Alex Messenger - The Twenty-Ninth Day

Copyright 2019 by Alex Messenger
E-book published in 2019 by Blackstone Publishing
Cover and book design by Alenka Vdovi Linaschke
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-9825-8332-3
Library e-book ISBN 978-1-9825-8331-6
Biography & Autobiography / Survival
CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Blackstone Publishing
31 Mistletoe Rd.
Ashland, OR 97520
www.BlackstonePublishing.com

To my family, for showing me the world, and to my wife,
Lacey, for helping me see it all over again.

Bears are made of the same dust as we, and they breathe the same winds and drink of the same waters. A bears days are warmed by the same sun, his dwellings are overdomed by the same blue sky, and his life turns and ebbs with heart pulsing like ours. He was poured from the same first fountain. And whether he at last goes to our stingy Heaven or not, he has terrestrial immortality. His life, not long, not short, knows no beginning, no ending. To him life unstinted, unplanned, is above the accidents of time, and his years, markless and boundless, equal eternity.

John Muir

PROLOGUE

The cool wind blowing across the subarctic tundra rustled the thin nylon of my tent, the crisp air refreshing and relaxing me. Sunlight shone through a thin haze of high cirrus clouds, gently warming the tent, adding to my sense of well-being. I was comfortable, cozily tucked away in my sleeping bag, and soon fell into a deep slumber. It was midafternoon on the twenty-ninth day of a six-hundred-mile canoe journey that I had embarked on with five other paddlers.

From the depth of a dream, I jolted awake, sitting upright and gasping, my mind lurching toward consciousness. My chest heaved, lungs filling as if I had come up from under a wave. My dream was already forgotten. Alarmed, I looked around the tent. In a place with no sense of time, I was overcome with the uneasy feeling that I was late for something.

Pushed by that unsettling sense of urgency, I threw on my clothes and shoes and left the tent, crossing the hill in long strides. I began climbing the steep, rocky ridge above our campsite. Still feeling late and shaking off the lingering fog of my nap, I was soon breathing heavily from the hard ascent. It took several minutes to gain the hundred vertical feet of the ridge. At the top, I found a lunar landscape of gently rolling granite domes scattered with smaller stones. I was four hundred feet above the wide blue expanse of Princess Mary Lake and could see thirty miles in all directions. The treeless vista was startling in its grandeur, the scale difficult to comprehend.

Barely able to take it all in, I turned toward another slightly higher point in the distance, topped with a rock cairnan inukshuk and resumed my hike. My Nikon, in its waterproof case, hung heavily in my hand. I decided I would leave it closed until I reached my destination. I walked past small round boulders, deposited along the ridge by lumbering glaciers eons ago. The large crescent moon of the island bowed in front of me, pointing north toward the Arctic Circle. I walked, watching the ground beneath me, the sparkles of sunlight in the granite and the green-gray blooms of lichen.

The feeling of tardiness slowly ebbed, and I began to calm down, my mind wandering. I thought about my coming senior year of high school and the summer reading book in my pocket, The Liars Club. Quickly casting that thought aside, I thought of my camera in the case and imagined what I wanted to shoot first. I passed more lichen and granite, more scrub grass. Taking out the camera or reading the book seemed like too much effort right then, and the thought of sitting near the inukshuk seemed perfect.

Halfway to the cairn, I was still studying the ground, walking up one of the gentle granite domes, when something flashed in the upper periphery of my vision. My head snapped up. Thirty feet in front of me, at the top of the dome, an image materialized. Brown fur. My core tightened and my pulse doubled. All the muscles from my shoulders to my legs tensed at once. I thought of the ornery musk oxen we had seen earlier. We had been warned they were quite dangerous. As my brain decoded the firing synapses and visual signals, I made a far more horrifying realization. This was no musk oxit was much worse. At this instant, the creatures gaze met mine. I was staring into the sharp black eyes of a grizzly bear.

PART I

There is magic in the feel of a paddle and the movement of a canoe, a magic compounded of distance, adventure, solitude, and peace. The way of a canoe is the way of the wilderness and of a freedom almost forgotten. It is an antidote to insecurity, the open door to waterways of ages past and a way of life with profound and abiding satisfactions. When a man is part of his canoe, he is part of all that canoes have ever known.

Sigurd F. Olson, The Singing Wilderness

CHAPTER ONE

Entering the Taiga: Days 12

The plane vibrated with the cacophonous drone of idling engines. We had over an hour of flying ahead of us, and then forty-two days of paddling. The pilots, now directing us to climb aboard from their perch on the float, had filled the Twin Otter turboprop with our gear, from the forward bulkhead to the tight heap of large packs at the rear. Our three Old Town Tripper canoes filled the entire right side of the plane. The only open spaces left were the cockpit, the narrow row of six canvas seats on the port side, and the space above the poorly sealed spare fuel barrel stowed immediately behind the copilots chair. The drum wafted fumes of jet fuel, which we tried in vain to ignore.

Dan was clambering over the seats in front of me, his six-and-a-half-foot frame scrunched by the small fuselage and the wall of canoes. The seats were austereold canvas slung over aluminum frames, positioned in the small space like hurdles in a tunnel. We had to step awkwardly over each one until we found our spots. At an even six feet, six inches shorter than Dan, I was also having trouble traversing the seats. Behind me was Jean in his bright-red rain jacket, eyes hidden behind sunglasses, jaw tight as if to hold in the same nervous excitement I felt clenched under my ribs. Behind him was Auggie, the least bundled up of us, in just a few layers topped with a thin fleece. He was ready to go, calm. Behind Auggie was Mike, in bright yellow, his recently shaved head up, eyes open. Bringing up the rear was Darin. The littlest of us, he took the smallest seat at the rear bulkhead, behind a cache of gear and beside the large door at the back of the plane. His hair rolled out in dark curls from the sides of his black fleece cap, and he pressed his lips together as he located and clicked the buckle to his seat belt. I found mine and then looked out the hazy porthole, past the blur of propeller blades spinning loudly on the wing.

Standing on the dock was a group of five girls, the Femmes , who would be making a counterpart trip to ours. Their canoes and gear lay in a heap onshore, just as ours had. After setting us down in the emptiness of the Canadian taiga, the plane would come back for them. They, too, would land somewhere deep in the wilderness and paddle great rivers and lakes. Our routes would run parallel, hundreds of miles apart, until several weeks from now, when our paths would finally intersect. We wouldnt see them there, however; their route put them half a week and a hundred miles ahead of us by then. We wouldnt see them again until we met in the little town at the end of our routes, 550 miles almost due north from where we sat.