Writing the life of Pi, a 97-year-old NWT icon

“Pi Kennedy is the true North, strong and free. He is the real deal.”

Imagine a new season of survival show Alone in which, instead of a couple of months in the NWT wilderness, contestants have to spend eight decades or more in the bush.

Pi Kennedy would win.

Now 97 years old, Kennedy has become an emblem of 20th-century outdoor life in the North. He hunted, trapped, used a dog team and helped turn bush radio into an art form.

Patti-Kay Hamilton, a former reporter in the NWT and no stranger to a bush lifestyle herself, says she spent four years with Kennedy to better understand his life and turn it into a book.

In the Wild: Stories of a Lifetime on the Trapline was published late last year. Hamilton spoke with Cabin Radio about putting together the book – and learning from that experience.

Read our interview with Hamilton below. As a bonus, use this player to listen to our 2018 podcast episode in which Pi himself describes how his bush radio connected him to the world.

---

This interview was recorded on December 15, 2023. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ollie Williams: How has it been, publishing this? How has the interest level been in Pi and in what you two have put together?

Patti-Kay Hamilton: Well, the interest level has been higher than either Pi or I expected. We have sold over 1,000 books in less than 10 days – and that’s not what we expected at all. And how I feel is exhausted! It’s been a lot of work, especially the last month. It was really important to me to get the book in Pi’s hand for his birthday.

Which was December 9.

Yeah. And a year ago this time, Pi was in the hospital. He phoned me and said, “Patty, it’s Pi.” I said, “Where are you? You’re not at your house, I went over.” And he said, “Well, I’m in the hospital, the doctor says I’m going to die.” I said, “Pi, doctors don’t tell you you’re going to die.” He said, “Yeah, the doctor told me I’m going to die, so you’ve got to get over here because we’ve got to finish the book.” And then the pressure was on and I realized, boy, I gotta get this thing done if I want him to have it in his hand for his birthday.

And let’s be clear about what birthday that was. He just turned 97, didn’t he?

At first, he kind-of forgot. He thought he might be turning 100. But yes, it was the 97th birthday. That’s all.

I can understand how by that point, you might get a little vague on the details.

But most of the time, he’s not. The guy has a mind like a steel trap. I’ve often questioned him. There are a number of specific times I’ve questioned him, and he was dead-on – and I would fact-check with the archives.

One in particular, he said he left Aklavik in 1947 on the SS Mackenzie. And I checked: the SS Mackenzie, according to all the mariner records, was not on the Mackenzie River system in 1947. So I went back to him and said, “Are you sure? Maybe it was another ship?” Nope, nope, nope. It was the SS Mackenzie. “I remember sleeping on sawdust over the steam boiler. It was very hot.” He remembered everything about it.

So I found the Hudson Bay archives, who kept meticulous records, and I explained. I said, “OK, I know you kept records. I need something for this 97-year-old guy. He insists it was the SS Mackenzie. Was it on the river in 1947?” She phoned back – great glee, because I think archivists don’t always have interesting jobs and she took it as a challenge – and she said, “I do have records. I have all kinds. What do you want? Do you want their grocery list? Do you want the day it went in the water? The day it came out of the water?” She found all kinds of things. He was right. I was wrong – and Wikipedia was wrong, which I took great delight in phoning and letting them know.

Let me take a step back. The book is In the Wild. It is essentially the story of Pi’s life on the trapline. A lot of people in the NWT will have heard of Pi because his exploits are quite well-known if you’ve lived here for long enough. There will be people who don’t know about Pi. How would you explain who he is, in a minute?

Pi Kennedy is the true North, strong and free. He is the real deal. We see all kinds of shows where people are paid wads of money to go out and survive in the wilderness for a couple of weeks, a month, whatever. Pi didn’t ever make that much money and he just lived the life. He was as much a part of nature as the animals as he was hunting and trapping.

And he did this around Fort Smith, and he did it from – I believe – about the age of seven?

Even earlier. So a lot of these guys… one of the things I’ve discovered – not just Pi but his friends Philip MacDonald, who we just lost during the evacuation, he was 95, and his good friend, Eddie Burke – when they were little children, they didn’t maybe play the way we think of play. For them, their recreation was hunting. So from the time they were about five years old, they would go out and take old fish nets that were thrown away and they’d spread them in the willows and catch snowbirds and ptarmigan. They’d have these little wire things they made like boomerangs and they’d take down whatever they could, a spruce hen or something. They’d set snares for rabbits.

Pi and Philip both said often that was the only food their family had to eat. They would skin it and one of the family members would cook it for them. At that young age, they were all out in the bush, trapping and hunting, and it was a part of who they became. Hunting was really bred into them, much like a wolf or a bear. They’d grow up knowing how to hunt and trap. Well, bears don’t trap, but you get it.

You were a longtime reporter in the Northwest Territories, and I know you met Pi a good long time ago, When I first met Pi, I was daunted just by the sheer scope of the man’s life, and everything that he’s achieved and everything he knows how to do, which from a small-town British kid’s perspective are all the things I can’t do. It’s amazing to see what he’s capable of in a wilderness environment, but also things like how he operated bush radio, how he had all this electronics equipment. It wasn’t an analog lifestyle, necessarily. He was very connected – miraculously so – because he had all these gadgets and things that helped him tune into the world, even when he was one of the most isolated people in the NWT. What did you think, when you met him? What impression did he strike on you?

Well, I met him first with a bush radio.

I lived on a trapline and at night, we would always tune in about eight o’clock, that’s when the reception was good. Everybody would be talking and the most engaging was often Pi and his friends who he was talking to. He’d get in these irreverent discussions about dog teams with Ray Beck senior, who was I think on Rat River around the Taltson somewhere, and then he would get in heated discussions with Dave Dragon who was on the Taltson around moose-hunting season about wolves. “Kill all wolves,” Dave Dragon would say, and then Pi would not defend the wolves but perhaps suggest other alternatives. That’s when I first met Pi.

Once, I got really sick in the bush and I was by myself. I’d stayed in the summer to feed the dogs and I had a medical emergency. Nobody was on the radio. No one would call. And then Pi answered: “Yeah, I’m here. What do you need?” And I said, “I need a plane.” And I told him where I was. Next thing you know, the plane came – and he saved my life.

So after that, I had a lot more respect for Pi. He wasn’t just an interesting character telling stories, he was very attentive – and still is. I will walk in his house today, if I was there, and he will know what is the top story on the news. Once, I walked in and he said, “Did you hear the bad news?” I was like, “No, I didn’t hear any news today.” I don’t listen to the news any more. He said, “There’s five million litres of toxic sludge spilled into the Athabasca River and that flows right by here and we eat the fish.” He’s very engaged with the real world. He doesn’t live in some little fantasy mythical place where trappers live. He’s really in touch with what’s happening.

First of all, how dare you not listen to the news daily. Secondly, how did you distil Pi’s life and the relationship that you and Pi have into the process of making this book?

I tried to stay out of this book. There are different ways we could have done it: I could have interviewed him like a journalist, I could have gone in with focused questions. But I decided I wanted you, when you read it, to feel like you’re sitting down with Pi having tea and he’s doing what he always does. And he would go, “Ollie, I know you won’t believe this, but my dad shot a caribou in the heart and it fell on top of me.” That’s how I wanted you to feel. I wanted it to be all him.

So I just recorded everything he said. I miked him with one of those lapel mics, and we’d go for a cruise to the Salt River, and whatever he decided that day was important, that was what he talked about. And then I’d go home, transcribe it all, take out any of the gibberish or gossip or things that we can’t put in a book and, next day, I would read it back to him and he’d correct me and tell me where I’d made a mistake or misinterpreted him, and we’d fix it. And it went on like that for four years.

Four years to put this together. What did you learn, putting this book together, given that you had a relationship already with Pi? You knew so many, I’m sure, of the stories that were in this book.

I did not know all the stories in that book. In fact, I was always shocked. I would be on my way out the door thinking, “OK, this is it. We’re almost ready to go to print.” Put on the coat, on the way out the door, and he’d go, “Oh, did I ever tell you about the time I was a powder monkey?” And I’d stop in my tracks. “No, Pi, I don’t even know what a powder monkey is.” And then there would be a story. And it was constantly like that, he was always springing something on me that I didn’t know about him.

But the question you’re asking was asked at the book launch. Marie Wilson asked the same question and I gave her an answer, but I don’t think it was the right answer. I think what I learned was how he has this tremendous calm about him. He doesn’t get really excited about things, he just has some kind of presence and mindfulness about what’s going on around him.

I think it’s why he could be in the bush by himself so much. He doesn’t get bothered with the quiet, the absence of people always talking, or whatever it might be. He’s fine with that. He’s content with himself, with the person he is, and there’s not a lot of us that can say that, that are happy with who we are and can just sit quietly, without engagement in anything.

What is a powder monkey?

You’ll have to read the book. I am not going to try to explain it. I talked to Dave Smith and some of the people I know in exploration – it has to do with blowing things up. That’s what Pi would tell you.

To what extent do you feel a civic responsibility to help produce a book like this one, where you’re documenting the life of someone whose lifestyle we’re unlikely to ever see in the same way again?

I lived in the bush – not as long as Pi and not in the same way as Pi but I was a trapper. Before I came to the Northwest Territories, I’d never killed anything larger than a mosquito. And now I’m a trapper and a hunter and I have a great respect for people who live on the land. But when I go south, I see it’s a very misunderstood career and lifestyle. That is one of the things that drove me.

It really drives me crazy when I go in libraries across the country – and I always try to find a library wherever I am, Finland, Norway, Iceland – and bookshelves even in foreign countries always have a Canadian Arctic section. It seems to be kind-of this mythical thing people are fascinated with. And the shelves are full of Farley Mowat and Sir John Franklin. And God bless Sir John Franklin, I’m sorry about everything that happened, but we don’t need that many books about one guy who froze to death in the Arctic when the Inuit actually already knew where he was and were doing this search.

I wanted to celebrate people like Fred Carpenter from up in the Arctic. There are no books about Fred Carpenter. He built his own schooner, he rescued people, he travelled the Northwest Passage – never got froze in, never froze to death. And Sarah Simon, and Jenny Flett who delivered 600 babies in Fort Chipewyan and often travelled by dog team to help women, never lost a baby. Why aren’t we writing books about them, telling stories about them?

That’s what I want. I want to see more of our heroes like Pi Kennedy on bookshelves.

I want to ask you about romanticization of this lifestyle. On the one hand, people see it and they perceive it to be glamorous, almost, in its own way. On the other hand, I wonder if there’s much wrong with that. Maybe it’s OK to have a romanticized lifestyle. Maybe it’s OK to see this as being an incredible thing and an incredible set of achievements. Where do you sit on that? I notice you’ve seized a copy of the book and are tearing it open as I ask that.

There are so many pictures in here. Earl Evans, who is Pi’s cousin, talks a bit about it, about how people – particularly in Europe and the south – do have kind-of a romantic notion of how people live. Yeah, here it is. “They have a romantic image of a trapper living in a tidy log cabin with a nice wood fireplace. They have no idea it’s endless work. No time to relax until you fall into bed at the end of the day and sleep. You’re constantly working. Everything freezes when the fire goes out in your draughty log shack and you are always cold.”

Because I lived it, I know it’s not really a mythical, romantic life. It is hard work. But if you’re an outdoors person and you love the outdoors, yay. It was great. One of the things Pi points out – he said, “Patti, you never asked me the question everyone always asks me.” And I thought, “What? How, in four years, did I miss a question?” And he said, “Why didn’t I get married?”

So he answered it. There’s a whole chapter called Joy. And he explains it. When he thought he had found the one, and he would be able to have a life in the bush but also in town, she got scarlet fever. Do you know what that is?

I have a vague recollection.

Yeah. People die. That’s what I thought. No. Scarlet fever is when a Mountie hooks up with a nurse or a teacher in a small northern town. So that happened to him.

But his point was: for women living in the bush, life might not have been as romantic as people think. Maybe it was at the start. You go out at the start and you’re an outdoors woman and this is great. You have one child and you’ve got them on your back and you’re still doing everything. But then you have more children and it gets harder, and you’re bound inside, you get shack-wacky, you’re turned to booze because you’re stuck in this cabin that’s draughty and cold, you have to continually fill the stove, look after all the kids… where the guy hooks up the dog team, starts the Ski-Doo and goes off on a wonderful adventure. But the women don’t get to do that.

What do you hope to do next? You’ve already sat here and listed a whole bunch of other names of people who you think should similarly be celebrated and their lives should be told. Do you have someone in mind for the next one?

Not for me. I’m hoping other people will maybe take it on. Judith Drinnan, who is the person who started the Book Cellar and the former owner of the Book Cellar, has returned to the North. Judith, for a long time now, has been thinking about this: ways of getting people’s stories out onto bookshelves, but also using the editorial skills of people perhaps with more literacy skills.

Lots of people have stories, so many people, everyone has a story to tell. But not everyone has literacy skills to lift it into a quality that might be published in a book and enjoyed by others. Judith has some really good ideas cooking and there’s a bunch of other people interested too, so there might be something coming down the pipe in the next few years that will help get more northern stories on the shelves. But not for me.