YELLOWKNIFE - Around 1995, Art Dodman was all set to go to work - maybe build a dock on Great Slave Lake - when the boss phoned him and said that was enough.

His working days were done. He was 70 years old and his bad hip was giving him trouble.

"I don't regret anything really," Dodman said shortly before his death in October last year. He lived at the Aven Manor senior's home for about five years. - Mike W. Bryant/NNSL photo

"I got everything ready to go, went home to pack my stuff, and the guy phoned me to see if I was ready to go," says Dodman, from his room at Aven Manor senior's home.

"He said, 'you can't go.' I said, 'why not?' He said, 'well, you're too old.' That was it. No more jobs."

Dodman had been a working man his whole life, ever since he was a teenager minding the store for the Hudson's Bay Company as his father did before him, and his grandfather before that.

He worked as a cook throughout the North, up on the oil rigs on the Beaufort Sea, in the mining camps, at Akaitcho Hall and the Yellowknife Correctional Centre.

He hauled lumber using heavy equipment for the Snare hydro project, he worked as a diamond driller in Uranium City, Sask., he carted supplies by dog team with the RCMP at his side across Great Slave Lake.

At 82-years-old, Dodman doesn't get around much any more. He has lived at Aven Manor senior's home for five years.

His common-law wife Evelyn Powder was a resident there too but she died the year before.

The North has gone through a lot of changes during his years.

Gone are residential schools, the trading posts, and the DEW Line. Gone too - at least in a practical sense - are the dog teams the young men would ride into town so they could trade and chat up girls.

"You'd maybe decide to go Fort Rae, see if there was a girl around," says Dodman.

"You'd hook up your dogs and away you'd go."

"We just gradually lost them - like the Model A Ford was the car in the day. In time, there were no more Model A Fords. You didn't have to shoot them or anything like that. Just suddenly there were no more. It was the same with dog teams."

Dodman was born in Arctic Red River (Tsiigehtchic) in 1925, one of seven children.

He wasn't baptized until later that year because "the (Anglican) bishop only came up once a year from Edmonton on a steamer."

His mother, Marian, was Gwich'in; his father, Bob Dodman, was a trader who had migrated north in 1917 to follow his father's pursuits with the Hudson's Bay Company.

Dodman pulls out an old Hudson's Bay journal, an account written by his grandfather of the scow barges heading up to a post on Herschel Island in the High Arctic. "Experienced a craving for beef - ordering of a steer on the hoof and its final disposition," it reads. "Had a hard time getting firewood. Had a 16 lbs turkey stuffed with 40 oz bottle of Teacher's Highland cream," reads another.

It was a different time, for sure.

When Dodman was five or six years old, he was bundled off to a residential school in Aklavik.

The town was soon bustling with excitement, he recalls. Albert Johnson, the mad trapper of Rat River, had shot an RCMP officer and a huge manhunt by air and dog team was scouring the countryside.

Dodman went to school in Aklavik for only a very short time, however. His father was transferred to Fort Rae to mind the Hudson's Bay post there.

Tragedy followed shortly after.

He isn't quite sure how old he was when his mother died but he believes he was around nine or 10.

"That changed a lot of things, that's for sure," says Dodman.

It was off to another residential school after that. This time to Fort Resolution, where young Dodman received a heavy dose of the gospel.

The experience left him with a near life-long indifference to religion.

"It was prayers, prayers, prayers," says Dodman. "Prayers at breakfast, prayers at lunch, prayers at dinner."

A few years there, and then Dodman was sent to Vancouver to live with his grandparents.

When he went to school there the principal was aghast with the lack of practical education he had received in Fort Resolution.

"The principal asked me, 'what was four times four? What's eight times eight?' I didn't know," says Dodman.

"I had a tough time. I should've known that because of my age. It should've been taught to me already."

When the Second World War broke out, Dodman tried to enlist with the Canadian Army but they wouldn't accept him because he was too young.

So he went back up North and to the trading post at Fort Rae with his father but not for long.

"It was against the policy for family to work together," says Dodman.

For a while he worked with the Hudson's Bay in Hay River but then he learned of the good pay offered to young men working the gold mines in Yellowknife.

He took a job as a dishwasher at the Con Mine camp but the Hudson's Bay wasn't done with him yet. After only three or four months, they learned of his whereabouts and ordered him to return.

"During the war there was a regulation that said you had to be with Hudson's Bay or the military," says Dodman.

He was sent back to the post in Hay River. He watched the store, did a little trapping and thought about finding a wife.

At Rocher River, he met a young woman named Antoinette McSwain. She was a frequent visitor to the store there. He didn't waste any time courting her.

"You had to do those things fast too because you might not be around long," says Dodman.

The couple had one son, Hector, but he died as an infant.

Over the next several years, Dodman worked a variety of jobs - most gravitating towards cooking, the profession that held him most of his life.

He worked for a while cooking for the park attendants at Wood Buffalo National Park.

He worked another job he was not all that fond of - turning bison meat into sausages.

"Disgusting," he says.

During the construction of the Snare Hydro Dam, Dodman drove a "CAT skinner" during the winter, dragging logs 10 at a time through the bush from Yellowknife to the Snare River, which were used to make power lines to the city.

"If you had good going all the time, it might take you two weeks," says Dodman. "The colder it was the more things broke."

Eventually, he found his way to Uranium City, Sask., where he obtained work as a diamond driller. There, he met Evelyn Powder from Camsell Portage. He struck up a relationship with her which went on to produce eight children over 20 years, all of whom reside in Yellowknife to this day.

He was still married to Antoinette and was surprised when the two woman became friends.

"Yes, they were very good friends, which really surprised me but..." says Dodman, trailing off.

Antoinette died of tuberculosis in 1968.

Dodman and his young family moved to Fort Smith and then on to Inuvik where he took a job cooking at the rehabilitation centre.

In 1967, Dodman took his family down to Yellowknife where he was hired on as the jail's first cook.

The family lived in the only house built at the time on 57th Street across from J.H. Sissons school.

His daughter Sharon Phippen says her father wasn't always an easy man to get along with and when he wasn't home, he was often gone for several months at a time, working in mining camps or on oil rigs on the Beaufort Sea as he did through much of the late 1970s and 1980s.

"He wasn't a nice man for a lot of our younger years," says Phippen.

"As we got older, we got to understand why he was the way he was. We came to just accept him."

About 15 years ago, Dodman and Powder separated, after which he bought himself a place at Northland trailer park.

Phippen says while he wasn't particularly handy he was fond of painting. He took to splashing the cupboards in his trailer with a wild assortment of colours.

"He painted more than one fridge green or brown or whatever colour he could find," says Phippen.

"In his trailer his kitchen cupboards were every colour under the sun."

His son Dennis says his father enjoyed going to the city dump - "the co-op" he called it - to salvage. One time he found a whole lift of drywall, which he used to side the inside of his trailer. While living in the trailer, Dodman resolved to quit drinking, and the bitterness between himself and his estranged wife abated.

When family came over to visit, there were often 30 or more people in his tiny home.

"That's when he used to enjoy us the best, after he quit his drinking and wanted to be Dad," says Phippen.

About six years ago, after several years of retirement, Dodman moved into Aven Manor. Powder had already been there for about 18 months and when she became sick, he watched over her. Following her death in 2006, and after turning his back on religion all those years, he decided to become a practising Catholic.

Last fall, while sitting in his room, Dodman beckoned towards a photo album. Sitting in his wheelchair, he points to pictures of birthdays, family gatherings, kids playing in the yard.

Dodman has 11 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

When an Aven care worker walks into the room, she calls him "papa."

"The staff at Avens were wonderful, couldn't ask for better care," says Phippen, adding she misses going there.

"I don't regret anything really," says Dodman. "I don't think I'd change anything if I had to do it all over again."