At this NWT pike lodge the monsters are real—and you’re guaranteed to catch one

In June 1789, Chipewyan guide Awgeenah led Scottish explorer and fur trader Alexander Mackenzie, along with a crew of four French Canadian voyageurs and four fellow Chipewyan helpers, to the western arm of Great Slave Lake. They had paddled north down the Slave River from Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca, then across Great Slave, and were now poised to venture down what Mackenzie referred to at the time as  the “Grand River.” Their goal? To follow the unexplored waterway north all the way to its mouth, thought to be the Pacific Ocean.

There was just one problem. Once the group reached the river’s outlet from Great Slave, around what’s today known as Brabant Island, Awgeenah and the other Chipewyan crew members balked. According to Mackenzie’s journal, they refused to venture further downstream, warning of gigantic, river-dwelling monsters lying in wait.

A man on a mission, Mackenzie eventually convinced the crew not to abandon the party, offering them inducements to continue in the form of blankets, beads, booze and other goodies. Sealing the deal for Awgeenah was a tanned moose hide, a considerably hot commodity among local traders at the time. And so, they carried on downstream, following the river north into the unknown.

Fast-forward 236 years to early last July, as my fly-fishing buddy, John Cleveland, and I stepped off a floatplane and onto the dock at Brabant Lodge on its namesake island. Unlike Awgeenah, we didn’t need an inducement in the form of a moose hide to explore the river. And unlike Awgeenah, John and I actually wanted to come face-to-face with gigantic monsters—gigantic northern pike, to be precise. In particular, I wanted to top my personal-best pike on the fly, a 45.5-incher I pulled out of northern Saskatchewan’s Reindeer Lake four years earlier. And by all accounts, this was the place to do it.