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“Once I’m finished with it, this canoe will take you anywhere you want to go,” Hal said.

“Even Hudson Bay?” I replied.

Hal’s eyes softened. He invited me back to his office, set down a blue plastic barrel of the sort used in Minnesota to distribute salt on the roads, and ordered me to sit. He described how he had paddled many venerable waterways, including Great Slave Lake, the Yukon River, and the Border Route from Lake Superior to Lake of the Woods. The Sevareid route had always loomed above all others in his imagination, but he was getting too old to even think about it now. He offered me a grimy can of Diet Coke from the shelf above his computer.

“You’ll need a shotgun: double-barreled, 20-gauge minimum, pump action. Anything smaller will just piss off the bears,” he said. “The Canadians are insane about guns. They’ll make you fill out a pile of paperwork before they let you bring one into their country—and even then they’ll probably deny you entry.”

Hal interrupted himself, logging onto the Web site for the Canada Firearms Centre and printing out a one-page declaration form, along with two pages of instructions.