Arctic Solitaire - Paul Souders

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miles to go before I might find enough ice to chill my evening cocktail, let alone support any polar bears.

      My destination for the day was Cape Tatnam, still fifty nautical miles off. The C-Dory was designed as a speedboat; its twin forty-horsepower outboard motors could send a lightly loaded boat skipping along at more than twenty-five knots. She came from the factory with two twenty-gallon gas tanks, which, used carefully, might propel the boat for 150 miles. As my trips grew more ambitious over the years, I accumulated a stock of six-gallon plastic cans that soon filled every available space on deck. I kept the leaky red containers held in place with a tangle of bungee cords and ratchet straps. C-Sick now carried more than one hundred gallons of fuel, weighing close to six hundred pounds, and my woefully overloaded boat sat low in the water. Add to that hundreds more pounds of camera equipment, survival equipment, and food—and the additional burden of sodden toilet paper on the roof. If I had to, I could push the boat up to twelve or maybe fifteen knots, but as I bumped up the speed, the engines would use exponentially more fuel. My plan was to go slow. At a leisurely pace of five or six knots, I burned a single gallon per hour, and could travel as much as five hundred nautical miles before I would need to start paddling.

      Soon, I felt like I really was at sea. Port Nelson slipped beneath the horizon, and I traveled miles offshore to avoid the mudflats and shoals that stretched far out into Hudson Bay. Only a faint line of refracted, distorted forest marked the shoreline far to the south. There was nothing but sea all around and a flawless blue dome of sky above.

      Along this part of the Bay, I never saw another boat. Or ship or barge or skiff or raft, either. Except for a few jet contrails far overhead, I might have been the last man on Earth. As hours passed, I began to feel a vague anxiety growing beneath the burden of the vast and featureless expanse. I felt every one of the six hundred open miles of ocean to the north like a weight teetering above my head, ready to come crashing down with the next storm. I didn’t even know where I was going to anchor that night. Not that it mattered, really; there wasn’t an island or a natural harbor or the slightest hint of shelter where I was headed.

      Clouds of black and common scoters wheeled and turned in the coloring sky as the sun slid from the western horizon toward north. I could find not a hint of the promised sea ice. Instead, a forest fire billowed smoke from beyond the tidal flats.

      I tried not to think about the fickle weather or how utterly exposed I was, five miles out from shore and ten times that far from shelter. Hours later, when I dropped anchor at sunset, the evening breeze calmed. The Bay went still: a steely blue pool, shimmering and magical. I climbed up onto the roof, and stared out at the water stretching to the horizon in every direction. I felt smaller than a dust speck floating on this endless sea. From my starting point on the Nelson that morning, I’d covered seventy nautical miles. A good day’s work.

      I woke to the smell of smoke—never a good sign, especially on a small boat. I bolted upright and stared wildly around, but was greeted not by flames, but instead by a thick white haze of forest fire smoke borne on the wind. A short night’s sleep had left me punchy and a little slow out of the gate. I wanted to run the Zodiac out to where I thought I might find the pack ice, and I set off heading due west. I motored along for several sleepy miles before it slowly dawned on me: I was heading the entirely wrong direction, and away from the ice. I swung the dinghy around 180 degrees, back the way I came and into what I thought was a line of morning fog. But in an instant, I was coughing and rubbing tears from my stinging eyes. I was motoring blindly along through clouds thick with yet more wood smoke.

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      Melting sea ice and distant forest fire, Cape Tatnam, Hudson Bay

      I traveled nearly two hours away from C-Sick before I spotted my first pieces of ice. It was twenty miles more before I reached the edge of the pack. I spent the next few hours studying mile after mile of dirty, broken ice. No polar bears, just the disconcerting sight of distant trees burning in the summer heat, billowing plumes of smoke, and ice melting away before my eyes. Soon, the Bay’s mood began to darken, and an easterly wind started to build. I turned the Zodiac back toward C-Sick, but before long I was struggling to muscle the inflatable dinghy up the back of tall waves. At each crest, we pitched forward over the top, crashing down into the trough below. I fought to keep the boat balanced, hold everything onboard, and not panic. I continually checked and re-checked my handheld GPS to make sure I was on the right course. Without that small battery-powered device, I never could have found C-Sick, not in a week of looking.

      She was right where I left her, though now bucking angrily at anchor in the waves. I had no stomach for sitting out a storm in these conditions. I scrambled back onboard and didn’t even change my sopping clothes before turning C-Sick west to ride the following seas back toward the Nelson River. The abandoned Hudson’s Bay Company settlement at York Factory, forty-five miles southwest, offered a sheltered spot to anchor inside the protection of the Hayes River. I motored C-Sick for eight or nine hours, picking up speed each time the boat surfed down the face of a wave. At sunset, we reached the river delta’s confusion of mudflats and unmarked, indistinct channels. I was desperate not to get stuck out on the flats on a quickly falling tide. As soon as I found more than four feet of water, I let out the anchor with a feeling of resignation and disgust. I’d been on the road for more than a week and had yet to accomplish anything. I may have been taking pictures all along, but they were nothing but snapshots—unexceptional and unmemorable.

      During the night, I woke to raindrops pattering in through my open window, and I looked out on a flat, gray sky. Come morning, there was enough east wind to keep me hunkered down. But by afternoon, I was itching to get off the boat. I hadn’t set foot on land in four days, and I headed out to explore the abandoned site of York Factory. The settlement dates back to the late 1600s, when the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC for short, or simply and ominously The Company) established one of its first trading posts there, part of a centuries-long dominion over the northern Canadian wilderness. The small fort grew into the central operating base for its trade in furs and nearly every other facet of the frontier economy. Every year, nearly all of the trade goods that arrived—everything from casks of cheap liquor to cotton and wool fabric to knives, axes, and rifles—were off-loaded from the HBC’s ships. The empty holds were quickly filled with the new continent’s bounty: beaver and lynx, marten and wolverine, even polar bear and wolves were all trapped, killed, skinned, then bundled and stacked like cordwood and shipped back to England. For centuries, the HBC served as the de facto government across the Bay’s vast watershed—the sole employer and its only store. The Company effectively ruled 1.5 million square miles of land, nearly half of what is now Canada. For centuries, York Factory’s central location at the mouth of the Hayes and Nelson watersheds allowed canoes to probe deep into the continent’s heart before the invention of steam-powered ships and trains. In time, HBC traders ventured north to the Arctic Ocean and west to the Pacific by river, lake, and overland portage.

      The Company introduced white man’s goods, weapons, and liquor to Native tribes unprepared for the oncoming rush of modernity. And York Factory, stuck out along the desolate southern shores of Hudson Bay, was at the center of it all. At its peak, halfway through the nineteenth century, there were fifty buildings, a permanent administrative workforce, and an even larger population of Cree and other First Nations tribes nearby, working and trading on the fringes of the new economy. Not everyone was a fan of the place, even then. Peter Newman’s sprawling book Empire of the Bay describes one clerk who, having endured the winter of 1846 here, grumbled that it was “a monstrous blot on a swampy spot, with a partial view of the frozen sea.” The place wore down even the toughest Scots—men like James Hargraves, who served for years as an administrative chief, or factor in Company parlance. Plagued by rheumatism, he complained bitterly that the local climate was “nine months of winter varied by three of rain and mosquitoes.”

      The Hudson’s Bay Company story is likely familiar to anyone who has cracked a history book. The unquenchable hunger for pelts nearly wiped out the beaver and decimated just about anything else unlucky enough to walk on four legs and wear a coat of fur. Vast fortunes accrued in London even as disease and dissipation shredded the fabric of indigenous tribal life. It wasn’t until 1870 that the newly

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