Pause for Thought
BBC 2
Sunday August 9th, 2009

We’d been cutting wood for a few days down at our logging camp which was ten miles down the lake by canoe. It was Autumn. The nights were turning cold. The snow on the hilltops would creep a little lower each morning.

We didn’t have more than a week before we’d have to stop cutting for the year. Mid-morning the two of us downed tools to have a smoke – both of us with the impression that we were being watched. We turned around and there was a fellow standing behind us dressed in Moose hide from head to toe, with a Winchester rifle slung over his shoulder and a knife in his belt. His hair was in two braids and his eyes were bright blue.

We stood there in stunned silence.

“My name is Ice” the man said, and that was about all he said for three days.

Now understand that this was all in the Yukon Territory in northwest Canada. We’d canoed ten miles down the lake to get to our camp – there was at least some sort of settlement in the direction from which we’d come. This ‘Ice’ had wandered into camp from the other direction where there was nothing.

Now the Yukon in the mid seventies was filled with characters like this. Ice stayed with us for a couple of days. He was good with a chainsaw and his basic bush-craft was in order – consistent with a man wandering around the wilderness dressed in Moose hide. Still, it took us a good day before we’d turn our backs on him.

Our canoe was big enough for three and later we took Ice with us back to the village where some of our friends met him. Opinions were pretty evenly divided. Had Ice survived a plane crash when he was a child and was he then raised by wolves or was he a high school English teacher from Toronto who had taken too much dodgy LSD in the late sixties and gone to live with the bears?

The stories we concoct to make sense of characters like this. either build them up fantastically or reduce them to something wounded and pathetic.

And we are, let’s face it, curious.

We find ourselves yearning for something beyond mere explanation. Mystery. Possibility. Extending the horizons of those whose lives have become uncomfortably predictable.


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The audio is available HERE for a limited time.
Pause for Thought begins at 1:10.18 which is two thirds of the
way along the audio bar.