Death on the Barrens

by George James Grinnell

  After a while the hunter began to prance over the rocks in imitation of a caribou. Then he stopped and held his hand to his brow as if looking far into the distance.

  We shook our heads. We had seen no caribou for ten days. Skip held up both hands, then pointed to the sun, drew its motion across the sky with his finger in the air, and held up his ten fingers again. The hunter understood. He looked sad. We hoped this happy family would not be facing starvation that winter as so many had before them.

  As darkness settled, we went our separate ways. We were tempted to ask the hunter to guide us down the river to Baker Lake, which was still a hundred or so miles away, but we restrained ourselves. He had a family to feed, and here we were, grown men, frightened of what the Inuit children lived with every day.

  CHAPTER 24

  Flies of the Lord

  Glorious was life

  Now I am filled with joy

  For every time a dawn

  Makes white the sky of night

  For every time the sun goes up over the heavens.

  —INUIT SONG

  The following morning, we shot the dangerous rapids into Schultz Lake and continued on our way under a gray, cold, and windy sky. Having filled our bellies with caribou steaks the evening before, we decided to save the last of our food. A gentle snow was falling.

  That evening, I gathered stones along the beach, took out the charred ends of the last of the spruce poles, and built a fire. While Bruce cooked dinner, I steadied the cans on the rocks with frozen fingers. There is one advantage to having frozen fingers: I felt no pain, even when the embers burned them. Formerly, my hands and feet had frozen and thawed, frozen and thawed, but now they just stayed frozen, swollen, and without feeling all the time. They were yellow and scarred with the black gashes of burns and frostbite, but I felt no pain.

  What causes some fingers and toes to drop off while others manage to weather the cold is something of a mystery, but to keep the blood circulating is important even when there is no feeling left. I have heard of Buddhist monks walking barefoot on glaciers in the Himalayas while Western mountain climbers, their feet laced up tight in climbing boots, have lost their toes. The swelling of frozen hands and feet in the cold is nature’s way of protecting them. Tight mountaineering boots are dangerous because circulation is inhibited when feet swell in the cold.

  Fortunately, our boots had long since fallen apart. As we stumbled over rocks, we had no feeling in our feet, but the circulation continued, and they remained attached to the ends of our legs. But the fire was especially dangerous to me because I could not feel the flesh of my hands burning when they touched hot coals. I soon learned to watch carefully.

  When the water in the tin cans was boiling, Bruce began to cook up the latest of his gourmet concoctions. Since Art’s death, he had created one memorable meal after another, with such unlikely ingredients as canned spinach and moldy oatmeal well disguised with liberal and judicious spicing. Bruce’s stews were magnificent. We were all very grateful that Art’s box of spices, which had been in the red canoe with Peter and me, had survived the falls.

  As Bruce busied himself happily about the fire, his anger of earlier in the trip subsided. He did not seem to miss his fishing rod or even his rifle, both of which had been lost. The days of Bruce the killer were gone. Bruce and I worked silently together, he the artist, I the tender of the flame, concentrating on keeping our meager supply of heat focused under the cans. Together we created an artful cuisine.

  In Songs of Innocence and of Experience, William Blake wrote of the transition from lamb, to tiger, to shepherd. When Bruce had entered the Arctic, he was uncertain, submissive; then he became rebellious and aggressive. But now, he had made another passage, as had we all. Bruce sat in Art’s place by the fire, caring for the rest of us, without malice toward anyone or anything. He, too, had called out at the moment of truth and was saved.

  In one way or another, we had all abandoned Art, left his body on the island; but Art’s pilgrimage had inwardly changed us all. Joe, once the slothful complainer, now picked up the heaviest loads and passed choice morsels of food to others. Skip retained his self-denial and his hard work, but the arrogance was gone; only humble helpfulness remained.

  Before Art’s death, Peter had been the most frightened of the six of us, always the most eager to move on. He never dawdled; he was the one always to vote against holidays, the one who had saved scraps of food against the day when we would be starving, and the one who had kept his matches in a waterproof container. Now the rest of us were afraid, and he was the one who had saved us all. His was the only canoe to have navigated the cascade successfully. His was the fishing lure that now provided our food. His were the matches that lit the fire. He was now the most relaxed man in camp.

  When we embarked again, my hands shook with fear, but as the days after Art’s death passed and we survived rapids, arduous portages, and blizzards, the beauty of the tundra elevated my terror once more to awe. My anxieties were quelled, and I began to take pride again in those small things I could do for others.

  Earlier in the trip, we had been lords of the flies, but now we were pleased to be just flies of the Lord.

  The Thelon is a beautiful river, fast and smooth. By the time we began on the last leg of the expedition, we had long since eaten the last of our food—our last meal consisting of a partial can of curry powder split five ways. Thankfully, the river carried us onward; that last day we rode seventy miles between its bedrock banks and in time were spilled out into yet another lake. We saw a white building with a red roof, the distinctive mark of a Hudson’s Bay post, and pulled the canoes up onto the north shore of Baker Lake. Out of habit, we turned the canoes over the packs for protection, although the packs were empty of food.

  We walked up to the Hudson’s Bay post and we were given hot coffee. There was a float plane in the bay, the last flight south for the season. The pilot was revving its engines, eager to take off before the ice settled around its pontoons. I would have liked to stay at Baker Lake for the rest of my life, but the Hudson’s Bay post manager did not give me any choice and hurried us onto the plane—all except Skip, who stayed behind to guide the RCMP back to Art’s body. The date was September 24, 1955.

  I lingered as long as I could in Churchill, Manitoba, where the float plane left us, while the others continued south. One day, a gray-haired lady approached me. She said she was a correspondent with the Winnipeg Free Press and thought there might be a story in our trip. She invited me to dinner to talk about it. Her husband had been a trapper. Three months before, we had passed his cabin on Selwyn Lake. He asked me whether we had seen it. We had, and I informed him that it was in good repair and that we had found an empty tobacco can on the sill of its one window.

  He smiled.

  When I finished telling my story, the old trapper looked me in the eye. “I bet I know how you feel,” he prodded me with a knowing smile.

  I thought him a fool. I doubted very much that anyone really knew how I felt: my experiences were so very personal, so uniquely my own …

  “You feel lucky.”

  … not so uniquely my own.

  CHAPTER 25

  The Longer Pilgrimage

  I never get lost because I do not know where I am going.

  —ZEN MASTER IKKYA

  Forty-nine years have passed since I traveled with Art into the Arctic, and I am now seventy. One might think that I would have learned something on that voyage, and I believe I have, but it is difficult for me to explain then why I have failed not just as a son but as a husband (three times) and as a father (four times).

  After the trip with Art I stayed in Churchill, Manitoba, long after the others had gone home and searched for a way to earn a living in the north without success.

  When I returned home, I was the stage manager of a play that all the critics agreed was perfectly terrible; its run lasted only one night. George Segal and Peter Falk, the stars, went on to better things; I went on a bicycle
trip.

  I met Zaidee, her mother, and her brother in Seville for Holy Week, after which I toured with them for a while with my bicycle on top of their car. An ulcer I had had on and off for years grew so fierce that I felt I had to escape. I got on my bicycle, went off, and slept alone in a cave in the mountains of Spain. I lost a lot of blood that night, which made me feel relaxed. I passed out.

  In the Middle Ages, it was common practice for monks to be bled once a month. Loss of blood has a calming effect on the nerves, an effect similar to that of tranquilizers except that tranquilizers add chemicals to the bloodstream while bleeding removes them; bleeding is cheaper and less damaging to the health.

  The next morning, I coasted dizzily down the mountain.

  For a time, I convalesced in Malaga, where my mother was then living, and then I boarded a boat for home. For four years, holed up in a twenty-seven-dollar-a-month tenement, I failed to tell this story in such a way that any intelligent publisher would be interested in releasing the book.

  I met Nancy Bigelow at a friend’s wedding. We bought a tandem bicycle and a kayak, traveled all over the map, and married. No man was ever happier than I was. After we were married, I decided to get serious about life. Following George Bernard Shaw’s advice that “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach,” I returned to school (Columbia University), worked like a dog, and won a fellowship.

  A son (George Landon Grinnell) was born on June 14, 1962. My happiness reached unbelievable heights. I adored him. At graduate school in Berkeley, California, I worked harder and harder at my studies, until I collapsed with a nervous breakdown. I was at Berkeley between 1962 and 1967. The Vietnam War was on, and I was again experiencing difficulty adjusting to “reality.”

  While I lay on my hospital bed staring at the walls, I had an imaginary companion, a white rat, whose acquaintance I had made in a behavioral psychology laboratory at Columbia University. The professor, dressed in a white coat, had deprived the rat of water for a few days and placed it in a wire cage where there was a basin. When the rat went to the basin to drink, the professor turned up the electric current that ran through the floor of the wire cage. The thirstier the rat became, the higher the voltage, until finally the rat, given the choice of dying of thirst or dying of electrocution, retired to a corner, its hair standing on end, shivering and shaking uncontrollably; then it collapsed.

  I saw another clever experiment in that class. A white rat was conditioned to run an American flag up a pole and salute it. I was astounded at the inventiveness of science, so I studied very hard and on the Graduate Record Examination scored in the ninety-seventh percentile for the verbal section and in the ninety-eighth percentile in the mathematical section. This placed me in the top ninety-ninth percentile overall because those who had excelled verbally had not scored as high mathematically, and vice versa, and that is how I won a fellowship to Berkeley between 1962 and 1967 when everything was going haywire there. Clearly I was a great genius. The Russians had recently launched Sputnik, and the U.S. Congress, fearing that the “Free World” was falling behind, had voted to throw money at people like me who had scored highly on the GRE. But when Mario Savio was mounting the steps of the administration building at Berkeley to denounce “The System,” when students were occupying the offices of the president of the university, when the federal government, under President Johnson, was drafting the poor out of the slums of Chicago and into the army in order to defoliate Vietnam, and when the chancellor of the university collapsed and was sent to the hospital with a nervous breakdown, I joined him. For six weeks I stared at the walls and was unable to cope with “reality.”

  One afternoon, a lady from the local Episcopal church popped her head into my room, looked into my insane eyes, and apologized for the intrusion. I made no reply and she left, but I began to think that if I could survive until Easter, I might recover my sanity. On Easter Sunday, I and my imaginary white rat crawled out of the hospital to church.

  From the scientific point of view the Virgin Mary is not a virgin, Jesus is just a human like the rest of us, we do not have souls, and the universe is an accident of atoms bumping around in the void. Now at seventy, having spent the last fifty years studying and teaching the scientific point of view, I prefer Christianity. In church, I feel at peace.

  In the Arctic I discovered the reality of inner peace, the reality of reconciliation with my companions, and the reality of gratitude for all the living creatures that died for me. In some ways this was the same reality I was living in at Berkeley, but it felt different then, so I escaped to church where I could create a different reality from that of wars, riots, and the defoliation of the world.

  Hardworking, a judicious kisser of ass, and mentally unstable, I had all the basic qualifications for a PhD. I completed my dissertation on Charles Darwin in such an incomprehensible manner that it eventually passed. When I was offered a job at McMaster University, I hastily fled to Canada.

  I loved my wife and son above all things. I was grateful for the caribou that had died for me and grateful for the Christian, Buddhist, and other mystics who have walked softly on the earth to redeem the sins of my humanity. But above all I was grateful for my job, which enabled me to feed my wife and three sons, so I teetered precariously between the two realities: the reality of science, which I taught daily and did not believe in, and the reality of the Garden of Paradise, which I still escape to whenever no one is watching.

  Nancy, my wife, was wonderful: self-sacrificing, heroic, supportive—and she wished she had married someone else. As a professor, I resumed being a great genius. Every time she tried to talk to me, I graced her with a fifty-minute lecture. Grateful as she was for such edification, she nonetheless became depressed and seemed more and more to want me out of the house—at least, I thought she wanted me out of the house. Perhaps she just wanted me to talk to her as if we were both human beings.

  We parted company. When my eldest son was eighteen, he got hooked on drugs. I received a call from Nancy (now living in Washington, D.C., and happily remarried to a nice colonel in the U.S. Air Force in charge of weapons procurement for the Pentagon) telling me that Georgie had freaked out. I flew down to pick him up. Sylvia, my second wife, and I took Georgie on a hike on Good Friday, and he babbled on for three days. On Easter morning, he stopped babbling and fell into a deep sleep. When he awoke, he was once again at peace.

  He returned to Washington to complete his final year in high school, took more drugs, freaked out again, and this time was placed in a mental hospital. I moved to Washington so that I could visit him every day. When he again recovered, he returned with me to Canada, went back on drugs, and freaked out a third time. The psychiatrist said Georgie was schizophrenic and recommended that he be institutionalized for the rest of his life.

  Sylvia and I visited him every day, but one day he was not at the hospital. He had decided to walk home; it was a fifteen-mile hike. When we found him home, I suggested that we throw away all drugs, prescribed and not prescribed, go for a row, and keep rowing until he was at peace—kill or cure. That summer, my three sons (Georgie, Chuck, and Andrew) and I climbed into a twelve-foot wooden rowboat (I had paid $175 for it, and it leaked like a sieve) and began rowing down the Saint Lawrence River to Labrador. We rowed the length of Lake Ontario, rowed through the Thousand Islands, through the abandoned Gulop Soulange, and Lachine canals, reached Montreal after a month, Quebec City in a month and half, and then continued on out to sea on two pairs of oars and a “whale gusher” pump emptying the bilge full blast.

  By the time we reached the end of Lake Ontario, Georgie was off drugs and onto booze. By the time we reached the tides of the sea, he preferred a good steak to either booze or drugs. After eight hundred miles, we were out to sea physically, broke, but at peace.

  Unable to find a job in Canada, Georgie rode his bicycle down to Washington, D.C., to join the U.S. Marines. Along the way, he met Betty Emer. She had earned enough money working nights at a 7-11 store to buy a tent
, a sleeping bag, and a bicycle, but not enough money to rent an apartment, so she mounted her bicycle and rode west. When their paths crossed, they stopped, chatted, and then rode seventeen thousand miles together—out to Oregon, down to Mexico, over to Florida, and eventually back to Canada, where Georgie discovered that his younger brother, Chuck, had enlisted in the Marines, and that his youngest brother, Andrew, was now on drugs and skipping classes at school.

  With the help of Betty and Georgie’s cousin Sandy, Georgie took Andy down the Albany River, the same river in northern Ontario that Art Moffatt descended when he was seventeen.

  Alexander “Sandy” Host, my nephew, had been working toward his PhD in environmental science at Tufts. He too had suffered a spiritual crisis—similar, perhaps, to the one I had suffered at Berkeley while getting my PhD—so the four of them embarked down the longest wilderness river in Northern Ontario in quest of peace, harmony, and reconciliation. Forty days later, they were all dead.

  In an earlier day, Art had been able to board a boat at Fort Albany to carry him down the James Bay coast to the railhead at Moosonee, but the boat was no longer in service, so, on July 18, 1984, Georgie, Betty, Sandy, and Andy, after six arduous weeks of paddling, caught the outgoing tide and turned south in their canoes along the dangerous coast of James Bay toward home. On August 8, 1984, the Spectator reported the following:

  The official search for four canoeists missing on the barren James Bay coast was called off last night.

  But aircraft making regular flights in the area will continue to watch the coast for any new signs of the missing people.

  “As long as there is the slightest ray of hope, we’ll continue to look,” Sergeant Peter Hamilton of the OPP Moosonee detachment said this morning. He added, however, that the chances of finding them “diminish day by day.”