Cameras on Hudson Bay

by JOHN J. ROWLANDS

OVER and over again in the darkness on the riverbank high above us the Indian women were calling “Cheechoo . . . Cheechoo . . . Jimmy Cheechoo?” Their voices, like the flashing of the fireflies, came from unexpected directions, now near, now further away, in a clear and pleasant cadence. It was almost a chant.

“Cheechoo . . . Cheechoo . . . Cheechoo?”

It was nearing midnight, and although the earth on top of the bank still gave up some of the heat stored by the day’s sun, down where the canoes were beached in the soft clay of the Moose River a quickening breeze picked up the chill of the water and helped to blow the mosquitoes away. Behind us lay Moosonee, the end of the railroad near James Bay, its location marked now by the doleful chorus of howling sled dogs chained to stakes among the Indian tents. Ahead to the east on an island near the mouth of the river was Moose Factory, one of the oldest posts of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

We (meaning the artist and photographer Henry B. Kane, Fred Watriss of M.I.T., and myself) had come north to photograph wildlife. I was to learn that when a photographer goes into the field he follows the plan of a girl on her summer holidays — he takes something suitable for every conceivable occasion, with extras for anything else that may happen. The big aluminum-bound plywood camera case that our man carried was lovingly built to guard two thousand dollars’ worth of equipment from dust, moisture, and baggagemen. Its black velvet lined interior was like a jewel case. There were padded slots and compartments for every piece of auxiliary equipment, and a special section for a 4 x 5 Brand view camera with a Zeiss Tessar f 4.5 lens, which he used for general work. He also carried a versatile hair-triggered 2¼ x 3¼ Speed Graphic, with an f 4.5 Ektar lens, for shots when he must take the light and the subjects as they come, and compose and expose in a wink.

In the afterglow of the long sub-Arctic twilight, several Indian women squatting in the 24-foot freight canoe loomed up as shapeless humps, and beyond, standing in the water, a young Cree held the stern against the current. A baby whimpered in its moss bag laced to a backboard, and the young mother crooned softly in Cree, slowly twisting her shoulders from side to side to comfort it.

One by one the heavily laden canoes were pushed out into the stream, and as the men struggled to get them off the beach the women left behind on the bank started their pleading chant again.

“Cheechoo . . . Cheechoo . . . Chee-c-h-o-o!”

A young Hudson’s Bay clerk, who scrambled aboard at the last minute, chuckled when he explained: “They always want to travel in Cheechoo’s canoe, He’s respected as the best canoeman at the post — knows the river better than any Cree in the Moose Band.”

Copyright 1948, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

Driven along by a powerful outboard motor clamped to its flattened stern, the canoe shouldered the current, twisting and turning as Jimmy Cheechoo sensed the meanderings of the channel. In the bow a young Cree sounded continually by thrusting a paddle ahead of the canoe. He grunted something in Cree when the blade hit bottom. Once when the fin of the propeller shaft touched, the engine coughed convulsively and then, clearing its throat, resumed its explosive chatter. Near the end of our crossing to Moose Factory we stopped to let the Indian women go ashore to their camp, and soon afterwards we rounded the end of Factory Island and saw the lights of the post ahead.

2

THE man who in the early days of the company would have been called factor of Moose Factory (but who now carries the title of manager) is Ronald Duncan, a Scotsman who has seen service with the “Bay” for more than thirty years. He is a thin and wiry man of inexhaustible energy and patience; a gentle man, yet firm when need be, and he has the respect of the Crees to whom he speaks in their own tongue. It was long after midnight when he led us up the steep, high-risered stairway to the second floor of the staff quarters, once long ago used for storing fur. The massive brass lock on our door was made some two hundred years ago and the keyhole was almost big enough for a mouse to crawl through.

The single light in the big hall at the head of the stairs revealed a life-size oil portrait of Henry Hudson, whose name is the very symbol of the history of the region. Looking at the grave face with its massive beard, you had the uneasy feeling that the piercing dark eyes were alive. When we asked why this splendid portrait was relegated to the shadows of the old fur loft, Ronald Duncan smiled. “It used to have a place of honor in the living room,” he said, “but the men were a bit disturbed by the old chap; they felt he was always watching them with those hunting eyes. They couldn’t forget that he died somewhere up there in the Bay.” He nodded towards the north.

In the living room of the Moose Factory staff quarters two clerks were solemnly listening to the throaty moaning of a jazz band singer whose voice, momentarily waxing and waning in volume, had struggled some 1800 miles to Hudson Bay despite the steadily protesting static of the northern lights. Civilization had trailed us to the wilderness.

The original Moose Factory post was built two hundred and seventy-five years ago on Hayes Island, a short distance across a channel of the Moose from its present site on Factory Island. The post, still important in the fur trade of the north, has changed little with time. Its buildings and the scattered Indian houses are strung along a single road of clay beaten hard by the feet of generations of Bay people. The staff house, a structure of squared logs with dovetailed corners, now hidden by sheathing, was built in 1820. Next to it is the manager s house, also built of logs. Close by is the big store and fur warehouse, a massive building of heavy timbers closely braced to stand the gales and the snows of the northern winter.

The Hudson’s Bay Company is the country storekeeper of the north and its stock, ranging from pins to canoes, is carefully chosen to meet the needs of the people and the rigorous conditions of life in the bush. One end of the store was given over to provisions, including bags of flour, barrels of salt — which is used in great quantities in preserving meats — bacon and salt pork in huge slabs, canned fruits and vegetables, black tea, and plugs of strong black tobacco.

Guns, high-powered rifles and shotguns, with ammunition as well as percussion caps for the older weapons, were stacked on shelves on one side of the room, with tumplines and packsacks near-by, and long rubber boots hanging from nails. Here were the famous Hudson’s Bay axe with its back-flared bit, and the company’s indispensable knife with the curved blade; drawknives, planes, saws, files; coils of rope and kegs of nails; bunches of traps and piles of sheet-iron tent stoves.

Glass cases filled with mounds of chocolate drops and gum orange quarters and trade cookies were the wonder of crowds of Indian children, while their mothers gravely appraised huge shining pots which would be blackened forever over the first campfire. Ball-pointed pens at forty-nine cents were selling briskly, although most of the Indians cannot write.

The buildings are joined by neat gravel walks bordered with whitewashed stones, an identifying mark of nearly all Hudson’s Bay posts. A winddriven generator which whirls with a soft swishing sound day and night aids a small gasoline power plant in supplying current to light the post buildings. It is bad manners to leave lights burning unnecessarily.

Down the road a bit, just beyond the headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police constable, where his ten sled dogs snarl at each other from the ends of stout chains, is the little Anglican church, its red steeple askew as the result of a spring flood many years ago. Held by a gigantic ice jam, the Moose overflowed the island, and the church rose from its foundations and headed for the sea. When at last it was restored to its proper place, large holes were bored in the floor so that it would fill rather than float in any future flood.

The fall of the lectern is a beautiful piece of soft moose hide embroidered in beads by Cree women in a design of mallards rising from reeds and water. The altar cloth, also moose hide, bears a more formal design. The congregation sits on simple benches under which one notes the big plugs fitted in the holes in the floor.

In the old cemetery near the ancient stone powder house, wooden and slate markers told the stories of generations of Moose people, including a former factor, “a faithful servant ... in the twelfth day of the third month of his eighty-fifth year,” and a man who “died by the sea in his twenty-fourth year.” And there were markers for children — far too many — whose greatest enemy here is tuberculosis.

Wildlife photography was our chief purpose; there would be no wasting of film on the way. Our photographer had said so himself. But a battered one-armed sawdust doll, hanging by its wigless head on a fence picket, was too much for him. There, in the perfection of unconscious composition, good lighting, and human appeal, was a picture! That was the beginning. Thereafter, it could have been anything — an Indian mother and her baby, a sled dog puppy asleep in the sun, or perhaps the Crees raising the flag on a spruce sapling before a trappers’ meeting.

An expert photographer has the cunning of a cat, stalking his prey with an apparent air of complete indifference. With his camera open and ready, he wanders about, seemingly interested in everything but the chosen shot. Keeping a sharp eye on the light, he moves closer and closer. He may even look a bit bored. Then, when his victim is completely disarmed and least expects it, he springs the shutter and the hapless prey is devoured by the lens and digested in a developing tank at leisure.

Attempting the impossible, challenging the fading light, straining the fastest film to its limit to stop life in its tracks, delighted our photographer. One night while he was going over his cameras during a savage thunderstorm, he experimented with color photographs by lightning. He set his camera in the window and opened the shutter, closing it immediately after the next earsplitting stroke, which, incidentally, killed a near-by sled dog. The result was a dramatic picture of the little white Indian church with its bright red steeple, and the blue-white jagged line of the lightning reaching down from the flying storm clouds.

To a photographer, whether or not he has his camera, life is an endless game of composition — tragedy, comedy, and monotony, which is the hardest of all to photograph. The very old Indian woman waiting her turn on a bench outside the doctor’s office started our photographer’s shutterfinger trembling, and the young trapper sitting beside her with an injured sled dog in his arms — doctors in the north draw no line between man and beast — never knew that his troubled face had been preserved on film.

The constantly moving northern lights in all their beautiful hues, unfortunately too faint to register in color, were successfully recorded on our black and white film with exposures ranging from five to fifteen seconds with the lens wide open. But attempts to photograph hundreds of mosquitoes that alighted on our packsacks failed because the insects wouldn’t sit still.

Indians now too old to trap and retired servants of the company end their days in houses about the post , and with reminiscent watery stare look back in time and point to the long-discarded fur presses, huge squared timbers raised and lowered by massive screws, and the rusty cannon with which the fort was defended in the early clashes of the fur trade. In the clay along the banks of the river you can still find rusty spikes that were forged by hand years ago in the old blacksmith shop which is used to this day for chores of the post.

The apparent tranquil pace of Moose Factory is misleading, for there is activity from early morning, when Ronald Duncan goes to the store to work a while before it opens, until nearly midnight, when with earphones clamped to his head he talks by radio with the company’s far-flung posts on the Bay — Rupert House and East Main, and Port Harrison; Attawapiskat, Fort Albany, Port Nelson, York Factory, Churchill, and others.

All day long the store is filled with Indian trappers, idling the summer away, buying trifles without thought for thrift. Canned apple and tomato juice take the place of the ice-cream cones and soft drinks of the city, and the Crees sip their drinks from holes punched in the top of the cans and solemnly watch their small offspring pitching pennies in the powdery dust of the walk. To persuade an Indian to accept work during the summer is a task at which few have been successful.

Many of the Indians who trade at Moose Factory travel as far as two hundred miles to their trapping grounds. The best of them go the greatest distance and come back to the post only at Christmas, sometimes at Easter, to replenish their supplies. The average Indian probably takes in from three to four hundred dollars a year in cash for his furs, although a really skillful trapper in favorable country may make up to five thousand dollars in a good year.

3

IHE Indian families at Moose Factory were already breaking camp in late August and starting, canoes loaded to the gunwales, for the trapping grounds. Of all the canoes wo saw go down the river only one was moving by manpower, for every Indian who can scrape together the price of an outboard motor travels in ease, and there is little doubt that in the Cree’s scale of values an outboard motor is equal to, if not more important than, a wife. He will risk running short on provisions and economize on everything else to make sure his canoe carries an assorted collection of cans and bottles of gasoline.

The old and weather-battered boardwalk built on logs across the mud to the river’s edge at Moose Factory is the gangplank to the eastern Arctic. Fur traders, prospectors, explorers, the Mounted Police, government officials, doctors, nurses, men of the church, and Indians come and go by plane and canoe and dog sled.

We were bound for the lonely tidal marshes of Hannah Bay, famous James Bay rendezvous of the snow and blue geese. Here, early in the fall, the birds rest and feed for several weeks on their southward flight from the summer nesting grounds on Baffin and Southampton Islands and the marshes of Ellesmere Island in the Arctic. They come into Hannah Bay by the tens of thousands, the snow geese like whitecaps taking flight from the sea, the blue waveys as dark and unpredictable as the Bay’s autumn storm clouds. With them are flocks of Canada geese, great whistling swans from the barren grounds, ducks, and shore birds. The air is filled with the clamor of their calling.

From Hannah Bay they make what is believed to be a nonstop flight of nearly two thousand miles to the marshes of the Southern states. We had hoped for a cold snap in the Arctic to bring down a few early geese, but the continuing warm weather was assurance that we would see only local birds. But that was enough to lead us on.

With Jimmy Cheechoo as guide, we left the post in midafternoon for a “Hudson’s Bay start,” an old company practice to allow for the inevitable delays of loading canoes and dawdling farewells in the early days of the fur brigades. The idea is to go out from the post a few miles for the first night’s camp and get ready for a crack-o’-dawn start. It is still a good way to begin a journey.

Where it enters James Bay the Moose River is a majestic, tawny flood nearly four miles wide, with many shoals and several sandy islands covered with scrub willows. Its current, although hardly perceptible, is powerful and can be treacherous when it meets the incoming tide and a northerly wind.

The shallowness of lower James Bay makes it one of the most dangerous pieces of water in the north. In some sections at low tide the blue clay flats run out from two to five miles from the true shore, and in many places you can step out. of a canoe ten miles at sea and make repairs in water only a foot or so deep. Indians and white men alike are cautious and apprehensive while crossing this wide, unsheltered stretch of sea. The north winds that sweep down from Hudson Bay, the parent body, quickly turn it into a thrashing maelstrom from which there is little chance of escape if you are caught far out. Should the ebbing tide leave your canoe high and dry on the cheerless, boulder-strewn flats it is exhausting and sometimes impossible to walk ashore through the deep, sticky clay which makes every knee-deep step a great effort.

In calm weather the tide glides across the flats, an undulating line, now curving to follow the pattern of the rippled clay, now running ahead in short tongues of amber water. Ordinarily it advances at a fast walking pace, but with a strong following wind it rushes in with frightening speed, a low, frothing bore that can be disastrous to canoes aground on the fiats. The only hope then is to paddle or run for the shore under full engine power, keeping pace with, but just behind, the breast of the tide, where it is still too shallow to build up dangerous seas. This operation is complicated by the risk of striking the innumerable boulders lying just below the surface.

4

WE CAMPED the first night at the mouth of the river on Ship Sands Island, a lonely low and sandy piece of land on which only sea grass and stunted willows get any encouragement to go on living. Henry Hudson may have spent his last days in this region, perchance on this very island, for in the spring of 1611 he was abandoned with eight of his men by the mutinous crew of the Discovery after the ship had spent the winter in the ice in the southwest part of the Bay. Unless the coast has changed a great deal during the intervening centuries the vicinity of Ship Sands Island seems to offer the only shelter for a ship. Sixty miles to the east across the water, now still and gray in the twilight, lay Hannah Bay.

The James Bay tidal country is notorious as one of the worst places in the north for mosquitoes. Millions of them descended on us the moment the canoe touched land. They came in clouds, literally dark against the sky, and we began to believe the old man at the post who said we might need shotguns to blast holes through them to get our bearings. Two minutes after we set our packsacks ashore they were completely covered with a gray coating of the vicious insects. And they covered our clothes, but the effective insect repellent developed during the war kept most of them away from bare skin. Nevertheless, they hovered within an inch or so of our heads and it took hours to overcome the instinctive tendency to swat at them. To move through the grass meant stirring up more insects, so Cheechoo pitched our tent on the shore just above high-water mark.

The hum of swarms of mosquitoes concentrated in an area of a few yards grows to a high-pitched all-pervading whine something like the singing note of a dynamo, but far more penetrating. In time, as you hear it hour after hour, the sound takes on a rhythmic throb that bores into your head until it becomes almost unbearable. Without the protection of fly dope or nets, men in the bush would soon die under the attack of hordes of insects driven by their lust for blood. They tell stories in the far north of caribou being killed by the poison and loss of blood from countless mosquito bites. Whether this is true I don’t know, but it is not improbable. However, it is well known that mosquitoes kill young birds when they are newly hatched and without the protection of feathers. I once came upon a prospector whose face was swollen to repulsive proportions. His eyes were completely closed and he was stumbling aimlessly in a delirium. He had lost his precious bottle of fly dope when his canoe capsized a week before.

Mosquitoes are at their worst in the calm just before a storm on a hot and humid day in July when the muskeg reeks and the stench of the skunk spruce fills the breathless air. Only a strong breeze drives them to cover and brings relief, and high open ground as far as possible from grass and trees is the best location for a camp.

The two young government ornithologists who were camping on the shore opposite Ship Sands Island had been there since June, when ice still floated in the Bay, to take a census of the duck population, particularly the blacks, as well as shore birds. Now it was late August and the dreary existence was beginning to tell on them. One was a graduate student in biology and the other was preparing himself for forestry.

They had reached the stage when the constant hum of the mosquitoes had become a trial, and for the past week they had stayed in their tent, moving out only when absolutely necessary. To pass the time when talk lagged and playing cards became monotonous they had twice taken their outboard motor apart and slowly reassembled it. The daily trips to the duck traps in the tidal pools became journeys of dread.

Before we crawled into our sleeping bags that first night on Ship Sands Island, Jimmy Cheechoo pulled out a cloth-wrapped bundle and revealed a battered alarm clock which he solemnly wound and set for four o’clock. We had come more than a thousand miles to the wilderness to get away from clocks and the discipline of time, yet here on James Bay a Cree whose ancestors depended on the sun — if they were interested in time at all — used an alarm clock to break the day.

5

THE tide had started back to the sea and it was spitting rain when we started for Hannah Bay at dawn. Somber clouds scurried out of the southwest, wraiths in tattered shrouds fleeing from the rising wind, and soon we were plunging in a heavy sea with tarpaulins hastily nailed to the gunwales to protect our dunnage and the photographic equipment. Water poured over the bow and rushed back to drench us.

If Cheechoo was anxious his stoical face gave no sign, though once, thrifty in his words, he wished aloud that we had the extra motor that is usually carried in the big canoes for emergencies in crossing the Bay. He knew, long before he told us, that the offshore wind would hasten the outgoing tide and that we would sit one out before we reached Hannah Bay. We managed to work within half a mile of desolate Big Rock Island before the canoe grounded. Then for a little the sun broke through the clouds, and the lonely blue flats, stretching away to the north, were patched with gold wherever the tide had left a pool.

Hours later we watched the sea line for signs of the returning tide, and only when Cheechoo glanced toward the west did we discover the thin line of whispering water slinking toward us parallel to the shoreline, a phenomenon which could be explained only by some peculiar configuration of the bottom. Cheechoo slogged out through the mud and inched the canoe toward the island as the water rose. When it was deep enough to drop the engine we started across a long open stretch on the last leg to Hannah Bay.

We had gone only a short distance when a peculiar clicking sound under water led to an investigation. The nut on the end of the shaft was missing and the propeller was held in place only by its thrust against the water. Standing in water a foot deep far offshore Cheechoo confidently produced a collection of spare parts carefully wrapped in oily cloth. He had two of everything, including carburetor and water pump, and innumerable bolts and nuts, but not the one for a propeller shaft. If ever a Cree turned pale Cheechoo must have, for his troubled eyes instinctively turned westward toward the mouth of the Moose, now nearly fifty miles away.

“Me no want to paddle,” he moaned. “Long way home; canoe very heavy.”

Fred Watriss, the technical man of our group, trained in the design of aircraft, focused the accumulated knowledge of four years of engineering education and the authority of a bachelor of science degree on the problem of improvising a propeller nut. Finally with tormenting patience he transformed a water pipe connector into a nut. Little by little, working it on the end of the shaft a fraction of a turn at a time, he cut new threads, making a wedge for the key slot, until with the true objectivity of the engineer he suggested that we might test the job by resuming our journey.

During that period Jimmy Cheechoo, in whose veins flowed the very essence of the north, who knew the Bay, the wilderness, and the ways of canoes, stood by helpless and bewildered, his confidence completely shattered. Only after we had advanced steadily for an hour and he had twice stopped the engine and tilted it to make sure that the bolt was still holding did he recover his spirits. All the while he watched the sky, for the Indians fear an offshore wind, which, if an engine breaks down, may blow you out to sea. Paddles are of little use in a 24-foot canoe weighing more than a ton.

We put up flocks of ducks and families of big Canada geese on our trip across the Bay, but as we had anticipated, the abnormally warm weather held the snow and blue waveys on the summering grounds a thousand miles to the north. Only the cold early storms of the Arctic would start them south, but this year the storms were late.

Once during the afternoon we landed to boil a pail of tea. Clean drinking water is rare on James Bay, for there are few springs near the coast and every stream, from brook to river, carries the color of the clay through which it flows. Because of the enormous burden of fresh water pouring from the great rivers, the saltiness of Bay water is reduced to a slight brackishness, and when boiled and disguised in strong black tea must serve for drinking most of the time. Getting a pail of water at low tide is an experience that makes you willing to endure thirst.

Gooseberries, raspberries, and strawberries grew in profusion a few yards back from the beach, and hundreds of sparrows, including the sharptailed, eastern tree, chipping, white-throated, whitecrowned, and the swamp sparrow, busily foraged through the grass in pursuit of swarms of grasshoppers that snapped into the air with every step. With our pannikins of tea we had wild onions that Jimmy Cheechoo discovered growing near-by.

Indians on their way to the wintering grounds were ahead of us and their deserted camps were strewn with the feathers and entrails of ducks and yellowlegs on which they had feasted. Now and then we heard the distant blast of shotguns as they continued their hunting,

6

LOCATING a good place for camping on James Bay is like finding the right spot for a picnic on a Sunday afternoon’s drive — there’s always a better one just ahead. We finally pitched our tent in a dense growth of spruce and mosquitoes at the top of a gravel bank near the mouth of the Harricanaw River.

Our photographer, like a hound on a hot scent, unlimbered his cameras, and Cheechoo was at once put to work as a goose runner. The Crees are famous for their skill in imitating the calls of geese and ducks, and the Indian demonstrated his ability, but the geese can be tolled in only when they are moving in big flocks. Cheechoo finally gave up and at the insistence of the photographer he tore through the tidal mud to capture young Canada geese which had not yet grown t heir flight feathers and could not rise. For hours our Indian labored through the mud until the photographer had his fill of geese on film. The Indians may kill game at any time and once Cheechoo, obviously attempting a diversion, offered to share a roast goose for dinner, a suggestion which had no effect on the cameraman, The chase went on with the older birds flying overhead in alarm. Others led fluffy goslings to safety far out on the Bay.

In their desperation to escape, the young geese would often swim under water, using their wings for extra speed. One dived to the shallow bottom and held on to a stone with its beak, hoping it would be overlooked. Still others buried their heads in holes in the banking, a trick not so stupid as it sounds, for once their heads were out of sight the dark bodies blended with the surrounding stones in a fine demonstration of protective coloration.

Nature photography in its most virulent form is an obsession with professional status, and in the comings and goings of the photographer any resemblance to a concern for the passage of time is purely coincidental and bears no relation to what actually happens. There are no minutes on the nature photographer’s time scale. His measurements begin with hours and end in suspense. Our companion was no exception.

The Indian hunter and the photographer have much in common. To the former, time at last may yield a bear. To the photographer, crouching in a blind, time may yield a horned owl feeding its young, a Canada goose on her moated nest in the heart of a swamp, or a trout in mid-air.

The nature photographer must not only be an expert with the camera, but an outdoor property man and scene painter as well. If a squat balsam on the brink of a moose pond should suddenly get up, stretch, and transplant itself to a shady spot, it’s almost certain to be a nature photographer on the hunt. The dun-colored hump lying for hours one morning half hidden by sea grass in the wet clay of Hannah Bay was our photographer with his camera. A cloud of mosquitoes marked the spot.

Combined in the photographer’s nature are the characteristics of the camel, which can stand thirst a long time, and the bear, which is not interested in food during suspended animation. A really good photographer is quite willing to give up breathing for considerable periods to get the picture he wants. He will risk his life to bring a canoe within a few feet of a swimming moose and drops just as cheerfully to the level of a snake to make a portrait at whisker range. Protected by a fencing mask and heavy gloves he will ascend by climbing irons to the top of a pine to sit in a canvas blind for hours for a shot of an eagle. He waits a day without protest for the fleeting moment when the young of a wood duck plunge to the earth from their nest hole high in a tree to follow their mother to the nearest water. A whack on the trunk of a tree brings forth a flying squirrel to be caught in mid-air. A snapping turtle, dangerous at any time, poses to his satisfaction whether it likes it or not.

The success of any photograph has no relation to the difficulties of making it. That’s the difference between camera hunting and nature photography. In the former the knowledge and skill required to stalk game often constitute much of the satisfaction of making a picture which in itself may be quite mediocre. In nature photography, however, the end result, a successful shot with an appropriate and natural background, is all that counts.

Almost every evening after darkness had come and the mosquitoes were at their worst, our photographer went through a strange and dismal ritual. Stripped to the waist and clutching empty film holders and boxes of new film in both hands ho plunged headfirst into the depths of his sleeping bag and wriggled to the bottom. For ten minutes thereafter we heard muffled explosive mutterings as he sought in this sweltering improvised darkroom to load films by the touch system. Emerging from his cocoon perspiring like a stoker, he invariably complained about the unconscionable amount of light that lingers in the darkness of a northern night.

Camera hunting for moose on the Harricanaw River meant hard paddling, poling against a swift current and tracking a canoe up rapids, but tracks along the shore suggested pictures of a big bull further up the river. Conditions were ideal, for the hot days of August when the flies are at their worst and the moose seek relief in the water is the best time for photographs. Along the river the land is higher than at the Bay and the pines on the banks nearly fifty feet above us bore splintered gashes made when the spring ice jammed and the river thundered through the woods.

The fisherman of our group had been given fair warning that except for a few days in the spring and fall when trout appear in the rivers, there is no decent fishing in the James Bay region. Nevertheless he carried his rod and insisted on finding out for himself. The doubting Chcechoo led him back through a swamp bordering the river to a series of beaver dams which flooded the country for miles around. There in a tangle of alder where the muck was thigh-deep the fisherman stood on a beaver house and dropped a Royal Coachman lightly on the polished surface of a shallow pond. The fly was taken on the instant and his catch of squaretails in the next hour was astonishing and satisfying. These ponds lie in muskeg, and the permanent ice, only a few feet below the surface, keeps the water at a temperature favored by trout.

The sun was setting and the western clouds were tinted with colors loaned by a rainbow when we started down river to Hannah Bay. Soon the clear, cool face of the moon appeared over the jagged tops of the black spruce which became eerie shapes in the growing darkness. Yellowlegs, startled from the mud, skimmed low on rigid wings with quick piping calls of alarm, and a little later as we raced with the current a moose snorted and thrashed out of the river. Twice as we ran through rapids after darkness Cheechoo’s instinct for hidden rocks averted disaster.

The morning we left Hannah Bay the wind breathed softly from the northwest, and the sky and the sea were one in the color of cold ashes, without a line between the two. Again, as on the way in, tarpaulins were nailed to the gunwales, for within an hour the clouds were on the run and quartering seas broke over the bow. Now and then strings of duck raced low over the water heading for the sheltered inland waters. Checchoo’s eyes were looking steadily to the misty line of the shore leading westward. That way lay the Moose. But every so often he thought of the makeshift propeller nut and glanced down anxiously at the froth astern. Hour after hour, soaked to the skin and cold, we plunged on. Big Rock Island, its ugly black boulders lifting above the sea, came and went, and with only water enough to get ashore we made camp at the mouth of Partridge Creek late in the day. Only then did the wind die down and the disappointed sea subside.

That night the aurora set the sky ablaze with rose and green and frost-blue light that danced to the celestial rhythm of the centuries, leaping, whirling, rippling back and forth across the dark stage of the Bay in a breath-taking ballet of the Arctic. The mirrored water picked up the glow and as we watched in silence Chcechoo got up and walked to the shore, where he stood, sharply outlined against the light, gazing out to sea. Suddenly we had a strange feeling of aloneness. He had walked out of our world back to the north to which he had always belonged. The gap between us was centuries wide, for in that moment in the darkness by the Bay he had become the very spirit of the wilderness and all its ancient mystery.

He thought, when he came back to us, that the tide would be right to start at dawn. Then he wound the battered alarm clock — and suddenly Cheechoo, symbol of the north, was Chcechoo the Cree, a good canoeman glad to be heading back to Moose Factory.

In the morning when the canoe swung in from the Bay and lifted to the current of the Moose, we looked back toward the east beyond the range of vision, but not of memory, past Big Rock Island and Sand Point, beyond the tidal pool where a dead seal lay, and far on to lonely Hannah Bay and the desolate beauty of its vast marshes, the conjuring place of brooding silence, now broken only by the whistling wings of the restless geese and the plaintive cries of the shore birds.

(This is the second of two papers entered by Mr. Rowlands for the “I Personally ” awards. The first, “ Train to Moose Factory,” appeared in the Atlantic for August.)