Death on the Barrens

by George James Grinnell

  In February, Captain Bullock arrived back at Fort Reliance, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) post on the eastern shore of Great Slave Lake, in the Northwest Territory, from whence they had departed several months earlier. There he told an officer the story of how Hornby had tried to murder him. At the end of his story he added, “By the way, Jack asked me to give you this.” He handed the officer a note, which read, “Arrest Captain Bullock; he has been trying to murder me.”

  The RCMP promised to investigate come spring. Captain Bullock stood up, left the outpost, and walked through blizzards and killing temperatures the several hundred miles back to Hornby.

  Despite having gone “Barren Grounds batty,” Hornby and Bullock survived the winter.

  Hornby’s next trip, however, was less fortunate. He returned to the Barrens with two other men, Harold Adlard, twenty-seven, and Edgar Christian (Hornby’s nephew), who had just turned eighteen.

  “You are out to lay the foundations of your life,” Christian’s father had written him, “and all your future depends on how you face the next few years.”

  Hornby, Adlard, and Christian descended farther down the Thelon from Great Slave Lake than Hornby had in the company of Captain Bullock. They found a suitable stand of white spruce, built a cabin, and waited for the migrating caribou herds to pass and provide them with the winter’s food.

  Unfortunately, the caribou made their way south by a different route that year. Hornby starved to death in April, Adlard in May, and Christian in June, just shy of his nineteenth birthday. Christian left a note:

  Dear Mother,

  Feeling weak now—can only write a little. Sorry left it so late, but alas I have struggled hard. Please don’t blame dear Jack. He loved you and me only in this world, and tell no one else this but keep it and believe.

  Ever loving & thankful to you for all a dear mother is to a boy & has been to me.

  Bye-bye—love to all.

  Christian’s father had supported the trip, believing it would build his son’s character, but the character of a cannibal was not, perhaps, what his father had in mind. The caribou returned before Christian died, but he was either too weak to shoot one or had lost the desire. In his diary, Christian noted that he had “plenty of meat to eat” near the end but that it was on the lean side.

  Edgar Christian put his diary in the stove and pulled a Hudson’s Bay blanket over his head.

  The bodies were discovered a year later by four young prospectors paddling down the Thelon. The RCMP, represented by an Inspector Trundle, managed to reach the site on July 25, 1929, two years after Hornby, Adlard, and Christian had died. Trundle reported evidence of possible cannibalism.

  That evening I imagined myself writing a similar note:

  Dear Mother,

  Please don’t blame dear Art.

  Noble sentiments aside, I was terrified.

  Art sipped his tea and did not volunteer much information. Finally, he got up and left the campfire.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Broken Teacup

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  —T. S. ELIOT

  The night following the Hornby tale, we were camped on the height of land when Art appeared in my dreams again, this time in the garb of a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church. It was strange in that he was not preaching in a church but was standing on a stage in a large room that resembled an old vaudeville theater, but with the rear wall missing so that I could see through it to the frightening wilderness beyond. My feelings toward Cardinal Art were ambiguous; I could not make out whether he was a man of great wisdom or an imposter trying to deceive me.

  On one level, the more afraid I became of the wilderness, the more I admired and depended on Art. But on another level, my fear and doubts gave rise to an anxiety about trusting my life to his judgments. In the early days of the trip, I had listened to his words of wisdom as though he had been Moses proclaiming the Ten Commandments. To have had Art appear in my dreams as a spiritual authority dressed like a Roman Catholic cardinal, then, is not surprising, except that I had been brought up in the Protestant tradition and had become an atheist in my adolescence.

  One evening while Art cooked dinner, the pot boiled over and some of our precious food was lost to the fire. “When the pot boils over,” he mused, “it cools the fire. In civilization, it just messes up the stove.” At the time, I thought this comment to be extraordinarily perceptive. How glorious it was to be out in nature, where, as Art had just pointed out, all things are taken care of in peace and harmony. Art’s words of wisdom were imprinted in my heart.

  On a previous occasion, as we worked our way slowly up the rapids and lakes to the height of land, we had stopped for lunch on a beautiful spit. It was a lovely day. Art passed out our ration of three hardtack biscuits, one with cheese, one with peanut butter, and one with jam.

  “Gold!” came a sudden exclamation from Joe. I stopped munching my biscuit to look at him. “Look, Art! Gold!”

  Art continued to chew his biscuit. “Probably fool’s gold,” he said without bothering to look up.

  Joe scooped some sand from the beach, pinched a golden speck, took out his hunting knife, cut into it, and carried his sample over to Art. “It’s not fool’s gold, Art. It’s the real stuff.” Joe thrust the specimen under Art’s nose. “Look! See! Gold!”

  Gold had been discovered on Lake Athabasca not far from where we had embarked at Stony Rapids. A boomtown called Gold Fields had sprouted out of the rocks just east of another, called Uranium City.

  Art crunched his biscuit. “What this place needs to improve the scenery is a gold mine.” We all laughed except Joe, who returned to where he had been eating and resumed his lunch. Before Art had spoken, we had all taken an interest in Joe’s gold. Now we ridiculed it.

  I interpreted Art’s lack of interest in gold as further proof of his enlightened status. I wanted to enter his spiritual Garden of Eden. A few days before this conversation, I had taken out the few coins left in my pocket and thrown them into the lake with great pleasure. It was good to know we had no more use for money in this paradise into which Art was leading us, both physically and spiritually.

  My father had been the senior partner in a Wall Street banking firm. So had my grandfather and my great-great-uncle, L. P. Morton, who had also been vice president of the United States under President William Henry Harrison. The Universal Almanac describes their campaign as one of the most corrupt in U.S. history. One wing of my grandmother’s summer cottage in Southampton, Long Island, was large enough to accommodate five servants, while the groom and his family lived above the stables a quarter mile away—distant enough, at the end of a beautiful lawn, to prevent the odor from the stalls from mingling with the scent of afternoon tea on the veranda. I had been sent to the “best” schools, Groton and Harvard, as had my father before me; but wealth is not necessarily a blessing. My great-great-uncle, vice president of the United States, died of syphilis, or at least that was the story I had been told by my mother, whose background was rather different. My grandfather died of a perforated ulcer when my father was only four. My father committed suicide when I was nineteen. Money had not bought any of us happiness.

  At Groton I had rebelled. I became a Marxist and refused to kneel in chapel. I had been thrown out of Harvard after only four months. I did not want to follow in the footsteps of my ancestors. Instead, I went down to the corner of Wall Street and Broad and made speeches denouncing the capitalist system.

  My father’s suicide took the edge off my rebellion. Whenever we had been in a room together, I felt at peace, as if everything were being taken care of. Although I adored my father, and he had always been kind to me, I did not want to become an investment banker like him. I wanted to escape.

  For a while I kept company with the wild animals in the backwoods of New Hampshire, where my mother owned a summer place, until she persu
aded Lewis and Virginia Teague to rescue me. I fell in love with Virginia and then had to escape into the army. I tried to be a good soldier but was placed before a court-martial for disrespect to my commanding officer. After my discharge, I escaped to the Arctic with Art.

  At first I felt so happy to be at last in the company of a man who valued something more than money, and I would have been happy to be his disciple, but he preferred solitude. While I respected his privacy, I collected his words of wisdom and tried to apply them to my own life; but now he stood before me in my dreams, this guru of a religion alien to me, a great spiritual authority in scarlet robes of dubious authenticity, completely out of place in that bleak wilderness of rocks, moss, and hunger.

  As the trip wore on, I and the others began to question Art’s authority and to rebel against him, not that Art ever tried to establish himself as an authority.

  In daily life, Art wore a frayed work shirt that was occasionally tucked into blue jeans but more frequently hung out, an old tennis sweater worn through at the elbows, a well-broken-in pair of L. L. Bean boots, and, on cold nights, his old moosehide jacket. This was his “uniform,” or at least the clothes he wore every day because he did not have any others—hardly the trappings of an army sergeant, an elegant banker, or a priest.

  The only things that set Art apart from the rest of us (aside from his wisdom and experience) were his control of the food and the extra large pannikin he ate from.

  Sometimes at lunch Art would pass out chocolate bars for dessert. I often traded mine to Joe, Bruce, and Pete for pieces of paper on which to record my dreams. Dreams function as a kind of psychological digestive process in which the experiences of the day are emotionally reconciled to the feelings of past relationships, but sometimes the conflation results in nightmares. I probed my dreams for answers to the anxieties I was feeling. I wondered what they were trying to tell me about my true feelings toward Art, toward the wilderness, and toward the world we had left behind. What I discovered was that nothing quite fit.

  It was not just Art toward whom I was beginning to have ambivalent feelings, but also our other leader, Skip Pessl. Superficially, Skip and I were very similar: we were both the same age, twenty-two, and of comparable height and build, about five-feet-ten, lean and strong. We also shared similar ideals, both believing that if the expedition ran into difficulties, we each would be willing to sacrifice ourselves for the good of the others. But hunger plays strange tricks on a man, and I found myself slipping into selfishness and greed.

  During basic training I had received the award for being the most physically fit soldier in my company, and among these five other men, too, I was the strongest. Was it so surprising, then, that I had initially looked forward to the hardships ahead in order to demonstrate both my physical and moral superiority?

  One evening after dinner, I had asked Art if I might lick the pot. He shrugged in acquiescence. The next night I asked again, and again Art acquiesced, but no sooner had I placed my tongue into the pot than I was arrested by Skip: “In my humble opinion, George, someone else might wish to lick the pot tonight.”

  Embarrassed because this was not exactly the ideal image of myself I had wanted to project, I immediately withdrew my head and offered the pot to Skip, but he declined disdainfully, as if I had insulted him. I offered the pot to each of the others in turn, but they followed Skip’s example and declined. They were hungry too, though, and thereafter the unspoken rule prevailed that whoever washed the dishes got to lick the pot. Noble Skip. Although he cooked breakfast, he also took a turn washing the dishes, and hungry as he was, he was never willing to assume the undignified position of burying his head in the pot to lick the sticky oatmeal or the remains of a glop from the sides and bottom.

  During the early days of the trip, I, like the others, had talked of great adventures and secretly compared our astounding acts of imagined heroism with those of lesser mortals, but by the time we had climbed to the height of land and stood on the precipice, ready to descend the dangerous Dubawnt River, flowing north into the desolate Barrens, my thoughts were no longer on heroism at all, but on survival.

  The next morning we completed the portage across the height of land and reached Wholdaia Lake, the headwaters of the Dubawnt River. It was on the shores of Wholdaia Lake that Art’s sacred teacup fell and broke.

  When portaging, the best way to carry a heavy load is with the aid of a strap, or tumpline, across the forehead. When tumping, one uses the neck muscles to support and balance a load by bending forward and staring at the ground, and this position also creates a level platform at the top of the spine where an additional box or bale can be balanced. The voyageurs transported their cargo in this manner and could carry not just one ninety-pound bale, but two, and sometimes three. There are even stories of men who carried four bales with a cumulative weight of up to three hundred and sixty pounds!

  At first, Joe Lanouette had experienced difficulty carrying one of the heavy wooden food chests by means of a tumpline around his forehead. When one’s neck is not used to supporting that kind of weight, every step is painful. After nearly a month of portaging, however, Joe’s neck had become very strong, so like the voyageurs before him, he piled the wooden box that contained our dishes and cutlery on top of his other loads.

  As Joe arrived at the shores of Wholdaia Lake, he reached up to grab the rope handle on the left side of the box, but it had not been properly closed. When Joe, unable to see this, pulled the box from his shoulders, all our dishes and cutlery clattered to the ground. Art’s china teacup fell onto a rock and broke into a thousand pieces.

  When Art came over the portage and saw his shattered teacup, he sat down on the boulder with the shards at his feet and was silent. Two hours later he was still silently sitting on the rock.

  Small sentimental objects had become sacred to all of us. My sister had given me a blue bandanna shortly before my departure, and I took to wearing it religiously around my neck. We had been severing so many links to our civilized homes that we clung desperately to the few symbols that remained.

  Because Art’s teacup had been a gift from his wife, we all knew how important it was to him. Every evening he would hold it for hours, clutching it with both hands, filling and refilling it with warm tea. The cup was slightly concave in the middle and flared at the top and bottom so that it could be grasped tightly with both hands. Art coddled it every night into the wee hours, the warmth of the tea passing through the china into his hands.

  The cup was mostly white porcelain with a red rose painted on one side, which Art had caressed so often that it had all but worn off, and the red rose now appeared pink from the white of the porcelain shining through. The night before his teacup broke, Art had written in his diary,

  July 21: Anniversary day—Carol and I have been married ten years. Ten years, two daughters, a house, and here I am, in the biggest wilderness in North America.

  And this morning, as I loaded the canoe, I felt pretty certain that what I have been suspecting for three or four days is true—namely, that I’ve started a small hernia in my left groin. It is not particularly painful—there is a small lump about as big as the end of my thumb there; but after lifting the packs and camera boxes, the groin is tired and sore. Then as I paddle, the sensation is with me all day, though much of the time it feels perfectly normal.

  This brings up a big question. Whether to continue the trip. Going back would be relatively easy, except for the long portages, and safe. Going on is an unknown quantity—though I can be sure it won’t be easy—and there isn’t much chance I’ll be able to get back once we start down the river. We are only about one quarter of the way to Baker Lake, if that far.

  If I do go on, the hernia, if it is really one, will probably get worse. Can I depend on the men to help me? Not very well—it takes two men to paddle each canoe, and load and unload. Further, the men would not want to—or be able to—help when tired. Still, the thing might not get worse. If it doesn’t everything will be al
l right.

  When Art’s sacred teacup broke, the place and the time were inauspicious. It seemed as if the gods were giving Art one last chance to turn back to his wife and children.

  The Dubawnt River is the last Garden of Eden on earth. Its waters flow north five hundred miles from the height of land toward the Arctic Ocean before being diverted east by the Thelon River and ending up in Hudson Bay. It is the most beautiful river on earth, uninhabited, and very dangerous.

  The lakes it drains are clean and crystal clear. To slake our thirst, we had but to dip our cups over the sides of our canoes and drink our fill. The sky is resplendent with endless color in all directions. We would admire the summer dawns all morning while the sun played spectral games in the cold, crystalline clouds until noon, and then we would watch the summer sun mutate them again through all the colors of the rainbow till dusk.

  We watched Arctic terns diving for fish, ducks gliding to graceful landings, and geese in molt skittering across clear water. Ancient dwarf birch trees grew like bonsai about the brooks and dropped their autumn leaves in limpid pools. Heather-covered, rocky islands dotted the lakes, and purple snow-covered mountains rose in the distance. We were like giants in that land, always the tallest creatures on the rocky hills, while the horizon stretched in every direction, and the green mossy valleys meandered beneath us.

  Winter comes early in the Barrens and is very cold. Without the moderating influence of the Arctic Ocean, temperatures fall to intolerable depths. Even the caribou migrate to the protection of the trees south of the watershed, and the Arctic terns retire to summer in Antarctica while winter holds this beautiful land in its frozen grasp.