‘I expect a rough go,’ he wrote, and I knew him to be tough, ‘with as many as a dozen portages a day.’ We flew to a place called Timmins with a mountain of gear. Gold was struck there in 1907. In 1964 it became a boom town for the second time when the Texas Sulphur Company made a major ore strike, and prospectors staked every inch of ground with more than twenty thousand claims in a wild mêlée. When we got to Timmins I still had no boots, because I had just come from Bali. All the shops were shut but eventually I emerged from a cellar to which I had been guided with a pair of bright orange size twelves with steel caps, made especially for the locals, who are always dropping lumps of ore on their toes, by the Gorilla Boot Company – ‘Brutally Strong’. Then we flew in a tiny Cessna to Cochrane, where there was an 8 p.m. curfew for people under sixteen. The weather was bad: ragged, smoking clouds spread across the horizon and there were violent rain squalls. Below us was the Boreal Forest, the Taiga, which extends without a break in a four-thousand-mile arc from Newfoundland to Alaska.
What do You think about What The Traveller Saw (1993)?
