It is five degrees below zero in northern Quebec, but for the first time this week the sun is shining. I tilt my chin up toward a beam of light fragmenting through snow-covered pine boughs, then turn to my guide, a Cree trapper named Clifford Neeposh, who is demonstrating how to catch a beaver.
First, he explains, you must look beneath the frozen lake for trails of bubbles suspended in the ice. These will lead you to the den’s entrance where you will set your trap: a pair of steel jaws submerged underwater, anchored by a wood log atop the ice. It’s important that the branch is strong enough to prevent being gnawed through; if the wood is too green, another beaver could break away the trapped carcass. Beavers are known to bury their dead kin in the mud, he says, much like humans do.
This is the first lesson of our trapper hike through the boreal forest along Waconichi Lake in Eeyou Istchee Baie-James, a vast and sparsely populated region in Canada’s Quebec province that is home to 11 Indigenous Cree communities who have been hunting and fishing here for 5,000 years and trading fur like beaver pelts since the 17th century.
As we make our way through deep white snowbanks and evergreen trees, the only sound I hear is the shuffling of snowshoes—but we aren’t alone in the forest. Our tracks leave sunken imprints alongside spiraling trails of dotted rabbit paw prints, some bigger than others. The large hind legs of a snowshoe hare leave two marks ahead of their smaller front feet, forming a letter Y. We follow a set of these to the base of a pine tree, where Neeposh teaches us how to set a snare. As he uses his fingernail to form a wire into a loop—the same way you might use scissors to curl a ribbon—I notice for the first time that his hands have been exposed to the cold for most of the hike.
“Aren’t your fingers freezing?” I ask. In response, he holds out his hands and tells me to feel them, which requires peeling off my two layers of waterproof mittens and fleece-lined touch-screen gloves. Somehow, his skin is warmer than mine.
It is not the first or last time on this trip that I am forced to recognize the fragility of my own body, long coddled by the ability to outsource its survival. After just one day in the bush, as the locals call the wilderness here, I have become hyperaware of how quickly the elements could kill me without a phone to call for help or correct wrong turns. To survive, you need to pay attention. Not to a screen but to the location of the sun and the direction of the wind, to beaver bubbles and rabbit tracks, to the hunger in your stomach and the dryness of your socks. One mistake and you could starve or freeze, or both. Of course, none of that is ever a true danger to a visitor like myself, guided by the deft hands of locals like Neeposh, but it is impossible not to feel the threat quietly lurking as the wind bites my nose.
We are halfway through our hour-long hike when we reach a clearing with a cluster of spruce trees that are slightly smaller than the rest, and Neeposh pauses. “This is where my family lived,” he says, explaining that his parents and grandparents used to work at Waconichi Lodge, where we are currently staying, before the land became a wildlife sanctuary in 1985. Tourism here looked much different then: Cree were often told they weren’t allowed to enter, as the land was reserved for paying customers.
The tide began to change in 1975, when the Quebec and Cree governments signed the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, a treaty that gave the Cree ownership and self-governance over certain areas in their traditional territory as well as exclusive hunting and fishing rights. Today, guests visiting the Albanel-Mistassini-Waconichi Wildlife Sanctuary are not allowed to hunt and must apply for fishing rights, which requires them to adhere to community quotas (eight walleye, eight pike, and three lake trout, and 5.5 lb. of brook trout) and daily reporting guidelines, all of which is intended to prevent overfishing.
As negotiations with Quebec continued, the Cree Nation of Mistissini created the Nibiischii Corporation in 2017 to manage the wildlife sanctuary, which includes Waconichi Lodge. Following multiple years of prep and renovations, this is Nibiischii’s first winter season open to tourists. The property now includes 11 rentable cabins, two “floating cabins” on the lake, miles of wooded hiking trails, three saunas, an astronomical observatory, and even an outdoor cinema, where we are transported via snowmobiles one night to watch the documentary The Cree Hunters of Mistassini (1974) from heated igloo huts on top of the lake’s frozen ice.