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July 11, Friday, 8:20 A.M.—After I attend to a few things around camp, I go up high. Yesterday laid out the problems with hunting from a canoe on a fast river like the Keele. If I secure the rifle, I can’t reach it. If I leave it loose enough to reach, I risk losing it, when the canoe bounces in a rapid.
I know I write this narrative to sound as if I were a little old man, whose dearest loves were his warblers and his orchids, with the physical abilities to correspond to the needs of those pursuits. Perhaps such an assessment is accurate enough. If it is, I think I can say I pursue my orchids and warblers with vigor. To reach this Keele River, I had to come down the Tsichu from the divide. According to the RCMP, the last expedition to descend the Tsichu was seven years ago and a disaster. As if I needed the lesson, the Tsichu taught me to face my weaknesses and find a way to endure.
I can, nevertheless, very nearly, literally, dance on the wide, church pew, ash gunwales of my old Mad River canoe. The canoe is part of me. If I am too clumsy to parallel park a car without risk, I can put the canoe where I choose, which requires as much fluidity of body as it does dexterity with the paddle. Sometimes to avoid rocks or to catch current, it is necessary almost to lay the canoe over on its gunwales. These are small things. Anyone who has lived in a canoe for years can do the same or better.
What I do reflects not great skill but a lifetime in the outdoors. I am likely to survive another season will offer no great surprise. I could succumb to an accident, but the likelihood of being killed by an event beyond my control strikes me as less probable in this country than were I to spend an equal amount of time in a major city.
A man’s weapon is more than mere inanimate steel; it is an embodiment of his personality. It is charged with both the light and the dark
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Adventure can be found in any place, even in these Mackenzie Mountains. Adventure is as much a state of mind as it is a set of physical circumstances. A person, such as myself, already deeply preoccupied with his hobbies and pursuits might well miss adventure in even the wildest circumstance. Imagine for the moment that in my walk up high today, I stumbled across an open vein of gold or silver. I do want to find something like that, but I want it about the way I wanted the calypso orchid or the Wilson’s warbler. I might take a little and never get around to getting back for the rest.
Now, and this is where the real adventure comes in; I haven’t bothered in some time to record precisely my exact whereabouts. I am somewhere between Sekwi Canyon and where the Natla River joins, which is the kind of feature I usually mention as I pass. This camp is located on an old glacial moraine, but old glacial scars are common in this country. If I have left approximate times for my hours on the river since the last definitely fixed position of days ago, I must admit that my records of travel time have been somewhat sloppy, as if exactness in such a thing could help. A change in water level, of as much as one inch would destroy anyone’s chances of reproducing my drift rates.
Then there is the final clue, and the most important one, which I can leave to fix my position: on the north bank, when the clouds lift from the top of the mountain, I can see a collection, almost a set piece scene of some weird, wind worn, rock structures. One of them has a hole in its center. The hole can be seen only from this small knoll where I camp. It is almost a window to heaven, so to speak. In my imagination, when I’m not looking, when nobody looks, which is most of the time, the rocks in that set piece scene dance, they speak to each other, they sing, they perform dramas.
Now, let us say I found the silver or its equivalent; I never get around to coming back, and I leave a will. I love wills. Everybody I know has one, or at least talks about having one, and I would like to have one too; except that when I die, nobody would want to get stuck with storing my junk. Nobody would want the books, and the few guns are mostly worn-out from use. Beyond their worn, used condition to pass my Colts on may not be a completely good thing. To leave my Colts to say a young nephew would be almost like passing along a curse. To palm a Colt is to assume a responsibility a man from another background might not even understand exists. What if the darker side of my personality, a side that seethes and rages at my perception of the injustices of the world, a side nurtured in all those hours and all those years of practice, came to life in a young nephew from the simple possession of those obsolete, worn weapons? A man’s weapon is more than mere inanimate steel; it is an embodiment of his personality. It is charged with both the light and the dark. If I were not there, how could I be assured that he would inherit the light and not the dark?
Suppose for the moment that someone like my nephew from Philadelphia, years from now, as a young man, finds my old notes. I know enough about myself now to know that my old, yellowed notes will be the only thing I will leave that might be of value. Suppose in those old notes the thing of interest he finds are the clues to the gold.
Charles is still in grade school, but I can already tell from his personality that he would consider millions in gold a convenience and not a bother. In Philadelphia, he is growing up in a social milieu where money would not constitute a drawback. Imagine him, sometime in his twenties and finding these imprecise notes. His outdoor experience would have been limited to the very occasional weekend with his father to their shooting club, where they hunted released birds. Perhaps at this age he would have learned to handle a small sail on the Chesapeake Bay. How he would handle himself in these mountains in his search for this camp would be high adventure.
Enough speculation about adventure, I have to go out with the rifle and the collecting bag and try to find something to eat. I feel myself weakening, to fail is to die.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images
So passes the Drumcliff curse? From hand to gun and gun to hand?