Where canoes rule: Paddlers float their wildest dreams in wilderness of 7,000 lakes | Gone Wild

“Scott,” I said softly for the second time, trying to rouse my tent partner in the dark of night.

Three sharp jabs to the belly finally got him to open one eye.

“Hear that?” I whispered.

“Hear what?” he said, unconvinced that waking would be worth the effort.

“Listen.”

His head bolted upright as if we were bunked on a hotel’s 50th floor and he’d just whiffed smoke. His eyes bulged, ears strained.

The wolf serenade had started with a solo, a deep bass introduction to the wildest choral arrangement a human will ever hear.

This was 1982, mind you, long before Western wolf reintroduction brought the endangered species back to the attention of the masses.

We were in our 20s and already had logged thousands of hours in the North American outdoors.

We had been treated to the range of emotions summoned by bull elk bugling, coyotes yipping, loons wailing, ruffed grouse drumming, rattlesnakes rattling – and even the chilling scream of a cougar. But this was our first time for this.

In a viselike grip of fascination, we had no inclination to sprint for the shotgun, which was 30 yards away under the overturned canoe.

Our tent was a box seat for North America’s most hair-raising performance – wolves, in four-part harmony as the bass soon was joined by at least two baritones and a tenor scattered around us.

Two seemed very close.

These haunting howls could be heard across the continent for centuries until wolves were shot, trapped, poisoned and pretty much eliminated from the lower 48 states save for the silences of land north of Lake Superior.

Scott had seen wolves. One couldn’t grow up in Minnesota and visit the Boundary Waters Canoe Area for weeks at a time, 15 years in a row, without seeing wolves, even in the 1960s and ’70s.

The vast roadless area had given the predators refuge from the temptation and consequences of attacking livestock.

But this was the first time Scott’s ears had celebrated their intimate presence.

It was the first time he had felt the hair bristle on his neck as if each strand were standing erect to the anthem of the untamed.

Most likely we were the only two people in the audience, being among the few daring or foolish enough to be outside where we didn’t have to be, paddling through the vast wet wilderness at the end of October.

Snuggling back into my sleeping bag, I said, “Do you realize that we’re out for 10 days and after the first few miles of canoeing, we haven’t seen another person?”

Scott whispered, “I think I just died and went to heaven.”

Fleshing out that thought with the waning focus of two tired bodies begging for sleep, we agreed we weren’t sure what the hereafter holds – heaven and all of that – but we’re sure going to miss all of this when we go.

Ideal way to go

A canoeist travels much like a feather in a breeze.

He becomes part of the medium through which he floats, one with the water that chuckles against the rocks, melting into the laughter of the loons and the wind swooshing through the birch and aspen.

He’s part of the decorum.

Even if motors were allowed in wilderness, the canoe still would be the vehicle of choice for exploring most of the Boundary Waters. The landscape looks as though a colossal flood followed the retreat of the glaciers and filled every valley, nook and cranny with water.

The open canoe’s portability has critical advantages, being swift on the water as well as quick to unload and carry on portages that range from a few “rods” (a rod is a 16.5 feet) to more than a mile.

Lakes are attractions in many of the nation’s 662 official wilderness areas, but here they are the essence.

Scott and I had driven through Ely, Minnesota, launched at Moose Lake, one of 80 BWCA entry points, and paddled beyond civilization to a vast network of wilderness waterways.

The BWCA extends nearly 150 miles along the international boundary contiguous with Canada’s Quetico Provincial Park. Together they form a core wilderness of 2.1 million acres holding some 7,000 lakes.

The busy season had tapered off. The golden glory of the birch and aspen was strewn about the ground; even the tamaracks stood bare.

Most locals had warned that we were too late to safely enjoy the BWCA; we’d be playing Russian roulette with the fickle weather between Indian summer and freeze-up.

They said no one would be there.

So, we went.

One day after unloading our gear at a campsite, we paddled off to explore the bays on Jordan Lake.

The mission was to hunt ducks that might be in the forefront of the great flights yet to come from the north.

With the wilderness nearly void of visitors, we didn’t feel it would be a disruption to take the occasional shot into the bygone age of subsistence.

As we dipped around a point and into a cove, I noticed a beaver with its back to us working at the salad bar it was storing for winter in front of a lodge.

We stopped paddling and drifted ahead. The canoe moved so quietly that we were within a few feet of the beaver before it startled and disappeared into the water with a splashing slap of its tail.

We used the stealthy virtues of the canoe for similar close encounters with moose, mink, herons, mergansers, bald eagles and many other creatures that had dropped their guard in the absence of man.

By the end of our adventure, we would owe the canoe a considerable debt for education, fitness, entertainment and gastronomic pleasures.

Carrying out a plan

Our trip began with most of our gear tightly packed in a large mountaineering pack and a pair of well-worn Duluth Packs, which are designed for hassle-free loading and unloading in an open canoe. The idea was to keep everything together for efficient portaging.

Scott informed me that canoe jocks, who idolized the voyageurs, never made double portages.

He showed me his technique for carrying both Duluth Packs at once.

It looked like some sort of ancient torture used to bring men of principle to their knees.

“It’s not that bad,” Scott said, noting that he’d carried up to 160 pounds at a time to avoid double portages. “You’ll never see more than a fraction of the million acres of Boundary Waters if you double portage.”

Scott proposed that he would carry the two heaviest packs, the shotgun and fishing rods while I would carry a pack and the 75-pound canoe. (This was before we were wise and wealthy enough to have the new-fangled lightweight Kevlar canoes.)

I looked at him, two packs piggybacked on his shoulders, leather straps biting at his flesh and tumpline taut around his forehead.

I considered the punishment of performing this body-buckling exercise five, seven, maybe 10 times a day and said, “Nobody’s here to see us.”

“Pansy out?” he said, spoofing outrage. “Take it easy? Enjoy ourselves? That’s preposterous, unthinkable and unmanly. But you win.”

We had come to the Boundary Waters when a traveler could hunt and fish to bolster camp meals with fresh pike, walleyes, grouse and ducks.

Double portages were a perfect fit for this autumn plan. We’d carry two packs and hunt grouse on the first leg, then carry the other pack and the canoe on the second leg.

The tactic allowed us to explore the BWCA wilderness and its wildlife beyond the water and trails. It paid off occasionally in dividends for our meals.

But Scott made me swear I wouldn’t tell anyone that we wimped out.

Nature boys

We woke early one morning – before the first squirrel had come out on a limb to scold us – and saw a bald eagle swoop and sit on the water like a duck.

Eagles aren’t as well designed for this as waterfowl. We wondered if it would sink.

After nearly a minute, the eagle put its mighty 7-foot wingspan to work.

Its talons had found their mark in a large lake trout. Maybe 5 pounds of wriggling fish. An eagle’s Moby Dick.

The great bird struggled until it finally yanked the fish through the surface tension and skimmed it across the lake. The splashing attracted gulls that swooped and screeched on the chance that harassment might prompt the predator to give up and drop the prey.

It got to shore none too soon and flopped itself and the fish on the rocks, wasting no time to eat its fill before the ravens would gang up to chase it off.

Our adventure had been blessed with several misplaced summer days to this point.

Scott reveled in stringing together simple pleasures such as watching a pileated woodpecker hammer a dead snag, and spotting a black-backed woodpecker making a rare visit to the BWCA.

Life was good, and we made it even better after selecting a campsite, stoking our bravery with taunts and ridicule and then stripping naked and plunging into the frigid autumn waters.

“Feeling a little vulnerable skinny dipping in a lake infested with hungry northern pike?” Scott asked me breathlessly, shivering as we treaded water.

“In water this cold,” I said, “I have nothing to lose.”

Go with the wind

A few days later, change seemed to be on its way.

A raspy wind swept in from the east. It alarmed us some.

Intuition is all you’ve got when you’re too cheap to buy a weather radio. We were lucky to this point, and I had been friends with Scott long enough to know we didn’t deserve it because of clean living.

Since the wind was coming from the east and we were heading west, we resisted the responsible urge to turn back and reveled in the opportunity to be gone with the wind.

I held a sail rigged from two paddles and a tarp; Scott manned the rudder as I leaned back and let a breeze, that surely must be one man’s scourge, be our delight.

Wool pants and felt-lined boots felt good that morning, but the wind eventually fizzled and the clouds melted away.

By noon we had peeled off the coats and rain gear. I even considered taking off my wool cap, an act which for the first week was done only to accommodate brief fits of scratching.

We were paddling down one narrow lake that afternoon when Scott saw a huge fish slash the surface. He took up his rod to make a few casts while I held the canoe in position.

Between the splashing of his lure and the whir of his retrieve, I heard a rustling in the brush a few paddle lengths away on port-side shore.

It was more than leaves shifting in the wind.

An animal suddenly broke into the open, close enough to see the yellow in its eyes – stout but sleek, gray and white, gracefully hurdling the windfalls.

My enthusiasm rocked the canoe, and Scott began reeling in his lure as four more wolves appeared, much lighter in color, nearly as big as white-tailed deer, working up a ridge, hardly making the effort to glance our way.

Those few moments would have made the afternoon – even the trip – complete.

But Scott capped the day by catching a lunker walleye as clouds, looking like an army of rosy-colored turtles, marched across the sky.

We tethered the fish to a tree, letting it swim in the bay in front of camp so it would be fresh for breakfast.

Late entertainment

That night, I had to wake up Scott again.

It only took one good punch this time. He came instantly to his senses and gasped, “Wolves?”

“Northern lights.”

Shafts of yellow tinged with green dazzled above us in a sky untainted by city lights. Striking, evanescent, moving east and west and back again, great beams of bluish white sweeping across the sky.

Physicists say the aurora borealis are caused by some complex reaction from gaseous disturbances on the sun that bombard the Earth’s stratosphere with hydrogen protons and electrons which in turn explode atoms of oxygen, nitrogen, helium and other elements.

But to us it simply was a heavenly light show, best observed with the open-minded curiosity of a child.

Sometime during the night, the Boundary Waters remembered it was October.

We could make a few route adjustments, but all in all we were going to pay a price for those days of autumn bliss.

The previous day’s tailwind had turned its back on us. It bit our faces and lapped icy fingers of water over the gunwales to freeze on our packs.

A wind becomes formidable when a paddle not properly feathered on the forward stroke is slammed back against the side of the canoe. You know the situation is serious when the sternman chokes on his obscenities.

“It’s a 40-mph wind when spray is blowing off the whitecaps,” Scott said.

We slinked around the edges of the lake, looking for any hint of a lee. When there was no choice, we bowed our heads and plowed into the raw throat of winter.

Much of the battle was mental.

An hour can go by on a big lake before you detect any progress. Scott started singing sea shanties.

As we struggled up Ensign Lake, we spotted a bald eagle. Within minutes we spotted four more eagles, numerous ravens and gulls.

Something was up.

Over the wind we heard the roar of a short rapid that would sweep us from Ensign to Splash Lake.

It seemed quite normal at first – riffles, scattered boulders and a smooth tongue of water for our safe passage.

As we got into the channel that blocked most of the wind and entered the slot, the water began to boil around us.

We were in a veritable river of fish.

Scott ruddered the boat into an eddy. We grabbed our rods and hopped along the shore to the head of the rapid.

Shiny fish scales and bird droppings littered the area leaving no doubt as to why the birds were so concentrated.

After a few casts, we each had hooked several of the spawning whitefish, an underrated species that’s difficult to catch at most other times of year.

That night, after gazing at the sunset and making mental genuflections of relief that camp was up, we filleted the whitefish on our paddles and ate a feast around the welcomed warmth and the sweet scent of a cedar fire.

We were tucked away before the rain and sleet set in seriously that night.

It droned against the tent, which, with its golden glow of candlelight, was a snug den in the wilderness.

Scott was reading as I looked out at the battered old cedars silhouetted against the lake. The food was hanging and the canoe seemed to be snoozing, overturned on the beach.

Within two weeks, ice would form on the smaller lakes, bringing an end to the canoeing season.

“It’s a shame to see the door slam shut on this place,” I said.

Scott chuckled and reminded me that the canoe was king in the Boundary Waters, but a dog sled was a close runner-up.

“This winter! Are you game?” he said.

“You’re on.”

Editor’s note: This story was first published in 1982. Indeed, it was followed by a dog-sledding adventure story that ran April 5, 1992.

More from Gone Wild