Eagle Plains - Where the True North Begins
We take our seats in the restaurant and are served by the genuine kindness of a Russian waitress: a beer for me and a chardonnay for her. As the drink hits my empty stomach it begins to combine with the spinning roof fans and the humpty bumpy drive across the sub-arctic plains with dizzying effect. We order our crunchy-bag caesar salad, with white bread, toasted and smothered in now melted butter - the universal (over)civilized delight. Directly to my right stands Corporal WJD Dempster, in photographic sepia form. His chest broad and proudly rotund. So this is the man who they named this road after.
While waiting for our main course to arrive we share photographs of some epic scenes along the road - “take a look at this one!” we exclaim to each other. An older gentleman with a hump back on returning to his table enthusiastically asks to see one. I happily share, in which he reciprocates with smiling approval. He is part of a table of two North American couples. Earlier I watched as these strangers came together to sit at the same table. After a few playful jokes and awkward stances they are now happily chatting the evening away. The hump back man and his wife have baggy plain clothing, angular sneakers and curly hair. We spot them the next day, sharing the load of lifting their suitcases back into the trunk of their SUV. Now with big child-like wooly hats on and 90’s looking colourful winter ski jackets. They wipe together the dried mud and dusk off their brake lights and hit the road again. These older folk are also driving the highest highway in so-called Canada in September.
After eating and while digesting, I glance down at the table for a split second and a piercing eye of a bald eagle stares right into me. “Eagle Plains - Where the True North Begins” reads the plastic clean-easy table cloths. This bird, and quote sit besides a map of the Dempster Highway and couple of other animals. All the other Northern fauna not shown here are conveniently and immaculately stuffed next-door in the lodge’s bar. Several humungous moose heads, a bear head with flattened pelt, a wood bison head, an arctic fox behind the bar, perched between the Spirits, a large chandelier made of antlers, a whole stuffed standing caribou and a muskox too. Besides the wooden paneling and gas lamps (now just for show) hang other framed and faded sepia beings of sleds and dogs, wooden cabins, canvas tents, fish catches and associated northern folk in their arctic clothing. This is contrasted delightfully with the triptych of three suited well-groomed sky news panelists framed upon their flat-screen TV hovering in the bar’s corner.
The feisty and intense bar/front of house/everything else lodge-lady, gave us a frantic personal performance of animal behaviour of several of the northern creatures now held here in the bar in stuffed situ. “Bears! They just want to be left alone to do their own thing!” she exclaimed. “I’m a bumbling bear” she says in a deep and bellowing voice while making a heavy and drooping walking-in-place reenactment, “Leave me be!” Next is the the moose: “All they want to do is mate! They’ll only attack if they think you're after their partner”.
“Now this one is the cream of the crop!” she says excitedly. “The arctic fox”.
She goes on to tell us how scientists tagged and tracked a female arctic fox that trotted their way more than two-thousand miles from Norway to Canada. This I later found out was done in a seventy six day crossing over the arctic ice and being among the longest ever recorded journeys for an arctic fox. Impressive indeed!
“What’s this one?” My partner asks and points to another stuffed individual in the room.
“Ohhh this is the worst one!” she says with boxer-like apprehension in her frame. “Worse than bears or moose” (she mentions again how moose just want to mate) “You want to watch out for this guy! He’ll attack your car, jump five feet in the air, get through your windows, or he’ll jump at your neck, latch on and roll you to the ground, oh mean they are!” After this enthused missing criminal report, I ask her how many times she’s seen said individual. She’s only ever seen a Wolverine the once.