Arctic Daughter. Jean Aspen

and gave it order. The mosquitoes were reluctant to give up the chase, but one by one they stowed away or were left behind.

      “We’re off at last!” I called back cheerfully. I smiled, feeling the thrill of an irrevocable choice.

      Phil had finished bailing and was peering toward that phantom shore. Absently he swatted at a lingering bug.

      “I just knocked my glasses overboard.”

      “You’re kidding,” I said, knowing that he wasn’t. “Your new ones?”

      “Yes.”

      I studied the flawless surface that had swallowed Phil’s new glasses. “Let’s camp at the first spot.”

      He nodded wearily.

      Very soon the sun was gone, sliding into the spruce forest, and a diffused pink glow of boundless sky softened the summer. The shore we finally reached shelved gently from a willow bar into a quiet stretch of river. There we beached the canoe, making her fast to a sunken log. We snapped a fitted nylon tarp over the load and pitched our camp among the supple bushes. Without bothering with dinner, we crawled into our small, orange tent and zipped it tight against the bugs. Soon I had drifted into a sound sleep, lulled by the lap of wavelets against the canoe and the shrill cries of arctic terns as they darted for insects in the cool dawn sky.

      Early day burned bright and hot when we deserted the stuffy tent for the smell of open water. I knelt in the sand, feeding sticks to a young fire and enjoying the stir of wind on my face. A gossamer mist of mosquitoes swirled in the eddy of my body, attracted by the warm animal smell.

      The beach was a story of river moods, gathered from countless other shores. Along it wavered a series of parallel lines marking recent water levels in trails of twigs. Small plants were forcing their first two leaves upward through the mud. Because the Arctic receives most of its sunlight in an intense burst, plants and animals grow rapidly during the brief summer. However, environments with low productivity, such as deserts and the Arctic, are delicate, each niche being filled with a single species.

      Here one could see the progression of life. Hardy, young willows formed a living net of fluttering green that locked down the sand with tough, red roots. Behind these stood older willows and the fast-growing balsam poplar, and sheltered by the poplar from the careless river, a two-foot forest of young spruce pushed through to claim the future.

      I leaned contentedly back on my ankles and buttoned the throat of my denim shirt against the bugs. We were finally underway. This trip had started in my head, and we had taken one step after another to find ourselves here. That is what it takes, I thought: imagination and tenacity.

      Phil dropped an armload of firewood and grinned down at me. It was the first smile I’d seen in days. “I want to repack the canoe after breakfast,” he said. “It’s poorly balanced. I think less weight in the stern would help.” He had found his spare glasses—climbing goggles with dark prescription lenses. To save space, he had a set of clear lenses that could be inserted. Phil often forgot to wear glasses, as his driving record attested.

      “I’ll make us some breakfast, if you want to get started,” I offered.

      All our bulk staples—like cornmeal, flour, and sugar—were packed in square, five-gallon cans. We had designed a grub box, already dubbed “Wonderbox,” with racks of plastic bottles to be refilled at intervals for easy access in camp. Freeze-dried camper foods were just coming onto the market and were far too expensive for our budget. I had also reasoned that we could pack more actual food as bulk staples. We hoped to supplement our supplies with rabbits and fish during the summer, and would of course need big game before winter. My mother had told me that an active person consumes his weight in prepared food each month, but a canoe’s capacity is small—even ours with its eleven-hundred-pound limit.

      Into a bucket of boiling water I dumped a handful of dried and salted horse meat, an animal we had bought and butchered for the trip. At forty-seven dollars it was protein we could afford and had furnished our first butchering experience. We had oven-dried the meat with much salt and then broken it into chips, which I planned to use in cooking until we found game. I was inexperienced in cooking with staples, and Phil was useless. To the boiling horse meat I added flour, lard, salt, and pepper to make a kind of horse-chip gravy. I stirred the pot and bedded it in the coals to simmer. Then I stripped off my clothes and dashed for the river. Phil was still repacking.

      “Come and have a bath,” I called, safely submerged. “You’ll feel much better.”

      “When I’m done,” came the voice from the duffel.

      I upended with a splash, driving the mosquitoes from my scalp. “Come on, you’ll enjoy it.” I could imagine the specter of my disembodied head floating on a swirling sea of cocoa amid its own little, black cloud.

      Reluctantly Phil undressed in the smoke of the fire (mosquitoes avoid smoke) and proffered one toe to the river. “It’s cold!” he accused me. He wasn’t big on water under any circumstances.

      “Just rush in and get it over,” I advised him. The cloud of bugs was settling contentedly onto his naked skin. With a grimace, he splashed through the water to join me.

      Later I stood beside the driftwood fire as Phil brushed out my long hair. Over us, a cruising gull dipped sharply, head pivoting in keen interest, white on blue. The sudden hiss of the pot shifting startled me and I shoved a stick under the bail, lifting it to rake out more coals.

      Thoughtfully my eyes trailed over the muddy beach where the tools and supplies that were to see us through a year alone were heaped in the sunlight. Every item had been chosen with care, from the folding sheet-metal Yukon stove for the cabin, to down clothing and rifles. We had discussed our possible needs at length, each of us making decisions in the areas we were most familiar.

      Phil was arranging the load in layers. On the bottom were the water-tight five-gallon cans of food and winter clothes as well as the gas tanks he had built to fit the canoe contours. Items like axes, wire, saw blades, one hundred feet of half-inch polypropylene rope, snowshoes, and a few traps were stuffed down beside these. Many kits, such as sewing, photography, medical, maps, journal, and personal items were packed in a middle layer. On top would be everyday items: tent and sleeping bags tucked into a canvas duffel sack, jackets, and a large Ensolite pad for the tent floor, rolled and tied. All the cookware nested into a seven-gallon kettle we called “Mightypot.” To ensure that equipment would not be washed overboard in case of capsize, everything was lashed in.

      This was our future. There were wicks for the tallow candles that we hoped would light our winter and a few special books. We needed fuel for the secondhand outboard motor and rope for pulling the canoe during the later stages of our journey. We had winter clothing, backpacks, and canoe patching materials. There were knives and whetstones, files, matches embedded in wax, an auger, tin snips, nails, hinges, bullets, panes of Plexiglas for cabin windows, measuring tape, and nylon twine. We had a fish net, binoculars, rivets, a plastic tarp to waterproof the sod roof, window putty, four small bottles of military mosquito repellent (the strongest available), film, and a small gas lantern: in short, everything we could conceive of needing and fit in a canoe.

      Like many partners, we tended to specialize. Phil was physically stronger than me and good at building things. I, with my knowledge of the North and my dream, was the momentum behind our trip. And somewhere, unseen, was my mother with her stories and advice.

      When repacking was completed and cargo again towered over the little craft, we turned to enjoying our breakfast. It was terrible. The jerky was the texture of cardboard and so salty as to be nearly inedible. Above us, arctic terns hovered and wheeled—dazzling flashes of life engrossed in their great summer task, a job of such importance they had flown from the Antarctic, a round-trip of thirty-six-thousand miles, for these few weeks of sun and insects to perform it. In all the world, only terns can make more terns.

      It