Grizzlies, Gales and Giant Salmon. Pat Ardley

They nest in burrows along the coast and often feed at night to stay safe from predators. They were being blinded by the lights, especially the huge spotlight that could be seen for miles. Ray said that this strange behaviour happened every few years. Such a sad waste. Some managed to escape with only a bump, but we collected hundreds of little bird bodies in the morning and gave them a burial at sea.

      One day, the helicopter arrived with our mail a week before the supply ship was scheduled to be there, which was such a nice surprise. But then when the supply ship did arrive, it was so anticlimactic, since it brought no mail. So disappointing—we lived for the mail service. I began to think that maybe I wasn’t cut out for this kind of wilderness of the spirit. Then John arrived with a load of mail for us that had been sitting for two weeks in the post office at Dawsons Landing, our alternate mailing address. The general store at Dawsons Landing has the closest post office and is about six miles south of Addenbroke and eight miles up a side channel of Rivers Inlet called Darby Channel. We didn’t realize that it would be so hard for us to get to the store, quite impossible really, since we didn’t own a boat. We would have to see if we could borrow Ray’s boat once we knew the area a little better.

      There were cards and letters and a parcel from George’s sister Gery. She had mailed us a bottle of wine! Unfortunately, she didn’t want to get into trouble with the feds at the post office if the bottle gurgled en route, giving away its true identity, so she opened the bottle, topped it up with water and re-corked it, then covered the top with wax to seal it! It was not the best glass of wine, but even watered down it was better than no wine, which is the usual sad state of affairs when one is so far from civilization!

      We had been there for almost three months and, in spite of the warm weather, we had yet to receive a fridge.

      Exploring the Wilderness

      George liked to get away from “it all.” One day we headed out hiking and I found that it was more like slogging once you were about six feet into the bush. There was a lot of heavy coastal underbrush, mostly salal, amongst the towering spruce and cedar trees. Huge trees had fallen over the years and were hard to climb over or under. Occasionally we had to scramble straight down ravines and then straight up on the other side, clutching at little clumps of roots, young bushes or sometimes prickly young spruce trees to steady ourselves. We then came to an area that was impassable. We couldn’t go up or down or over or under and had to turn and claw our way back to the water. We were sort of swimming across the top of the thick salal, our bodies far above the actual ground. I had been so hoping for an easier route back to our house and its lovely expanse of wide-open green front lawn. We finally “swam” our way out toward the edge of the island, which at this point was a rock face, straight down to the water with a thin ledge about sixteen feet above the rocky beach. Waves were crashing and swirling on the rocks far below.

      George could see how nervous I was, and said, “Trust your boots. They have a good solid sole and will keep you safe.”

      I stared down at the thin strip of rock cliff that was little more than half an inch in width. I was supposed to walk back, along this? I would have preferred a skyhook to lift me out of there. I put my foot on the ledge and without letting go of the branch in my hand, I tested my boot by bouncing slightly and could feel that it wouldn’t slip off the narrow ledge. I reached over and found another handhold and brought my other foot onto the ledge. This was going to take a while. I carefully reached again and pulled myself over, one boot and one hand at a time. After I had taken six steps across the sheer face, I came to a vertical crack, a fissure in the rock. It was about three feet deep and narrowed as it went in. Peering into the darkness, I could see a little brown bottle stuck near the back of the opening.

      I called George to come back and see what I had found. He worked his way back along the ledge to where he could peer in and see the little bottle. It was in as far as he could reach and he tried to pull it out but it was stuck fast. He carefully inched his fingers into his pocket and slowly pulled out a small knife, then he chipped away at the rock around the bottle. After a few minutes he was able to free the bottle from the crack and gently slid it into his jacket. My mind jumped to the stormy wave that must have carried the little bottle and inserted it into the gap without shattering it on the rocks. Ooops! I had forgotten for a moment that I was still perched sixteen feet above the waves crashing over the rocks below.

      Just past the ledge we came to a wider shelf where we stopped and lit a fire with our usual allotment of one match. George had a competitive streak—that I had witnessed before on the badminton court, baseball field and at the bridge table—which meant we always had to light the fire with only one match. We each wore a small backpack on our treks, with a small jar to keep matches dry, water bottles and a snack. On this trip, George carried the hot dogs and I carried a small pouch of flour. George cut branches to spear the hot dogs on and I mixed flour and water to make bannock wrapped around a fat stick. After cooking the bannock, you pulled it off and stuffed the cooked hot dog in. I crushed a few thimble­berries that I picked from the bushes surrounding our ledge and spread the delicious jam on the extra bannock.

      I would have loved a refreshing nap but we persevered, tramping through the woods for another two hours before we eventually saw the red roof of one of the houses. Strangely we had gotten lost on this little island. My sense of direction was born of the Prairies, where, in the wide-open spaces, I always knew which direction I was headed because I could always see, or at least feel, where the sun was. Down in the darkness of the forest surrounded by two-hundred-foot cedar trees, I barely had a feeling of where the sun was supposed to be. And George hadn’t brought his trusty compass with him. I was worn to a frazzle. I felt like the cat on the Pepé Le Pew cartoons to George’s Pepé Le Pew.

      Ray let us use his speedboat to explore around the island. Addenbroke Island is at the entrance to Fish Egg Inlet. This inlet had not yet been surveyed so it was exciting to poke into all the little bays and channels, feeling like we were the first ones there since Captain Vancouver’s crew. We weren’t though. There were ruins of two First Nations’ villages near a great clam beach. Both villages had been burned to the ground in the early 1930s. There was also a small safe anchorage on the north side of Fish Egg with a little wooden sign that read “Joes Bay” tacked on a tree that leaned out over the water.

      At low tide in the back of the bay, there is a waterfall more than three feet high coming from a tidal stretch of water called Elizabeth Lagoon. At some points the lagoon is over four hundred feet deep and about a mile wide so, as the tide falls, there is a huge volume of water that comes crashing and tumbling out through a very narrow gap in the rocks. It’s very impressive to see but you really don’t want to get caught in the lagoon when the tide starts to fall or you will be stranded for many hours. At least until the water calms down around a high slack tide, which is when the high tide changes direction, stops going in or coming out and momentarily stands still so you have a chance to escape the lagoon at last. We almost got caught. But usually George knew enough to read the day’s tide table before we headed out in the boat. Usually, but not always! Huge drifts of thick white bubbly foam pile up along the shore just outside the waterfall from the force of the water churning out. I have always fancied that the bubbles are from the grizzly bears having a bath just out of sight. There is a large grizzly bear population in this vast mountainous wilderness area.

      We headed back to the wharf at Addenbroke when it was close to low tide. George stopped the boat near the edge of a patch of bull kelp, where you could see the top six feet of the stem ending in a baseball-sized bulb with its long flat leaves ebbing and flowing with the surging of the swell like streams of mermaid hair caught in the current. I leaned over the side and cut several two-foot-long hollow pieces, including the large bulb. I had read that you can pickle bull kelp, so I was going to give it a try. The most applicable recipe that I could find for the kind of texture I was dealing with was one for watermelon rind pickles in an old pickling book my mom sent to me. I spent days boiling, draining, chopping, brining, boiling again, draining, spicing and boiling again before I was finally able to pack the “pickles” into the sterilized jars. In the end, they were actually quite tasty, and I would eventually add them to my Christmas parcel for my mom and dad, which also included salmonberry tea leaves in hand-stitched muslin bags, our canned clams, my fabulous jelly that I would make and canned salmon from the lovely coho that we were