It was my first trip to the Ungava peninsula and we were determined to accomplish what nobody with any fishing sense thought possible - catch an Artic char on a dry fly! As guests of a local hunting outfitter who had invited us to evaluate the fly-fishing potential of his territory, we flew in from Montreal on Air Inuit and landed in Kujuuak, formerly known as Fort Chimo. And while it was a mere two hour flight that separated our daily existences, it was like landing in another world altogether.
As the plane came in for its final descent, the arctic landscape came into view where the boreal forest sharply ended and the tundra began, a rich tapestry of greens and blues, thousands of rivers and lakes as far as the eye could see. It was hard to tell if there was more land or water. As we circled the airstrip, the dirt roads and shacks of the settlement could be seen clearly from the air and there seemed to be no movement on the ground. The mighty Koksoak river, influenced by the tidal waters of Ungava Bay, was at low tide and had left several fishing boats stranded on its sandy banks. A few lay broken and bare on the shoreline, like giant whales that had beached themselves, dead corpses in an advanced state of decomposition, their broken backs and ribs exposed like skeletons in an open grave. Like all of nature in this desolate place, the river imposes its rythm on the inhabitants and their way of life and forces them to adapt their activities to it’s incessant ebb and flow.
We were met at the airport by one of the men working for the outfitter who, upon our request, dropped us off in town to pick up some last minute supplies at the Hudson’s bay Store, instructing us to meet him at the smaller air field at the outskirts of town once we were done. His sentence barely complete, half in English and French, the wheels of the Ford pick-up began spinning and we were left in a cloud of dust on the side of the road. The weather was unusually warm, with the mercury rising above a hundred fahrenheit and nothing stirred save for a mangy brown dog that crossed the dusty road and dissappeared behind a corrugated structure that looked like a warehouse. The village was like a deserted ghost town. The general supply store was one of the oldest fur trading posts in the country, and as we walked through aisles overstocked with canned goods, ammunition, fishing tackle, and clothing, the wood flooring creaked beneath our footsteps and an age-old musty smell of trading history emanated from the floors and brought us back a hundred years to the era of fur-trading. We commented to each other, that strangely, we had not seen another person other than our driver since our arrival. The Inuit were not active in this weather confirmed the non-native cashier at the general store when asked about the whereabouts of the villagers. They were waiting for the weather to turn, she said, as she handed over my receipt and change.
We would be fishing for landlocked char in some inland lakes located northwest of Kujuuak, far above the treeline on the tundra, a vast and lonely landscape bejeweled with millions of lakes and rivers created by the receding glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. Our base camp, one of eight satellite bases set up along some of the known caribou migration routes of the George River herd, was on Lake Rougemont, a large oligotrophic lake that was home to Artic char, lake, and brook trout.
It was late August and the char were preparing to spawn, staging at the mouth’s of rivers and creeks that flowed into the main lake. These were not sea-run fish and we had assumed that they would display characteristics similar to all trout everywhere and would inherently feel the age old genetic imperative to rise to an insect on the surface. If they weren’t like trout, we reasoned, then maybe they were somewhat like the often enigmatic Atlantic salmon. After all, if the king of finicky fish would, nevertheless, and with uncertain irregularity, smack the bejesus out of a floating fly, the same hopefulness could perhaps exist for the char. After all, we were convinced enough to spend a few thousand dollars on the flight just to test the theory and possibly shed some light on the mystery. This had been the subject that animated many late night fishing discussions for two years until Johnny May, the most famous of all bush pilots in Arctic Quebec, gently alit the pontoons of the Beaver float plane upon the crystalline surface of the lake.
On our first day, under the advisement of Clifford, the camp manager and chief hunting guide, we headed out onto the main lake and began to fish near every trickle of water that discharged into the lake, no matter how small. As we discovered even the smallest flows - literally drops of water falling from three hundred foot rock precipices - would hold fish. Near the first creek we located, we saw huge schools of ghostlike char that mysteriously appeared as shadows and then vanished into the turbulent water, leaving no clue as to their whereabouts. At first we though they were hallucinations. We were so excited that our hands trembled as we tied our flies to the ends of our tippets. This was the moment we had dreamed of for many years, travelling thousands of miles to the top of the world, above the fifty- eighth parrallel in the land of the midnight sun, Eskimos, polar bears, igloos - and now we were about to realize our finest hour.
This was clearly our intention but nobody had told the char.
We drifted every fly in our boxes over their noses without a rise and then every so often, as if to get a rise out of us, a fish would surface near our flies, giving us the hopeful impression that they were rising to something, despite the absence of any visible hatch. As the day drew on without a fish, and the golden sun dropped over the flat horizon, we were both silent as we motored back to base camp. Maybe the naysayers were right and it was an impossible feat.
Unable to sleep that night, frustrated with the first day’s activities, I wandered out my tent to relieve myself in the middle of the night and was met with the most incredible sight of my life - the aurora borealis. The sky was lit up in a kaleidoscope of colors - reds, violets, purples, and pinks - that kept moving and shifting across the horizon, like a colorful curtain, hanging across the sky. For an hour or so, I watched this spectacular light show in complete awe and wondered about how the first Inuit to witness this interpreted this mysterious natural phenomena in their oral mythology.
The next two days were spent flagellating the water with similar results, our psyches becoming increasingly unhinged in the process as at night, under the influence of strong libation, we engaged in wild conjectures about char conspiraces within the Theodore Gordon Society, the mating habits of Arctic muskox, and whether or not Lee Wulff or Roderick Haigh-Brown was the greatest fly fisherman that ever lived.
At the end of each day, as we returned empty-handed, Clifford would would come running to meet us on the beach and upon hearing of our results would proclaim that he had the solution to our problems in his shirt pocket. His sharp blue eyes, hardened by years of living on the tundra, glittered with childlike amusement as he would then proceed to pull out several white curly tail jigs heads, waving them teasingly in front of our faces.
In order to maintain our faith in the feather and maintain what little sanity remained, in between our unsuccessful outings for char we took our frustrations out on the many brook trout in the creeks adjoining the various smaller lakes on the territory. At least these trout were willing to hit a dry fly. One particular fly, a black gnat, was very effective and had caught hundreds of fish before we ran out of the pattern. In complete contrast to the char, the trout fishing was so easy it was almost shameful.
On our last day, when failure was almost a certainty, we decided to hike across the tundra and fish another lake a few miles away. The Artic landscape spread before us like another planet and merely walking on the and greenish-grey colored lichen of the tundra was a strange experience, like walking on an uneven sponge and there is always the expectation of falling through its soft carpeting. It is an unforgiving land, and there are signs of it all around us. A sun-bleached, ivory white rack of caribou antlers stands alone on the ground and points skyward in supplication. The remaining bones of the animal are scattered around on the ground, like runes, telling a story about a injured leg or a final struggle with a wolf or bear. One can sense the loneliness of the land, the delicate balance between survival and death, the daily struggle to survive in this hostile environment.
Within minutes after arriving at the lake, my companion managed to get a small char on a streamer and as he fought it, confessed to me how he had stayed up late the night before and switched to a fast-sinking line, hoping I did not mind the breach of mission protocol. It was a beautiful fish, the first Arctic char that either of us had ever seen, other than from photos in fishing magazines. He caught several more fish like this while I continued to drift dries, again using every pattern in the fly box.
At one point, after switching over to a small brown Bomber pattern that had caught some smallmouth bass a few weeks earlier on my home waters and casting out in the current, I placed the rod on a rock and turned around to relieve myself on the tundra. No sooner than my pants were down below my knees there was a terrific splash and my companion began yelling at me. I turned slowly, thinking that he had another fish on but then saw my fly rod bouncing across the rocks towards the water. Leaping forward, I managed to grab the rod before is disappeared into the lake and when I reeled in the slack line I felt the weight of a good fish. The first run took me into my backing and I fought in for a good ten minutes before it finally lay exhausted at my feet.
There it finally was, salvelinus alpinus, glistening in the sun like marvelous piece of museum artwork, sporting the colorations of the aurora borealis along its flanks, the object of a lengthy and noble quest, yet something didn’t feel quite right. Cold wind was blowing through my legs and I had an eerie sensation of being surrounded and watched by an unseen presence. I looked down and realized my pants were still around my ankles. As I stooped down to pull up my pants I suddenly wheeled around to face the tundra and was stunned by the sight that met my eyes. A thousand or so caribou had momentarily slowed down their migration, some at a standtill while others slowly trotted, apparently to stare at the odd human on the tundra, all the while snorting their indifference in the cold Arctic wind. - ARI VINEBERG
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