Lost in the Barrens

by Farley Mowat

  In a week Jamie was able to breathe normally again and could get around without discomfort. Ayuskeemo was soon better too, though she walked stiffly for some time.

  When Jamie was again fit to travel, he and Awasin hitched Fang to the sled, and taking towropes themselves, helped the big dog haul in a load of bear meat.

  Jamie was truly startled at the size of the carcass. It was bigger than a farm bull, as massive as a buffalo. There could be no doubt that this giant animal was a Barrenland grizzly—a bear that few white men have ever even heard of, let alone seen. Living in lonely isolation on the broad plains, the Barrenland grizzly is king of his world and has no challengers. The few Eskimos in the land avoid the bears and with reason. Weighing half a ton, they are armed with claws two inches long and razor-sharp. Normally they give men a wide berth, and are not ill-natured. It was probably only outright starvation that had forced this bear to tackle the boys, for at this season of the year it should have been in hibernation.

  The boys brought home a paw. It looked as if it measured a good ten inches wide, and a foot long. Jamie looked at it with particular interest, and when he was finished his face was grave.

  “No grizzly made those queer tracks we saw at Stone Igloo Camp a month ago,” he said at last.

  Reluctantly Awasin agreed. The boys went to bed that night with fresh memories of the mysterious tracks filling their imaginations with unpleasant dreams.

  CHAPTER 23

  Escape

  NOVEMBER DREW TO ITS CLOSE AND there came a time when the winter exerted absolute mastery over the Barrens. The gales roared steadily down from the polar seas and laid fierce hands upon the plains. For days at a time it was impossible to go more than a few feet from the cabin door, and the boys’ world shrank until it was confined within the four walls of their little cabin.

  At first they did not mind. They were snug and comfortable and they knew they had enough food to see them through the bad times. For a while it was fun to sit with the two dogs beside the open fireplace and talk, or work at minor jobs while the brutal wind howled angrily outside.

  There was very little daylight now. Dawn broke sometime after ten in the morning, and by about three o’clock night lay over the white, wind-swept world again. The drain on the fat lamps the boys had made from the three soapstone pots grew so heavy that their stocks of fat began to sink alarmingly. They had to ration themselves to one lamp, and for only a few hours each day. So there were increasingly long hours when they could do nothing except sit by the fitful light of the fire and talk, or play at Indian games that Awasin remembered.

  Jamie learned cat’s cradles—complicated figures woven from a long loop of sinew held on the fingertips. When this grew dull the boys spent hours playing udzi—a guessing game—with bits of sticks and pebbles. However, this and the other games they knew or could invent did not hold their interest long.

  They talked constantly in an effort to drive away a growing feeling of imprisonment and of depression. Jamie told long stories of his school days in Toronto, while Awasin told old Cree hunting tales and legends.

  During the brief hours that the lamp was burning, things were easier. The boys busied themselves sewing new skin clothing; repairing bits of gear; making new dog harness; shaping willow arrows for the bow. Then there was wood to cut, water to get, and food to cook. Jamie particularly took pleasure in inventing new ways of preparing the limited kinds of food they had available. He made stews of fish and meat combined. He made a kind of berry sauce one day from some of the dried crowberries. He invented new ways of roasting deermeat, and he even managed a kind of pancake, using pulverized, dried deermeat for flour, and cooking it in marrowfat.

  Oddly enough, neither boy missed the staple foods they had been used to in the south. The lack of salt and sugar had bothered them for the first few weeks, but these were now forgotten. The hunger for flour had lasted longer, but after a month on the plains they no longer felt the need of it, and even the thought of hot bannocks no longer distressed them.

  Experience had shown them that a well-balanced diet could be maintained on meat, and meat alone, providing—and this was the important thing—that they had lots of fat with the lean meat.

  When once or twice short breaks in the foul weather came, they went outdoors, but they did not dare go far from camp for the skies remained overcast with the ever-present threat of new blizzards.

  On these outings, Awasin killed a few ptarmigan with the bow and arrows, while Jamie set a dozen rawhide snares and caught two fine arctic hares. These made a welcome change to their diet, but they were only enough to make the boys wish for more.

  As the weather worsened, the dogs were forced to spend more time in the cabin. When Jamie was really depressed he would look at the two big, handsome beasts and feel a thrill of hope—for someday he believed the dogs would help them to escape the bleak winter Barrens.

  In the early days of their adventure the boys had seldom talked about home, for they found this only brought on waves of homesickness that took away all will to work and left them miserable and lazy.

  However, as the days passed, they found themselves thinking more and more of home.

  Christmas was near. Awasin thought of the cheerful preparations which were even then being made for the annual Christmas journey to the other Indian camps. There would be parties for many miles around through the forest country, and dog teams gaily outfitted with bells and strips of bright ribbon would be passing from cabin to cabin. Awasin knew there would be little rejoicing in the house of Alphonse and Marie Meewasin, for the memory of a son whom they believed to be dead would destroy all merriment.

  Jamie often thought of his Uncle Angus, and he believed that Angus Macnair must long since have given his nephew up for lost.

  One day Jamie counted the notches on the lead plate, and suddenly he blurted out, “It’s just a week till Christmas, Awasin. I guess they all think we’re dead.”

  For the rest of that day the boys were sunk in a pit of depression. They moped listlessly about the cabin while the blizzard howled outside. They were suffering an attack of homesickness much worse than any they had experienced before, and this time they could find no antidote for it.

  During the next few days when they talked it was always about their chances of escape. The dogs sensed their unhappiness and whined in sympathy. Life was no longer pleasant in the tiny cabin deep in Hidden Valley.

  Then, five days before Christmas, came a real change in the weather. The wind died away to nothing. The sun rose and hung low on the horizon, shining clearly. The temperature went up. A front of warm air had pushed into the arctic from the south, bringing with it a false promise of the spring which was, in reality, still five months away.

  The effect on the boys was to make them lose all common sense. They went wild with joy, and as they stood in their tattered shirt sleeves outside the cabin they had but one thought between them. At last they could make their attempt at an escape!

  They resolutely refused to admit the dangers that they faced. The urge to make the break was so strong that they put out of mind the hard facts of the case.

  The facts were these. First, the freakish good weather could not possibly last more than a few days before winter returned full force. Second, in order to succeed, the boys would have to traverse more than three hundred miles of winter-locked country—most of it open plains—to reach the most northerly camps of the Chipeweyans. It could not take them less than two weeks, and would probably take three, even if they could travel every day. This meant that they would have to carry, on their backs and on the sled, well over two hundred pounds of meat to feed themselves and the dogs. This heavy load would slow them down—which in turn meant they would probably need more food before they arrived at safety. And this reckoning was based on the assumption of good weather all the way! But three weeks of good weather was an impossibility. They might be held up by blizzards for a week at a time, in the open plains, without fuel, and with food running low
!

  Reckoned carefully and coolly, they had only a slim chance of surviving such a dangerous journey. But on this day in December they were not thinking coolly. They were hardly thinking at all. The only thing that mattered was that they were going home.

  Despite the reckless mood which was on them, they took what precautions they could. They loaded the sled only with the most nutritious foods: marrowfat, pemmican, and dried meat and fish. They took a tent made from three caribou skins. They resisted the desire to take extra bedding and extra clothes, for they knew that every extra pound would count against them. The ax, all of their heavy equipment, the bear hide, even the bow and arrow were left behind.

  When finally the sled stood loaded, and the two dogs whined and twitched in their harness with eagerness to be off, the boys stopped and spent a last few minutes sitting by the dying fire in their cabin. Now that the moment had come to leave, they felt the little building tugging at their hearts. Here they had been safe from every danger. Here they had built new lives for themselves out of their own intelligence and skill. Here too, they had learned to be men.

  At last Jamie got to his feet, and after a final look to see that everything was neat, and everything protected from the inevitable wolverines, he turned towards the door.

  “Let’s get going,” he said quietly. “It’s not forever. Someday we’ll come back again.”

  Awasin joined him outside and they closed the door and barricaded it.

  The sled moved off down the valley with the boys trotting behind it, bent low under their heavy packs. At the esker they turned for a last glimpse of the cabin, and the thread of blue smoke from the dying fire hung silently in the still air.

  CHAPTER 24

  The White Fire

  A YUSKEEMO AND FANG PULLED steadily at the overladen sled, but the runners would not slide easily, for the snow had softened in the warm weather. They made such slow progress that they decided to spend the first night at Stone Igloo Camp.

  As they sat under the igloo’s frost-encrusted walls they were still filled with the fever of excitement that had led them to begin their journey south. Doubts about the wisdom of their plan had not been allowed to come to the surface. In imagination the boys could already see and hear the tumult of celebrations which their arrival at the Cree camp would touch off.

  They slept fitfully, and when morning came the weather was still clear and warm. The frost of the night had hardened the snow, so that they made good progress in the early part of the day.

  Because of the dangers of getting lost in this vast wilderness, where all the landmarks were now covered under snow, they had decided to retrace their original route eastward almost to the Kazon. Then they intended to turn south, keeping the river on their left as a land of fence which would prevent them from straying too far east. Once they reached Idthen-tua Lake they would be able to follow its shoreline, and then turn down the now frozen water route they had followed north early that summer.

  During all of the second day they traveled fast and well. By midafternoon they had come up to the great bulk of Idthen-seth Mountain and had swung southward.

  It was a queer, hazy sort of day and the snow seemed particularly bright. Jamie complained a few times that his eyes were dazzled by the brilliance, but neither boy paid much attention to the feeling of eyestrain which they experienced.

  They steered partly by the sun and partly by the line of the hard snowdrifts, for they knew that the prevailing winter winds were from the north, and so the drifts must run roughly east and west.

  No other living things moved on the broad immensity of the frozen plains. Not even the white shadow of a fox, or of an arctic hare, shared the tremendous emptiness with the boys and their two dogs. The boys had, of course, walked the whole distance; and often they had helped the dogs when the eager beasts began to feel the strain. In camp that night the boys looked back on the day’s march with pride and confidence.

  “Ten more days like this and we’ll be at Denikazi’s camps,” Jamie said optimistically.

  Awasin was not quite so confident. Despite their good progress, he knew better than to trust the north too far.

  “We’ll make it home all right,” he replied, “if the weather doesn’t break. But we had better count on having to hole up for a few days before we get into timber country.”

  He paused to rub his eyes and Jamie noticed the gesture. “Do your eyes feel queer too?” Jamie asked. “Mine have been hurting like blazes for the last hour. I wasn’t going to mention it, though, until I saw you rubbing yours.”

  Awasin blinked his eyelids. “Mine feel as if they were full of hot sand,” he complained. “We must have strained them today.”

  It was dark in the little deerskin tent the boys had erected on three spruce saplings which they had carried with them. Awasin got the soapstone lamp, filled it with fat, and lit the wick from a coal raked out of the dying fire. The flame flared up, and instantly a spasm of agony shot through his eyes. He sank back on his sleeping bag almost sobbing with the pain. His hands were sweating and he could hardly speak.

  Jamie was farther from the little light. He knelt forward to help Awasin, and the glare of the flame caught him like two swords thrust through his eyeballs.

  “My eyes!” he almost screamed. “They’re burning!”

  On Awasin’s face was a look of agony. Tears were running past his swollen eyeballs and coursing down his cheeks. Through waves of pain he managed to speak.

  “Snow-blind!” he muttered. “We’re going blind, Jamie! I should have known. We were fools to walk all day like that without goggles of some kind!”

  Jamie did not answer. He had been rubbing handfuls of snow into his eyes in a frantic effort to relieve the pain. It had not helped, and finally he buried his face under his robes to escape even the faint rays of the little lamp.

  Awasin was shaken by the knowledge of what the calamity meant. He had heard about snow blindness often, and had even seen one or two men afflicted with it. The White Fire, as the Crees called it, was rare in the forests, where the trees provided shadow and softened the glare of sun on snow. But in the plains it was almost certain to strike any man who had no protection from the sun’s rays reflecting from the shining snow, particularly on hazy days.

  Awasin knew that there was no cure—except time. For days he and Jamie would have to stay in complete darkness, unable to help themselves. They had been trapped by the very sun they had thought was their friend.

  The little fat lamp still flickered, but its rays were no longer seen. As far as the two boys were concerned, the world had become a well of darkness, filled with pain.

  The three days which followed were a nightmare. Time passed with terrible slowness. Fang and Ayuskeemo came into the tent, worried and disturbed by the odd behavior of their masters. They whined, and licked the boys, but got no response. At last, driven to desperation by hunger, the dogs tore the covering from the sled and helped themselves to the meat. They gorged, and what they did not eat they scattered about in the deep snow.

  Shivering in their robes, the boys were not aware of hunger. Nothing mattered except easing the pain. Gradually it began to lessen, and on the morning of the third day Jamie fell into an uneasy sleep.

  When he awakened it was to find Awasin stirring about the tent. “Jamie,” Awasin said, “I can see again. How about you?”

  Weak from hunger and suffering, Jamie replied, “I can see a little. The pain seems to have gone.”

  Awasin crawled out of the tent. It was still quite dark, for the sun had not yet risen. Shielding his eyes from the cold air with one hand, Awasin felt his way to the sled to get some meat. He reached it, and for a moment did not believe what his dim eyesight told him. The sled was a shambles, and the supplies of precious food had all but vanished!

  It was the final blow. Numbly Awasin stood by the sled and he did not even notice when the two dogs, overjoyed to see him moving about again, came bounding up and thrust against him with their shoulders.
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  At last he recovered himself a little. He gathered a few handfuls of scraps and took them back into the tent. With the fire drill he laboriously coaxed some moss into flaming life. The light of the flame made him wince, but by narrowing his lids he found he could bear it.

  When the scraps of meat were half warmed through Awasin shared them with Jamie, and the two boys ate ravenously.

  Glorying in the relief from the pain, Jamie was talkative and even cheerful. He did not notice Awasin’s silence and preoccupation.

  “That was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” he said. “Most of the time I wished I was dead. But we’re okay now, and it won’t happen twice. Anyway, nothing else that could happen to us would be half as bad.”

  Awasin could keep silent no longer. “There is something worse,” he said reluctantly. “The food’s all gone, Jamie. The dogs got starved while we were sick…”

  It was shocking news, and for several minutes Jamie could find nothing to say. Then an idea began to emerge from the confusion of his thoughts. It seemed so clear, so obvious, that he could not understand how it had escaped him for so long. It was perhaps the most important single piece of knowledge that had ever come to him—and it took a near tragedy to drive it home. He had to think about it for a while, but first he did his best to comfort Awasin.

  “Well,” he said as cheerfully as he could, “that’s not so bad. We’ll just have to go back to Hidden Valley. We’re only thirty or forty miles from it and we should make it in two days.”

  Awasin brightened. “Yes,” he said, “that’s the only thing to do. I knew we’d have to go back but I thought that you’d refuse—I’m glad you see the way it is.”

  By now the idea in Jamie’s mind had crystallized. He was ready to share it with his friend.

  “Yes, we’ll go back, Awasin,” he said, “and we’ll stay at Hidden Valley. Stay there as long as we have to. I’ve learned my lesson. As long as we went along with things the way they were, and never tried to fight against this country, we were all right. But when we set out on this trip south we were standing up to the Barrens and sort of daring them. We were going to bulldoze our way through. And we’re lucky to be still alive!”