Death on the Barrens

by George James Grinnell

  Although I loved my father and his futile quest to bring love, justice, and truth to Wall Street, I was more attracted to the American way of life as presented by my mother’s side of the family. After my father’s death and after despairing of a relationship with my jet-setting Zaidee, I repaired to that old homestead in the backwoods of New Hampshire to lick my wounds and boil up groundhogs for dinner.

  I loved the spiritual purity of the Arctic wilderness; I felt I had come to a place where I could discover the source of all truth, beauty, and life. But when I discovered that my identity in this wilderness was no different from that of a caribou, I became anxious again and gave way to yet another spiritual crisis.

  Later in life I met a Buddhist monk named Kama Amanda. His real name was George Bell, from Winnipeg. He had spent part of his childhood in an iron lung and part of his youth in a Theravada monastery in Sri Lanka. He informed me that the anxiety attacks I—and likely the others—had experienced on our sojourn into the Arctic were quite normal. When novice monks retire into a three-month meditation, they experience similar attacks of anxiety about the death of the body, about the loss of individual identity, and about the existence of the immortal soul. It is only after experiencing the third anxiety that one falls totally into the abyss of despair, which is the portal to satori, to enlightenment.

  Over the course of the trip, my feelings for the wilderness waxed and waned. In the first few weeks, I had been so eager to escape the catastrophe of my civilized identity that I hurled my coins joyfully into the lake along with everything else that reminded me of civilization, but by the time we reached the height of land, I wished I had not been so rash. I wanted to turn around, recover my coins, live near a hospital, fill my belly with processed food, and inherit the wealth of my crooked ancestors.

  As the days went by I did not break a leg, or get appendicitis, so I stopped worrying for a while. After forty days, when Art had asked us if we wanted to turn back, I was eager to continue. When we met the herds of caribou, I embraced them body and soul. But then the pendulum swung back. I dreamed the wilderness was swallowing me alive, and I was afraid again.

  In time, all things pass, including my second panic attack. A week later, the night after we killed our second caribou, I dreamed of my rebirth. I had become the river.

  Through the weeks, as we killed our third, fourth, and fifth caribou, I came to experience civilization as a more and more remote nightmare and a more and more unattainable goal—neither desirable. I had thought I was losing my identity, but I eventually refound it in the tundra. During the last days of August, I spent hours in awe of the sky, the clouds, the northern lights, the stars, the color of dawn. It was incredibly beautiful, and I was nurtured by the vision of being fed by mother sky, cradled by father earth. The natural world was not just the source of my life, it was my destination after death, and I embraced this vision as the return to paradise, where all things exist in peace, harmony, and reconciliation for eternity.

  Over time, my dreamworld of oneness with creation became the real world, and my former civilized world seemed increasingly unreal—more like a bad dream from which I was glad to have been awakened, and to which I no longer desired to return.

  “So you lost your sense of reality,” the young RCMP officer had said.

  Looking at him with uncertainty, I thought, “Was it not reality that we found?”

  On the day Skip Pessl fell into the lake, I went to hunt ptarmigan. I killed five with my .22 before running out of ammunition, then drew my hunting knife and killed a sixth. The seventh took flight. I brought my arm back, wrist straight, eyes focused. My knife sliced through the air; the bird fell with the blade cleanly through its body. Now I cooked and ate it.

  By the end of the second month of pilgrimage, the portraits I remembered on the wall meant nothing to me. I accepted that I was part of the food chain, and that was all. The ptarmigan was me, and I the ptarmigan, body and soul. In time we would pass together into some other, more beautiful creature, and finally into the universal beauty of the Creation.

  One evening, about a week before killing the ptarmigan, I had left the campfire to go back to the tent Peter and I shared. I felt sick from eating too many mushrooms. (They had not been poisonous; I had just eaten too many.) We had recently killed our third caribou, and it was hanging from a tripod by the lake, where the wind could keep the blowflies away.

  A wolf had spotted the meat and was stalking through the gully where Peter had pitched our tent to be sheltered from the wind. As I rounded the corner of the cliff, I came face to face with the wolf. It dropped into position to spring at my throat. I held out my hand as if to offer the nice doggy something to eat. Our eyes locked. After a moment, it backed off slowly, remaining crouched and alert, ready to defend itself should I attack. Once a safe distance away, it turned and trotted off and then turned back to take a second look, like that psychiatrist who had purchased our house in New York City, as if to analyze my particular insanity. I smiled at it, and it almost seemed to smile back.

  Those sunny days of August were the happiest I had ever experienced. The weather was fine for paddling, but we preferred to hunt, fish, and gather berries. A great variety of mushrooms had sprouted up everywhere in great profusion. There are no poisonous mushrooms in the Arctic, but we did not know that at the time, so Skip volunteered to test one. Noble Skip. I witnessed his experiment with more than culinary interest. He did not drop dead, so we collected buckets and buckets of them.

  I borrowed Art’s ax to cut some wood to boil some water to wash my socks. I found a black spruce that seemed to be hundreds of years old. It had grown no higher than my waist and was the only wood I found. Tiny dwarf birch and willow still eked out a precarious bonsai existence in unlikely places, but none grew taller than knee-high.

  One swing of the ax and I struck a rock. Most of this tree’s wood was buried in moss. I decided that washing my socks was not worth the spruce’s life and spent the remainder of the day filing out the chink in Art’s ax.

  After many hours the chink was gone, but so was about half an inch of Art’s ax. The blade had become very shiny and noticeably shorter. I put the ax back in its leather sheath and buried it deep in Art’s pack, hoping he would not have occasion to use it until the blade weathered a bit.

  Bruce returned from the hunt and led me back to the dead caribou. I skinned and butchered it there, and we carried the meat back to camp. Skip asked for the hide so I handed it to him, although I had hoped to keep it for myself to make a pair of mitts. Instead of thanking me, Skip became very angry and accused me of doing a particularly terrible job of skinning the animal—further proof of my lack of group consideration and altruistic behavior!

  Nonetheless, dinner was a splendid affair, with the delicious trout Peter had caught, the best cuts from the caribou Bruce had shot, and savory mushrooms of the variety Skip had tested, all topped off with buckets of blueberries picked by Joe. The clear, fast waters of the Dubawnt washed the stone bank. Dwarf birch, willow, and heather dressed the landscape in autumnal splendor while the sun set through golden clouds.

  On a ridge across the river, a delicate cairn built by long-dead Inuit hunters marked the entrance to Dubawnt Lake. We had passed out of Chipewyan country, through “no man’s land,” into Inuit country. The Inuit, however, had long since gone, and the rocks were silent.

  After dinner, Art asked who had borrowed his ax. I confessed, and, much to my surprise, he bathed me in gratitude rather than criticizing me for borrowing it without permission. During his six trips into the wilderness, he said, everyone had borrowed his ax, but I was the first person ever to have sharpened it for him. I was very happy to have done something that pleased Art, but the following day, when we entered Dubawnt Lake, there would be no more trees, and he would never use his ax again.

  Because we had lost the sensation of getting anywhere, we began to spend less and less time actually trying. The more time we spent hunting, fishing, and gathering the fru
its of the wilderness, the more at home we felt on the tundra. Although life was very pleasant and we took holiday after holiday, feelings of anxiety still welled up within me from time to time. One day, I picked up a pretty stone from the beach and watched the waves curl, break, and rejoin the water. The wave was more beautiful than the stone, but part of me still wanted my civilized name to endure longer than the time it takes a wave to break onshore. I put the pretty pebble in my pocket, a monument to endure forever as a symbol of my civilized soul, and that evening I had another anxiety dream. I dreamed that Art was in a valley with overhanging cliffs, photographing a stone bird. I wanted to call out to him that the walls of the cliff were about to fall, but I dared not lest the vibrations of my voice trigger the catastrophe.

  Later, on September 12, two days before Art was to die, at a point when I believed that none of us would survive, I climbed a quartzite mountain and watched the sun set over the purple hills on the far horizon. The view from this mountain was particularly spectacular, even in a land where beauty abounds. On top of this mountain was an alpine meadow, and on a ledge near that meadow was a grave—simply a pile of rocks under which some ancient Inuit man, woman, or child lay buried. There was no headstone giving a name, just growing darkness. I felt close to this person, who was more my spiritual ancestor than the pirates and robber barons whose portraits hung on the walls of my nearly forgotten civilized home. But then some inner urge toward civilized immortality surfaced yet again. I stamped my foot and yelled out to the wilderness in defiance of its anonymous vastness, “I name this Grinnell Mountain!”

  The air carried my words away into nothingness like the whirlpools from my paddle on the calm lake, and all was stillness again in the growing darkness.

  I looked uneasily around to see if any of the others had chanced to climb this mountain and witness my vanity. I saw nothing but the beauty of the sun setting over a snow-covered land frozen in purple, diamond, and gold.

  CHAPTER 17

  On His Own

  The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

  —GOETHE

  “C-c-crazy,” he stammered. “Everyone has g-g-gone crazy.”

  Peter Franck was sitting cross-legged on his air mattress, his head making a bulge in the side of our A-frame mountain tent. “One d-d-day every one panics; we get up before d-dawn and k-k-kill ourselves paddling all d-d-day, and the next d-day we take a holiday, and then another, and then another. It makes no sense! I mean I l-l-love it here. I want t-t-to come b-b-back; but this is m-m-madness! Everyone has gone c-c-crazy.”

  Peter had only ever spoken in the briefest of sentences before; now an irrepressible torrent of words came flooding forth. He seemed very distraught. I lay on my air mattress, propped on my elbow, and nodded my head as I had seen my psychiatrist do.

  “… m-m-madness. Everyone’s g-g-gone insane …”

  The date was August 29. We had all voted (except Peter Franck, of course) to take yet another holiday even though the weather was excellent for paddling. The official reason for this one was to celebrate reaching the north end of Dubawnt Lake.

  Actually, we had not reached the end of Dubawnt Lake, which was still another day’s paddle or so away, but we had almost reached it, and our campsite, like so many of our recent campsites during those last weeks of August, presented a splendid view of autumn on the tundra, a sight that is exceeded nowhere in its beauty, so we did that day as we had done on all those previous days and voted to take another holiday.

  It had seemed a perfectly rational thing to do from our point of view, but in Peter’s eyes, taking all those holidays was insane, “c-c-crazy.” There was ice on the tundra in the mornings; winter blizzards would be upon us within a week. We had fallen a month behind schedule, yet we voted for holiday after holiday.

  “It’s nothing but m-m-madness!” Peter repeated. “I mean Art’s a g-g-great g-g-guy, but I c-c-can’t stand it anymore. Everyone has gone c-c-crazy.”

  While I and my fellow bowmen had gyrated through emotional turmoil, fearing and then loving the wilderness, voting against and then voting for holidays, Peter Franck had remained constant. He kept track of how far we had gone and how far we had yet to go in order to reach the outpost at Baker Lake by September 2, and the figures did not add up. Dubawnt Lake was only halfway from the height of land to Baker Lake.

  Because Peter planned to enter his sophomore year at Harvard that autumn, the September 2 deadline was particularly important to him. He would have to travel to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to register for classes within a few days of our return. He had pointed this out to Art and the rest of us several times in the early days of the trip, when it first became apparent that we were falling behind schedule. No one had taken his concerns very seriously. Joe and Bruce, who were entering their sophomore years at Dartmouth, told him not to worry, that there was always late registration, but Pete continued to worry. As we fell farther and farther behind, he worried more and more.

  “… m-m-madness …”

  While the rest of us went on laughing at Art’s little ironies (“We’ve got all summer”), Peter kept to himself and saved bits of hardtack in empty peanut butter jars.

  “… crazy …”

  Imitating my psychiatrist, I nodded sympathetically, although I too had voted for all the recent holidays.

  The more attention Peter paid to the calendar and to the status of our food supplies, the more worried he became. In addition to protesting all holidays and storing away bits of food, he took to packing up earlier in the morning than anyone else, to loading our canoe before Art had finished sipping his breakfast tea, and to waiting in it for an hour or two, hoping Art would get the hint. Art did not respond, just went on his leisurely bird walks and left Peter to sit there in a state of elevated agitation.

  “… c-c-crazy …”

  Like Peter, I had had episodes of panic, but I had hidden my fear from the others better than he. For a man to show fear, no matter how real and intense, means automatic demotion to the bottom of the male hierarchy. It is therefore the first unstated law of machismo that no other male should ever discover just how scared one really is.

  “… insane …”

  I smiled and nodded my head wisely. During my own episodes of panic, I found Peter’s perpetual state of agitation reassuring. His concerns about our safety were so much deeper than mine that I had begun to relax. I could not believe that our situation was quite as dangerous as he was constantly implying, so his anxiety helped me to put on a brave face. Now his distress was so great, though, that I began to fear he was in danger of going off the deep end, so I continued to nod and reassure him, “yes, yes, yes,” as I had seen my psychiatrist do.

  After killing our first three caribou, we bowmen lost our fear of the wilderness and took effective democratic control of the expedition, with Art’s tacit approval and Skip’s begrudged acquiescence.

  Having long since learned Peter’s position on holidays, we no longer bothered to consult him, and to avoid any argument at all, we found it convenient to wait for him to leave the fire to pack his things before discussing the day’s plans. During the month of August we spent more days hunting, fishing, picking berries, relaxing, and taking exploratory side trips than we spent paddling toward the outpost at Baker Lake.

  By the end of August, Peter was feeling not only isolated and ignored but also slightly paranoid, as if his concerns were being deliberately disregarded.

  They were.

  “… madness …”

  I nodded, “Yes, yes, yes.”

  I had learned how to play psychiatrist at Groton. Instead of tossing me down the garbage chute in the old-fashioned way, the school had modernized its brainwashing techniques and sent me to a psychiatrist. Although the garbage chute probably would have proved more efficacious, I learned a great deal from the psychiatrist—in particular, the art of hypocrisy, how to nod my head in agreement with everything said, regardless of what I thought.

  “… c-c-crazy
…”

  Nod, nod, nod.

  To make matters worse for Peter, he had me for a tentmate, and I was crazier than the rest. I had not followed Art back into the Garden of Eden reluctantly, but enthusiastically. I now had become Art’s most devoted disciple. In addition to voting for holidays and pitching our tent in the most exposed locations, my attitude in the rapids had become cavalier, even reckless. Sometimes, as Peter and I approached a rapids, the speed of the current quickening, I would lie back on the load and rock peacefully in harmony with the turbulent water, like a baby being cradled in its mother’s arms. This tended to cause Peter’s nervous shiftings to increase by several orders of magnitude and the splashings from his paddle to find their mark on my face with increasing accuracy, until I had to sit up to avoid further drenching.

  “… n-n-nuts …”

  “Yes, yes, yes.”

  Once we met the caribou, the immediate threat of death by starvation had passed, but Peter continued to urge, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that we keep our eyes on our professed objective and get across the Barrens before freeze-up. “I-I-I can’t understand what has g-g-gotten into everybody. We are s-s-supposed to be at B-B-Baker Lake in t-t-two more days, and we are only a little more than halfway th-th-there, and we j-just t-took another h-h-holiday! It’s c-c-crazy!”

  I thought Peter had gone crazy, and he thought the same of me. We were inhabiting different realities: Peter’s heart seemed to dwell in civilization while mine was living in the Garden of Eden. We were both deluded.

  A few nights prior to Peter’s outburst I had dreamed about the overhanging precipice that was about to fall on Art, but I never spoke of my deep, half-subconscious anxiety about the impending disaster that Art and the rest of us were so obviously courting. It expressed itself only in my dreams. Outwardly, we were all playing chicken, waiting to see who would flinch first. Peter did, so we laughed at him, but we were all scared.