The Strange Story of a Dog, a Diamond Discovery, and the Fierce Rivalries of the Canadian Arctic

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My novel Ice Angel is set in the Canadian Arctic diamond field, an area where I spent many happy days as a reporter covering the great discovery and diamond rush of the 1990s. In fiction, you create your characters, but a reporter takes them as they are. Luckily, when it comes to diamond exploration, that’s good enough. This is a story about one of them. His adventure says a lot about the mistrust, the competitive obsessions, and the plain craziness of a mineral rush. I never got to interview this particular character, because I lacked the necessary skill: proficiency in husky.

In the Spring of 1992, the winter staking rush was over in the Barrens. The Arctic summer was approaching in a rush. As the northern hemisphere tilted to the sun, explorers gained an hour of daylight every ten days. Tents sprang up beside the lakes. Eira Thomas, a 24-year-old Vancouver geologist, shoved her last stack of research into a filing cabinet, grabbed her hiking boots, and headed for the airport. She was not alone. Sitting beside her with his long, pink tongue hanging out was her equally eager companion, a 60-pound white husky with one blue eye and one brown—Thor.

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The exploration team—five geologists—met in Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories. They transferred their baggage to a Twin Otter. Thor rushed around on the tarmac in jubilation, whining and barking and cocking his head at the plane. He loved to fly, and as soon as the geologists had finished loading their gear into the Otter, he hurtled aboard and wedged himself happily among the packs. The plane took off, rose above the thin spruce forest, and headed northeast into the vast, granite fastness of the Barrens.

The tent camp had been pitched at Lac du Sauvage. The site faced a broad bay with a wide sand beach where floatplanes could run up on the shore. But in late May, the water was still clotted with melting ice, and instead of floats, the Otter was fitted with the big “tundra tires” that allowed it to land on rough terrain.

That part of the Barrens is strewn with ridges called eskers—tidy strips of gravel disgorged on the rock by melting glaciers ten thousand years ago. An hour and a half after leaving Yellowknife the plane dropped down, lined up on an esker, and bumped to a stop beside a waiting helicopter.

Thor shot out of the plane and tore around in a delirium of joy. The geologists hauled their gear to the chopper, Eira rounded up Thor, and they all clattered off to the camp. The moment the skids settled on the ground and Eira opened the door, Thor shot from the helicopter like a dog fired from a gun.

The camp had nine tents: an exploration office for the maps and daily meetings; a cook tent, in many ways the heart of any camp; a storage tent; a little lab for examining minerals; a combined laundry and shower tent; and four sleeping tents, each equipped with oil stove and raised platforms for the sleeping bags. From the tents, a flat shelf of tundra ran down to the beach, a twenty-foot-wide arc of perfect sand. Thor charged around, the campsite, dashed to the shore, and then went pelting off into the tundra in sheer ecstasy.

A long, thin esker ran in a straight line from one end of the beach into the lake. The cold water teemed with trout. A few of the explorers cast from the beach. The cook built a fire with green Arctic willows in a tiny smokehouse, and put the fish on racks inside. That first evening the explorers gathered in the cook tent and ate smoked trout.

On Eira’s first day, the chopper dropped her at the northern end of Lac du Sauvage. The discovery of a diamond-bearing “pipe,” as the extinct volcanoes that contain diamonds are called, had ignited a furious competition across an area the size of western Europe. Geologists raced to make the next discovery. As the helicopter flew away, Eira surveyed the panorama of rock and glittering, ice-flecked water. Twenty miles away, a plane glinted in the sun as it approached a rival camp. She turned away, and walked east until she found the course of a stream. She slipped out of her pack and began to dig. Summer was short in the Barrens. Everyone understood the need to sample for minerals widely and quickly.

Thor had his own work to do—rolling in the bushes, snapping at flies, and examining every inch of the terrain. It was his native land. Huskies descend from a breed that was established in the Arctic not long after the glaciers had gone. They have many qualities—strength and endurance. But an animal is not a robot. They have their own individual natures. Thor was no different. As everyone would soon find out.

For the geologists, the days in the Barrens were long and arduous. They trekked and dug and filled their sampling bags, working through the lengthening daylight hours. Later, in the cook tent, they devoured enormous meals, then went out and sprawled by the lake to watch the evening fade. It was often midnight when they made their way back to the tents, to fall instantly asleep.

One night Thomas and her tent mate, Leni Keough, woke to the sound of Thor whining loudly in the tent. Keough got up and stuck her head out to see a Grizzly wandering through camp.

“Thor was frantic,” Eira said. “He tried to burrow into my sleeping bag. I ordered him to go outside, but he wouldn’t go near the exit. Finally Leni and I managed to push him out and fasten the door behind him.”

Instead of chasing the bear, Thor wailed in terror and dashed to another tent. “He almost tore it apart getting in,” said Eira. The bear panicked at the commotion and galloped out of camp.

Not every encounter with a Grizzly ends so well. Their keen smell draws them to the camps across long distances. They can appear suddenly, loping over a hill—an animal the size of a tractor moving at the speed of an antelope. In the Barrens, a lake is always near. Panic can send a person rushing into the water to escape attack, and prospecting lore abounds with tales of people who have died of hypothermia while a Grizzly paced back and forth on shore. Perhaps some dogs would fling themselves at such a monster in the service of their masters. Thor was not that dog.

Let me step aside into the geology of diamonds for a moment, because it explains a lot about what happened to Thor in the great adventure to come.

One problem Eira and the others faced was that they didn’t know exactly what a diamond pipe should look like on the printouts from the airborne surveys. It was those surveys they relied on to tell them where to explore. The color-enhanced printouts looked like maps of molten galaxies. Huge splotches of red and green and blue squirmed across the maps. But which blob was a diamond pipe and which was just some magnetic anomaly? What they really needed was the signature of a known Barrens diamond pipe, so they could search for the same thing. There was only one location in the Barrens with known pipes—the discovery that had started the rush and brought them all up there. So they decided to do something no one had yet dared to do. They would fly directly over the discovery pipe and steal its magnetic signature.

With a pod of instruments fastened to a long tether, the helicopter lifted away from Lac du Sauvage. It flew out to Lac de Gras, a huge body of water at the very center of the diamond field, then cut sharply inland and clattered across the discovery camp. Men rushed out of the huts in a rage, studying the intruder with binoculars. The pilot completed his run, turned back, and crossed the pipe again. The agitation of the men below was clear. In a few minutes it was over, and with the geophysics of the diamond pipe securely stored in their instrument pod, the team flew back to camp, leaving their outraged competitors fuming.

Competing geologists in the field are ruthless in deceit. They often lay false leads. They leave phony staking maps in bars, or allow their enemies to “eavesdrop” on carefully prepared baloney. They steal core from competitors’ drill shacks and pilfer soil at night. They scrutinize each other from the air. That’s the nature of a mineral play, and it explains the bizarre story that began when a pair of Eira’s fellow geologists went up on the little esker, set up targets, and started to shoot.

“Thor just took off down the lake,” she said. “Guns terrified him. He just vanished.” He didn’t come back that night. Or the next. “He was gone for three days! I thought for sure he was toast, that wolves had got him. Maybe he’d followed a female and she’d led him back to the pack and that was the end of him. He’d run with wolves before, but you never know with wolves.”

On the fourth day a radio call came through from the discovery camp. Was anyone missing a dog? When the reply was affirmative, the callers asked if the dog looked like a wolf. Yes, they were told, he did.

Spooked by the gunfire, Thor had fled up the eastern shore of Lac du Sauvage and kept on running. He ran on and on until he reached the north end of the lake. He rounded the top, and continued his flight down the other side. By the time he reached the discovery camp—the camp where Eira’s team had made the overflight—he had traveled sixty miles.

When they saw him coming along the shore, long-legged and loping, they thought at first he was a wolf. But wolves are afraid of men, and by the time Thor got to the tents they realized he was a dog. Exhausted and hungry, he headed straight for the cook tent. The camp made a fuss over the personable dog with the one blue eye and the other brown, and Thor settled in. Naturally, they wondered where he’d come from.

Thor wore a tag issued by the city of West Vancouver. His new hosts called the municipal licensing branch and asked if a dog with Thor’s license number was reported missing. The municipality checked its records and called Eira’s mother, Gail, to ask if the dog was lost. She told them Thor was up in the Barrens with her daughter. The city passed this information back. It was received with disappointment. Thor had eaten his way through an impressive share of their provisions and into their hearts. Reluctantly they called Eira’s camp.

She offered to jump in a helicopter right away and come to get him. But the other camp refused. What if the whole thing was another scheme? Some treachery designed to give Thor’s owner and her team a closer look at their competitors’ camp. Instead, they offered to keep the dog. They liked him, and hey—he liked them!

When Eira insisted she wanted him back, they refused to let her make the short journey to collect him. Instead, they flew him out to Yellowknife. So instead of a five-minute chopper ride back home, Thor made a 400-mile round trip. When the news broke, the husky enjoyed his Warholian moment of fame—heralded by reporters as “Thor, spy dog of the north.”

Eira became famous too. The next year she dragged a rig onto melting ice and drilled the discovery hole of what became the Diavik diamond mine. She went on to make other discoveries, and is now the chief executive of a company that found the second largest diamond in all of history—the 1,100-carat Lesedi la Rona. Naturally I wrote about that too. You can find it on my website.

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