Death on the Barrens

by George James Grinnell

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my father,

  George Morton Grinnell (1902–1953),

  to the memory of the leader of the expedition

  across the Barren Grounds of Keewatin,

  Arthur Moffatt (1919–1955),

  and to the memory of Sandy Host (1954–1984),

  Betty Emer (1961–1984),

  George Landon Grinnell (1962–1984),

  and Andrew Preble Grinnell (1968–1984),

  who died together on the barren coast of James Bay.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Introduction

  PART I July

  Chapter 1 The Mounties

  Chapter 2 Embarkation

  Chapter 3 Art Moffatt

  Chapter 4 The First Sugar Dispute

  Chapter 5 Panic

  Chapter 6 The Broken Teacup

  Chapter 7 The United Bowmen’s Association

  Chapter 8 Separate Ways

  Chapter 9 The Second Sugar Dispute

  PART II August

  Chapter 10 The Ceremony of Innocence Is Drowned

  Chapter 11 The Blood-Dimmed Tide Is Loosed

  Chapter 12 Caribou

  Chapter 13 Tundra Time

  Chapter 14 The Widening Gyre

  Chapter 15 His Hour Come Round at Last

  Chapter 16 I Was the River

  Chapter 17 On His Own

  PART III September

  Chapter 18 The Garbage Dump

  Chapter 19 Blizzard

  Chapter 20 Death on the Barrens

  Chapter 21 Our New Leader

  Chapter 22 The Last Farewell

  Chapter 23 Inuit

  Chapter 24 Flies of the Lord

  Chapter 25 The Longer Pilgrimage

  Chapter 26 Gratitude

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Heron Dance

  PROLOGUE

  The circumstances leading up to Arthur Moffatt’s death on the Barrens were first described by Skip Pessl, the second-in-command of the expedition, on the television program Bold Journey in 1955.

  At about the same time, Skip’s bowman, Bruce LeFavour, told his interpretation of events in the local newspaper of Amsterdam, New York.

  Three years after Art’s death, Sports Illustrated published Art’s diary with a commentary by Art’s bowman, Joe Lanouette.

  Over the last fifty years, wilderness canoeists have concluded that Art made “every mistake in the book,” but a Buddhist monk, Kama Ananda, told me he was of a different opinion.

  The purpose of art is to unite the particular with the universal, to elevate the sordid into the sublime, and to bathe the tragic in an ocean of compassion.

  INTRODUCTION

  On September 14, 1955, Arthur Moffatt, an experienced wilderness canoeist, died from exposure on the banks of the Dubawnt River, deep in the heart of the Barren Grounds of northern Canada. He was thirty-six. The five younger companions with him just barely survived.

  The result of fifty years of reflection, guilt, and gestation, this book represents the personal story of that unusual wilderness sojourn and that horrific day by one of its survivors. Intertwined and juxtaposed, it is also a tale of George Grinnell’s travels through life. Both tales are unconventional and fascinating.

  The 1955 canoe story can be viewed from either of two extreme perspectives. The first view is the practical and dismissive observation that as a remote sub-Arctic canoe expedition, it was poorly planned and irresponsibly executed, and its tragic conclusion was a natural consequence of that folly. It is, however, a truthful story about a real canoe trip, with all its associated petty human interactions and problems. Many of the trip’s problems arise from the gnawing reality of incessant hunger resulting from an inadequate daily food ration.

  The second view takes a much deeper look at this story. Most individuals who have traveled in the Barrens have been affected by them in some spiritual manner. My own first canoe venture into the Barrens was also on the Dubawnt. That was 1969, and due to the late ice that year and similar food shortages, it was a hard trip. But it affected me deeply, and I have returned five times since then to do similar crossings of the Barrens in the same area in an attempt to recapture that same spiritual experience. It is precisely this vivid spiritual experience that permeates George’s narrative and makes it a joy to read.

  In the words of the author, “The real voyage is traveled within one’s soul.” And as a spiritual odyssey George’s adventure was a truly extraordinary passage.

  The majority of us live our lives in relative psychological security, choosing to graze in the center of the pastures of the human asylum. We leave it to genuine artists and individuals, like George Grinnell, to explore the unseen and less-traveled edges of our enclosure for us. This exploration of the human soul is far more difficult than any exploration of the geographical landscape can possibly be. It is both difficult to arrive at the edge, the place of enlightenment, of heightened sensation and perception, and then equally difficult to return and to reattach to the humdrum everyday world of the center.

  Their three-month canoe trip across the uninhabited Barrens takes George Grinnell to the lip of the abyss that separates sanity from insanity and life from death. And it is his firsthand exploration of this uncertain edge that provides the profound insights that make this a most powerful and unique narrative.

  To illustrate with just one such exploration in Death on the Barrens, in Chapter Sixteen the author describes his experience of a temporary loss of identity and the associated panic attack. He was in terror that his soul was being “vaporized by the wilderness”—by an overwhelming wilderness that lives forever and cares not a whit about a human individual. The nothingness of the barren-land wilderness was almost too much for the youthful psyche to bear.

  Edward McCourt, in his book The Yukon and the Northwest Territories, asks the rhetorical question, “Why do men go to the Barren Lands?”

  In an eloquent passage, a portion of which follows, he answers, “The Barren Grounds is a world so vast, so old, so remote from common experience as to encourage the annihilation of self; its sheer immensity reduces the individual by comparison to a bubble on the surface of a great river, a foam-fleck on the ocean; and its great age—its rocks are the oldest in the world—shrinks his life span to immeasurable minuteness. It is a world that affords so little evidence of man’s existence that it tends to suspend the passions we associate most commonly with him—love, hate, pride, fear. And in the long run it makes what a man does or does not do seem of little moment, even to himself. It is a world that by reason of its seeming invulnerability challenges the brash, optimistic young to attempt great things and assures the old that what they have failed to do makes no difference.”

  —GEORGE LUSTE

  FOUNDER OF THE WILDERNESS CANOE SYMPOSIUM

  CHAPTER 1

  The Mounties

  Illusion is so beautiful. And Truth can make you cry.

  —MICHAEL ELLWOOD

  Before our food arrived that afternoon, we four divided up the sugar bowl between us and drank the contents of the cream pitcher. The following morning, the manager of the one hotel in Churchill, Manitoba, told us the Mounties wanted to see us. As we walked up the frozen dirt street to the headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, snow swirled about in the wind. I saw a crust of bread in the dirt and reached for it, as did the others. We laughed at our good fortune. Our bellies were full now, full to the point of bursting, but the sensation of being hungry had not left, and we could not stop eating or saving food. To be on the safe side, I put the crust in my pocket even though my companions and I had already filled our hotel rooms with food.

  Our hands an
d feet had not yet thawed out. Another three months would pass before the yellow swelling would return to a more normal shape, before feeling would return to our toes, and before the black marks of frostbite on our fingers would flush again to a healthy tone of pink. But we were safe now, and happy, able to smile and laugh a lot.

  The Mounties ushered us into separate rooms and asked us to tell of the events that had led to the death of our leader, Arthur Moffatt. The young Mountie who interviewed me was friendly and encouraging as I spoke. When we were done, he concluded, “So you lost your sense of reality.”

  I stared at him, not understanding, not believing.

  Perhaps, back in June, when I had first joined the others at Stony Rapids, a Hudson’s Bay post on Lake Athabasca, I had not had a very profound appreciation of reality. I had had visions of heroic deeds and epic accomplishments. I had been on my best behavior. But the luxury of my youthful illusions was stripped from me soon enough.

  My first awareness of Reality with a capital R came to me in the form of hunger, that nagging devouring of my own flesh from which there is no escape except through death, that incessant longing that has to be satisfied at all costs. My second awareness came in the form of freezing cold, which kills more quickly. In the face of this awareness, the real me—a vulnerable, petty, selfish, greedy, cowardly me—surfaced. Despite my best intentions, by the time Art died, I had no more control over my actions than he had over his. I lived, he died: that is all I have to say.

  What more reality must I be burdened with?

  I felt as if Art had given us all a great gift. The day he lay frozen on the tundra and I sat beside him in the sunlight, I felt a warm spiritual peace envelop me like the grace of God. I had come to understand that life is good. I was grateful for the sunlight that warmed me and thawed my ice-coated clothing, grateful that it was his body lying frozen on the cold tundra beside me and not my own. Reality had never seemed so sweet. Death would come when it would come—to us as to every living creature—as it had already come to Art. I felt grateful to the caribou we had roasted on the flames, to the fleeing ptarmigan I had brought down with my hunting knife, thrown through its wing, to the fish we had hooked from the cold Dubawnt River and boiled into hot soup.

  By the end of the trip, we loved one another as we had never loved before because outside that perimeter of love lay terror, terror of lying alone on that ever-frozen land. We loved Peter when he brought back a fish, we loved Joe when he returned from the river rocks with a sack of bleached driftwood twigs, and we loved each other when we shared warmth, shivering together in the night.

  Art had brought us to reality. We ate, drank, and breathed that reality night and day. We smelled that reality; we studied the reality of the wilderness sky and the reality of the wilderness river. We shuddered in the fear of that reality. How graciously it fed us; how quickly it had killed Art. So we huddled together in our spiritual cocoon of love and lived in beauty, frightened to death.

  Acknowledging my cowardice, my pettiness, my greed in exchange for the gift of life seemed a small enough price to pay, to say nothing of the gift of love by which the others sheltered me from the terrifying abyss.

  Art had stripped away all the protective structures of civilization so that we had no other defense against the awesome power of the wilderness, and we bathed in that love night and day.

  Like Lord Jim in Joseph Conrad’s tale, I had always believed that at the moment of truth, I would perform the heroic rather than the cowardly act; but when faced with Reality (not some philosophical exercise in semantics during a course in English literature) I found that dying that heroic death had little appeal. Like Lord Jim, I had saved myself.

  My own name is Jim. My full name is George James Grinnell, but my father’s name was George Morton Grinnell, and my great-uncle’s George Bird Grinnell, and his father’s George Blake Grinnell, and his father’s George Grinnell; so, to give me an identity in a family full of Georges, they called me Jim, and Jim I turned out to be—like Lord Jim, a coward. So if you don’t mind, for now just call me George.

  The Mountie stared at me.

  I stared at the Mountie.

  Must I now face that other, more civilized reality, that no one could love a coward like me?

  He smiled at me.

  Perhaps, during the course of my tale, he had developed a certain amount of sympathy for me and was hinting that a plea of insanity, or a “loss of a sense of reality,” might not be viewed unfavorably by the civilized authorities.

  CHAPTER 2

  Embarkation

  To fly we must dance with our longest shadows in the brightest sunlight.

  —LOUISE RADER

  When I had arrived at Stony Rapids a quarter of a year earlier, I began to follow Art around as if I were a child and he were my father. Every time Art stood up to go outside, I would stand up and follow him. The others did the same.

  He moved across the rocky wilderness with sure-footed agility, as if he always knew where he was going.

  We all laughed at his jokes and memorized his words of wisdom. We loved Art in those early days, as though he were not only the leader of an expedition but also the guru of a religious cult and we his five anointed disciples.

  Art had been on six previous trips into the wilderness and before that had served three years with the American Field Service assigned to the British Eighth Army in Africa. He, therefore, had met Reality before. But Joe Lanouette and Bruce LeFavour, my fellow bowmen and novices like me, had been brought up in civilization and felt, as I felt, that some protective veil would always hang between us and the abyss, and we wanted Art to be that veil. All three of us followed him around, hoping to pick up scraps of wisdom.

  In those early days we were all so very obliging, prompting Skip Pessl, our second-in-command and Art’s number-one disciple, to comment on how well we were all getting on.

  “Enjoy it while it lasts,” Art replied with an ironic smile, as though he knew something we did not want to know.

  Along with the others, I had laughed at Art’s cynicism. I was convinced that “it” would last forever. I was eager to get away from civilization and to escape from my former life, which had brought so much pain. I had a feeling that on this expedition I would be able to start life over again, leave my old self behind. I was determined to stop rebelling against everybody and everything, behavior that I believed had contributed to the death of my father: no more speeches denouncing the capitalist system on the corner of Wall Street and Broad, no more getting myself thrown out of Harvard, no more summary courts-martial for disrespect to my commanding officer.

  The prospect of becoming the new me, a person everyone would like and admire, was exciting. I was full of eager anticipation like a child before a birthday party, my own birthday party. I was about to be born again, strong, courageous, heroic, self-sacrificing, obliging, witty—in general, the most loveable person in the world. I felt like a caterpillar awaiting its miraculous transmutation into a butterfly.

  In those early days of the trip, I just smiled and followed Art around. I was happy for the first time since my father had died two years earlier.

  When I had first joined Art and the others at Stony Rapids, they had been holed up on four wooden bunks in a small shack built for the pilot and crew of the plane that flew supplies in from the south. Earlier that day, the DC-3 had bounced down the dirt runway and nearly crashed into the trees at the far end before it turned and taxied back to where a small group of people was waiting. As the doors swung open, the cargo was passed down to ready hands. I jumped out and landed in the dirt.

  There was a strange silence in the air, and the light of the sun was diffused to a pink haze by the smoke from a forest fire burning nearby. I heard the clicking of dragonflies’ jaws chomping on hapless insects. I felt as if I had jumped into a dream.

  Then I saw Art walking toward me, accompanied by three other men. He smiled and introduced Bruce LeFavour and Joe Lanouette (my fellow bowmen) and Peter Fra
nck, the third stern. There was tension in the air, a thick blend of the excitement of embarking on an adventure together, the foreboding of possible danger, and the nervousness of being already three weeks late leaving civilization.

  There was the roar of engines as the plane took off again, and then the five of us walked back to the pilot’s shack where I met the sixth member of the expedition.

  Frederick “Skip” Pessl, the second-in-command, was busy grooming his full golden beard in front of a broken scrap of mirror. Ruggedly handsome, he reminded me of the model for a Player’s cigarette ad. He greeted me in a friendly manner, but there was a coolness about him. He kept his distance.

  That evening, lanky Bruce LeFavour cooked dinner while Art studied a field guide to birds. Bruce liked to cook and had volunteered for the job on a permanent basis, but Art declined his offer. “He who controls the food, controls the men,” Art remarked in a cynical tone that made the left side of his mouth curl upward in a smile while the right side held firm.

  We all laughed appreciatively, as we had laughed at his other bits of cynicism during those early days of the trip. I was glad that Art was in control of the food. I trusted his judgment more than Bruce’s—more, even, than my own. Art seemed so wise.

  When I had received Art’s letter the previous February, I had been in the U.S. Army. He wanted to know if I would join him, Skip Pessl, and young Peter Franck on an expedition across the Barren Grounds of sub-Arctic Canada, which previously had been crossed by only two other expeditions: the first led by Samuel Hearne in 1772, in the company of Chipewyans, and the second by the Tyrrell brothers in 1893, accompanied by Iroquois. Ours was the first expedition to attempt the crossing without the guidance of native wisdom.

  I had not known Art before the expedition, but he had lived in Norwich, Vermont, at the end of the same dirt road on which Lewis Teague, a painter, lived. Lewis had once been married to my cousin but was divorced and remarried to a beautiful woman named Virginia, with whom I was in love. It was Lewis who had given Art my name as an ideal candidate for a long-distance canoe trip into the frozen north.