An Affair With a River
EVERY SO often, Art Moflatt '41 likes to drop in at Fort Albany, an outpost at the mouth of the Albany River, on James Bay. He gets there by canoe, and the trip is long and hard. The Albany has much white water, and some of the portages are more than a mile long. The country is virgin wilderness, seven hundred miles of it. The speckled trout weigh in at a minimum of two pounds and the Crees and Ojibways who live along the banks take sturgeon from the river. Anywhere along the Albany, this uneasy century drops to a very faint murmur in the far distance.
The affair between Art Moffatt and the Albany River has been going on since 1937 —not just a passing fancy, but a true affinity. Fourteen years ago, he made the trip alone. It tells you something about the country between Sioux Lookout and James Bay that it stayed in his mind while he was a student at Dartmouth and while the occasions of World War II detained him in North Africa and the Near East. In 1948 he took his wife down the long-remembered river, and Carol, the first white woman to make the trip, got her picture on the cover of The Beaver, a magazine published by the august Hudson's Bay Company.
Last summer, Art turned up at Fort Albany again, this time with a party of six young men Tyke Miller '51 and five others from various prep schools and colleges in the East and Middle West. This year, Hudson Bay Trips (that's Art) will repeat, with the group limited to five.
The voyageurs meet in Toronto, go by train to Sioux Lookout, thence by the English River and Root River, across the Height of Land and down the Albany. From Fort Albany, at the mouth, a schooner takes them to the railhead at Moosonee, and so back to Toronto, for a total of something like 2,500 miles in nine weeks.
This is the least attractive form of the itinerary, which has to be filled in with details of woods and weather and river flowing north. A Dartmouth man named John Ledyard once made much of a some what similar opportunity.
Art MofFatt '4l (2nd from right) with student voyageurs on the Albany River last summer.
