Above the 60th parallel, the Canadian Far North covers a territory the size of Europe, with barely 100,000 inhabitants. In winter, it is minus 41 at four in the morning, survival depends on the wood you put in the stove, and the roads run over frozen rivers. Those who travel there have almost all come from elsewhere, from Quebec, Germany or Sudan, for a little gold, furs or a job, and each has their own way of holding out in the immensity.
Christophe wants to cross the Yukon and the Northwest Territories from south to north, over 2,000 kilometres; the snow will decide otherwise.
A snowmobile would be “much easier”, Corr admits, “but engines break down”; the dogs, for their part, are ready to run 200 kilometres.He lives in a cabin in the Yukon, among the tins and the portraits of the King. Ever since a UFO flew over him, he says over breakfast, he has known that he was born to be Elvis Presley, and “the whole world is at a loss, because they don’t know what to do with two Elvises in one and the same life”. He has had three Cadillacs, a blue one, a white one and a pink one; the last one no longer runs, the transmission gave out under the snow. So off they go on foot, at minus 15 degrees, he half-undressed, in shoes made for summer. Three to six months a year, he goes from village to village to sing, mostly in spring and summer, and he has gone as far as New York and Los Angeles, by bus. His rule fits in one sentence: “I’ve got a car, I drive, I haven’t got one, I hitchhike.” After two hours of walking, a car stops. Tonight, he is giving a show in Whitehorse and expects a hundred, a hundred and fifty people, maybe more.
Being Elvis means, he says, that he is “welcome anywhere in the world”; his next Cadillac, he would like in fluorescent yellow.
He has even painted the UFO that flew over him: three little aliens one metre twenty tall, “with big black eyes, but nice to look at”.In 1896, the Klondike gold rush sent 100,000 people towards Dawson City; on the map they were given, it was written that, whichever route you chose, you would regret not having taken the other. People there paid for their whisky in gold dust. Nearly 300 claims remain, and in winter people dig so as to be ready for spring. After three hours by snowmobile, deep in the woods, Claude and his brother Ridgy, two Quebecers who have come 6,000 kilometres, live in a tent around the stove, the sow, as they call it in Quebec: at four in the morning, it is minus 41, and Claude has got up four or five times to feed it. Their plot, number 18, was staked on 14 February 1899. Ridgy, the jackhammer man, goes down the shaft six hours a day. Usually he digs for others, who pay him and send him away before he sees the gold. This time, if he finds a few grams, “I’ll stop everything. I’ll wait for the end of winter and in the spring, I’ll close the hole and go back to Quebec”. Claude, with gold, would rather “get therapy to stop drinking”, and would collect as much of it as he could.
At the confluence of the Yukon and the Klondike, Dawson City brings together “the Far North and the Wild West”, the harshest cold in the country and gold fever.
“Everyone has come to Dawson City and everyone comes back”: in summer, many Americans come to mine here, and the Germans dream of it.
At the bottom of the shaft, it is thirty degrees when it is minus thirty outside; at fifteen metres, the gold, they assure you, “has been proven”.
Claude has lived in Dawson City for twelve years; here, says the law of the woodsman, “you go out for a pee, you bring in a log”.To reach the trappers, you need a plane. The only pilot at the Dawson City airfield arrived from Germany by motorbike, out of money, and stayed to set up his own business: 800 to 900 flying hours a year, moose counts, the injured dogs of the Yukon Quest, a 1,600-kilometre race to Alaska. At the end, at the very end of nowhere, lives Corr, a trapper in the woods all year round. A piece of moose in the freezer lasts a month. His trapline is about 160 kilometres long: four days to go round it with the dogs, two days at the cabin to skin the animals and dry the pelts, then he starts again. By sled, he has covered nearly 150,000 kilometres. His best season, about ten years ago: 205 martens, 36 lynx, 5 wolverines, 6 wolves. He sets a snare every 200 or 300 metres and killing does not bother him: “I’ve got respect for them. Then what I don’t like is making them suffer.” The trade does not really earn him a living; it gives him enough to get through the winter with his dogs. Dawson City has 800 or 1,000 inhabitants, but for him: “More than five, that’s a town for me.”
“In Germany, I would never have had the opportunity to start my own business”, says the pilot, who lives mainly from bush flying.
On the Yukon Quest, the Dawson City plane serves as the “sweeper plane”: it comes to pick up dogs in distress, hurt in accidents or injured.
Corr has been trapping since the age of five: between the farm and trapping, “I prefer the woods to the fields”.
Facing a grizzly, Corr does not run: “You move forward quietly or you back off quietly.”Further north, a thousand kilometres away, reindeer herders were meant to be waiting. Their story begins in the 1930s: during the Great Depression, for fear that the Inuit would run short of meat, Canada brought in Sami, a nomadic people from Norway, to drive herds of reindeer from Alaska. The journey was meant to last a year and a half; it took six. In Inuvik, 3,500 inhabitants, literally the place of people, Lloyd, the herder, does not turn up. There are barking dogs, a mosque, and a taxi. Omar comes from Sudan: a cousin who has lived there for nearly twenty years brought him over, he has lived there for three years, and the town’s Muslims number 70 or 80, counting the children and families. The river has become an ice road, big boats are trapped in it. Go back to Sudan? If there are still problems between the South and the North, “I’ll stay here. I don’t want any trouble.” Further on, the road is closed, and the journey ends there, in front of a sign that the wind lays flat in the snow.
With the road closed, Christophe had to fly to Inuvik, where the reindeer herder had arranged to meet him “between the rubbish bin and the mosque”.
On the ice road, the signs point to Tuktoyaktuk and Aklavik; further north the Inuit, the polar bears and the northern lights were waiting.“There’s plenty of people who go into the woods, and then they’ve got no business being in the woods because they go crazy after a while. Me, I go crazy in town.”Corr