The Canoe

There was a small bump of muscle on my left forearm; I couldn't explain it, partly because I was skin and bones at age nineteen, but Darrell Dennis offered: "It might be from paddling your canoe." I thought about that and was inclined to believe he was right. We were at the Ontario Agricultural College (OAC) in Guelph, Ontario in I960. I was in my second year of university intending to advance into a career of wildlife biology and Darrell was to proceed to a major in honours chemistry. Later, he switched to join my major; that of fisheries and wildlife management and continued into a life-long career with wildlife as did I. The canoe he had referred to was the focus of stories I had told him of growing up near the small town of Geraldton in northern Ontario (in fact, as far as we could figure out that year, I was from the most northerly location in Ontario of any of the students at the three-partitioned colleges; OAC, Ontario Veterinary College and MacDonald Institute). I had purchased and used the canoe when I was sixteen years of age. The canoe was a 15-footer, canvas and cedar (the Cadillac of canoes), pointed at both ends. It was a Peterborough paddling canoe (built in Peterborough, Ontario) and I had ordered it directly from the catalogue; brand new and shining green.

I needed the canoe, or so I thought to expand my activities of duck hunting, trapping and general exploration in the boreal woodlands, muskegs and never-ending lakes and rivers of the northern Precambrian Shield country surrounding the small gold-mining town. In those years, there were few roads; human presence north of the town amounted only to workers of the northern line of the Canadian National Railroad and habitants of the much smaller hamlet of Nakina; beyond that were the northern boreal forest, the "land of the little sticks"-- the lowlands of James and Hudson Bays.

Each fall, my brother Reg and our buddies Raimo and Mauri Mikkonen would hike through a mile or so of muskeg to get to the cattail (Typha) marsh of a small river (Pine Creek) in which the town poured its wastes. The fertilizer had encouraged the growth of a sizeable and productive delta where it entered Kenogamisis Lake (ask a northern Cree to explain the meaning of the lake's name -- I can't do it here in public; by the way, it does not mean "long lake" as reported on the internet). Various species of ducks summered there and late-fall migrants, especially black ducks, would arrive to rest and feed for a few days. The duck-hunting season was the highlight of the year for me; the four of us always missed that day of school when the season opened, but the teachers knew about it and tolerated our absence. Shooting the ducks, especially the large black ducks on the wing was terribly exciting and enjoyable. We made our own decoys from cedar (Thuja) wood and with the canoe, we were able to place them out in the shallow water. Reg shot a green-headed mallard drake in 1956 and mounted it; this was one of the first indications of this species moving into northern Ontario from the west.

At an even earlier age (in the 1940s), the summers were occupied with helping out in the garden, which included gathering little bits of organic soil from the nearby forest for the vegetables. We picked blueberries (Vaccinium) all-day-long during some August days (after a five-kilometer hike, followed by the hike back, carrying six- and eleven-quart baskets full of berries) so our mother could preserve them in quart sealers for the winter (as many as fifty sealers per year). We picked mushrooms for the same purpose, used dandelion (Taraxacum) leaves for spinach and generally eked out a living from the surrounding woodlands of black spruce (Picea), jack pine (Pinus) and white birch (Betula). We handpicked jack pine cones and sold them to the tree nursery. During those years we had few, if any, toys. Rocks and sticks were abundant, so we made slingshots and used these to war against the Mikkonen brothers, when we were not just simply throwing rocks at each other at an abandoned mineral-drill site. I can still remember, while standing next to the garden at age eight or nine, listening to the cries of a pack of wolves not that far away.

Of course, we fished for northern pike and "pickerel" (walleye) in the nearby lake. On one occasion, while fishing off Little Long Lac Bridge, we noticed a huge pike-like fish trying to grab a 2-pound pike on one of the lines. Four or five of us boys immediately attached other small pike to our lines, and threw them out to catch the monster, but to no avail. This large fish, which we compared to the length of our bicycles, must have been a muskellunge, never before reported from that lake, or if not, one of the largest northern pike ever! In summer, we somehow survived the mosquitos, blackflies, no-see-ums, horse flies and deer flies, all so common in Ontario's northern woods with never-ending water bodies. When I travelled back to my home country in later...