Farley Mowat’s unexpected airdrop in the Keewatin Barrens is less a planned arrival than a forced threshold-crossing: after a precarious flight, a pilot deposits him and his supplies on a frozen lake, then departs without being able to identify the location. The comic bravado of the pilot’s assurances gives way to a stark uncertainty about where Mowat has been left, how remote his new base is, and when anyone might return.

Background and Arrangement

Mowat’s enforced stay in Churchill town ended in the last week of May, after three days of a howling blizzard. On the third day, with visibility reduced to zero by snow squalls, an aircraft descended over the hotel and flopped onto a nearby pond. The wind threatened to blow it away again, and people from the beer parlor rushed out to hold its wings down. The landing introduced the unlikely means by which Mowat would reach the north: a battered, twin-engine aircraft whose arrival seemed nearly as accidental as the journey it would make.

The plane had been built in 1938 as a military training aircraft and discarded after years of service. A lanky, hollow-eyed former RAF pilot had revived it, hoping to start an airline in the Canadian North. He had flown from Yellowknife, about seven hundred miles northwest, intending to reach The Pas, roughly four hundred miles southwest of Churchill town. When Mowat later explained his difficulty, the pilot offered to take him wherever he wanted to go, proposing a northwest course because the compass could not be trusted on other headings. He promised that the route would lead to Wolves and a place to put down.

Departure did not follow immediately. For three days, low cloud prevented the flight; the ski-equipped aircraft also developed a serious landing-gear problem when a hydraulic cylinder collapsed. The engineer found that seal-oil could restore it temporarily, though it continued to leak and the plane would stay upright for no more than about twenty minutes before keeling over. Mowat had to reduce his load because the aircraft could carry little. He abandoned a useless canoe that doubled as a bathtub, but traded a gallon of alcohol for a serviceable, seventeen-foot canvas-covered canoe, which the pilot agreed to lash beneath the aircraft.

The Flight and Landing

On the fourth morning, the aircraft finally took off. For nearly three hours, cloud hid the ground as the plane droned onward. The pilot then put it into a steep dive and warned that the fuel remaining would only get him home. Below, he said, lay good country for Wolves. The descent brought the aircraft beneath the cloud at just over thirty feet, revealing a mile-wide valley between high rocky hills and a frozen lake.

The landing was both improvised and skillful. The pilot set the aircraft down on its one good ski, then waited until it had lost almost all its speed before allowing it to settle onto its weak starboard leg. The engines remained running. The frozen lake became the landing ground not because Mowat had been brought to a surveyed destination, but because the pilot had found a place the failing aircraft could reach and use. The weather, the damaged gear, and the limited fuel had narrowed the journey to this brief opening beneath the cloud.

Left on the Ice

The pilot urged Mowat to get out quickly: there would be darkness before the plane could make it back to Churchill town. The mechanic, previously lethargic, moved with speed. Mowat’s supplies were unloaded, the canoe was cut loose from beneath the aircraft, and the landing gear was pumped upright once more. These hurried tasks made the separation material and immediate: the equipment needed for the field stay was on the ice, while the aircraft was being made ready to leave.

The pilot looked over the canoe and acknowledged, with regret, that it was not quite what Mowat had bargained for. He nevertheless accepted that it might be needed. His reassurance about a possible return was conditional: he might come back in the fall if the aircraft had not crashed. He also suggested that local Inuit could take Mowat back to Churchill town, but the promise offered little certainty about when or how he might leave. Mowat asked where he was, explicitly requesting the information for his records. The pilot apologized, admitted that he did not know himself, and estimated that the site lay about three hundred miles northwest of Churchill town; there were no maps of the country.

The cabin door shut, and the aircraft struggled across the pressure ridges. It lifted unwillingly and vanished into the overcast. Its departure closed off the only immediate connection Mowat had to the settlement he had just left. The plane had brought him to a base, but neither the pilot nor Mowat could name its precise position, and any future pickup depended on the survival of the same unreliable machine.

Arrival Without a Map

The episode’s decisive reversal lies in the difference between arrival and security. The pilot had promised a quick solution to Mowat’s difficulty, yet the delivery ended with Mowat alone on an ice-bound lake, hundreds of miles from Churchill town by the pilot’s estimate. The carefully assembled supplies and the canvas canoe made a stay possible, but did not make the site known or the return assured. In the closing irony, Mowat describes himself as having arrived safely at his base: the sentence registers success in reaching the field, even as the circumstances expose how provisional that success is.

The chapter title, Happy Landings, carries the same double edge. The pilot’s cheerful manner and breezy assurances sit beside a flight delayed by weather, a leaking hydraulic cylinder, uncertain navigation, and a landing made on one functioning ski. The event thus establishes the conditions under which Mowat’s northern stay begins: not with a dependable expeditionary arrival, but with an improvised insertion into a vast, unmapped landscape and an uncertain prospect of rescue.