Territories | Alone in Nitassinan

Every corner of Quebec is full of stories that are as incredible as they are little-known. Maxime Pedneaud-Jobin takes advantage of the beautiful season to explore some of them. Today, he tames solitude in Ashuanipi.

I always slept with a gun next to me in the tent. It wasn’t absolutely necessary, but it reassured me. It was a .410 caliber, useful for hunting partridge, but especially useful for scaring off bears.

I have to say I was very far away and very alone.

To get to my island, I drove about twelve hours from Gatineau to Mani-Utenam, near Sept-Îles. The day after my arrival, I loaded my canoe, my three barrels of equipment and supplies, and my oars onto Tshiuetin, the Innu train.¹. Six or seven hours after leaving, I was left with my gear, somewhere halfway between Sept-Îles and Schefferville. On the edge of the track, there was a path that led to a river. I went down this river for three hours before arriving at Lake Ashuanipi. I spent the next 15 days there, going from island to island.

When I was little, the name “Pierre-Esprit Radisson” made me dream. A famous coureur des bois, his life is a novel. I invite you to read his autobiography, an extraordinary text (Septentrion and Glénat have recently published excellent comics about him — see below). I imagined myself like him, capable of tolerating all the suffering, of facing all the beasts, of crossing an entire continent alone by rowing, free.

In my barrels I had enough food for a little over two weeks, what I needed to fish, what I needed to hunt, what I needed to sleep well in the forest. I had a good canoe, good oars, a good flotation device. I had been advised to bring a satellite phone or a small emergency alert device, a kind of portable 911. I said no. No connection to the world. So I did it the old-fashioned way. A friend knew the route I had in mind, if I wasn’t on the train on August 6, she would have sounded the alarm.

Being able to count only on yourself. To move forward. To set up camp. To eat. To repair your equipment. To ensure your safety. To get out of the woods if you get injured. It forces you to go slowly. “Petekat,” an Innu would say. The word simultaneously expresses “take your time” and “be careful.” In its original meaning, it means “put your foot down quietly in winter so as not to fall.”

The most beautiful quality of the canoe as a means of transport is its silence. One can row while producing only the sound of the drops falling from the oar blade. Even clumsy, a canoeist can completely blend into the murmurs of the territory. It is magic.

When the train left, I walked silently across the river. Every move I made took me away from the hustle and bustle of the world.

The society we live in sees dangers, threats, everywhere. It seeks “zero risk”, it produces regulations, invents surveillance mechanisms, wants to protect us from ourselves. It sanitizes life. Our hyperactive world swallows up our daily lives, captures all our attention, fills us with useless information, images and scenes. It distracts us from our own thoughts, distracts us from the wind that blows, distracts us from life in the flesh.

Not Ashuanipi.

Ashuanipi is outside our world, he is only flesh and bones, earth, lakes, rivers.

Ashuan is a prefix that means “to wait.” Nipi means water. Ashuanipi: “the waters where one waits.” Waiting for the ice to melt in the spring. Waiting for the wind to die down. Waiting for the herd of caribou from Lake Joseph that spends the summer and fall there. Waiting for families to gather there for the climb north or the descent to the coast. Looking at the horizon and waiting for the moment when, finally, you really see it.

A friend told me that you have to stay in Ashuanipi “in a position of gratitude and welcoming of what is around you”. That’s what I tried to do. I gave myself the impression of moving towards infinity, of having a world to discover, I slept rocked by the wind, I read to the sound of the rain, I walked on the moss, I ate wild blueberries, I picked tea, I looked, I saw, I loved Ashuanipi. In The Snow LeopardSylvain Tesson, a true adventurer, writes that “the intensity with which we force ourselves to enjoy things is a prayer addressed to those who are absent.” If this is praying, I have done it a lot too.

The boreal forest, the one we have not destroyed, exudes a feeling of eternity. As if it were the same today as it was 6,000 years ago. Immense lakes, proud rivers, forests as far as the eye can see, soft carpets of moss, immense stands of Labrador tea whose aroma surprises us at the bend of a path and completely envelops us like the perfume of a bride returning from too long a journey.

The boreal forest is a sanctuary, “protected place, shelter, bastion, refuge”. A sanctuary of beauty, a sanctuary of silence, it is a testimony to the past and, if we preserve it, a promise of the future. Thank you, Ashuanipi.

1. Read “Tshiuetin, a train to the future”