A Valley and a Wolf

by April Clyburne-Sherin

It was my first time riding in a helicopter and I was anxious. The pilot was giving me the orientation: never walk behind the helicopter as the rear blades are low and almost invisible. Keep your head low. Never approach the helicopter from high ground. Since I’d started the job in the spring I had heard over and over the gruesome tale of the geologist who was decapitated by a helicopter just the season before. “His girlfriend was with him and saw the whole thing,” I was told. “The pilot freaked out and flew away, leaving her alone with his body.” I asked my pilot if he knew the story. “Of course,” his eyes sharpened, “it was one of our pilots.” Had the geologist failed to follow these safety rules? “No. He was very experienced. Flew with us for eight years. No one’s fault, really. Sometimes the wind can lower the blades…”

I buckled my seat harness and watched the blades above me hypnotically gathering speed. The pilot selected his route on the GPS in front of us. Leaving from the old gold claims of Forty-Mile, Yukon, and bearing north. One hundred kilometres north of Dawson, near the Alaska border, was a little slice of property accessible only by helicopter, inhabited by no one, and named “Og” by some distant geologist scanning his topographic map in Vancouver. Here my crew chief and boyfriend Jacob and I would spend the next month and a half, hiking and weathering ourselves in strange and dramatic isolation.

It took the helicopter three trips from Forty-Mile to drop off all our gear:
two canvas tents (one used for cooking, one for sleeping)
one month’s worth of food
two cots
one diesel stove (for heating)
one propane stove (for cooking)
two tables (one for cooking, one for processing our data)
two chairs
two gasoline generators (one for the camp, one for the equipment)
one electric “bear fence” which was really a cattle training fence
one satellite telephone (for emergencies and one call per week home)
$200 000 worth of geophysical exploration equipment
one adventurous and confident crew chief named Jacob (useful in every situation)
one inexperienced me (generally useless, it seemed to me)

And so began the hardest six weeks of my life. Twelve hours of physical labour per day, seven days per week. I grew tired and sore but kept going. The weather was working on me as it was working on the mountains, and I felt as smooth and worn as the stones were cold and wet in the creek. At night I slept deeply and had vivid dreams of the wolves and bears that slept nearby. Jacob and I talked only of work and the land. Some mountains were benevolent, rounded, wide, and protective. But there was one ridge, the Palisades, that we always dreaded approaching. Jacob screamed at the mountain to initiate the chorus of disembodied echoes belonging to the souls trapped inside the razor-sharp Palisades. I felt like something was watching us, and in this place guided by intuition, what I felt was what I knew. Eventually we did not talk of work and the land anymore. We became silent. Entire days of silence. Everything in me slowed and softened. My dreams became more vivid and mysterious, until I no longer believed they were mine. “I think the old wolf talks to me in my sleep,” I told Jacob one morning. I saw the old wolf later that day, and he did nothing to convince me that it was not true. He had warned me, told me to be careful in a world I knew nothing about.

In the city, my edges are back now that I can shelter myself from the weather. We never talk about the land anymore. On the sidewalks of Montreal, I think of that old wolf sometimes. In a world he could never survive in, that is where I walk now.