated, be easily removed for burning or burying in a landfill. It’s cheap, exists in almost limitless abundance, and quickly and safely degrades into the environment.
Garrett’s mission house was a simple building set beside the white frame church where lengthy services were held on Monday, Wednesday and Friday nights, as well as twice on Sunday, all summer long. Since at that time the residents spent the long months of winter out on their remote traplines and only came together in the spring to sell their furs, renew their trapping equipment and spend the summer fishing and socializing, they felt they had a lot of churchgoing to make up for, and make it up they did.
The mission house itself was much like a plain farmhouse. The largest room was the kitchen, with its polished linoleum floor, huge wood stove for both warmth and cooking, and generous table where, apart from porridge in the morning, I ate what seemed to me better than gourmet meals (fresh-caught lake trout, pickerel and whitefish). Christine Garrett was a rotund, happy Ojibwa woman whom Garrett had married some years after his first wife died of typhoid fever. She baked wheaten bread about three times a week and the aroma, mingled with that of the birch logs burning in the stove, was sheer heaven. My “room” was a section of the upper storey of the house separated from the Garretts’ sleeping quarters by a four-foot partition surmounted by a curtain. Through the low window at night I had a splendid view of the wilderness, the boreal forest stretching away forever. On those long, long summer nights the sun seemed barely to set at all. The hermit thrushes sang me to sleep.
The Garretts’ three children, Bessie, ten, Herbie, eight, and Esther, five, shared a room on the ground floor. They were very early risers and I was wakened each morning by the strained chords of the only two records they seemed to own and which they played on their hand-wound Victrola as a daily ritual. The songs were “There’s a bluebird on my windowsill, there’s a rainbow in the sky” and “Come to the church in the wildwood, oh come to the church in the dale . . .” They knew hardly a word of English and so most of the conversation at mealtimes was in Cree, of which I at first understood virtually nothing. They were usually very well-behaved children, except for those occasions when somebody would bring us a large lake trout in exchange for a couple of loaves of home-baked bread. Mrs. Garrett always baked or boiled the head of these monsters (thirty to forty pounds) and always there would be a squabble over who got the cheek pieces and the eyes. I knew we were dealing with delicacies, but I always had to avert my own eyes when the fish’s orbs were about to be forked and eaten! There is nothing like a boiled fish-eye rolling on a plate to make one queasy.
The fact that the missionary’s own children seemed to know only Cree made me apprehensive about what I would find when for the first time I faced a roomful of my charges for the summer. They say 90 percent of the things you worry about don’t come true. Unfortunately, this experience belonged with the 10 percent that do. The morning after my arrival, I rang the church bell, signalling nine o’clock. It wasn’t really