New book celebrates the life of legendary trapper and bush man Pi Kennedy

It’s been four years in the making for Fort Smith’s Pi Kennedy and Patti-Kay Hamilton, and last week they held their first book launch for In the Wild: Stories of a Lifetime on the Trapline.

The two have been friends since the ’70s. In the book, Hamilton writes that her family was living on a trapline with their dog team and would listen to Kennedy share conversations and stories with other trappers on the bush radio.

“I met him in person in 1988,” Hamilton wrote. “In his style, he ignored me, unimpressed with my microphone, and ordered me to fetch boxes of nets and bring him dogs.”

Kennedy knew he wanted to document his adventurous life on the land, and said when he met Hamilton, he knew he found the right person. He finally asked her to help him write a book in the late ’90s.

By then, the legendary trapper and bush man had been featured in several publications such as National Geographic, children’s books, radio interviews and a CBC documentary.

“But he wanted a book with his own stories in his own words,” Hamilton wrote.

The book chronicles Kennedy’s life in the bush starting in the early 1930s, when his father Phillip Kennedy — too sick to work the trapline on his own — pulled Kennedy from residential school in Fort Resolution. Kennedy made his living in the bush until 2010. 

Hamilton includes stories of Kennedy’s life on the land, including his preference for sled dogs over snowmobiles, his knack for photography, music, and jigging, even his first love.

An award-winning journalist and writer, Hamilton said writing the book was important to her because so many books about the Northern bush focus on southern adventurers.

“It just drives me crazy,” she told CBC. “Most libraries across Canada have a northern section because the myth of the North is important to Canadian people. But the shelves are full of books by people who came, maybe died here, maybe left after a month.”

She said it’s stories like Kennedy’s and other authentic northern trailblazers that need to be written and shared.

“To me, the heroes are people like Pi,” she said. “Every time an elder like Pi Kennedy dies, we lose a library, we lose so much history. I would love it if everybody sat down and wrote a book about their grandma, and the things they did in their lives.”

Pi’s stories

One of the tales in the book — and incidentally, a great argument for why dog teams are better than snowmobiles — tells of one of Kennedy’s journeys home from Elbow Lake by dog team after the Taltson hydro dam was built.

He intended to camp in a small outpost cabin he had made with his Uncle Rene on Star Lake. Part of the trail was on a 10-foot-wide creek after it froze. 

“When I returned home, boy, I got a nasty surprise. I rounded the corner to find the creek had become a big lake and frozen rough,” he recalled in the book.

He did his best to navigate through the water and ice to continue forward, when his dogs slowed and laid down like they’d arrived.

It didn’t take long for Kennedy to notice a beaver lodge next to him. That’s when he realized it was built right on top of the small outpost cabin — now completely underwater.   

“The river rose 20 feet and flooded a vast area. The power of the water bulldozed down all of the trees and forest. It was no secret the N.W.T. government was putting in a dam, but I don’t think anyone imagined how it would affect us trappers,” he wrote. 

A book for the North’s kids

In the book dedication, Kennedy wrote, “For the children of the North so they wont forget our way of life. I hope you have as much fun in the wilderness as I did and please look after it.”

Kennedy told CBC he thought it was important to dedicate this book to children because they are the future, and the ones who will carry on the lifestyle and stories.

Although Kennedy didn’t have any kids of his own, the book makes note of his love of children.

The closest he got, according to the book, was when he fell in love with a nurse named Joy Edwards.

She liked the outdoors, going out boating and taking rides with the dog team. Kennedy thought he’d found the perfect partner to compliment his lifestyle. But when he got back from his first winter trapping trip that year, he found out she caught “scarlet fever.”

“That’s what they call it when Mounties snag a nurse or teacher in a northern town,” they wrote in the book.

That’s when Kennedy realized the bachelor life was best for him. “I chose the bush and dogs over settling down in town,”

He added he didn’t have books to read or learn from when he was growing up.

Both Hamilton and Kennedy said they are extremely proud of the book. 

“It was a lot of responsibility,” Hamilton said. “Because it is somebody’s life and you don’t want to make mistakes.

“But working with Pi was fun, it was a lot of fun. And as you saw tonight, he doesn’t even take a breath between a story. He’ll go from caribou to ships to wolverine just like that,”

The tour for the book will be heading to Hay River on Dec. 12 and then Yellowknife on Dec. 14.