Death on the Barrens

by George James Grinnell

  The inadequacy of our sugar supply reminded us of other shortages. Although nothing had been lost in the rapids, we were acutely sensitive to the vulnerability of our supplies. We carried no radio; we had seen no caribou or other big game. If in the next rapids we were to lose essential equipment, our fate would be sealed. Every one of us had an intense urge to seize greater control of the way the expedition was run.

  After letting the precariousness of our situation sink in, Skip encouraged us to discuss what action we felt would be appropriate. He leveled his most remonstrative scowls at Joe, who had made fun of Art’s honor system when it was first introduced, and at me, for having laughed the loudest at Joe’s cynical wit.

  Predictably, Joe became angry at Skip’s accusatorial tone. The stage was set for a continuation of the United Bowmen’s Association’s revolt. We younger members of the expedition were just making the transition from childhood to youth, from dependency to the realization that we were expected to look after our own boots, so why not also after our own sugar?

  “Divide up the sugar six ways,” Joe exploded angrily, tired of being presumed guilty simply because he had a realistic assessment of the role of “honor” in the face of our hunger. “Let each man look after his own!”

  We all knew that Art was the one who liked to sit up late at night sipping cup after cup of tea and dipping wet spoon after wet spoon into the communal sugar bucket.

  “Put it to a vote!” Joe demanded.

  However physically and mentally able we thought ourselves to be, our childhoods in civilization had not prepared us for the harsh reality of the Barrens. We knew we were behind schedule. At our current rate of travel, we no longer had enough food to reach Baker Lake before freeze-up, nor enough time; it was not just the sugar that was short. The near loss in the rapids that day had only increased our anxiety, so it seemed that unless we wrested the expedition away from Art, we would perish.

  “We tried it his way, Skip, and it didn’t work,” Bruce implored. Skip frowned at him, obviously deep in thought. Bruce stared back and pleaded, “It’s only fair that you let us try it our way this time.” Skip hesitated. Everyone looked at him, waiting for a decision, as though he were already our new leader.

  Skip turned and deferred to Art, then waited while Art sipped his tea thoughtfully and tried to dissuade us one last time. “It won’t work,” he said. “We don’t have enough containers.”

  “Y-y-yes we d-d-do,” Peter contradicted, “I-I-I’ve been s-s-s-saving th-the empty j-j-jam t-tins.” Everyone stared at Peter in shocked surprise. During the trip he had rarely spoken, and certainly never to contradict Art.

  Art was silent for a long time and then asserted cynically, “Soon we will have six little fires on the tundra and if anyone comes near we will growl.”

  Joe and I laughed appreciatively at Art’s wit, but the worried expression on Bruce’s face remained as he turned again to Skip: “What do you think we should do, Skip?” Again, Skip hesitated.

  Joe renewed his earlier demand. “Put it to a vote.”

  We all watched Skip and waited for his decision. After a long pause, he nodded. “All right.”

  The vote was a foregone conclusion: four to one. We bowmen voted as a block and Skip abstained, as he had always done.

  Outwardly, the vote may have been about rationing the sugar, but beneath the surface it was a vote of no confidence in Art’s mode of leadership and, indirectly, an endorsement of Skip’s.

  Throughout the trip, it had been Skip who had arisen to cook breakfast every morning, while also humbling himself—unlike Art—to take his turn washing dishes. It had been Skip—not Art—who had always stood last in line for food. That day, it was Skip who had led the way successfully down the rapids. Skip was strong on the portages and skillful in the rapids. Skip’s command of the group was rising while Art’s was falling. Skip was the man of the hour. I did not like Skip as much as Art because he was more critical, but like the others, I respected him. During the discussion, Art just sat on a rock, sipping his tea, saying nothing.

  “You be the one to divide up the sugar,” Bruce said to Skip, then added pointedly, “We trust you.”

  Stunned, Art stood up and left the campfire.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Ceremony of Innocence Is Drowned

  Everything flowers from within.

  —GALWAY KINNELL

  Before coming on the trip I had taken to memorizing poetry, particularly when assigned to guard duty in the army, and would while away the midnight hours reciting Keats and other lyric poets.

  Guard duty is a spiritual exercise. A guard’s only job is to stay awake, and the best way to do that is to keep walking, but without any physical destination, there must be a spiritual one, lest the meaning of life disintegrate into the silence of the midnight bleakness. John Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” had become my favorite while sauntering around the motor pool trying desultorily to prevent my buddies from siphoning gas away from the army trucks and into their own dilapidated vehicles so they could pick up their girlfriends on the weekends.

  Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

  Alone and palely loitering?

  The sedge is withered from the lake,

  And no birds sing.

  Keats had something other in mind for his knight-at-arms than guarding a motor pool, but his lyrical lines transported me to a world where the trivial was elevated into the sublime.

  For Art, our adventure into the wilderness was more a quest for the universal than the mundane; his destination was within, a destination of inner peace, where he could live in harmony with the birds that surrounded him. We, unfortunately, had a different destination in mind.

  Now, after a month in the wilderness, it was not just Keats, but William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” that surfaced in my consciousness.

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer,

  Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

  Viewed from Yeats’s perspective, I could see our bickering in a more prescient light.

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

  The best lack all conviction

  While the worst are full of passionate intensity.

  A squall passed over us, and the ends of a rainbow met in the clear Dubawnt River at our feet. While we squabbled, the serene beauty of the natural world elevated our sordid bickering into the sublime.

  Unusual for him, Art arose early the morning following our second sugar dispute and had words with Skip. I was not privy to their conversation, but I know that Art agreed to run the trip more expeditiously, and I suspect that, as encouragement, Skip agreed to continue on with Art once the rest of us had been safely deposited at Baker Lake. The wilderness was Art’s spiritual home. Skip’s home was the wealthy suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, but, noble creature that he was, he was willing to sacrifice civilized comfort to Art’s spiritual journey if Art would guarantee the safe deliverance of the rest of us at the Hudson’s Bay post at Baker Lake on time.

  After breakfast Art reported this new resolution brokered by him and Skip. Although he did not like to “play the sergeant,” as he put it, he was willing to run the expedition in a more militaristic fashion if that were what we really wanted.

  We cheered. It was exactly what we wanted: more structure, more discipline, more assurance that everything was being done that could be done to reach Baker Lake. We scurried about packing the canoes, launched them in record time, and paddled hard all day, deeper into the wilderness.

  Drenched alternately by rain and icy spray off the rapids, Art pulled his gray canoe into a rocky shore so that he and the other sternmen could walk downstream to scout the rapids ahead. While they were gone, we bowmen stood by the canoes, blew on our hands, and kicked at rocks to warm our toes. The temperature of the a
ir hovered only slightly above freezing. The irony of Art’s words from early in the trip, when we had been held up by the wind on Black Lake, haunted us: “There’s no hurry. We’ve got all summer.” We had laughed then, but the brevity of the northern summer did not seem so funny now. The summer, it seemed, had already passed us by, yet the date was only July 31.

  After a few hours, the sternmen returned and Art announced that, because of the strong wind, he thought it inadvisable to shoot any more rapids that day. We crossed the river and made camp. Skip, Bruce, and Pete took advantage of the time to fish the rapids.

  It was my job, assumed early in the trip, to dress any game shot and to clean any fish caught. Unlike the delicious lake trout that I was most accustomed to cleaning, the fifteen fish they pulled out of the river for dinner that evening were heavily scaled. Everyone was hungry; Pete, Skip, Joe, and Bruce were standing impatiently around the boiling pot, waiting for me to finish cleaning the fish. It was a difficult job; my fingers were numb and the fish were slippery. Unfortunately, the better part of dinner was spent not enjoying the soup, but spitting out all the scales I had failed to remove.

  Peter was silent and Joe made a joke of it, but Skip launched into his familiar “group consideration and altruistic behavior” lecture, with particular emphasis on altruism when cleaning fish. After the lecture, I left the campfire and climbed the hill behind camp to escape further admonitions. In the distance I could see the river widening into another lake. The landscape was changing, becoming not only bleaker but also, in a strange way, more beautiful. The Barrens encompassed everything I could see, spread to the horizon in every direction as though we were camped on the peak of the tallest mountain in the world.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Blood-Dimmed Tide Is Loosed

  The longest journey is the journey inward.

  —DAG HAMMARSKJÖLD

  The current slowed and the river widened as our canoes glided into another lake. Ten thousand years earlier, a glacier had piled boulders into a moraine along the western shore, and not much had taken root since. Green lichen covered the rocks, but no trees grew.

  That evening, we took refuge on an offshore island. A meager clump of black spruce eked out a stunted existence in a protected valley by the western shore. On the island’s one hill, I found the remains of a caribou. I felt a kinship with those bleached bones, more so than with the birds that flew overhead or with the fish we pulled from the water.

  Skip handed Bruce a pack from the green canoe, and Bruce carried it to a dry spot on the hill. “Say Skip, is it all right if I take a pee?” he asked.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Bruce, please do!” Skip replied sarcastically. We all laughed, but Bruce looked puzzled. In days past, whenever the sternmen were downstream scouting rapids, leaving us bowmen the chance to gossip in private, Bruce had always extolled Skip’s virtues and had made no secret of his wish that Skip were leader instead of Art; but now Skip was angry. Bruce’s chin dropped to his chest as if it were too heavy to carry, and his shoulders slumped forward. As he returned to the green canoe after watering the bushes, his eyes never left the ground.

  Skip was certainly critical of Art’s leadership but typically kept his thoughts on the subject to himself and was apparently embarrassed by Bruce’s comment of a few days earlier when we were discussing dividing the sugar (“We trust you”), for it had implied that Art was no longer trustworthy and had thereby placed Skip in a difficult position in relationship to Art.

  Skip had gone into the wilderness twice before with Art and had become a devotee of Art’s gentle philosophy, but Skip’s father was an executive at General Motors, a company that Art considered to be emblematic of everything that was wrong with the world, so Skip found himself astraddle two opposing views. However, although Skip’s father was an executive at General Motors, he was also the man who had paid Art to take young Skip on a six-week adventure into the wilderness.

  Art was opposed to all forms of corporate hierarchy and despised machinery of every description, of which the automobile, second perhaps only to the tools of war, was the lowest manifestation, but Art and Skip’s father both admired virtue, and Skip was virtuous. From his father Skip had learned the stoic virtues of fortitude, temperance, prudence, and generosity. At Art’s side, he had begun to reconcile these virtues with the calm, peaceful, harmonious way of being of the Cree villagers. Within Skip’s soul the automobile world of Detroit and the Cree world of Kagami were united, but the alliance was not an easy one.

  Like many mystics before him, Art believed that a voyage into the wilderness was a pilgrimage, a journey, not of conquest, but of reconciliation. Skip, at the same time, was trying to walk the fine line between truth and survival. Art had come to appreciate Skip’s virtues, and Skip to admire Art’s philosophy, but what may have troubled Skip now was whether Art was leading us on a pilgrimage into the wilderness from which we would not return.

  Although Art had promised to run the expedition more militarily, he had soon fallen back into his meditative ways. Art knew as well as the rest of us that the wind was most apt to be calm just before dawn and to blow the strongest in the afternoons, but only twice during the previous month had he taken advantage of the early hours to paddle. Most mornings he preferred to take a lengthy bird walk. He seemed to be at peace with the birds.

  Unable to find a balance between Art’s philosophy of living in harmony with the natural world and surviving its rigors, Skip became anxious and then angry—angry at Joe for his table manners, angry at me for not cleaning the fish properly, and angry at Bruce for watering the seeds of our discontent. The only person with whom Skip never became angry was young Peter Franck, who, like Skip, had already been on other trips with Art and was acquainted with their particular virtues. We bowmen just did not seem to be up to that standard, so the rift splintered the group and cast us farther apart with every passing day.

  When we had first landed on this island, Art caught a huge lake trout that seemed almost as large as he was. Near shore, the fish slipped the hook. Art jumped into the water and wrestled with it.

  In a Buddhist koan, the master says, “A fish saved my life once.”

  “How could a fish save your life,” his disciple asks.

  “I ate it.”

  Art managed to embrace the fish, and together they rolled out of the water and onto shore.

  The fish was good, but could we continue to survive off the land if we did not happen upon the herds of caribou? Like Starbuck, Captain Ahab’s first mate in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Skip was uncertain whether, in obeying Art, he was not condemning us all to an early grave.

  For the next three days, high winds imprisoned us on an island, and our fears mounted. After we had eaten the last of the fish at dinner on the third day, Art put on a long face and, in a tone as mournful and affected as a funeral director’s, or a teenage camp counselor’s trying to scare the living bejesus out of his young charges, outlined the perilous position in which we now found ourselves.

  We had many questions about our prospects of survival, and Art’s answer to each was doom and gloom. He not only confirmed all our worst fears but also elaborated on them. At our current rate of travel, we would run out of food long before reaching the outpost at Baker Lake and would soon come face to face with the reality that Hornby, Adlard, and Christian had suffered. Even if we did meet the caribou as they migrated and were able to kill enough food, we would surely be trapped by ice before reaching our destination.

  Art looked intently at each of our drawn faces and then asked if we would like to turn around and go home.

  The idea of death is easier to face when one is not looking directly at it; still, the beauty of creation seemed infinitely more attractive than the prospect of turning around and retreating back to Stony Rapids. My panic had passed, and I was eager to continue on. I felt once again that we were on a voyage of discovery, the beautiful Barrens opening up before us. As we left the forests of the south behind, streams,
mountains, and fields of grass and flowers greeted us, making it seem as though we were not so much descending a river as discovering a heavenly domain. The farther northward we paddled, the more extensive the view became, the more the tundra opened out before us like an endless Alpine meadow surrounded by lakes and snow-topped rocky peaks, and the more I realized that what was unfolding was something beyond physical beauty.

  A missionary once attempted to explain the beauty of heaven to a Chipewayan Indian and was asked, “Is it as beautiful as the ‘land of the little sticks’?” As we traveled north, we too were discovering the beauty of the Barrens, but I was also discovering something else, something inside me. I was taking my first steps on Art’s spiritual pilgrimage. I no more desired to turn back than to return to my mother’s womb.

  Surely some revelation is at hand;

  Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

  We had spent more than a month in the wilderness, and I could feel that I was undergoing a change, like a beetle metamorphosing into a dragonfly.

  The previous day I had taken a canoe out despite the wind and paddled around the island to prove to Art that it would be safe to load up and continue on our way, but he declined to follow my advice. I got the sense that he might have been stalling on purpose, hoping to scare the malcontents into returning home.

  Art had ventured into the wilderness to find peace. When the bickering had broken out, I think he began to regret having taken so many of us along on this expedition. Now Art seemed eager to get rid of us, perhaps even before we reached Baker Lake. By making our circumstances out to be as dire as he could, I think he hoped that we, or at least some of us, would vote to turn back.