A solo canoe journey through the Mackenzie Mountains
Northwest Territories.

Broken Skull River; South Nahanni River; Liard River; Mackenzie River; Keele River, Twitya River; Mountain River.

by

Chris Larkin.

The book is in two parts. The first and shorter part gives a brief background history of the author and takes the reader quickly and directly into the bush experience, into isolation. It recounts the building of the first cabin on the Broken Skull River, the first winter alone, and the following spring. It continues with the initiation into canoe travel with a journey down the Broken Skull, South Nahanni and Liard Rivers to Fort Simpson. This chapter includes an account of the Nahanni fire of ’81 and a contrast between wilderness and National Parks.

The second part of the book takes the reader along on a two year solo journey down the Mackenzie River and into the Mackenzie Mountains by way of the Keele River. Wintering over in a previously built cabin, the author continues his journey over the spring ice and following break-up, on up the Twitya River, nearly to the Yukon border. Building a small cabin a further winter is spent alone and then in the following spring a descent of the Mountain River is made. At the height of the flood waters the canoe capsizes in sixteen foot waves. All is lost. A ten day walk out with but life-jacket, sheath-knife and twenty matches was made to the San Sault Rapids on the Mackenzie River where the author was picked up by a passing party of Indians from Fort Good Hope. The book concludes with an attempt to place in a wider context the lessons so easily perceived in wilderness, yet so obscured in present society.

A Perspective: ‘The Dangerous River’ by R.M.Patterson formed my introduction to the Mackenzie Mountains when I was eleven years old; ‘A Far Cry’ in some sense, modernizes the timeless wilderness endeavour. The search is no longer for gold but for original material for photographs and paintings, it is founded in reality, not dream; it possesses purpose. That the purpose ultimately fails is irrelevant for the wilderness provides a more valuable gift than any sought. This is the real parallel between the ‘D.R.’ and the ‘F.C.’ and the same sets it apart from the more usual wilderness travelogue limited in both duration and purpose.

Aside from this story I have endeavoured to paint with words much of what I saw and also to convey a sense of the perpetual land by recounting the ongoing day to day travel, from one winter through to the following winter. Criticism has been levelled at the length of this story and whilst I accept this as valid, I never-the-less want to respond – it was a long journey – and find comfort in many historical precedents, whose authors did not have to conform to modern literary accounting and styles.

This internet publishing is very much in the spirit of the storytelling of old, and is not unduly inspired by the Russian ‘samizdat’ experience under Communism. I have toyed with several ideas on how to present the material but in the end I have used a very simple and honest philosophy: the story is of principal importance, enjoy it. But if you can afford to contribute $5 or $10 by way of a donation to keep ‘A Far Cry’ on-line and in its own web site, please consider helping out, I would really appreciate your support. However, reading from a computer screen is not ideal for some of us and should you love books as much as I do and would like to support a hard-copy version, please email me with your thoughts, and should there be a few hundred people out there who are sufficiently enamoured of this tale, maybe we could get a copy printed through blurb.com. – or even a genuine leather bound edition. That would really be the free market at work! But principally, thank you for coming this far, may you have many more pleasurable pages ahead.

Chris Larkin.

Notes:

All positional bearings given are related to the general direction of canoe travel, so if I am travelling upstream the right shore is on my right hand side facing upstream; similarly if I am travelling downriver, the right shore is on my right hand side facing downriver. This may not be technically correct by some accounts but the first priority is to facilitate the reader in ‘seeing’ where he or she is going!

Speaking of position, for those who maybe of a younger generation, this journey through some of the remotest wilderness on the face of the planet was made with the assistance of 250,000 scale topography maps, it was made before the advent of GPS and cell phone technology and without any form of radio communication. It is my firm opinion that GPS would have lessened the experience. The experience would have been improved had I had no map.

This story was written first in longhand, with a fountain pen, it was then typed up on an old (1940’s?) manual Remington typewriter, the sort which holds a ribbon (with a virtually indefinite life); it was finally transcribed on to a computer. It would seem almost inevitable that typographical errors occurred along the way – given that I was the typist in each case. Should you find any such error, please feel free to email me with the page number and place. I would be grateful.

If you do want to pass this story on to friends or relations can you please do so via a link to this web site, rather than a direct transfer of the pdf file, as this will keep traffic volume to the site higher, rather than lower, which is important for Google ranking. Thank you.

Allow aproximatly 10 minutes for complete loading of the Flash book, (Pages load consecutively) file size is 92MB.