Death on the Barrens

by George James Grinnell

  Art had never tried to tell us what to do. We had treated him at first as our leader because he was the most experienced and the eldest and because we were insecure; but as we gained confidence, we felt we needed him less. Increasingly, decisions were made by consensus rather than by decree, which also put Skip, by proxy, in a less influential position. Also, after we had met the caribou, Skip’s altruistic sacrifices paled in comparison to the sacrifices of those beautiful animals. Skip still maintained his virtuous position last in line, but we held the three caribou, which had given up their lives for us, in even higher reverence.

  Skip was noble, but he was also vain. As the trip progressed, the rest of us became more tolerant of each other’s foibles. We accepted that Art did not like to kill animals and that Bruce did, and we now respected both positions. We accepted that Joe liked his creature comforts and also that Skip felt obliged both to cook breakfast and to wash dishes. Joe may not have been as noble as Skip, but he was less self-righteous and possessed a much better sense of humor. We recognized that each had his merits, and we realized that Skip was no better a person than Joe, Bruce, or Art—just different.

  On one level, Art was not as noble as Skip. He probably had taken more than his share of the sugar and may have eaten more oatmeal than the rest of us, but Art had other virtues. We never saw him angry. Around him, we lost our vanities and began to feel at peace. On the day of the big waves, on the other hand, Skip’s rage exploded with such vehemence that we feared for Art’s safety.

  August was abundant with blueberries, mushrooms, fish, and caribou. Our bellies were stuffed. Autumn color had come to the tundra. We lived in harmony amidst beauty. To paddle endlessly toward a seemingly mythical Hudson’s Bay post hundreds and hundreds of miles over the horizon seemed pointless, so we once again began to follow Art’s ways and move more slowly.

  There is a Buddhist joke about a pilgrim seeking enlightenment. He asks his master how long it will take and is told, “Ten years.” The pilgrim protests, “No! No! What if I work really hard?” The master replies, “Twenty years.”

  For Art, the wilderness was not hostile. His inner pilgrimage could only be completed slowly, so he sipped his tea and allowed us time to reach our own spiritual destinations. He never hurried; he had accepted our rejection of his leadership with equanimity because he had had another destination in mind—not Baker Lake, but inner peace. Inner peace cannot be achieved by running faster, or yelling louder, but by flying more slowly, so while we rediscovered his leadership in the spiritual dimension, he surrendered his leadership in the physical.

  It had come as a surprise, but a week earlier, when he had come down to breakfast, Art had picked up the sixth, beige, Bakelite bowl, which was identical to those the rest of us had been eating from since the beginning of the trip. The previous evening he had noted in his diary, “Skip says my pannikin is causing grumbling among the men, since they think I’m getting more than they are. Could be. Will use bowl from now on.” And he did.

  Two days after Art had switched bowls, we had our last fight with him. The wind held us captive. We tried to paddle into the deep water of Dubawnt Lake but without success, so we had taken refuge on an island. The crashing waves were so fearsome on the windward side that spray blew across the entire island and drenched the campfire we had built on the lee side.

  Art had asked us what we wanted to do. We bowmen said we would rise in the early hours and leave the island without breakfast, thereby taking advantage of the calmest time of day, which tended to be during the darkest hours just before dawn. Art countered that we should wait until after breakfast before embarking.

  Earlier in the trip, he had never told us what to do; he did not need to because we followed him instinctively anyway, but now that we felt more confident in challenging his authority, he seemed to be testing our resolve to take responsibility for our own destinies. When we insisted on a predawn departure, he nodded. The following morning, we did not follow him; he followed us. After we had rebelled against him three times, he tacitly turned over the physical running of the expedition to our control. For him the wilderness was a holy place. He had come to this place of transcending beauty neither to squabble nor to see how fast we could leave it. He left us to find our own way to inner peace.

  In the movie The Emerald Forest, an American engineer meets a native chief in the jungles of Brazil whose tribe has captured the engineer’s son. When the engineer tells the chief to order his tribe to release their prisoner, the chief replies, “If I tried to tell them what to do, I would no longer be chief.”

  Rebellion is a substitute for inner peace. It gives meaning and purpose to life as long as the object of rebellion is seen as the cause of discontent, but if the object of rebellion concedes, it becomes necessary to search more deeply inside.

  What we discovered was that the true source of our discontent was not in Art, but in ourselves. In the following days, when we looked over at Art, peacefully sipping his tea, we too began to reach for the tea pot and to emulate him once again.

  The day after our last dispute, we had arisen before dawn; the wind had remained calm all day, and we had paddled sixty miles, but where had we really gone? Beauty was all around us. Ugliness was but a vague memory. Before our enlightenment, we pilgrims had needed faith in salvation through a tangible objective (the Hudson’s Bay post at Baker Lake), but once the seven deadly sins had fallen away, we discovered the Garden of Eden everywhere around us.

  Art had understood our pilgrimage, our fears, our youthful vanities, and our jealousies and had allowed us to make our own way. On Dubawnt Lake we discovered that we had arrived at the destination where we really wanted to be: a place of transcending beauty, a place of reconciliation, and a place of harmony with all of creation. If the weather were unfavorable for paddling, or the waves too big, or the auguries unpropitious, or if a holiday were called for to celebrate the return of good weather, or if life were just too good to hurry, Art would pour himself another cup of tea; and now, so did we bowmen. But Skip did not.

  Earlier in the trip Skip had lectured us, but he considered it beneath his dignity to express an opinion on such things as how the sugar or the milk should be divided or what our schedule should be. Accordingly, when Art surrendered control of the expedition to us bowmen, we did not bother to consult Skip on such mundane matters. As a result, the expedition did not move far during those last pleasant days of autumn.

  Each morning we would wait for Peter Franck to leave the breakfast fire to pack his things, and then we bowmen and Art would discuss the plans for the day. We already knew what Peter’s vote would be—he never voted for holidays—so we felt no need to consult him, and with Skip’s high-minded abstentions, the rest of us came easily to consensus. Outwardly Skip accepted our decisions, but inwardly his anger grew.

  Although we took holidays on more than half the days of August, we did occasionally travel down the lake. During one such lazy day, Art pulled his canoe into an island to stretch. We were running out of hardtack and other lunch supplies, so rather than prepare another cold lunch in the canoes, Art cooked up a delicious soup of fish Skip had caught.

  Uncharacteristically, Skip went for a walk and did not return until we had finished eating. Because he had always stood last in line, we all agreed that we ought to save an extra large portion of this especially delicious soup for Skip by way of saying thanks. To top off our gratitude, we served it in Art’s extra large pannikin to salute, symbolically, Skip’s noble mode of leadership. We reflected warmly on our goodness and on how proud of us Skip would be for at last being governed by “group consideration and altruistic behavior” instead of selfishness and greed, but when he returned, Skip examined the contents of Art’s pannikin and then exploded in a rage; he accused us all of cheating him as we had been cheating him throughout the entire trip.

  We hung our heads in embarrassment, and Skip ate his soup alone, in silence.

  In the beginning of the trip, Skip had seen himself not
just as second-in-command but as Art’s most devoted disciple as well; however, what Art and the rest of us seemed to be asking of him now was more difficult. We were not asking him to exercise power, but to relinquish it.

  As John Cassian, a fourth-century monk, wrote, “To seek power, even in a righteous cause, is not virtuous.” Although Skip was reluctant to surrender power, fortunately the gods intervened and made his pilgrimage easier for him by tipping over his canoe and dumping him headfirst into the frigid waters of Dubawnt Lake.

  On August 25, when Skip finally extricated himself from his overturned canoe and crawled onto shore dripping wet, he was angrier than ever. For many minutes Skip stood before Art glowering in apoplectic rage.

  The rest of us waited silently, wondering whether Skip were going to have a stroke or murder Art, but Art stood patiently before him and stared lovingly into Skip’s eyes, and then Skip began to laugh at the foolishness of his own anger, suddenly aware of his own flawed humanity. Art built a fire and helped Skip dry his clothes.

  While we waited, Bruce excused himself to hunt a caribou, and I took off in the other direction after ptarmigan. The island was rich in game, and we were hungry.

  The following morning, Art announced that Skip would continue to cook breakfast but had decided no longer to wash dishes, and then we all voted (except Peter Franck, of course) for yet another Holy Day to celebrate the good weather and Skip’s epiphany. So as winter approached during those last days of August, we did not make much progress down the Dubawnt, but we all discovered something far more precious—all of us except Peter Franck, who crawled the walls of our tent and wondered why everyone but him had gone so crazy.

  CHAPTER 16

  I Was the River

  The birds have vanished into the sky,

  and now the last cloud drains away.

  —LI PO

  The lake had been flat calm and mirrored the sky out to the horizon, where the two met in oblivion. All day we had paddled toward that distant horizon, but the faster we paddled, the faster it receded. Behind us the scene was the same. For weeks and weeks we had been paddling toward that same intangible destination. At first it had excited me, and then it bored me, but as the weeks wore on, my boredom turned into anxiety and provoked my second panic attack.

  On the Barrens, nothing has a name. There were no street signs, no people, and no spoken words; we had been surrounded for weeks and weeks by nothing but “miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles.” When I panicked this time I had the feeling, as in a nightmare, that I was paddling and paddling in an attempt to escape some undefined danger, but no matter how hard I paddled, I could not escape my fate.

  I propped a book up in the bow and tried to read. Earlier in the trip I had been interested in the Penguin edition of William James’s Psychology, but now it seemed meaningless and irrelevant. William James had had a nervous breakdown while studying in Germany, but I was having my own nervous breakdown and could no longer be interested in his.

  As the day wore on, I drifted in and out of consciousness, nearly asleep at the paddle, until I suddenly awoke and slammed my paddle across the gunwales. I had to grip the canoe with all my strength to prevent myself from being swallowed alive by the lake. I looked down at the water; the canoe was still afloat, and the bow sliced quietly through the flat calm. I continued to paddle and gazed at the whirlpools each stroke made; I turned my head to look behind us and saw these whirlpools spin themselves silently into oblivion, just as we seemed to be propelling ourselves into nothingness. Behind, as in front of the canoe, the lake was mirror-flat out to the horizon, as if we had not been there, and then I panicked.

  I had ceased to exist! I had never existed! It was all a dream! Reality and dream seemed interchangeable, and I could no longer tell which was which. My name, my identity, the real me, was spinning itself out like the whirlpools from my paddle and disappearing into the flat calm.

  This panic attack was different from the one of several weeks earlier. Then, I had been afraid of breaking a leg, starving, and freezing—all tangible, physical dangers. This time, it was not for my body that I feared, but for my identity. I could remember my past identity in civilization, but only as in a movie or a bad dream. Was the former me the dream, and the wilderness me the reality, or was it the other way around?

  When we had first killed a caribou, I was so grateful that I wanted it to become one with me and I one with it—not just physically, by my eating it, but spiritually, by making a ritual of its death so that it could be resurrected through me. I had boiled up its heart and eaten it silently, meditating on the relationship between my heart and its heart. I had been more than willing to trade in my civilized soul for its heart, but now the reality of that trade was settling in. Eating caribou steak was one thing; abandoning my identity to become nothing more than a 156-pound link in the food chain was another.

  I no longer weighed 156 pounds. Before meeting the caribou, I had become mostly skin and bones. Becoming part of the food chain to bring my weight back up to its civilized level was reasonable enough in my eyes, provided I was the animal doing the eating, but having my soul measured by the criterion of a butcher shop suddenly made me nervous. What voyage of spiritual oblivion was Art leading us on, anyway?

  Nature, as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead considers it, can be regarded as a process in which everything, by myriad means, eventually passes into everything else. But within this process there is also an aspect we know as being, which, despite its dependence on the process, revolts against the passage of everything into nothing and struggles to assert its individual identity. Human beings have their portraits painted to hang on the wall and bury themselves under ostentatious monuments, their names engraved in stone. On the Barrens, however, there are no portraits and no walls. Who knows the name of the caribou that gave up its life so I might live?

  In the wilderness, the universal caribou lives forever, but the individual caribou is born, eats, and is eaten in turn without ever having been given a name. The deeper we traveled into the Barrens, the more I felt my civilized soul was nothing but meat. Looking back on my life, I had done nothing worth remembering except to carry on the name of my ancestors, and I had never been very good at that. But I had no other identity.

  My mother’s ancestors were less distinguished than my father’s. Among them was a Commodore Preble, merchant sea captain sailing out of Portland, Maine. During the War of 1812, Congress decided that America needed an official navy, not just a gang of marauding pirates like those led by John Paul Jones. After dumping the first eight commodores for cowardice, Congress hired my mother’s great-great-great-uncle, “Old Pepper,” who is considered the founder of the U.S. Navy. Generally speaking, however, my mother’s bloodline flowed from artisans and farmers rather than from wealthy political crooks with expensive portraits of themselves hanging above the hearth.

  To the left of the fireplace in our library was a portrait of one of my father’s great-grandfathers, Nathaniel Tracy, painted by Trumbull; to the right is another great-grandfather, Thomas Amory, painted by Stuart. Nathaniel Tracy’s father had been the richest man in America at the time of the War for Independence, but my mother had always referred to him as “frog’s legs” because of their appearance in his tight yellow pants. She claimed he had made his fortune by carrying slaves from Africa to the Southern states and by running rum from the Caribbean. She could always find something disparaging to say about my father’s side of the family.

  My father’s maternal grandmother was a Lee, and in my grandmother’s living room hung two full-length portraits of General Lee and his wife, by Copley, that extended from floor to ceiling. My mother was quick to point out that this General Lee was not the famous General Lee from Virginia who had led the Confederate army, but the General Lee who had been dismissed by General George Washington for cowardice after fleeing the British at the Battle of Monmouth.

  The ancestral rivalry in my family ran deep. One of my father’s great-uncl
es paid a genealogist a minor fortune to trace his ancestry back through six kings of England and eight kings of France to the Emperor Charlemagne, crowned in 800 AD. From my mother’s point of view, this was as good as establishing descent from Attila the Hun.

  My mother’s favorite ancestor was her bachelor uncle Fred Rolfe, a school teacher with a pleasant sense of humor who owned a homestead on the shore of Indian Pond in the backwoods of New Hampshire. He left it to her when he died, and instead of taking us to Southampton to live in the wealth and splendor of my father’s familial summer home, my mother retreated with us to this homestead to grow our own food. There was no running water, electricity, or refrigeration. Every morning before dawn, my mother walked five miles to pick up the day’s milk from the nearest farmer, Fay Emory, who still plowed his fields with oxen, cut his hay with a scythe and pitched it into the hay loft with a fork, and milked his two cows by hand. On our homestead, we hand-pumped our water from a well, read at night by kerosene lanterns, and made a lot of cottage cheese out of all that sour milk.

  My mother’s grandfather had been a cooper, plying his barrel-making trade in Portland, Maine. His son had won a scholarship to Harvard and eventually became a professor of economics there. That is how my father and mother met, he as a student at Harvard, she as the daughter of a professor—but they came there from different worlds.

  I liked my father more than my mother; he was gentler, more peaceful, and kinder. The Wall Street Journal once referred to him as the “genius of Wall Street,” not because he had made a killing on the stock market (he had not), but because he had proposed a law that would regulate investment banking in such a way as to benefit society rather than just bankers. He believed that an investment banker should play a role similar to that of a patron of the arts and underwrite beautiful enterprises. Not surprisingly, his proposed legislation never passed into law.