Our yellow canoe is pulled up on a narrow beach, perpendicular to deep moose hoof prints. The birch and spruce forest leans over the beach, as if reaching for the sunlight that glitters off the water. Most of the leaves have already fallen and the trees are naked and white, bathed in the warm afternoon sunshine.
Kilvert Lake, in Ontario’s Eagle-Dogtooth Provincial Park, is one of thousands carved out of the 4-billion-year-old rock. This is the Canadian Shield, the largest mass of…