Wild at Heart

     Come for the murder have you? A slatternly woman peers out through the insect screen of a plywood cabin set among the brooding pines. I knew something like this would happen once I realized the dirt road we were travelling along was not to be found on my map of British Columbia. There was something uncanny about the way the dark trees closed in on us as the road became increasingly potholed and rutted.

     Then there were weird signs with coded messages nailed to the tree trunks. It was obviously some sort of lunatic backwoods cult. I asked that we turn back but Gerry was having none of it. "Bloody hell, Cassandra, this is a four-wheel-drive. We might as well see what it can do. Relax. Let things happen."

     We were eight hours into a mammoth six-week trek into the Arctic, following the route of a woman who walked up through the British Columbian wilderness into the Yukon and across Alaska to Siberia. Gerry is a friend from way back who has been working in the Gulf of Mexico for the past few years an volunteered to come north to be the driver for this crazy project of mine.

     "Well, have you?" The woman behind the screen is still waiting. I shoot a nervous glance at Gerry, slouched over the wheel of our Nissan Pathfinder.

     "We, um, we were looking for a cabin for the night. Two people."

     " Oh, sure." Her face breaks into a big-hearted grin.

     "Thought you were from one of the murder mystery parties who camp here every year,"

     "Murder mystery?"

     "My word. It's a kind of game. Big deal round these parts. Didn't you see their clues on the trees?"

     She's out of the door now, leading me to a collection of tatty cabins overlooking a limpid, tea-colored lake. The sleeping arrangements are rudimentary - two beds with mattress, pillow and blanket - with a communal bathhouse and toilet somewhere in the trees. I take one without a second glance. Sure we've got sleeping bags but I'm too old to sleep on the ground anymore. Gerry can sleep out if that's the preference. I doubt it. Sleeping rough is not as attractive as it was all those years ago when we went camping in the Flinders Ranges.

     I go back to the car and tell Gerry to bring the sleeping bags. I carry in the food we bought at the market in Vancouver. I am so hungry I'm practically salivating. We haven't eaten all day. "For dinner we'll have mushroom risotto. With fresh basil and shaved parmesan."

     "Not for me," Gerry says, lighting up a cigarette. "I'm not hungry. But you eat Cassandra. I know how much you like your food."

     The following day we make inquires of our hostess about the condition of the road which, we have been told, goes north to join the main highway. "I wouldn't drive over it. Did it once. Never again." She pauses and runs a doubtful eye over us; me, grey-haired, rosy cheeked and plump, wearing sensible jeans and T-shirt; Gerry is all long arms and legs, torso covered by an old school tunic and the front of her blonde hair hennaed to flaming red.

     "I'd say it all depends on your frame of mind." Gerry likes to think our frame of mind is utterly fearless.

     "Might as well give it a burl."

     "The passenger gets the worst of it. " Our hostess fixes me with a warning look.

     "That rough?"

     "Oh, it's rough all right."

     I realize soon enough that she wasn't talking about the passenger getting a bumpy ride. Vertigo, more like. The rocky road is cut into the side of a mountain just below the snow line to provide access to the high-tension power lines and is barely wide enough for our car. On my side there is a perpendicular drop into the canyon below, with nothing remotely like a guard rail or protective barrier between me and oblivion, just about a foot of raw dirt and rock, then empty space. And it is a bloody long way down. All my jokes about us doing a "Thelma and Louis" no longer seems so smart. I close my eyes on the hairpin bends.

     Gerry's jaw is set tight with concentration. She's a brilliant driver. The wraparound Ray-bans blank out her expression but with the sun catching the bright henna in her wind-tousled hair, she appears to be enjoying herself hugely. I allow myself to relax a bit and take in the view. Looking straight down, a flooded canyon of teal-blue water, colored by the fine moraine washed into it from the sheer walls of the mountain opposite, looks as it some playful giant has poured thin gravy over the stern, grey faced. Vertigo aside, it's a spectacular sight.

     "F***ing  Jesus!" Gerry screams. I whip my head away from the view to see a small red jeep come hurtling round a bend straight at us. The startled driver swerves and hits the brakes. The jeep skids into the mountain side. the boy driver and his equally young companion tumble out, laughing.

     "Are you boys all right? I call out.

     "Yeah, sure," They boast. "Don't worry grandma." Gerry is stung by their contempt. Furiously silent behind the wheel, she eases past them and drives on, extremely slow, just in case or more moronic youths out for a spin.

     We cross several mountain gorges with rushing streams and miniature waterfalls. Just as the road seems to be coming to an end, it starts to climb and once again looks dangerously precipitous on my side. I can see what our informant meant. If I ever met a road with attitude, this is it. We climbed right to the top of the mountain, our ears popping, then descend in a series of tight switchbacks to the bottom of the valley. Vertigo gives way to motion sickness.

     At the tourist information center, the chatty woman on duty hasn't got a clue about back roads but she wants to know what we are up to. "We're having a feminist adventure," I pipe up. "it's a cross between Thelma and Louis and Two Fat Ladies." Gerry seems displeased with this description.

     "I'd say it's closer to the Odd Couple," she remarks, sourly...

     After several hours of highway, with its zooming procession of log trucks and tour buses and long distance hauliers, we decide to take a side road that leads to the Babine Mountains Provincial Park to go for a hike...

     "When you meet a black bear you stand your ground," I tell myself. "With grizzly bears you roll into a ball and play dead." I cannot invasion myself standing toe-to-toe with a bear. Mentally I rehearse rolling into a ball. After quite a long tome Gerry comes striding down the trail. She looks at me with close contempt.

     "Couldn't make it, huh? Nothing to see up there anyway, just more bloody trees." I showed her my blood soaked T-shirt. She shrugs. "Probably blowing your nose too hard. You gotta stop worrying about yourself, Cassandsra" Then she relents a little. "I wouldn't have expected you to get this far. It nearly did me in."

     "I thought you might be waiting up there for me," I croaked faintly.

     "Naaa. I wouldn't do that."

     The walk down takes close to two hours. At the trailhead we find the ranger sitting in his truck, looking worried. "I felt real bad," he says. "It's a hell of a climb. I shouldn't have suggested it."

     "Naaa," Gerry swaggers slightly, hands on hips. "Easy peasy."

     ... Gerry's mood turns sunny once again when we enter the Bulkley River Valley, where they hay fields glow like a Van Gogh painting in the evening light. The trees are aspens - "quaking aspens", they are called because of the way their delicate leaves shimmer and quiver in the light - just on the turn.

     Every now and then a branch of bold, bright yellow punctuates the green. In the hazy distance are the bare granite points of the majestic coastal mountain range, smoky-grey against azure sky. At one point, we catch sight of salmon in determined progress to spawning grounds against the torrent of a small waterfall.

     We stop to marvel at their astonishing acrobatics, shooting several meters in the air, propelled by the tails, their battered bodies flashing in length, with metallic-blue backs and silver sides. Where there are salmon, there are fishing cabins. We divert down a rough dirt road in search of a bed for the night.

     The cabin we find is rustic indeed. Set in a meadow beside the Kispiox River, it has two spartan sleeping platforms, each with a mattress and   pillow, a wood stove and a pile of logs. Gerry sets to with the axe and soon has a roaring blaze in the stove. My temperature has risen to boiling, yet I fall asleep almost immediately, zipped into the nylon cocoon.

     The sound of my horse snoring wakes me. My sleeping bag is soaked through with sweat. I can tell Gerry is awake, though she gives me no indication. Waves of her silent fury radiate throughout the cabin. Grabbing the pillow, I stumble out into the delicious chill of the night and climb up to the back seat of the car for a nigh of hallucinogenic, violent dreams, punctuated by shivering sweats an a pain in my throat like sharpened knife points. Returning to the cabin after dawn, I'm in despair. "We have to find a doctor."

     "Nonsense." Gerry is hunkered down in her sleeping bag. "You got a virus is all, everyone catches some virus or another on an aeroplane. Eat some garlic." Then she is asleep again. I go to sit in the car until she is ready to drive on.

     "Bear," announces Gerry, applying the brakes. Sure enough, a very large bear, probably male, ambles out of the bush to cross the road in front of our car.

     "He is definitely a grizzly," I croak excitedly, "he's got a brown coat and a distinctive hump."

     "I can see that for myself, Doctor Know-it-all."

     The huge shaggy beast gives us not a momentary glance as he pads down to the riverbed which, we now realize is bubbling with spawning salmon. We get out and tentatively cross the road to watch him, absorbed as he is in fishing. Grizzly bears must be shortsighted, as this one seems to be concentrating on feeling for the fish in the silt-laden water. Triumphantly he rears up  on his back legs with one big beauty speared on his mighty claws. More like kitchen knives really.

     As the salmon twitches in his monstrous paw, the bear tears off its head and skin, then tosses it aside, going down on all four again to feel about for another. After a couple of partly eaten salmon he is satiated and lumbers up the bank on the far side of the river, looking as amiable as a gigantic, shaggy dog.

     Within the next kilometer another grizzly appears beside the road, heading just as purposefully for the river. This time we are less hesitant in moving to the bank to watch. To our astonished delight there are three other bears mid-stream; a mother with two cubs are splashing about, rather than eating. There is no reason for them to be hungry. The salmon, having already spawned, drift listlessly in the water. They shudder and die before our eyes. Mother and cubs sport with the spent carcasses floating belly up in the current.

     Further on, more bears lumber across the deserted road at regular intervals: two more grizzlies and four black bears. "Holy s***. The woods are full of bears." Gerry is both awed and frightened. "You're not getting me going on any walks with all these bears about."

     "There have been bears about all the time," I said hoarsely remonstrate. "It didn't worry you before."

     "Yeah, maybe. That was before I saw them. You want to go for a hike? Go by yourself."

     More than three weeks later, at the point where the desolate Dempster Highway snakes across the Arctic circle, Gerry and I finally acknowledged we can no longer persist with this folly. We agreed to drive to the nearest town in Alaska, 1100km to the south-west where I can catch a plane while Gerry will continue by car and ferry back to Vancouver.

     It is such a relief. We stand together in the middle of nowhere, laughing as the first snow of the season blows into our tear-stained faces.

Cassandra Pybus
The Australian Magazine