In Part 3, Macfarlane recounts his transformative journey down the Mutehekau Shipu River in eastern Canada, a waterway threatened by hydroelectric development and at the center of an unprecedented legal battle for river rights.

Macfarlane traveled to the remote Quebec-Labrador border region with his friend Wayne Chambliss, a restless geographer and geomancer whose unconventional background includes being buried alive for experimental purposes and carrying a wooden chest of talismanic objects wherever he moves. Wayne had recently lost his close friend Paul to cancer and hoped that the river journey would provide some form of spiritual encounter or healing. Their expedition included expert river guides Danny Peled and Raph St-Onge, both deeply connected to Quebec’s waterways, and Ilya Klvana, a Czech-Canadian fisherman who impulsively joined the group with just hours’ notice.

Macfarlane frames this journey as more than recreational adventure—it represented a pilgrimage to understand a river that Indigenous communities and environmental groups have legally recognized as a living being with fundamental rights. Central to the narrative is Rita Mestokosho, an Innu poet, activist, and traditional healer from the coastal community of Ekuanitshit. Mestokosho spent years fighting against Hydro-Quebec’s plans to construct additional dams on the Mutehekau Shipu. Mestokosho’s work is a fusion of traditional Indigenous knowledge and contemporary legal strategy. Through her poetry, which flows between Innu-aimun and French languages, she articulates a worldview in which rivers function as the veins of the territory—living relatives rather than resources. Her healing practice demonstrates this interconnectedness as she performs traditional ceremonies for community members, using sage, bird wings, and sacred songs.

In 2021, Mestokosho helped achieve a groundbreaking legal victory when both the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit and the Mingan Municipal Regional Council passed resolutions recognizing the Mutehekau Shipu as a legal person with fundamental rights, including the rights to exist, flow, and evolve naturally. This declaration employed what Mi’kmaq Elders call “Two-Eyed Seeing”—integrating Indigenous and Western legal frameworks to protect the river from future damming (215).

Macfarlane details the systematic destruction of Quebec’s river systems through hydroelectric development since the 1880s. Hydro-Quebec has dammed 14 of the province’s 16 major rivers, creating vast electrical machines that generate power for distant cities while devastating local ecosystems and Indigenous communities. The James Bay project alone affected an area the size of New York state, altering regional weather patterns and displacing countless communities.

The author witnessed the aftermath of the Romaine project firsthand—a four-dam complex that drowned traditional portages, fishing grounds, and ceremonial sites used by Innu people for millennia. Construction brought temporary employment but also increased crime, social inequality, and sexually transmitted infections to the region. The project’s completion makes the Mutehekau Shipu an even more attractive target, as transmission infrastructure already exists to carry power from potential new dams.

Macfarlane’s river journey itself became a meditation on the relationship between human consciousness and natural forces. Beginning at the northern end of Lac Magpie, the group faced immediate challenges: Wayne suffered severe allergic reactions to blackfly bites that nearly blinded him, while Macfarlane struggled with physical exhaustion and equipment failures during torrential rains. As they progressed from the lake’s still waters onto the river’s powerful current, Macfarlane learned to “read” water—understanding eddies, standing waves, and the deadly features like “holes” and “strainers” that can trap and kill paddlers. The physical demands of navigating major rapids like “Porcupine,” “Snow White,” and the massive “Marmite” forced Macfarlane to confront his aging body’s limitations while experiencing what he describes as a profound merging with the river’s consciousness. Both he and Wayne reported feeling “rivered”—transformed by prolonged immersion in the water’s rhythm and power.

The narrative’s climax occurs at a thunderous gorge where the entire river funneled through bedrock jaws in a display of almost incomprehensible force. Standing at the edge of this natural amphitheater, Macfarlane experienced what he describes as stepping across an invisible border into a realm where normal perception breaks down. In this liminal space, surrounded by spray and deafening sound, he perceived the gorge as a vast mouth speaking in voices beyond human understanding. The experience culminates in an epiphany about the fundamental question he came to ask the river—not about personal fears or aging, but about the nature of life itself. The river’s response transcended language, communicating through presence rather than words. Following Rita Mestokosho’s instructions, Macfarlane tied a red thread around a tiny, ancient spruce tree growing impossibly from a crack in the bedrock—a sacred tree that embodied resistance and persistence against all odds.

Throughout the journey, Macfarlane grappled with the challenge of translating mystical experiences into practical environmental politics. He and Wayne debated how Indigenous concepts of river personhood might function within existing legal and economic systems. The difficulty, they decided, lies not in speaking for rivers, but in learning to hear what rivers themselves might be saying. The author draws connections between this Canadian struggle and global movements recognizing rights of nature, from New Zealand’s Whanganui River to various waterways in the United States. These legal innovations represent attempts to bridge Indigenous worldviews with Western jurisprudence, creating new frameworks for environmental protection.

The narrative concludes with an epilogue set years later, as Macfarlane’s adult children scatter his ashes at the springs near Cambridge where his environmental consciousness first awakened. This circular structure connects the river journey back to earlier explorations of underground water systems, suggesting that all water is connected across time and space.