“He made people aware of the plight of the beaver and was very significant in changing attitudes.”


That night, at Smoothwater Wilderness Outfitters Ecolodge (www.smoothwater.com), we look over maps. Gary has laid out a route that Grey Owl


would’ve paddled often. The Wakimika River offers a good chance of seeing beavers, as well as sites with significant spiritual, historical and ecological significance. Although the topographic map indicates


we’ll be paddling through Obabika River Provincial Park near the Lady Evelyn- Smoothwater Wilderness, we know this to be the traditional lands of the Misabi family. We hope to meet with Misabi Elder, Alex Mathias, who lives in a cabin near our route. Gary and I first met Alex on a canoe trip 18 years ago while on a personal quest to help save Ontario’s old growth. Our daughter took her first steps at his camp three years later. Alex remains an important voice for his community and the wild, in ways similar to Grey Owl.


We leave the town of Temagami via de Havilland Beavers with a roar of engines. Grey Owl never saw the landscape from this perspective—I imagine the grandest views he ever had of the vast pine forests and the countless islands stretching out beneath us were from the fire towers on Maple Mountain, Caribou Mountain, Ishpatina Ridge and Obabika Lake. The pilot brings the Beaver in a


wide arc north of Obabika Lake over what is known by canoeists as the Wakimika Triangle. Of all Temagami’s vast network of interconnected nastawgan, this is one of the most beloved canoe routes. From our eagle- eye perspective, we can see the lakes and rivers of our entire route surrounded by the greatest red and white old growth pine forest in the world. The sky is dark and threatening rain when we suddenly swoop down over the treetops and the pontoons touch down on Wakimika Lake.


A torrential downpour at first light makes me thankful Gary had rigged a large tarp over the kitchen area the night before. It passes quickly and soon everyone is out of the tents to film and photograph in the morning light. By the time I have hot cereal on and the smell of coffee wafts through the campsite, the west wind completely clears the skies. We set off down the lake with the wind


to our backs and enter the Wakimika River at Grassy Bay. A full day lies ahead as we meander to Obabika. “Traveling down that river, knowing that


46 | Canoeroots


he’d been here, is very special,” Ray says later. “I feel like I’m paddling in his wake.” Having spent three months in the summer of 1997 exploring this area by canoe and tracing Grey Owl’s explorations, the echo of his presence is a feeling I can relate to. The river widens into a pond surrounded by


cedar and black spruce. A channel through riverside grasses leads us to a beaver lodge. Somewhere beneath us is the underwater entrance to their snug abode. We sit quietly, paddles resting across the gunwales, hoping to catch a glimpse. The beavers are a constant source of


conversation for the group. During the fur trade years, beaver pelts were the most valuable natural resource in Canada. Their


and McGinty. These two beavers and the two that followed, Jelly Roll and Rawhide, got up to all sorts of antics in Grey Owl’s life, including building a lodge inside his cabin. Their endearing personalities became the


catalyst for much of Grey Owl’s conservation ethic and decision to quit trapping. His first- hand descriptions of living with the beavers and other wilderness adventures enthralled people around the world. He was even invited to meet King George VI and the royal princesses when he visited Britain on a book tour. His ethos that the wilderness is more than a resource to be plundered was a new idea for many at the time. Through his storytelling, “He made people aware of the plight of the beaver and was very significant in changing attitudes,” says Ray. “The work he did was incredibly important.” Grey Owl’s true identity was


exposed soon after his death in 1938. “I don’t think the world really knows how to talk about Grey Owl,” says Ray. “In one sense they’re moved by his success, yet, at the same time, commentators have to explain he wasn’t a First Nation person and ask whether he was a fraud.” “I don’t think of him in those terms,”


Ray continues. “What’s important are not the personal demons he brought with him, but his message of conservation, which was ahead of its time. It’s as important today as it ever was.”


Temagami has a history of making conservationists. At the north end of Obabika Lake, we reach the infamous place where


luxurious fur drove trade across the continent for two centuries, motivating much of the early exploration of North America. At its height, indiscriminate trapping sent 100,000 beaver pelts back to Europe every year. In the way that it must have seemed


inconceivable that such an abundant bird as the passenger pigeon would go extinct, so too was the story with the ubiquitous beaver. A flood of get-rich-quick entrepreneurs almost trapped the beaver into oblivion by the mid-1920s. The species was in need of a champion.


By the mid-1920s, Archie had long since adopted the identity of Grey Owl, claiming to be born to a Scottish father and Apache mother. He ran a trapline with an Iroquois girl, Gertrude. One spring, with the beaver all but gone, Archie unintentionally trapped a female. Feeling guilty, he rescued her pair of surviving kits, and named them McGinnis


two huge rock-filled cribs flank the river. A logging road built here in the ‘80s was part of a plan to log the 300-year-old old growth forest. Though it’s almost three decades later, no


one has forgotten the bitter fight between the 300 protesters arrested and those who wanted the timber. As we paddle by, only the sounds of nature preside: A red squirrel’s scolding, the swish of our paddles and the rush of water flowing through the half- finished beaver dam spanning the stretch where the road once stood. That night we pitch our tents beneath


the pines. Two loons surface nearby, calling to one another. Around the campfire, under star-speckled skies, we plan the next day’s travels.


From the beach landing, the trail climbs straight up into the forest. With the canoe over my head, I focus on my footing. The


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