As the whine of the floatplane receded into the distance, I began to hum a comforting, tuneless song to myself. It was not from nervousness, more from the astonishing place lag of being flung, like a stone from a sling, into this remote place.
We were on Artery Lake, in eastern Manitoba, about 25 miles from the nearest (unsurfaced) road, though the distance was perhaps better measured in millennia than miles, so undisturbed by human hand was the landscape of rock, water and forest around me. I took comfort that I could share the sentiment, because I was not alone.
My fellow castaways — two Germans, Julian and Judith, and an Australian, Steve — had signed up with the Winnipeg-based Wild Loon Adventure Company for a trip down the Bloodvein river, a 12-day, 125-mile journey between Artery Lake and Lake Winnipeg. Leading us was Garrett Fache, the 31-year-old owner of Wild Loon, a khaki-and-canvas Crusoe: woolly-bearded, darkly tanned, an ingot of muscle — it was nothing for him to hoist a canoe on to his shoulders with an 8-stone food barrel already strapped to his back. He had river-guided for 12 years, and had a wealth of knowledge of the Manitoban back-country, its flora, culture and history.
For instance: the Bloodvein was once a major highway for the Anishinaabe and, after the arrival of Europeans, for the fur trading voyageurs. Still today, with only a little ingenuity, one could travel from the Bloodvein to Winnipeg, Hudson Bay, or the Great Lakes. Atikaki Provincial Wilderness Park, through which the Bloodvein runs, is a part of the greater Pimachiowin Aki, an 11,212 square-mile block of protected, Unesco-inscribed, indigenous land. Fache takes treading lightly in this land seriously — every piece of refuse we carried in was carried out, and more than once I watched him cross the river to collect a piece of litter left by other paddlers. In 2024, he won a national tourism award for his work in environmental sustainability.
Fache had told us to pack light. He provided everything else and it all arrived with us on the floatplane: the canoes, the safety equipment, the camping gear and food. We loaded our craft on the lakeshore — the Germans in one canoe, Steve and I in another, Garrett snugged into a single-seater — and glided out onto the water. Shortly, the river turned and, behind us, the stone banks appeared to slide together, shutting us in, just as the trees ahead glided apart to let the river roll on.
From the outset, the Germans were full of questions: “What will the weather be like for the next two kilometres?” “What satellites were used in the making of your map?” “What would we learn if we tested the water quality right now?” That, at least was known. As a wild, free-flowing river with few human intrusions, the water was as it had been for thousands of years: free of man-made pollution or chemicals (it was only to reduce the risk of giardia that we filtered our drinking water).
Early on the first day, we spied a scuttling on an outcropping of rock. Atikaki is thick with black bear, moose, lynx and woodland caribou, and we were hoping to see some of these animals by the riverside. But as the distance to the rock closed, these creatures performed more humanistic behaviour: the slipping on of dresses, the pulling on of clothes, and — strangest of all — the fitting of brightly coloured wigs.
Any ideas of nymphs or naiads, or memegwesiwag — the “little rock people” of local Ojibwe lore that live along the river — were immediately snuffed when we went ashore. They were an American girl scout troop, midway through a month-long canoe voyage through the Canadian hinterland. Gangly, muddy and sunburned, they shrugged and giggled away any questions about the wigs, then savagely fell upon a box of Tim Hortons muffins we gave them. While they munched, we slipped away downstream, left to wonder at the mysterious ways of teenagers. They were the only people we saw over the next 12 days.
In a ritual that would become familiar, we made camp that evening on the rocky shoreline, each of us in our own tent. Wild creatures were of no great concern — with so little experience of humans, the bears were unlikely to approach, and though we carried some flare-like “bear bangers”, we had no rifle. As the darkness closed in, we sat listening to a loon (a duck-like bird) calling over the water before taking flight to the south.
“That’ll be rain,” Fache said, explaining the “reverse-of-the-loon” concept, an indigenous adage that says a loon in evening portends rain, which will come from the opposite direction of the loon’s flight. We bedded down under a sky shot full of stars, but the rain soon came tapping on the flysheet. We could also hear the nearby rapids, whose timbre changed continually, and the call of the Harris’s sparrow which, in my exercise-fatigued mind, melded with the morning whistle of the kettle on the campfire.
The Bloodvein is a “pool and riffle” river, with long stretches of calm deeper water alternating with bursts of rapids and falls. Fache considered it a Class III+ river; moderately difficult, but doable for any novice honest about their ability and with no qualms about portaging (carrying the boats and supplies) around larger whitewater.
The Bloodvein is nearly always hemmed in by granite banks, through which run a constant streak of pinkish rock — hence, according to one theory, the river’s name. Beyond is a vast boreal forest of black spruce, white poplar and jack pines cowled in lichen. There is little earth here; when a tree topples over, its shallow roots pare back the topsoil like the peel from an orange. The rock walls are also touched with pictograms — drawings done by the Blackduck and Selkirk peoples a millennia ago using ochre and sturgeon fat. Some that we spotted were further proof that not much had changed over a thousand years on the river: a figure in a canoe, bird shapes, a moose.
At our first major rapid of day two, Bruise Easy Falls, Fache and Julian, who, to our collective good fortune, turned out to be a former whitewater canoe champion, surveyed the churning cauldron. “Hold right and drop through,” Fache said. “Dark water is your friend. Oh, and watch the rock garden.” He meant the boulders whose tops showed through the surf. Despite the advice, Steve and I became pinned on a rock and spun sideways, before, caught between surges of fast and slow water, we were quickly and unceremoniously tipped into the river.
Under the power of the purling flume, the body becomes all instinct. The hands seek something to close around, the eyes hunt for sky. I was underwater only a moment, but surfaced to realise I’d been carried a surprising distance downriver; Steve had gone even further. Our canoe was swamped, the barrels containing our kit floating free. With some effort we collected the flotsam and squared it away, but it laid bare the reality of the journey. Help was far away; our work was to move ahead, stay warm, stay alive; everything else was superfluous.
It wasn’t the last time we’d end up soaked, or bailing out our canoe. But after some days, there were marked improvements, which was good, because there were times when the rapids came one after another, some fun and exhilarating, some fun and terrifying, others simply impossible. Fache, otherwise a relaxed taskmaster, was serious about safety; we never ran a rapid without our helmets or life jackets, and he repeated his tenet “Don’t let go of your fucking paddle!” so often it became a serious joke; each canoe carried only one spare oar; without them, we were sitting ducks.
The water was not all fluvial rodeo. Some days the river was sluggish and flat before us, nothing to do but paddle. There were wide, still marshes of wild rice and lakes where ducks swam among the reeds and waterlilies. But it was never boring, with each bend of the river giving us a new vista of light and forest. And when we tired of the gurgle of the oar blades, we could placate ourselves with conversation. What does one talk about to pass those long hours of labour? The weather, family, the works of German novelist Karl May, the films of Werner Herzog (we imagined him narrating over us “Little did zey know, zey were paddling into oblivion . . . ”).
And dreams. From the very outset of the trip, we were all of us having wild night-time visions. While I wondered if those strange American girls had been memegwesiwag after all, Fache put it down to the ox-eye daisies that ringed most of our campsites; their pollen, he said, can produce a hallucinogenic effect.
On the fourth day, we came to the Stagger Inn, a trapper cabin set on a reedy embankment. It was custom to sign the “guestbook”, though one would need to be quite desperate to spend the night in that fly-blown place. It looked ransacked, with broken crockery and old magazines scattered across the floor. The book, rumpled with age and humidity, stretched from the 1990s to the most recent entry, a family of four two days ahead of us.
I had brought my telescopic fishing rod and most days made an effort to catch something for the pot. I was casting for pickerel but landed only jackfish and catfish, neither of which Fache nor I were keen to serve up as examples of fine Manitoba fare. There was never a worry of not having enough to eat, however. We breakfasted on oats and blueberries, and lunched riverside on cheese and pepperoni. Campers are the ultimate devotees of canned and preserved goods, and each evening Fache used them to great effect, producing hearty and inventive fire-cooked meals — burritos, pad Thai, chilli con carne, potato curry, spaghetti bolognese.
The seventh day, Fache told us, is always something of a pivot. And it was true: once we passed a week on the river, the canoe began to feel homey. I was comfortable in the stern, and was developing some kind of water sense, learning to balance my nerve against competence. That day, we came to a great rapid known as Island Chutes, where the banks rose into sheer cliffs and squeezed the river, which rolled and foamed before smashing into a wall of rock. Even to our veteran paddlers it seemed a tad dangerous and so, to avoid what Julian called “hydrological crucifixion”, we used a technique called lining, moving the emptied boats safely over the torrent by paying them out on ropes from the shoreline.
Come the last day, I was battered, scraped and bruised. My muscles ached. Even the most historically unforgiving among us must feel for the fur-trapping voyageurs, who were far from home, and did all this without the creams, slaves and sprays we used to make our journey more comfortable. It had been a bodily demanding trip at times, but one that was easy on the soul. Far out of the range of cell phone service, unencumbered by technology or cyber space, we had been beautifully confined to our surroundings.
“We are out of control!” Judith said one evening around the fire, meaning not a wild bunch of hoodlums, but rather beyond the constraints of the wider world. There were no demands upon us save from what was directly before us: to guard against the weather, to feed ourselves and to watch out for one another. The smallest things which, at home, would be chores or inanities, were, here, the purest of pleasures: fetching water, skipping rocks, washing clothes, collecting firewood, scouring the underbrush for blueberries. I felt I could never tire of the soft breezes, the bird calls or sight of otters gambolling on the riverbank.
It is a good trip, not because it is easy or luxurious, but because it reminds us of what we are capable. And one day, when the muscles are not as strong as they once were, and the call of the wild is not as clear, I will be able to remember stepping barefoot on the moss, feeling the pulsing water through the gunwales of the canoe, watching the purpling sky through the wood smoke, and, remembering it, I could say, “Ah yes, and I too ran the Bloodvein.”
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