The River

A Short Story From The Manuscript Of "Tracks In The Mud"

As I write this, and I do mean write this, pen and note pad here in my tent, I’m sitting in the sand on the banks of North Eastern Ontario’s Montreal River. We canoed into this spot two days ago, slowly following a back channel out into the main river and in doing so, reached this island. It’s the exact same island we used as base camp during the fall of 2016, when we conducted a very unsuccessful fall Black Bear hunt. By “unsuccessful”, I mean a complete disaster in terms of getting the jump on a single bear. The area itself is thick with Bear, and big Bear at that, but not for two novices who don’t do nary an ounce of research into the habits and behavior of Black Bear in the early autumn months. As the trip wore on, our hopes of tagging out on a bear diminished, and though we shot Ruffed Grouse, caught and ate Smallmouth Bass and Northern Pike, our bear tags were never punched.

This time around we are not here to hunt. This is a trip of relaxation and exploration. You see the last time we spent so much time maintaining and checking bait sites and trail cameras that we didn’t have time to explore the area as much as I think we probably wanted to. By the time we packed up camp and left, we were leaving with more questions than answers. By “we”, I mean myself and my best friend and hunting partner, Neal DeWaard. He joined me on this trip, as he did the last one, and more to the point, we are both enjoying this trip far more this time around. The Smallmouth Bass have been complying with our hopes and ambitions to really hit them hard this week while we’re here. You must understand a couple things about this river though.

First thing, it’s fairly large, and there’s no real buildings along it this particular section of it that would do any person any good. It’s nestled deep in the Lorraine Valley, and besides a couple of Hydro roads that lead down near the river to a single boat launch, there isn’t any other way to access it.

The second thing is that even on its busiest days of the year, it receives next to no angling pressure consistently. So to wake up in the morning, and walk along one of the shorelines of which are comprised mostly of golden sand, cool mist dancing across the waters’ surface, shrouding the far bank as so not to be seen from the other side, and hear the sound of splashing against the surface, one might be tempted to think that perhaps the wind is picking up, and the sound you are hearing is waves beginning to lap the shore. You might continue walking only to discover that the splashing sound is seemingly inconsistent and sporadic. It might be an animal….an Otter, more likely a Beaver. You can’t help it. You have to investigate!

You walk slowly towards where you heard the splashing, and along the shoreline you see ripples, ever subtle. It’s minnows, pressed so tightly against the shore that one tiny influx of water could beach them all, dooming them to be a cranes’ dinner. It isn’t until you look out six feet further into the water that you see the full story. A group of of a half dozen Smallmouth Bass, ranging from a half pound to three pounds, forcing the minnows into the shallow water, waiting for their prey to make that one mistake. That one fatal mistake that results in the splashing of water you heard just minutes earlier. This is a common occurrence most mornings along the shores of the Montreal River. It’s the reason we returned here, armed to the teeth with top water lures, and it’s the reason we’re expecting to eat well this week, too.

The first time I ever laid eyes on the Montreal River, I was attending my cousins’ wedding in September 2015. Navigating a long stretch of seemingly endless highway, through the heart of Ontario’s Temagami country, invariably we crossed the Montreal River which passes through the town of Latchford. The town itself is quiet, as is the river. In being truthful, the one thing I remember about most of the towns in this region were the inexhaustible number of missing persons posters. It gave me reason to pause and ponder what it is about this region that equates to so many people disappearing over the years. What took my mind away from that was the river. From the bridge in town, the river meanders east, before making its last stretches south, towards what inevitably becomes the Ottawa River. For whatever reason, that one view of it left something of an impression on me, and it was only a short while later that I found myself staring for hours at it on Google Earth. Fast forward a year later, almost to the date, and there I was, canoe loaded with gear, and a predetermined island of which to base a weeks’ worth of Black Bear hunting from. And by now, we all know how that trip ended.

Lets’ come back to the present.

As I sit here now, so much is different. There is time to relax now, with very few expectations of going home with a cooler full of Black Bear meat. I can sit in the sand all morning if I do so wish. Maybe I will swim my entire day away. Ultimately, either of those options are about as complicated as my time here today will get. It’s a warm morning, and the fog was burned away by the sun a couple of hours ago. Now, it’s just flat out hot.

I look out over this river, and I can imagine the log drives. I can picture the rafts coming from upriver. I can imagine the landscape behind me devoid of old growth. Whether or not it was ever like that in this exact location, I can’t be sure. But the concept of it fascinates me. There is, however, signs of logging in the not too distant past. In exploring the road that loops in and out of this place, there are areas that bare the scare of selective logging. Vast swaths of birch and poplar saplings pegging out of the ground, a few hundred yards away from them, a large, looming, wary treeline where the old growth had been spared.

And, as I sit on my ass, scanning the river, the sight that I truly want to see just doesn’t materialize. I can envision the canoes from a distance. Happy paddlers exploring this remote and deathly quiet landscape. This place, this experience, it’s certainly not for everyone. To find yourself in a tent in the middle of a crystal-clear night under the stars, but without the sounds of nature, though fully immersed in a wild place, is enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck at least once. I’m so used to the racoons and other small critters showing up and rustling some leaves outside the tent. But put me in a tent when there’s nothing but the sound of silence to lull you to sleep, and you’ve got the right recipe to make my mind wander in seemingly endless and terrifying places.

Yet this place possesses a bipolar nature. For all the time I’ve spent here, it has been gentle to me. Even the thunderstorms that often roll through are not particularly destructive in nature. But when you leave the false sense of safety that the beach offers, and trek into the dense forest that surrounds this place, the attitude of the river changes drastically. It is steep, rugged, dark, and gives the sense of ruthlessness. While I have spent plenty of time in remote areas, it’s here where I always feel like this forest would swallow someone up and never spit them out. It would be frivolous to try to explain that feeling further. I simply don’t have that explanation for why I feel the way I feel towards these woods. Back in 2016 during our first trip here, Neal and I hiked down a very small and steep dry creek bed to a section of rapids at the bottom of one of the hydroelectric dams that harness the rivers power.

The fishing was spectacular, in fact we were fortunate enough to catch walleye feeding right on the surface, which I’d only ever saw happen once before. Our hike back up the dry creek to the road was about halfway over when, all of the sudden, I felt the overwhelming sensation of being watched by something close by, and that whatever was watching us had the intention of harming us, should we give it the opportunity. The feeling was so powerful that I can only equate it to walking into an invisible wall. I stopped dead in my tracks, the hairs on my neck and back, not to mention my arms, standing up on end. I could barely form words, but turned around to see Neal behind me, his shotgun raised, scanning the woods that seemingly were beginning to close in on us. He had felt the very same sensation, and both of us had lost colour to our faces. We made it back to the road in record time, having not so much as heard a sound, let alone actually saw something. I will never forget how powerful, and intensely terrifying that experience was.

As it were, this river and its woods still possesses that same feeling of indifference now. There is an unspoken harshness to its demeaner back beyond the rivers’ shores. The canopy is so very thick that it’s always damp and musty below it. Moss grows on damn near everything, and the rocks are slick and slimy. More to the point, it’s a great place to roll an ankle, but a terrible place to get a tan. Somehow though, I know we need places like this, and I’m grateful that a landscape exists where I can feel these exact feelings, in no small measure does it keep the ego grounded. It isn’t any one mishap that could potentially happen that flows slowly through my mind – the thought of a broken leg or a terrible laceration while way the hell out there. It’s the thought of one occurring, and as a result of that, setting in motion the perfect recipe for others to occur afterwards, sealing my fate. If you guessed that I take every step with carefully and deliberately out here, you’d have guessed right.

In fact, on this trip I’ve been mostly barefoot. Not that this stops any sand from getting inside my tent, because it doesn’t. At this point, I might as well be sleeping out on the beach, and there’s very little if any way at all to stop this invasion. I won’t claim to really give a shit anymore, either. My tent and sleeping bag belong to the sand now, I’m just renting them. Walking barefoot just about everywhere we’ve traveled out here since arriving has been a shock to the legs. Having sand, moss, rock, decaying foliage, and god knows how many unlucky insects who’s last dying thoughts are to bite, and bite hard, have begun to completely reconfigure how I stand. My balance has also begun to chance, or at least it feels that way. I lean into my steps more now, especially when the ground I walk on is on an angle. I can’t help but observe that when I’ve two hiking shoes strapped to my feet, the grip and tread on the bottoms of them do a lot of the balancing work for me. Now, having nothing to protect or support my ankles and feet, the rest of my body begins to compensate. My hands begin to play a more important role in maintaining balance, grasping at branches, and rocks. At first this scene unfolding over and over must have looked every bit as ridiculous as it felt, but in a short amount of time, their movements become calculated and precise, navigating some truly steep and unforgiving places during the trip.

On one occasion, Neal and I took the canoe down river to a long stretch of shallows where vast sandbars protrude the rivers’ surface. The afternoons’ sun is hot and relentless, causing flies that looked a hell of a lot like house flies, to come out in full force and feed on both of us. Their bites are painful and stunningly quick and killing one before it has the chance to fly away comes as a great victory, however frivolous it ultimately is. There is always another fly waiting to take its place.

Canoeing through this sandy delta, I begun to realize that it doesn’t seem as though we’re in the same geographical region anymore. This is straight out of a scene from the Fraser River, or something akin to a glaciated river out of Northern British Columbia, or at least that’s where my mind tries to place it. It looks like the kind of place where a giant Northern Pike would tuck up along one of the sunbaked back bays, waiting for anything half its size with a pulse to so much as touch the waters’ surface. I can picture the torpedo shape creating a wake towards its prey, followed by the most violent eruption of water and teeth. Big pike like that do live here.

They made their presence known during our last trip here, on a day after we had set up our first bait site for Black Bear. Neal and I both agreed that the best thing to do was wait a couple days before we checked the bait again, so we set out to cash in on the potential of the river itself. We walked the shore, casting all manner of lures into the river, along its sparse weed beds, searching for bass and pike. I remember casting to where a weed bed paralleled a shallow sandbar. The lure, a Rapala Husky Jerk, which is designed to suspend when you stop your retrieve, twitched and swam along the edge of the weeds, then came into focus only a couple meters away from me. I paused, and a mouth full of daggers engulfed the lure in its entirety, turned and swam away. My 10lb monofilament shredded against the fishes’ teeth so quickly that I never so much as felt a single bit of tension on the rod. As the pike turned, its body seemed to go on forever. I can’t be sure of the length of it, but I always regard that Northern Pike as ‘really fucking big’.

As the canoe glides through the mid-afternoon heat, the breeze dies off and the surface of the river is glass. We angle the canoe towards the far shore to the left of us, where we can see a massive sandbar jutting out at the bottom of a high rocky outcropping. I watch the ripples that my paddle makes as we travel along. I don’t know for the life of me why I associate a good canoer as being someone who, when paddling a canoe, can paddle without having their paddle make any sound while pushing through the water. This I am most certain is entirely false, but I also can’t seem to shake this belief. My paddle still makes noise when it cuts into the rivers’ surface, and the more notice that noise, the more I try to alter my technique to quiet it, though it doesn’t make a difference, it just makes my ability to J stroke slightly more difficult, and makes me respect those who can paddle a canoe for weeks on end.

Reaching the sandbar on the opposite bank, it seems we’ve entered back into North Eastern Ontario once more. High above us, the rocks and boulder strewn mid section, about halfway up, loom high enough that the sun is blocked out around the base of the escarpment. I announce my intention to climb the whole damn thing barefoot to Neal, who has his reservations and opts to stay down on the sandbar where, if he were to fall, would only fall the length of his body, whereas my descent to bottom may last as long as ten very long seconds before I reach the bottom. But then again, it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the bottom.

Climbing up really isn’t hard. Taking a moment to look over your intended path up really helps, and so that’s what I do. Navigating one section at a time, with as carefully calculated steps as possible, the ascension becomes a little easier, though not without hazard. Halfway up, crossing a strewn boulder field full of sharp rocks is required, and my feet struggle endlessly with the ragged edges and angles of the rocks here. There’s no room for a graceful approach to this, and midway through the field, I am forced to resort to using all four limbs just to make it through safely. But across now safe and sound, the climb up continues. I reach the top, and before I look down at how far I’ve come, I need a moment to survey what’s around me. The top is matted with pine needles and low-lying blueberry bushes already beginning to deck themselves into their autumn attire.

While most of them maintain their greenery, some are sporting leaves of vibrantly sharp red that stick out in stark contrast. Some of them even have a few of the very last berries of the season still clinging to their stems. Almost strategically placed in a small clearing are the charred remains of what I can only figure to be the stump of a pine tree that at some point was struck by lightning. A blackened nub about 5 feet tall, completely burnt to a crisp. This would be the first of 4 that I would find here at the top. Out from the stump, I can see straight down to the river, and it is one hell of a fall back down there. Walking ever cautiously, I let my naked feet guide me closer and closer to the edge, seeking a view that will expose the sandbar on which Neal, and the canoe, await my return. I can now see the sandbar, so I sit along the edge trying to gain a better perspective and catch movement.

When I catch sight of Neal, he’s walking along the left side of the sandbar, and his sporadic movement indicates he’s casting a line in the water, looking for our next meal. But from here way up high, he barely looks human. I shout his name to let him know I made it to the top in good shape, and with all appendages in one piece, then begin to survey the surrounding landscape. The late afternoon sun lights the surface of the river in a way that one can only appreciate from such an elevated position as this. You wouldn’t even know, from up here, that this body of water is a river at all. I have this belief that each body of water, given its depths, current, and size, has its own distinct personality, and I’ve always felt strongly this way, but from here the Montreal River takes on an entirely different mood altogether. Down on its surface, even on a windy day, it has an unobstructed calmness. From here atop this ancient rock, with the sun catching the ripples created by the breeze, it gives the impression as being playful, and I’m now feeling drawn to climb down and dive into it.

Turning away from the spectacular view, I look for a path of least resistance to head back to the way I climbed up and notice a small trail. That’s when I step in it – the biggest pile of ink-black bear shit I’ve seen since we’ve arrived here, right in the middle of the trail. I notice another, and another, and really start to look around me with purpose. I hadn’t noticed this trail when I came through, the height of the Blueberry Bushes concealed it, but one glance at the moss that lines it and it’s perfectly clear to see that this trail is an annual Black Bear highway at the height of berry season. There are deep permanent indents from the years and years of wear from the pads of the bears’ feet stepping in the same place over, and over again. I look around at the pines and wonder about some of the incredible scenes that they have seen play out around them in such a truly wild place and feel a twinge of envy. Scraping a good sized chunk of moss off the ground, I wipe my foot with it and continue down the trail, avoiding any further incident with the landmines and begin the descent back down to the bottom, eventually crossing the boulder field again, and reaching the sandbar where Neal and the canoe are waiting. My feet don’t ache and are becoming callused in places that serve as weird grips of tread that I’ve never experienced before, and it’s not until we’re paddling back to camp that I realize I’m starved.

That night a storm rolls through without wind or rain. It’s the most awesome display of natural power I have seen in many years. Lightning flickers in intervals spread out over just a few seconds apart. And the brightest of the flashes seem to be concentrated downriver, in the area of that escarpment. I think about those Pines, both alive and burned, and wonder what is going on up there tonight, whether I should climb it again tomorrow to find out, but most of all I am thankful that they’re up there tonight, and I’m down here.

Then, right on cue, sleep arrives.