Death on the Barrens

by George James Grinnell

  As I crawled out the tunnel portal of our tent, the wind drove sleet into my bare skin. My drowsiness quickly faded. After peeing, I worked my way to windward to the aluminum tent peg being whipped about on the end of its two ropes. I tried to catch it in the dim dawning light. My bare feet melted the ice on the frozen gravel and then froze too. I staggered about groping through the wild air for the flying peg while the ropes lashed my bare skin.

  Art had paid twenty dollars for each of our three army-surplus mountain tents. Their prototypes had been tested in wind tunnels for forces up to one hundred and twenty miles (two hundred kilometers) an hour. At the weather station in Churchill, Manitoba, five hundred miles to the south, the cups of the anemometer blew off after registering one hundred and six miles an hour, so we were never able to find out how strong the winds were, but to give an indication, the Beaufort scale classifies any wind blowing in excess of seventy-five miles an hour as being of hurricane force.

  Eventually I was able to grab the miscreant peg and kick it into the gravel with my bare foot, but the two ropes—one attached firmly to the fly and the other to the corner of the tent—were wound up like a spring. The peg immediately tore loose and lashed my bare back as I turned.

  During the momentary lulls in the force of the wind, I was able to hold the peg long enough to work it back into the gravel, but I was not able to anchor it well and quickly retreated to the protection of the tent.

  Before coming on the trip, I had outfitted myself with the cheapest sleeping bag available at the local army-navy surplus store. It was made of kapok, one of those miracle fibers that inevitably migrates to the corners of sleeping bags before disintegrating into the night. Having paid all of six dollars for the bag, I had little to complain about, but if my mother had not pulled a blue woolen blanket off one of the beds at home and handed it to me as I rushed out the door to catch the plane north, I would have spent many a colder night.

  I wrapped the woolen blanket around my shoulders and felt wonderfully warm. The sleet biting into my bare skin had caused my metabolic thermostat to race at full throttle, and the inner warmth flooded through my entire body. I fell back into the deep sleep from which Peter had not long since awakened me.

  “W-W-Wake up!” Peter yelled.

  “What’s the matter now?” I asked.

  “Your t-t-tent p-p-peg has c-c-come out again.”

  This time I took the trouble to put my boots on; even fully dressed, replacing the tent peg was not an easy job. The wind shook the tent so ferociously that I found it impossible to hold the ropes tight while I kicked the peg into the gravel. The metal of the peg was cold in my bare fingers, furthering the numbness in my hands, which already lacked sufficient coordination to untangle the peg ropes. The wind kept jerking the peg from my grasp. I was not having much success.

  Art had provided each tent with a small canvas tarpaulin to help reduce condensation. The tarps were held away from the nylon tent by four ropes, one of which was attached to my miscreant tent peg, along with a rope to anchor the corner of the tent. These tents were surplus from World War II; the army had made them strong, of thick nylon, but the designer had not properly considered ventilation, so the condensation from our breath on the inside was a constant problem, and water continually dripped down upon us on clear nights. The canvas tarpaulin helped to reduce the condensation but in a wind like this acted more like a kite. As the wind peaked to irresistible force, I dropped to the ground and clutched an ice-coated rock to keep from being blown away.

  Eventually, during a brief interruption in the onslaught, I was able to pound the peg into the gravel again with the heel of my boot and place a few small rocks on it, but I had not managed to pull the ropes tight enough to keep the tent from snapping wildly in the wind. I hurried back inside, undressed, climbed into my sleeping bag, wrapped my blanket around me, and fell asleep once more.

  A short time later, Peter woke me again: “The t-t-tent is ripping apart.” Dawn light was coming through a long jagged tear, like a lightning bolt, on Peter’s side of the tent. Thick nylon threads still held the tent together, but as the wind gathered force, the snapping sounded more like a firing squad than a bullwhip, and the tear grew longer with each explosion. Peter feared the tent would soon be a total loss. We agreed to strike it in order to salvage what remained and then to head out into the blizzard to seek shelter under the canoes.

  I hurriedly dressed, then rolled up my blanket and sleeping bag. Peter crawled out into the wind as its howl reached a crescendo. Without his weight, the tent flapped more violently, throwing his rolled-up sleeping bag, air mattress, and all his other possessions carelessly about, this way and that. The two tent poles at the northern end snapped like matchsticks, and, as I crawled out, the other two poles also broke.

  With less weight in the tent and the four tent poles broken, the wind rolled the ripped and broken remains into a ball around our abandoned possessions. Fortunately, the one remaining tent peg—the one Peter had secured properly with boulders—held. Otherwise, all our belongings would have been lost.

  Peter and I worked our way upwind to where the kitchen tarpaulin once stood. It was no longer anything but a shambles of broken poles and wildly flapping canvas. We tried to lift it to make a shelter for ourselves but were unsuccessful; the corners were flapping so wildly we could not maintain a grip for long, and the pressure of the wind was so great that even when we did succeed in holding an edge of the canvas for a few seconds, we were unable to lift it high enough to get underneath.

  Suddenly Art, dressed in his moose hide jacket, head bowed as if searching for something, appeared in a vortex of swirling sleet. We tried to exchange a few words, but the wind was deafening, twisting sentences around in its cyclones and turning them inside out, rendering them incomprehensible. I heard the word “tobacco” but could make out little else of what he said. As another gust swept through, we dropped to the ground and anchored ourselves to rocks. When we were able to stand again, Art had disappeared.

  Breathing was difficult. Facing the wind, so much sleet was forced down my throat that I choked. Turning away from the wind, the vacuum in its wake sucked the air out of my lungs. I felt I was suffocating. By protecting my mouth with my hands and turning partially into the wind, I was able to bite off gulps of air from the torrents blowing by me as if I were drinking from a supercharged garden hose.

  What made survival possible at all were the periodic lulls. When the tumultuous cyclones abated, we were able to work our way into the wind toward the river where our canoes were wedged in among the rocks. Peter and I climbed under our overturned canoe, but it provided little enough shelter from the wind and none from the cold. As we lay suspended by the thwarts, our bodies shook uncontrollably.

  We stayed there uncomfortably as long as we could, but when it became apparent to us that we would be frozen where we lay if we did not move, we crawled out from under the canoe and again into the full force of the blizzard. The relentless wind had chilled our bodies to the point of near incapacity. Our legs were no longer working properly. We had to crawl. Our only hope was to let the wind carry us back to our broken tent.

  Once inside, Peter attempted to hold the torn nylon together with his bare hands, but he was no match for the wind at the height of its onslaughts, and it inevitably tore the heavy nylon from his grasp. Everything was thrown about the tent, including Peter and me. When the wave passed, Peter resumed his grip with his left hand and warmed his right in his pocket to prepare for the next assault. I sat cross-legged and braced the tent against the wind with my back.

  I felt the wind, like a Greek god, was deliberately making a joke of our efforts to survive. I would have become angry except that I felt an argument with the gods would be as futile as all our other efforts, and it was clearly the fault of my carelessness in setting up the tent that we were in this predicament. The wind forced my head against my knees with one casual but irresistible shove. “I give,” I repeated, in case the wind had not heard
me the first one hundred times, but it just mocked me by howling even louder and shoving my head down with ever greater force.

  After the twelfth hour had passed, I feared that the wind would not ease before my last ounce of strength was spent and that the temperature would not stop dropping until we were frozen, bent double, into blocks of ice.

  In an attempt to distract myself from these fearful thoughts, I pulled from my pack, during a momentary lull, the copy of The Atlantic Monthly I had purchased at the airport before flying north and tried to read an article about the problem the Brazilians were facing in trying to destroy enough coffee to keep the international price up. It took me several hours to read the short article. Every time the wind rose I would pause, wondering if this next straw would break the camel’s back—or rather, my back. I think the article was meant to be funny, but I was not laughing.

  Finally I gave up on The Atlantic Monthly and drew from my pack Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy. It took me about four hours to read a passage about becoming “one with the One.” With admonitions of deafening proportions, the “One” pushed my nose into the book as if I were a puppy, not yet housebroken, being disciplined by having its nose rubbed in poop, except that this book was not my poop, it was Huxley’s poop.

  Suddenly, during a lull, Peter disappeared outside without saying anything. I thought he had just gone out to pee, but he was gone too long. Eventually a box came through the entrance instead of Peter, and then another; one of the food packs came through next, then another, until the tent was so filled with packs and boxes that there was hardly any room left for us. Peter crawled back inside and resumed holding the ripped tent without saying a word. The stack of boxes and packs took the stress off my back, and I was able to sit upright. Peter was a good man.

  For hour after hour we sat there listening to every change in the wind, trying to measure its strength: was it picking up or dying down? We began to believe that it was easing toward the end of the day, but the temperature was falling rapidly. Peter suggested we try to move our red canoe up from the river to further break the force of the wind. It was not an impossible idea. The canoe was upwind; all we had to do was lift it, and the wind would sail it down to the tent for us if we could hold on to it. I followed Peter out.

  Once the canoe was in place and the tent weighted down with packs and boxes, Peter suggested we try once again to extricate the kitchen tarpaulin; this time we were more successful. We anchored it to the canoe by wrapping it around the bottom and tying it to the thwarts. Progress was slow because we had to do all the work during lulls, but by nightfall I began to feel that, thanks to Peter, we were going to survive the blizzard.

  In the morning, although the temperature had fallen precipitously and all the rocks were coated with thick ice on their northern faces, the wind had died down to mere gale force.

  The day before the blizzard struck, the heavens had opened up with an uncharacteristically warm downpour. Fat drops had drummed down on the river, raising huge bubbles that floated with us downstream on the calm water. We felt as though we had been suddenly transported into a tropical rain forest, but not for long. Cold, Arctic air forced its way beneath the warm mass, creating updrafts and downdrafts and horizontal cyclones that turned the rain to sleet and then drove it against our tents with such terrifying force.

  The evening before, Art had decided to make camp and to portage around a dangerous rapids in the morning. The campsite had not been ideal, but we set up our tents anyway on an exposed plain bestrewn by boulders cemented to the glacial till. Frost heaves had left flat, and apparently dry, gravel patches large enough for each of the mountain tents, but in the early hours of the morning, before the rain turned to sleet, water had collected under Art and Joe’s tent. As the water began to rise, Art and Joe had to stack their two air mattresses on top of one another and climb together into Joe’s large sleeping bag.

  They had not liked each other much before the blizzard, and cozying up to one another in Joe’s sleeping bag for thirty-six hours had done little to improve their relationship. The limit of Joe’s patience arrived when Art moved not only into his sleeping bag, but into his can of tobacco as well. After Art’s third cigarette, Joe put a halt to the imposition, and Art was forced into the storm in search of his own (nearly empty) tobacco can, which he had left under the kitchen tarpaulin the previous evening. That is when Peter and I had run across him at the height of the blizzard.

  Art spent the entire day after the blizzard by the fire, burning our emergency supply of driftwood in an attempt to dry his sodden sleeping bag while the rest of us moved camp to a more protected location downriver. The air was bitterly cold, everything was covered with ice, and the wind was blowing strongly from the north; but the worst of the storm had passed, and we were on our way to recovery.

  With our tent now useless, Art suggested that I join him and Joe and that Peter take shelter with Bruce and Skip. I placed my gauze-thin, six-dollar sleeping bag between Art’s down mummy bag and Joe’s five-star Arctic bag (with five pounds of the finest goose down stuffed between its flannel lining and canvas shell) and smiled. I never said a word; I had not been so cozy since before we embarked on this trip. Obviously the gods look after fools.

  In addition to my good fortune in being surrounded by two of the warmest sleeping bags on the expedition, Art had selected for himself the oldest but best tent, being the only one made out of Egyptian long-fiber cotton. Egyptian cotton is stronger and lighter than nylon and does not deteriorate in the sunlight; its greatest advantage, though, is that it breathes. The army had had to switch to nylon during the war when Egyptian cotton became unavailable; as a result, Peter and I had often been drenched by condensation during the previous two months. Now I was not just warm, but dry. Life was good and improving daily.

  Two days after the blizzard abated, we continued down the river, feeling lucky to have survived, but now confronting the new problem of ice forming on the canoes and on our paddle handles. I had no gloves, but even those who did had to remove them to melt the ice with the warmth of their bare hands, and their gloves provided little protection when soaked by wet spray off the bows. Soon enough, their gloves froze, so they learned to paddle bare-handed and to keep their gloves dry for breaks.

  With no gloves at all to warm my hands periodically, though, they swelled and turned yellow. I lost all feeling in my fingers and feared frostbite in both my fingers and my toes. The others must have also, although no one said anything. Art took frequent breaks onshore so that we could walk around and kick rocks to bring the circulation back to our frozen feet and blow on our fingers to warm them. The pain was excruciating whenever they did warm up, so after a while I no longer bothered to try. My fingers were soon scarred black with frostbite, but I felt no pain. Strangely enough, we all seemed very happy.

  Five days later, I struggled to hold an ice-coated fish I was attempting to clean, but my fingers were useless. In the army I had received an award for being the most physically fit man in my outfit. My vanity was unbounded: I had won a ten-dollar bet one February day by breaking through shore ice and swimming across a lake. When I joined this expedition I believed that I was constitutionally stronger than the other men and had no need of gloves or a warm sleeping bag. Now my hands were so useless that I could not perform even the simple task of cleaning a fish. Joe studied my ineptitude, then came over, took the knife from my swollen hands, and cleaned the fish for me. Not as vain as I, he had equipped himself well with the warmest sleeping bag, parka, and gloves that money could buy, so the fish got cleaned.

  Art cooked the fish with an inward smile, and everyone was happy and at peace: but there is a time for life and a time for death—and that day, September 14, was Art’s time to die.

  CHAPTER 20

  Death on the Barrens

  Toward me the darkness comes rattling;

  In the great night my heart will go out.

  —PAPAGO SONG

  “Just a little ripple,” Joe s
aid, his eyes staring blankly into space. He was lying naked on my air mattress with my blanket on top of him. I was also naked, astraddle him, rubbing him down.

  “Just a little ripple!” louder this time, his neck muscles tensing, veins bulging, arms and legs thrashing about. “JUST A LITTLE RIPPLE!” I could no longer hold him down. Our one surviving tent was in danger of being destroyed by his wild and uncontrollable gesticulations. The others shivered in the cold outside, perilously close to freezing. Art lay dead on the tundra, frozen.

  With the pots, pans, utensils, rifles, fishing gear, and all the food that had been in the gray and green canoes lost in the rapids, Peter was desperately trying to cook up some cornmeal in one of the tins of dehydrated vegetables we had rescued from the survey crew’s dump.

  “George! Pete! Help!” Joe cried out. I tried to talk to him, to reassure him, but he was not hearing me. Every muscle in his body was struggling; his flailing arms bounced off me, and he remained oblivious to my presence even as I tried to restrain his tormented body from accidentally tearing down the tent. “GEORGE! PETE! HELP!” His eyes bulged in terror; his motions became ever more desperate.

  “You’re all right, Joe,” I insisted. He sat up and stared at me, but he did not see me; he saw something else. He wrestled more violently until, exhausted, he fell back onto the air mattress. I replaced my blanket over him, straddled him again, and continued to rub him down. Then the memory came back, and the thrashing began again.