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Arctic Adventures with the Lady Greenbelly

by Kenneth Conibear

158 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #00-0106; ISBN 1-55212-441-X; US$17.50, C$19.50, EUR14.00, £10.00

In 1946 the author bought a small freight scow in Fort Nelson, B.C. to take freight north on the MacKenzie River to the Arctic Ocean - and back south. This humourous story is about the people - the Indians, Eskimos, and others he met or travelled with, plus the adventures of struggling with natural problems such as the many river rapids and well as the idiosyncracies of his boat.

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about the book      about the author      sample excerpts      catalogue info

About the Book Ken Conibear, Northern pioneer, Rhodes Scholar and storyteller of life in Canada's far North, writes of his exciting, dangerous, and humourous experiences taking his boat, the Lady Greenbelly, over 1000 miles from Fort Nelson down the majestic and rugged Mackenzie River to the Arctic Ocean. He took on this adventure for two reasons. First, he intended to carry freight to the Arctic communities with his newly acquired freight scow, the Lady Greenbelly, and then sell her there for a handsome profit. Second, Bill Sweet, an elderly, retired insurance salesman from Seattle who had read Ken's previous books, had convinced Ken to take him and a young friend, Jack Havens, on a side trip-a wilderness filming expedition up the relatively unmapped Rat River. During the course of the trip, everything that could go wrong with the Lady Greenbelly's motor did go wrong, and Bill Sweet himself caused more than a few problems because of his unbounded, but inept, enthusiasm-and excessive politeness. The people met on the trip provide their own stories - the Eskimo whalers who cheerfully gambled away their year's earnings; Mike Krutko, a storekeeper in Fort Providence who always remained cheerful - even as provisions for his store sank with the Lady Greenbelly; the priest at the Catholic mission who recalled last seeing Ken when he was only a small child; and the fir trappers, Jake and Izor, who went Outside to find a wife for Izor and instead adopted a 12-year-old English war orphan-and then headed back north with all the supplies any 12-year-old would need. With an axe, their team of sled dogs and the only butcher's chopping block in the North, they were among many who came to the rescue of the notoriously inept Lady Greenbelly. News travels fast in the North, and the Lady Greenbelly's reputation had spread so that impossible to sell-at any price. Stuck with her, Ken had to return south up the many rapids of the Mackenzie and Liard Rivers, facing more adventures and life-threatening situations-always with courage, a lot of luck and never-ending good humour.

About the Author Kenneth Conibear was born in Canada in 1907, and moved with his family to the Northwest Territories in 1912, travelling there by rail, stagecoach and barge. He was raised in Fort Smith, and was home- educated to the grade 10 level by his parents and friends within that community. He was sent out to Edmonton to complete grades 11 and 12, and continued on to the University of Alberta where he was selected as the Alberta Rhodes Scholar in 1931. Following 3 years at Oxford, he spent the next three years in England writing and had his first novel, the highly acclaimed "Northland Footprints" published in 1936. It was then that he was referred to as 'the Kipling of the North'. In 1937 his publisher, Lovat Dickson, hired him to travel with and manage the Canadian Indian naturalist Grey Owl's speaking tour of England, and he has often been consulted as an expert on Grey Owl. In 1938 he returned to the Northwest Territories with his wife, Barbara, and had "Northward to Eden" published, followed in 1940 by the novel, "Husky" written in collaboration with his brother, Frank, and "The Nothing Man," privately published in 1995. In the North, he was a hunter, trapper, storekeeper and skipper of his own fish-packing/freight boat on Great Slave Lake. After serving in the Canadian navy during WWII, he tried to establish a business carrying freight down the Mackenzie River to the Artic communities - plus serve as a guide for two men from Seattle who wanted to film an adventure trip down the Rat River in the far North - the subjects of this novel. All of the author's novels were based on his intimate knowledge and love of the people, the animals, and the natural environment of the north. He moved 'Outside' and at the age of 55 was hired by the newly established Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. He retired as administrator of the English Department at the age of 70. He presently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia with his second wife, Marilyn

Sample Excerpts

(The Lady Greenbelly's engine has caused problems again and we've drifted ashore on the Mackenzie River).

The wind abated a little, and the snow ceased falling, the sun glared fleetingly through a curtain of red cloud above the far side of the river; and from the upstream lay of the beach a dog came trotting through the snow towards us. I thought the great shaggy beast was a wolf at first. Certainly I never saw in it the forerunner of our salvation.

Jake and Izor, trappers on their way down river by canoe to their base cabin on the East Branch of the Mackenzie, had put in out of the wind the night before, and were camped around the point half a mile above us. They had made a good muskrat hunt the previous spring, had flown to Edmonton by the first plane after breakup, had spent nearly all their money in the city, and were returning for another hard winter's labour by the cheapest means available. It was an old story, I thought when I heard it first, different from most only in that they had saved enough of their fur money to buy two good canoes and some supplies before they started north, and to acquire the raw materials for a good dog-team on the way downriver. The Alberta Government, via the Liquor Control Board in this case, had not got it all.

Then I heard the true story. Jake had brown eyes and a grey beard, Izor grey eyes and a brown beard (and an immense nose on him, dwarfing his other features); they also had a pair of black eyes with them, shining little black eyes set in a bright little brown face, perky and smiling. "Snippet" they called the boy sometimes, sometimes "Pipsqueak"-or any one of a host of other affectionate nicknames. Alfred Peter 'Iggins was his proper name, and he had been born and raised in Stepney, London, England. He was twelve years old. When he was about six, he guesses, although he had not been told till two years later, his father had been burned to crisp in a tank near Bardia. When he was nine a V-bomb had wiped out his mother and three sisters, leaving only him and Aunt Priscilla alive. Somehow or other-I never got the rights of it-Jake and Izor heard about young Alfred Peter 'Iggins. They wrote Aunt Priscilla. Aunt Priscilla, though grieved, thought it all for the best in the short and the long, and probably the Lord's will besides. So Jake and Izor sent a large part of their winter's fur money overseas, and in due time had delivered to them by plane one small boy. They bought him a .22 rifle, winter clothes, a case of school-books, a super-super Meccano set and seventy-five dollars and eighty-three cents worth of concentrated cod-liver oil and vitamin pills. Then they all headed north together.

One way or another this business had run into a good bit more money than they had thought it would. They didn't regret spending it, not for a moment; but it was a pity, Jake thought, that it had knocked on the head another project they had in mind when they set out for civilisation that spring. The whole purpose of the expedition had been to pick them out a suitable wife for Izor. For his part, Izor did not seem at all grieved that events had turned out as they had. He blushed, then recovered.

"Instead, we got Limey-boy" he said, "gettin' fat, ain't he?'

He was, and no wonder. They had put the kettle on when they saw me following the dog towards them. We ate now. My first impression at the meal was that they simply tyrannized, in a benevolent sort of way, that unfortunate boy. They had killed a mule-deer swimming the river the day before, and seemed determined that he should consume every morsel of it before it went bad. Three times they heaped his plate with a man's portion, insisted on his eating every scrap of it, watching him as fondly as if they were feeding all the starving children in Europe, then let him of his own accord dig into the bannock and strawberry jam. I thought he was going to burst.

However, that first impression of mine was quite wrong. I heard their story, they heard mine: then they both turned to Alfie. "What do you say, Kid-wump?" Jake asked, beaming down at the boy. "Do we give the man a hand, or don't we? You're the boss in this here gang." At some period early in the war young 'Iggins had been evacuated from London, had got into the wrong social batch somehow, and had picked up odd phrases curiously contrasted to his own normal aitch-miserly speech. "Oh, rawther" he said, accenting both syllables.

Early the next morning Jake, Izor, Alfie, and their seven dogs came down to help us. We had three sets of double blocks and tackle strung out on the beach, giving us an effective strength, I reckoned, of forty-eight men, twelve women, and twelve boys, not counting the dogs. Consequently I didn't see that we needed to use the team; but all the impassioned eloquence of Demosthenes would not have sufficed to persuade Jake to forego this first chance to demonstrate his skill with them to Alfie. For their part, the dogs welcomed another chance: they hadn't been able to have a decent go at one another's throats all the way down river in the canoes and thought this a grand opportunity to start deciding which one was going to be the boss of the pack. Jake handled them: Charley, Linda, and I heaved and ho'd on a line alongside them; and Izor splashed boldly into the water outside the boat and started prying between skid-log and the Lady's planking with the most suitable object he found handy. The boat stuck, then came with a rush, two feet for the twenty-four feet of mud that we all stumbled through before we fell flat on our faces.

It was while the lines were being run out for a new purchase that I noticed what had seemed to Izor the most suitable thing handy for prying under the boat. It was the Lady's drive-shaft.

I didn't let Izor know how I felt about that. I wanted to talk to Linda about it, and Izor couldn't come within ten feet of her without blushing 'til that great nose of his glowed like a soldering iron. I didn't let Linda know quite how I felt about it either.

"That's done it" I said. "The only way to get a straight piece out of that shaft now would be to saw it up in little pieces, starting with two feet off the coupling end."

Linda took me seriously.

"And move the engine two feet aft" she said. "You know, Ken, if you did that, you could run the exhaust pipes out astern and not get nearly so many fumes inside. Have you ever thought of doing that?"

I had. Once I had even gone so far as to try to loosen the pipes to add new fitting to them. Heat had virtually welded them together, however; I hadn't been able to budge the joints.

"Two foot six" I said. "Damn Izor!"
"Shhh!" Linda's warning was a little late. Alfie, aimlessly walking towards us, was already within hearing distance, and must surely have heard my opinion of one of his gods.
"I think two feet would do it" she said. "And look, surely the rest of it is perfectly straight."
"Well maybe. But there's still those exhaust pipe joints. We can't even get them out the old holes unless we change the angle right where they come out of the jackets."
"If we could only heat them-" she began.
"If we ran the engine, Linda, with no water in it, just for a minute-"
"That might do it" she agreed.
After men and dogs had got the stern a full foot clear of the ground, we tried it. Linda was more nervous than I.
"Shut it off, ken. You'll burn out the valves!"
I braced my foot against the far gunnel and pulled as hard as I could on the pipe wrench. I couldn't move it.
"Give her more throttle" I said.
Iridescent colours began to play across the elbow between the jaws of my wrench, heat began to creep up the handle to my palms. I stuck a two-foot piece of pipe over the end, braced myself, and pulled again. The pipe moved toward me this time, slowly, then with a rush. Linda cut the switch while I was picking myself up off the deck.

The next man's job was the shaft. For the first time, I had qualms.
"I don't like this" I said, as Linda handed me the hacksaw. "It's so final."
"Pinny-pinching again?" Linda asked.
I started to saw.
Another big job was to cut a key-way in the shortened shaft, with no more adequate tools than the hack-saw and a half-inch cold chisel. I left that to Linda's direction.
"Charley'll do the heavy work on that if you'll show him how" I said, and outlined quickly a number of smaller jobs that I wanted her to do, to adjust wiring, throttle-control, and water-hose to the new position the engine would take. She didn't mind: those pettifogging details were what she had always got assigned to her when she was a mechanic in the Spars, she said, but-
"But, Heavens, Ken, you're in a hurry."
"I'm in one stream-lined hell of a hurry" I agreed, and departed. I could not tell her why, because little Alfie had joined us in the cabin.
Jake, Izor, and Charley were talking on the beach.
"I'm off to rustle up something for the new deadwood" I said to Charley. Jake turned toward me.
"Charley here says you want a piece of hard stuff, Mr. Conibear." I agreed. With spruce in her, which was the best I could hope to find on the beach, I would drift down river, largely at the mercy of wind and current; with hardwood, I might be able to run the engine all the way to Norman.
"Go on up to the camp" Jake said. "I'll be right behind you."
He had to assemble and untangle his dogs before he could start. I was too impatient to wait there. Waiting ten minutes at the men's camp instead, I grew still more impatient. I was desperately anxious to get all these repair jobs done that day, to pull out that night if possible, not for my own sake but for young Alfie's. Life for him under the wings of these great-hearted but impractical foster- uncles of his would be full of blessings, but full of hardships too. In prospect the very hardships might appeal to him more than the blessings, and by the look of the boy I judged that he would be able to endure them well enough once he was gradually broken in to them. But he was in no condition to meet them yet, physically or morally. It would be a poor start in his new life, I thought, if his party should get frozen in a three or four day trudge along the beach above their base-cabin. And I would never forgive myself if I was the cause of such a thing happening.

The storm, dying now, was a warning. Winter was coming here, creeping up from the north. Winter was nearer down on the East Branch. Every minute possible Jake, Izor, and Alfie should be paddling, putting the long miles behind them. That was the cause of my hurry.

By the time Jake joined me I had tramped a ten foot walk of impatience up and down on the mud of the beach. He led me straight to the freighter canoe drawn half its length out of the water.

"Bought a lot of junk before we heard of Alfie-boy" he said. "Kinda had some idees about how we was going to fix the place up nice for the little lady we hoped to get for Izor, you see. You know how most trapper's cabins are, skinnin and stretchin done inside, pelts hangin on stretchers over the stove, fur and innards right on the table beside you when you eat."

He worked as he talked, tugging at the canvas that covered the goods in the canoe, poking about in the bows, saying "No, ain't here", moving to the waist, repeating "No, tain't here", going on with his explanation all the time.

In forethought for the comfort of the unknown bride, Jake and Izor had built a special skinning cabin apart from the one they lived in at their base-camp. "Fixed her up nice, stove in her and everything." Then it occurred to them that they might as well do their butchering in it too-" that vast amount of cutting up caribou carcasses for dog-feed and personal use which makes a large part of the nightly chores of every trapper. The building of this special cabin was the last work they had done before they left their base in the spring: the fitting out of it was the first item of business they had turned to when they reached the city. One by one old Jake brought out cleavers, meat-saw, knives, stones, and showed them to me; then came at last to the object of his search-the first butcher's chopping block I'd ever seen in the Northwest Territories.

Grunting, he straightened up with it in his arms, grunting passed it over to me, grunting, I clung to it, bending at the knees.
"Maple, I think" he said. "Hard stuff anyways. She'll do you."
My protests were useless. My objections that it would takes me three days to whittle the thing down to the size I wanted were silenced when he produced a swede-saw with three spare blades.
I hurried back to the Lady, made measurements, gathered up Linda and a three foot length of inch pipe, hurried to the upriver camp again. Jake had most of the sawing done by the time we arrived. I heated my steel pipe till it was cherry red, moved it quickly with gloved hands, jammed it upright between two drift-logs, pressed the middle of the block heavily on the heated end, guided by Linda's eye and voice. Jake watched us awhile, then ambled off downriver.
It took us about an hour to burn the hole through that block, but it was neat and true when it was done. We hurried off with it.
As we neared the Lady we heard a chiming of metal on metal coming from our own camp.
"That's Jake and Izor a'thrash'n and a'pound'n on the prop" Charley explained. "They didn't seem to think she looked quite right somehow."
"Good Lord!" I exclaimed, dropped the block, and started to run.
Linda stopped me.
"They can't make it any worse, Ken."
"They can break a blade off-"
"What that prop needs" she interrupted, "is somebody with courage enough to wang it about with a hammer and be damned. That's what you said yourself."
"Hammer?" said Charley. "Them guys, they're using a axe."
I laughed then. It didn't matter if they smashed the thing to pieces: I'd drift. I would probably drift anyway.

***

I didn't see the propeller when Jake and Izor came back with it and put it on the shaft. I was working inside the boat with Linda. Charley tended a small fire hard by the Lady's side, heating six inch spikes in it, passing them to Alfie in a tin can. Alfie passed the can through the porthole, his small hand momentarily visible. Linda took it from him, grasped the hot spikes one by one in pliers, and passed them to me, carefully avoiding contact with the slightly leaky gasoline line. I burnt holes through the ship's timbers and into the deadwood from either side, put bolts in them when they met, lag-screws when they didn't. Finally I caulked the joint, then shouted to the men on shore to start prying us into the water again. By the time we got ashore to help with a final heave, the propeller was sliding into the waves.

I got a brief glimpse of it, couldn't believe my eyes and shouted to 'vast heaving. I was too late: the Lady's stern kept moving, and in the lap of the waves about them the three bronze blades took on a thousand different shapes each more improbable than the ones I thought I had seen. In the general shouting and heaving my shout passed unnoticed, and I was content to say nothing more about the matter. It was too late anyway-and surely I'd been mistaken.

She floated, my Lady, responsive again to every least shift of weight, alive. We hurried aboard and went to work in the engine room again. I never before saw a line-up job come as sweetly as that one did then. When we were done Linda could turn the shaft with one hand.

I poled the stern around till the boat lay at right angles to the beach, and yelled to the men ashore.
"Going to give her a try, fellows."
Charley and Alfie came aboard. Jake and Izor, coming from the camp with the last of our gear, threw it aboard, but themselves stayed ashore. Linda had already started the engine. I went below and gently eased the lever into gear ahead. At once the shaft began to spin, smoothly, sweetly, like a piece of oiled silk turning. Wider and wider I opened the throttle, faster and faster the shaft spun. Never in all the time I'd owned the boat had that drive assembly turned with so little vibration. I couldn't feel so much as a tremor in the stuffing box when I rested my hand upon it.

Linda and I looked up together. Our eyes met, gleaming. Then quickly she turned hers away and glanced out the porthole.
"Ken! We're moving!"
"That's all right" I said. "She won't climb very far on that skid. She'll push off easy."
"But we're not moving ahead, Ken! We're moving astern, fast!"
That was when I knew that I had been seeing straight when I looked at that propeller as it had slid into the water.
I got to the wheel in three jumps, and shoved it hard over. We were about a hundred feet from shore, backing through a mess of mud-bars towards the fast water beyond the bay. I eased up on the throttle, swing the wheel the other way, bore down on the throttle, swing the wheel again. Nothing seemed to make any difference: the Lady never had steered worth a milquetoast cuss when going astern, and with this particular prop she seemed to move as fast, or as slow, with the engine idling as with the throttle wide open.

The little rapids drew close astern, waves washing greedily over it. And at that moment, Alfie came sliding along the gunwale toward the pilot-house. "Put her in gear ahead-you know what I mean" I said to Linda.

She caught on quick. I suppose she had already guessed what had been done to us. She slipped the engine into reverse. Immediately we started to move ahead, helped by the eddy swinging into the bay, but still drifting sidewise towards the rapids. I bore down on the throttle then. The motor roared, a great fountain of froth burst out astern, and we began to move slowly up the inside channel in the curve of the bay-slowly, that is, except for the six-knot reverse current that hustled us through that channel. Probably Alfie didn't know about that current, and thought we were making this quite creditable speed against one flowing in the opposite direction. Anyway, he was greatly impressed by that huge tumultuous bubbly wake we threw up stern.

In the few weeks he had been in the country that kid had managed to pick up a fair amount of Canadian lingo to add to his strangely mixed English. He looked at the wake, then looked at me, with shining eyes.
"Gee! Gosh!" he exclaimed. "Jake and Izor shore fixed that prop for you, didn't they?"
I know my Canadian lingo too, a little better than Alfie.
"Yes, son" I agreed, "they shore fixed her."

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