by Ramona Koval
This is an irresistible entrée, which has all of the detail, character analysis and storytelling that you hope to find in a good novel.
Heyerdahl wanted to prove his theory of the foundation of Polynesian societies. His idea was essentially this: Peruvian Inca legends tell of a sun-king called Kon-Tiki who ruled over white people with beards who were called ‘big-ears’ because they elongated their ear lobes to reach their shoulders. These people built the giant statues in the Andes mountains before they were defeated by the Incas in battle and set off westwards on balsawood rafts.
On Rapa-Nui, or Easter Island, which lies on the route from Peru to Polynesia, the people tell a story of Tiki who, along with white ‘long-ears’ companions, came to the island from the east, skilled in the crafting of exactly the same statues that they erected here.
In Polynesia, the story told by people there was of Tiki, who had come across the sea from the east by raft, from a place called Pura from where the sun rose. Connecting the stories all made marvellous sense.
Heyerdahl’s absurd derring-do, which luckily ends in no lives lost and a celebratory party on a tropical island, gives him heartening confirmation of his theory that sailors from Peru could have set out on rafts like his, carrying their Inca legends, and indeed settle Polynesia. However, since mitochondrial DNA analysis has been done on the populations of Polynesia, there is evidence that many of the islands were settled by Asian travellers, but there are South American gene-markers there too.
For many of my male friends, Thor Heyerdahl was a childhood hero, the embodiment of what the boy scouts were about, a modern Odysseus who built a raft and went voyaging on the high seas. For me, a girl with no brothers, no uncles and a distant relationship to my father, the six men on the raft were a fascinating glimpse into the mysteries of men.
One of the mysteries is what Heyerdahl and his companions packed for the voyage. I was inevitably curious about this. Heyerdahl tells us that Erik Hesselberg had stowed several rolls of drawing paper and a guitar. His allocated box was so full that he had to put his socks in Raaby’s box. Bengt Danielsson’s box held nothing but books, all seventy-three of which were on sociology and ethnology. My sympathies were with Bengt, as I too had developed a passion for books of this kind.
Margaret Mead’s 1928 Coming of Age in Samoa and later her Growing Up in New Guinea were two of the first ethnographies that intrigued me, and it turns out that they engaged a generation of people who were looking for different ways to understand the changes in the sexual mores of the west. Mead described a Samoan society with a comparatively relaxed attitude to adolescent sexuality, and other Pacific communities where warfare was not the dominant trope.
But it was Colin Turnbull’s work The Mountain People, about the Ik of Uganda, that moved me to take a few anthropology subjects at university when I found it hard to continue an interest in scientific research while pregnant and with a toddler at home. It was 1977. My father had left my mother during her final illness to live with a woman he subsequently married, leaving me and my sister to care for Mama till she died ten months later.
The Mountain People was a truly shocking study of a group in extremis, the survivors of a famine in which parents seemed not to care for their families, adults took food from the mouths of children, and treated the dying with cruelty. The Ik were described as spies and double-dealers in their relations with other tribes. How interesting this field of study seemed!
My first sighting of my anthropology lecturer confirmed that I was in the right place. It’s only now that I see why I was so convinced that the study of human behaviour in small-scale societies was for me. I was eight months pregnant and twenty-three, and he was perhaps just fifty and built like Ernest Hemingway, barrel-chested, bearded, pipe-smoking and, most importantly, sporting a knife in a scabbard hanging off his belt—like Defoe’s Crusoe he also had nothing about him ‘but a knife, a tobacco-pipe, and a little tobacco in a box’.
His command of many languages, African and European, ancient and modern, was impressive enough, but when I learned that he had been a district officer in Botswana before he completed his PhD I just knew that if ever I found myself in a tough and remote situation he was the man who would be able to shoot an elephant, divine water, gather appropriate berries and lead me home.
Why I thought that my life then in all its settled suburban glory was in danger of going so far off the rails that I might be threatened with an elephant stampede, I do not know. Within a couple of years I became decoupled from my husband, but it was nothing to do with my lecturer, who remained blissfully ignorant of my romantic projections.
But he did point out some other romantic projections that I may have been nurturing, when I mentioned Colin Turnbull’s work. ‘Ah, the sick Ik,’ he said. He seemed not to be as impressed as I was. By 1985 Turnbull’s work was to be challenged by anthropologists who revisited the Ik and claimed that Turnbull had been speaking to informants who were not fluent in Ik and sometimes not even Ik, and had been in error in his analysis of their hunting, gathering and farming practices. If the Ik had indeed been spies and double-dealers, their position among their neighbours would have been subject to bloody reprisals long ago, it was claimed. Turnbull was accused of projecting his own antisocial feelings onto the Ik.
My faith in ethnography was shaken even further when I heard Margaret Mead’s reputation take a beating in a paper by Derek Freeman, a professor at the Australian National University, who revealed that he had revisited her field sites in Samoa and found a very different set of circumstances there. In his 1983 book Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth he claimed that Mead, who wrote about casual sex among teenagers in Samoa, for example, had been told what she wanted to hear by her teenage informants. A huge international argument ensued—Mead was dead by then and couldn’t defend herself—and after some years it emerged that the Samoans themselves thought that both anthropologists had got them wrong.
I was in New Zealand when I heard Freeman speak at a scientific congress. I remember going to a hangi, a traditional pit-based pig barbecue party, where I met Reo Fortune, Margaret Mead’s second husband, who was himself a New Zealander but by then he was rather elderly and somewhat inebriated. I was too star-struck to make any sensible conversation, apart from identifying him as a former Mr Mead. As he had been so since 1935 he was understandably less than interested.
All of them are dead now, but this was the time when my taste for mediated accounts of traditional peoples in remote places began to be replaced by firsthand accounts and the journals of explorers. I wanted to read of voyages, not merely travels. And as a nervous traveller, who fights against the panic of what will happen if I don’t pack exactly what I need (while desperate not to take too much), nothing impressed me more than the planning required for some of the legendary polar expeditions.
I had become attracted to snowy stories. I always had a romantic vision of the sledge and the dogs pulling it, and I now realise this derived from seeing the film of Dr Zhivago with my mother. I wanted more than anything to be Julie Christie as the brave and beautiful Lara, wrapped in furs and pulled through the snow by leaping dogs with an adoring Omar Sharif (minus the moustache) by my side.
Early in my career as a literary journalist, I fell upon the biography of Fridtjof Nansen. Born in the middle of the nineteenth century, he was the father of modern polar exploration, a Norwegian polymath who was a central-nervous-system biologist, an oceanographer, a historian and a diplomat. He ended his career working for the League of Nations as High Commissioner for Refugees and for the Repatriation of Prisoners of War.
Using his diaries and letters, Nansen’s biographer Roland Huntford paints a picture of a moody, dogged man, who had to invent many things before he could undertake his voyages across Greenland or towards the North Pole. In Nansen’s own 1897 account of his voyage, Farthest North: Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship ‘Fram’ 1893-96 he declares, ‘But the spirit
of mankind will never rest till every spot of these regions has been trodden by the foot of man, till every enigma has been solved.’
Nansen devoted himself to learning how Eskimos lived, and in doing so adopted their methodology for dog sledding. He modified a technique for cross-country skiing for his journey across Greenland (no one thought he would survive). He designed not only his ship, which he called the Fram, but a light-weight sledge, the clothing his expeditioners needed for trekking, sleeping bags and even a spirit stove. The pure alcohol needed to run it was also drinkable, and Nansen was concerned that his party not debauch themselves (he frowned at their carousing even on their last night in port) so he turned it into methylated spirits. He then took absolute control by cooking everything himself. His diaries show him to be driven by his ambitions and tormented by his inability to achieve things to the level he required.
He could be difficult and gloomy (‘sad even when enthusiastic, mirthless even when eager’, according to an account by Norwegian businessman Jonas Lied) and yet he convinced an assortment of men to follow him on trips that sometimes lasted years. He was passionate about preparation and about the need for careful scientific observations. In turn he studied accounts of the failures of his predecessors, and disapproved of the rush in which they had planned and equipped their trips. His took nine years in the conceptual framing and three years to plan.
So strong was the pull of my romantic Dr Zhivago vision, and so deep was my admiration for the manly arts of Nansen, that in my mid-forties I found myself behind a team of seven Alaskan huskies at South River, in the Algonquin State Park, three hours north of Toronto in Canada.
There I met Hosea, a small but determined little dog that led the team and taught me lessons about bravery, humour and sheer pluck, and that appearances are not all they seem. That even the most courageous of us have foibles that make us, well, vulnerable.
Preparing in Australia for my expedition I had anxiously filled out my list of extreme polar clothing and nifty little headlights and a Swiss army knife and many pairs of socks and gloves and something called a neck protector, while the mercury outside climbed to 40 °C.
My guide was a 25-year-old man full of Canadian niceness, which came in handy later when I spent the whole of the first day’s travels flinging either myself or him out of the speeding sled.
It turned out there wasn’t very much at all between the driver and the snow, but I was assured that the lightframed white ash sled, lashed together with ropes to make it flexible, was strong and functional. At the front there was a structure like a bullbar to deflect small brush trees along the trails. Between the two runners was the brake—a metal arrangement, which you either pressed on slowly or jumped on with all your weight, depending on how quickly you wanted to stop. The only other controls were to shout directions to the dogs, and to grip the back of the sled at all times. When you needed to stop, the sled had a snow-hook, like an anchor, and after you tipped the sled on its side you wrapped the hook around a tree so the dogs didn’t lunge the sled away and abandon you.
I found it easy to imagine watching the sled team rushing off into the distance because I had forgotten to secure the snow-hook. But I had read other accounts of snowy landscapes in order to pick up invaluable hints for survival. Instructive was John McPhee, the New Yorker essayist and adventurer, who reported in his book Coming into the Country a meeting with Leon Crane, who had survived a plane crash in the Alaskan wilderness and then emerged long after people had given him up for dead.
When Crane crashed he was wearing ‘a hooded down jacket, a sweater, winter underwear, two pairs of trousers, two pairs of socks, and felt-lined mukluks.’ Mukluks? No one said I needed these high soft-soled sealskin boots. Where was I going to get a seal at this late stage?
Crane had two books of matches and a scout knife. He used the matches and a letter from his father to light a fire. His cut his hands from tearing at spruce boughs, and it was his parachute that kept him alive. ‘It was twenty-eight feet in diameter, and he wound it around him so that he was the centre of a great cocoon.’ I had neglected to take a sheaf of letters from my father and hadn’t seen a parachute in any of my shopping expeditions. And could I take matches and a knife on the plane from Australia?
My guide taught me the signals for stopping and starting (‘Let’s go!’ and ‘Whoa!’), which, if you are not careful to speak with a Canadian twang, and growl low and high, can sound the same.
The lead dogs had to be harnessed first and clipped at the head of the mainline. Then the point dogs in the middle section, and the wheel dogs at the back. The guide whispered that the lead dogs were the smartest, his hushed tones implying that the wheel dogs would be offended if they knew we were speaking like this. But the truth is that the wheel dogs were used to following the leaders, and had a tendency to get themselves all mixed up and the line tangled if they couldn’t see little Hosea, our unprepossessing black, white and cream lead dog. When they got the line tangled they were more likely to chew it, which was akin to doing something terrible to your car’s universal joint.
We were loaded and with a ‘Ready—let’s go!’ we were off along the frozen lanes. I felt the light sled with its tongue-in-groove construction giving play to the bumps and speed traps on the way.
Soon we were off across a white lake, and then followed smaller snowy trails through the forest. It was bitterly cold on the sled and I gave silent thanks for my thermal layer, covered by my polartec layer covered with Gore-Tex. Suddenly I could see the point of a neck protector.
We said ‘get ahead’ when the line was slacking and ‘good dogs—let’s work!’ when we came to a hill. This was where the passenger had to jump off the sled and run up the hill behind it. The dogs had been pulling the weight of two people, their food, our food, our clothes and general camping gear. If you were driving, you did the same as the passenger, but hung on to the back of the sled. Sometimes you could get away with a scooter-like move with one leg, but you had to be ready to fix the leg firmly on the runners as the dogs reached the top and took off down the other side.
After a few hours the runners iced over, which made the whole procedure quite slippery and as I leaned left and right, trying to balance the sled around corners, I often lost my footing. Once, flung into a snow bank, I was unable to get a grip and turn over. I thought of Kafka’s beetle in Metamorphosis and began the laughing that sounds like crying to those in the world above the snowy pit.
Hosea was a crab-runner—his left shoulder faced forward because of a congenital hip problem common in canines. Alaskan huskies are quite small, the size of a blue heeler. They are the marathon runners of dogs, but I was surprised at their lack of physical presence, as they dragged the load through the landscape.
I thought of the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who in 1911 reached the South Pole five weeks earlier than the English explorer Robert Scott. The Englishman relied on technology and took tractors, which broke down, while Amundsen had a team of trusty dogs that got him to his destination, and fed him on the way back. In his 1912 book The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the Fram, 1910-1912 Amundsen is practical in his descriptions of slaughtering the weaker dogs and feeding the stronger ones on their bodies. And if the men hankered after fresh meat they helped themselves to a slice of dog which, according to Amundsen, tasted as good as the best beef. The dogs, he says, ate everything except the teeth, but on a really hard day these disappeared as well.
Hosea, however, running his heart out at the head of the team, did not look particularly appetising to me.
The skittishness and moodiness of the dogs gave way to high spirits as we neared the campsite. We stopped for some of the dogs to relieve themselves, but Spot, a wheel dog, had perfected the method of defecating while running.
When we reached the campsite, we were wet from the inside out, but all the dogs had to be unharnessed and taken over to a hitching area where they were chained up for the night. They were each watered and fed
and given a palette of straw, which they moved about like a little nest, before they lay down, with their noses under their tails. Although Hosea was a brave team leader, he was, at the end of a day’s work, afraid of putting his head in a bucket to drink the warm soupy water. He required a bowl, or he refused entirely. Every hero, it seemed, had his weak points. Granite and Harry might have been big stupid wheel dogs, but they were smart enough to know that there were gems of food scraps at the bottom of the bucket and they both kicked it over to find them. I learned to water them last.
After two nights out we were all ready for the trip home. Spot almost ran on his hind legs as I delivered him back to the yard. There he was, among two hundred and fifty other dogs, while I was almost hypothermic with cold and tiredness. I said goodbye to the dogs and thanked them for their work. But I saved a special pat for Hosea, the little dog that could.
Fridtjof Nansen writes of his first, rather lame, attempts at driving a sledge with ten dogs. Sitting in the sledge he was hijacked when his team spied a strange dog at the edge of the camp. They fell over each other in a rush to attack the animal, biting and tearing at it, drawing blood while the strange dog yelped. Nansen threw himself on the pack, bellowing. ‘Dog-driving, at any rate to begin with,’ he reflected, ‘requires much patience.’
How much less sanguine I would have been on that Canadian dog-sledding trip if I had read Nansen’s account of the dogs before I read Amundsen. When times were happy and the hard work was still to come, the dogs were joyous, rolling in the snow, ‘a cheerful sight’. Later, as things got harder, Nansen and his partner Hjalmar Johansen had to strangle a number of the dogs and butcher them in order to feed the survivors.
This was the origin of the phrase ‘dog eat dog’. The behaviour of the dogs, as they ‘hounded’ other weaker animals and set upon them in a pack, underlined the stark reality of what survival really means. As they neared the next part of the trip, a journey by kayak, Nansen and Johansen had to make a hard decision. They had no room for the dogs. But they had become so fond of the last two that they couldn’t bear to strangle them. They used two precious cartridges instead. In a gesture of mutual compassion, Nansen shot Johansen’s dog and Johansen shot his.
