Free Alone Against the North by Adam Shoalts

rather steep price) and the required paperwork, we exited the store with our new hardware. Brent, feeling hungry, suggested that we pay a visit to the Subway down the street.
    â€œAll right, then we’ll have to head to the map library at Brock University to get the topographic maps,” I said, glancing at the time. I had a hundred things on my mind, having to plan everydetail of our journey down to the last food ration. As we entered Subway, there was one more thing on my mind: my friend’s notorious habit of misplacing things. Brent would lose his car keys pretty much daily, his phone regularly, and his TV remote habitually. My concern was that in the wilderness, his carelessness could have serious repercussions were he to leave behind some vital piece of equipment.
    â€œGod, I love meatball subs,” said Brent, between mouthfuls.
    â€œYes. Did you find your cellphone?”
    â€œNo,” said Brent, pausing to think, “must have left it at the bar the other night.”
    â€œYou know, when we’re on the expedition, it will be critical not to lose anything. We can’t afford to forget something at a campsite or misplace the satellite phone.”
    â€œDon’t worry,” Brent gave a dismissive wave of his hand, “I won’t lose anything.”
    We finished our subs and got up to leave. Just as we were walking out, the young woman who had served us spoke up. “Hey, I think one of you guys forgot your wallet.” She pointed to a black leather wallet at our table.
    â€œOh, my bad,” said Brent, as he sheepishly retrieved it.
    I couldn’t help but feel a little uneasy about my new partner. He admitted that he had lost his wallet twice before that summer. This didn’t inspire a lot of confidence for our long journey ahead.
    IF THERE IS ONE LESSON that can be gleaned from the history of exploration, it’s that nothing ever goes according to plan. Therefore, I had made a point of devising alternative plans forour expedition in the event of any unforeseen difficulties. From the very beginning, when I was preparing the expedition proposal back in Ottawa, I had made sure to keep my plans flexible. I zeroed in on two rivers in the northern reaches of the Hudson Bay Lowlands that I was interested in exploring, both apparently nameless. It didn’t much matter which of the two rivers we ended up exploring, as they were similar. The larger of the two was situated some forty kilometres east of Cape Henrietta Maria, and it appeared on maps as a nearly 150-kilometre-long nameless tributary of the isolated Brant River. This, however, as is so often the case when dealing with obscure geography, wasn’t entirely clear: other maps labelled the tributary as the Brant River itself. Consulting various maps from different government agencies only compounded the problem: there was no agreement on which of the upper forks in this river was the Brant and which was unnamed. Since the basis of my expedition proposal to the Geographical Society was the exploration of a nameless river in the Lowlands, I was loath to go to the effort of exploring this river only to have someone later claim that it was the fork which was properly known as the Brant. Government scientists, ornithologists, and others had flown via helicopter and bush plane to the Brant and explored portions of it. But no one, insofar as was known, had ever canoed the river from its headwaters to the seacoast. I spoke on the phone with the superintendent of Polar Bear Provincial Park, a reserve whose boundaries on the ground are indistinguishable from the surrounding wilderness. She was unable to tell me anything about these rivers or their names, except to say that she knew of no one who had ever attempted to canoe them.
    In contrast, the other river that I had my eye on was more obscure and had no name on any map. This fact made it seem almost perfect—except that it wasn’t quite as long as the other