Karen and I were out for some exercise and to see how the trumpeter swans were faring. The weather had been fickle, with the temperature hovering around the freezing mark for almost a week then abruptly plummeting for several days then warming again before we could adjust to the chill. Today, at midday, the land was warming once again and a thaw was in the offing. Karen had forgotten her snowshoes.It’s hard enough, I told her stomping on the crust to emphasize my point. It’s only going to get colder now, and, besides, the trail is in the shade most of the way. And, the path was hard enough where others had walked but when I left the compaction, I sank to my knees. In these situations I normally pack my snow shoes for the comfort that just having them bestows, but I decided that wouldn’t be fair under the circumstances. We’d only just begun following the footsteps of the man who’d preceded us when his imprint sunk a metre in the snow. We dodged the cold blue cavern, followed the frozen tracks for another couple of metres and came upon another equally deep track, made with the man’s other foot this time. You wouldn’t wanna walk a mile in this guy’s tracks, I said. Another short distance and another deep set track marked the spot where our poor predecessor had sunk up to his crotch a third time. There’s a story in these tracks, I said, thinking of the time a quarter of a century ago when a similar experience made a deep impression that’s still with me. It was a spring day, late March or early April. The sun was out. The sky was as blue as skies get. We’d just endured one of those long, cold, windy winters whose frozen snowy remnants would still be melting in May. The Skeena was flowing through ice banks 2 to 3 metres high, and the snow pack in the bush was about half that. I loped across the crust to the upper Lakelse River where I waved hello to Clayton Lloyd-Jones who was out fishing for trout with a friend I didn’t recognize. I didn’t appreciate the true wonder of trout back then and never fished them when there was a possibility that fresh steelhead were around. Knowing that the chance of hooking a fresh steelhead that part of the river then was remote, I continued downstream, past the railway bridge, past the lower Island Pool until I was across from what is now known as Thunderbird, which was then unlogged. My efforts were rewarded. I caught newly arrived steelhead well into the afternoon. Tired but exhilarated, I turned back, took and few steps and crashed through the compromised crust. So it went until I was so exhausted I thought I would have to lay down and die. Fortunately, I remembered that the tracks weren’t that far away. I waded the river about a kilometre below the train bridge then struggled through the brush then up a steep embankment, rested on the rails, then walked them to where they run parallel to Herman’s Point. I cut through the woods and made it up the trail thankful that it still had its integrity thanks to the trout fisher traffic. We kept on. The tracks continued, on both sides, coming and going, and it became apparent that the fisherman (I could only assume he was fisherman for only someone with an advanced case of fishing fever would have attempted that trek) had slogged all the way to river. Why didn’t he turn back? Karen wondered. I can’t understand it, I said. At least I could claim that when I made my gruelling trek over 25 years ago I had no inkling the crust would soften on the way in. Sinking up to one’s groin in snow is bad. The anticipation of breaking through makes it worse. There’s so much stress in unpredictability. We reached the river. It was high due to the same rains that had softened the track and made the passage of the fisherman who had gone before us a week or so earlier so difficult. We heard the chortling of the swans downstream. As we approached them they began bobbing their heads. Short trumpet blasts began punctuating the chortling. They lifted off, slapping the water with their wing tips and passed over our heads trumpeting regally. After the fly past we turned and headed back up the trail. I looked down at the deep set tracks. All he had to do was walk up the creek on his way back, I said. He hadn’t. Exhausted to the point of delirium, he’d walked back up the trail on the rotten unpredictable snow unwittingly leaving an frozen testament to his strength, endurance and his agony.
