The bow of our canoe slides easily onto the western shore and we gaze at a well traveled path that leads into the wood. I'm bewildered. If this is a portage trail, it's not one of the two shown on the Nopiming Park map. Where could it be going? I dig out my original topographic map and search for some destination for this grand trail. I find nothing - no lake nearby, no river - nothing. We finally decide to walk the trail for a while. My GPS receiver plots a line that goes off to the north northeast, toward the next lake on our route to Obukowin. As we load up, I realize that I must have missed a first portage. (I later learned from Martin Kehoe that the first portage starts at the east end of the northern-most shore of Siderock.  See Martin's route description "Portages from Siderock Lake to Obukowin Lake in Manitoba" on the canoestories site for complete information.)

Six years ago, I would have turned back at Siderock lake when the stream became impassible and we found no portage. I had a healthy fear then of getting lost, of getting bogged down or blocked by rough terrain. But six years ago, I made my first trip to Woodland Caribou Park, and there I had enough rough portage adventures to give me confidence.

Our "well used" trail is a nice walk with a few mucky areas. It ends at a beaver dam just a hundred meters from another short portage. The stream is now wide but the channel is not well defined. It ends on floating muskeg at the southern tip of the first no-name lake.

After paddling the eastern shore for a few minutes, Mike spots a bit of ribbon on a tree. We land again in muskeg and start slogging our way to solid land. The area near shore has a few "surprise" soft areas and twice my leg sinks down as far as a leg can sink. We drag, sink down, get up, push, pull and find other amusements to keep us occupied on our way to land.

The portage itself starts on solid rock. Small rock piles mark the way through the healing landscape. Our landing on the western shore of the next lake is not much better. A watery muskeg trail leads to open water. A thought comes to me, something I read not long ago. Calvin Rutstrum wrote that the coming of the aluminum canoe brought a new way to travel in early spring, before the ice was completely out. One apparently would straddle the canoe, pushing with ones feet on either side. If the ice broke, you were left floating on top of the gunwales, not up to your shoulders in water. Hey, if it works on shaky ice, might it not work on shaky muskeg? I try it and we're soon laughing at my plight as my feet push uselessly against the soft ground. Evidently this method is an all or nothing sort of technique. Solid ice - walk. Water - paddle. Mushy muskeg - sit and dangle.

Mike and I paddle across the small lake and find a campsite on the eastern shore. We cook our simple spaghetti meal for supper, then settle into the tent as a steady light rain starts to fall. It's raining now but Mike is clean, I'm at least dry and we're both well fed. It rains steadily all night.

Gray clouds cover the sky this Monday morning. As I cook pancakes and make coffee, Mike starts to break camp. It only takes a few minutes to realize that we've camped on the portage landing. Our shore is rough and stark. There's very little sign of man's presence here, no worn soil, no areas cleared of firewood... We're completely alone now, or so we think until we reach the top of the first hill and turn around to look at the lake below. What appeared from behind to be just a large pile of rocks now appears in it's true form. There's another person here, and he or she has a small dog nearby. Here is a sign of man that brings a smile to our burdened faces. The rock man of the Obukowin trail seems to smile with us as he stands his high ground in this remote piece of paradise.

This final portage to Obukowin takes about forty-five minutes. In one place we sink down into water. The water gets deeper, deeper - I put the canoe down and float it through the watery ditch of a trail. Only after we complete this watery spot do we find the bypass path that other have cut! The Obukowin end of the trail has a nice landing and a triangle sign marking the portage. It's sunny now, a little after ten o'clock.

We troll for a while on Obukowin and catch a small jack and pickerel. There's a high shore on the western side of the lake and the top gives us a good view of the land below. Often these high shores are not hard to climb. If you land your canoe to either side of the high point, you can walk into the woods, keeping the high ground on your left or right. Often the land sinks until you can step onto the hill and walk a gently inclined path back to the high shore.

After our climb we eat the two fish with some potato soup. It's good to have a shore lunch again. Obukowin is shallow, at least on the part we travelled. Plants appear far out in the lake. We continue to troll, but we don't alter our course to find good fishing.

As we make our way past a fat peninsula, I stop at a point of land that happens to fall exactly on a grid line. My GPS seems to "read" the grid about 200 meters south of where I really am. I dig out my original paper map and here find that I should be using North American Datum 83 instead of the NAD 27 setting I've always used before. Although I like to think that my mind might be sharp as a razor, I always seem to find it more like an electric razor, humming and buzzing and coming unplugged now and then... At least the mystery is now solved.

There's a narrow channel flowing out of Obukowin, into Carroll lake, and Mike finds a fat jackfish waiting at the end of it. We're using inexpensive gear and eight pound line. Mike plays the fish for about three minutes as it splashes and dives, now running deep, now threatening to cut the line across the rough bottom of the canoe. Finally it tires and we get it into the net. The weather is good for traveling so we make our way across the open water on Carroll lake.

One of the pleasures of September in the higher latitudes is having the evening back. In June, evening doesn't come until nearly eleven o'clock. But now the sun sinks into the red sky and the land around us falls into shadow. Our world of distant shores now closes like the closing of a tent when the day is done, becoming smaller as we finish up our chores and huddle around our campfire.