While the others were thus engaged in the demanding business of assembling the wood for their cabin, Lord Luton was painstakingly grubbing away with an improvised hoe-cum-scraper to provide a level base as the floor, and when that was finished to his satisfaction, he reached for the expedition’s sole shovel, and began the fatiguing task of digging four postholes for the corners. Almost immediately he learned that this was not like digging in a Devon garden where the loamy soil seemed almost to step aside to let the shovel pass. This was brutal, demanding work, each inch of niggardly soil defended by rocky deposits, and when he found that an hour of his best effort had produced a hole only a few inches deep, he summoned the others.
‘I’m not a shirker,’ he told them. ‘You know that. But this digging the postholes … really, I’m getting nowhere,’ and he showed them his pitiful results.
This led to serious discussion, with Lord Luton and Trevor Blythe suggesting that a meager footing might be adequate if properly buttressed by stones above the ground, and Carpenter and Fogarty counseling from their greater experience: ‘A corner post not properly sunk is an invitation to disaster.’ Now a subtle change came in the structure of the Luton party, for without ostentation or any move which might denigrate his leader’s position of authority, Tim Fogarty lifted the shovel from where Luton had dropped it, saying almost jocularly as he did so: ‘The fields of Ireland have far more rocks than those of England, Milord. Harry will need help chopping on that third post.’
When time came to attack the fourth post, Carpenter said: ‘Fogarty, give Evelyn a hand on that last one,’ and just as quietly as the Irishman had behaved when taking over the back-breaking work of digging the postholes, Harry took away the shovel and asked: ‘Evelyn? Where did you have in mind for this one?’ By these easy steps, Lord Luton was removed from command work but protected in his apparent leadership of the expedition as a whole.
It was Fogarty who suggested the solution to the chimney problem, for it was known in the arctic regions that to live in any cabin for seven or eight months without adequate ventilation for removal of smoke and noxious gases might not only damage eyesight but also result in death. Each winter in remote northern lands a handful of men, often two or three crowded in one small cabin, would perish in their sleep because there was no way for smoke to escape. Those who found their peaceful bodies in the spring would often say: ‘It’s an easy way to die, but not necessary.’
Carpenter and Fogarty knew it was obligatory to devise some arrangement which encouraged smoke and fumes to escape while preventing wind, rain and snow from entering. Since the team had not brought with them from Edmonton a stovepipe or anything that could be used as such, the men had to devise a reasonable substitute. Several ingenious ideas were suggested, including Trevor’s that the stove should be located in one of the corners, with that section of the roof left open and a wall of some sort erected across the corner to keep the smoke out. This proposal was rejected by Carpenter on the grounds that the chimney would have to be so huge an opening that there would be no upward draw: ‘The wind would howl down it and suffocate us all with smoke.’
Fogarty, at this point, found a collection of slablike rocks, rough on one side, smooth on the other, and he proposed constructing from them a stone chimney, wide at the bottom, narrow at the top, and when he put it together it was applauded by Carpenter, who pointed out: ‘Best feature is that the wooden wall will be faced by stone. Prevent fires, the kind that kill sleeping people in the north.’
In this quiet way Carpenter and Fogarty assumed effective command of the expedition during the period of building the winter retreat. They decided how deep the difficult postholes must be, where the chimney should be located, how beds should be constructed, and how the tent area should be incorporated into the whole, but even between them an unspoken struggle for leadership evolved, although neither trespassed the other’s prerogatives. When Harry decided that for maximum safety the cabin section must have an additional central post, Fogarty did not even comment, but when Harry himself started to seek out and cut down the added post, the Irishman quietly took command of the two axes and said: ‘Mr. Harry, time you learned the secrets.’ Off they marched to fell and trim the post, and when that job was completed, Fogarty also dug the fifth hole.
In this subtle manner each of the men acknowledged and performed his special function. Lord Luton decided the questions of policy, or anything requiring a resounding speech; Harry made the strategic decisions upon which the life and death of the expedition rested; Fogarty determined the practical ways to achieve ends with a minimum of oratory. And even the two young members differentiated their contributions, with Philip providing muscle and boundless energy when required, Trevor an ingratiating willingness to do the most menial jobs, such as washing dishes, gathering firewood, or taking waste to an improvised disposal dump. He also surprised the others at times with suggestions of the greatest practicality, as when he constructed and positioned three different sites from which the lanterns could be suspended, depending upon where their light was most needed for specific tasks.
When the log cabin was properly roofed, its sides erected and lashed securely to the corner posts, the two younger men rejoiced that the hard work was over, but Carpenter and Fogarty soon disabused them of that foolishness, for as Harry announced when the roof was in place: ‘Now the tedious work begins. All of us scour this land, miles in every direction, to find moss, and twigs and mud, especially the clayey type, for caulking every hole you see up there.’ And he pointed to the roof, where a hundred ill-matched joints provided entry for snow and rain and especially wind: ‘Caulk along the walls, too.’
Philip turned to the Sweet Afton and said jocularly: ‘I’ll caulk that wall,’ but he was one of the first down to the creek searching for mud, and far upstream he came upon one of those apparently random deposits of earth which had a modified clay consistency. He became the hauler of buckets of clay and river weeds to the other four as they strove to render their arctic home reasonably weatherproof.
After the talents of these energetic and willing men completed the building of their winter refuge, they had indeed what Lord Luton still called his Hermaphrodite Igloo, a weatherproofed cabin defended from blizzards by the resting Sweet Afton, enlarged by the unheated space of the strong tent, and warmed by the big wood-palisaded room from which the smoke escaped through Fogarty’s chimney and to which proper light was delivered by what Trevor Blythe called ‘my peripatetic lanterns.’
When the hard work was finished, mainly as a result of Carpenter and Fogarty’s solid leadership, Lord Luton was not only free to resume command but was also subtly invited to do so, and he began enthusiastically by lining out sensible rules for the governance of daily conduct in what he called ‘Our Kingdom of Kindred Souls’: ‘No one will lie abed all day unless he be ill and confined there. At least once each day every man will exercise. Harry, mark out a quarter-mile running oval and we’ll give it a whirl. I calculate we’re still well south of the Arctic Circle, so we’ll have hazy light for such running, but even during the darkness we must protect our health.’
Carpenter had several sensible suggestions: ‘We must change our socks at least twice a week and wash the worn ones in soap and hot water, else we’ll develop a horrible fungus. It’s not good to sleep in your clothes or to wear your underthings more than a week. The latrine is to be kept well back from the cabin, and I want to find no one just stepping outside the door and pissing.’
But both Luton and Carpenter directed their major planning to the avoidance of scurvy. ‘I’ve seen it,’ Harry said. ‘Hideous disease. Comes from an improper diet. Most people like us have had no opportunity to experience scurvy, so we underestimate it. You ever see it, Evelyn?’
Luton said he had not but he’d heard enough to frighten him. So Harry continued: ‘I saw it during a long sea voyage. We should’ve known better, but the men began to fall sick. Teeth drop out. Legs become necrotic.’
‘What’s that?
’ Trevor asked, and Carpenter explained: ‘They die before the rest of the body dies. You punch your finger into the leg, and when you take your finger away, the hole stays there.’
‘What must we do?’ Philip asked, and Carpenter answered: ‘Canned fruit, pickled cabbage, the acid pills we bought in Edmonton. And we think that fresh meat provides just enough of what’s lacking …’
‘What is lacking?’ Blythe asked, and Carpenter said: ‘Various theories. We’ll know one day. So if anyone can shoot a deer, catch a fish or wing a duck, do so. Your life may depend on it.’
The five men, as congenial a group as could have been assembled for such adventure, spent their first two weeks of isolation in routinizing their existence. Snow did not yet cover the ground, and since this stretch of the Mackenzie received only moderate precipitation, snow, even when it did come, would not be a major problem, for as Carpenter explained: ‘Arctic regions like this receive far less snow than places like Montreal and New York.’
He laid out the running track, and he and Luton ran three laps morning and afternoon. The two younger men ran four laps in the late afternoon. Fogarty, who was often absent chasing game, ran on any day in which he had not walked extensively. And the health of all flourished. The latrine was dug, driftwood was collected from the riverbank and chopped to feed the effective little stove, and the men watched as the days swiftly shortened.
It was when the long nights started that the group showed itself to be exceptional, for under Luton’s wise leadership the men organized themselves into a kind of college in which each member except Fogarty would assume responsibility for a given night, during which he would expound upon something he knew, no matter how obscure or how apparently lacking in general interest. On one of his nights, for example, Luton explained the ramifications of the Bradcombe family and its role in English history. He told of the marriages, the scandals, the murders, the services his forebears had provided the crown. Later he and Harry spent more than an hour recalling fascinating examples of how the rules of primogeniture had operated in their family to ensure the longevity of the line. ‘It’s a thoughtful system,’ Evelyn said. ‘Eldest son inherits all—title … castles … land … lease to a good stretch of salmon river.’
‘Odd to hear you defending the system, Evelyn,’ young Henslow said, ‘seeing that you’re younger brother to Nigel, and he inherits all.’
‘But that’s what I mean, Philip. The law spells it out, item by item, so there can be no quarreling between Nigel and me.’
‘But aren’t you envious? Just a wee bit?’
‘I have my own title, an estate in Ireland, that’s adequate. Envy? I doubt I’ve ever had a shred.’
He then reviewed several fascinating accounts of how the principle of entailment had operated to protect important holdings in the Bradcombe family. ‘It’s like this. My father cannot sell or give away either the castle at Wellfleet or the two old houses in Ireland. They’re entailed. They must stay with the title.’
‘Interesting situation,’ Harry said. ‘Evelyn’s father can’t sell the Rembrandt or the Jan Steens, either. They’re entailed.’ He laughed: ‘You ever hear about the public scandal when my grandfather tried to sell off the pictures entailed to our family? Wanted the money to support an English actress he’d met in New York. Came home on the ship with her. Fearful scandal. The women in our family weren’t too worried about the actress but they raised hell about selling the Titian. Got the law to stop him.’
When it came time for Carpenter to conduct his first evening session, he surprised the group by announcing that on his nights he would read aloud the entire novel Great Expectations, which a tutor had told him was one of the best-constructed of all the English novels, and in time the others looked forward to his sessions, especially when the real cold set in and the river fairly crackled from the ice it was moving about.
They had become involved because this novel was composed of masterful visual images: the dramatic appearance of the convict in the churchyard, Miss Favisham and her moldering wedding cake, Pip’s boxing lesson, the wonderful scenes of London. ‘This is,’ said Harry, ‘a damned fine novel for a cabin near the Arctic Circle.’
Trevor Blythe gave a series of four lectures elucidating the magic of Shelley, Keats, Byron and Wordsworth, and because both his tutor and his mother had loved poetry, he had as a result of their pressures memorized long passages of the poets’ finer works, and he would sometimes sit with eyes closed, the light shining on his flaxen hair, and recite poems the others had known partially, and the cabin would be filled with the glorious music of the English language. Once on a very cold night when the land seemed to shudder from its weight of frost, with never a movement of air or breath of wind, he held a book open in his lap and without consulting it began reciting verses of Keats that he especially loved:
‘St. Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold.…’
He delivered the first forty lines from memory, then without breaking his rhythm he shifted to the book, but whenever he reached one of the sections he knew by heart, he closed his eyes again and filled the night air with those vast images that Keats had pressed upon his pages.
When Blythe reached the closing, with that marvelous line about the long carpets rising along the gusty floor, his listeners could see the lovers escaping and the drunken porter sprawled beside the gate. They could hear the door groaning and the warriors suffering nightmares. Such was the power of poetry that these long-dead words created living experiences, and the little cabin was alive with wonder.
On nights when Philip was responsible for the tutorial, as Lord Luton had dubbed these sessions, he could not compete in either wisdom or experience with his elders, and at first he was reluctant to try, but his uncle said firmly: ‘If you’re one of us, you must be one of us,’ and Philip, with fear that he was making an ass of himself, reviewed the courses he had taken at Eton, and because he had been above average in geometry, he began to give the men a review of that precise and beautiful subject, until Luton stopped him: ‘It’s fascinating, really, and we could profit from knowing what you know, but with your diagrams you’re using all our paper.’
By now Philip had gained confidence, so when he was deprived of geometry he turned to Greek mythology, and from that to the manner in which Charlemagne had established a great empire and then divided it among his sons. The older men listened attentively, happy to reacquaint themselves with subjects they too had studied more than a decade ago.
The hours of daylight, extremely brief at this latitude, were spent in vigorous outdoor activities—running, hunting, chopping—on those days when the temperature permitted, but when it skidded to fifty-below, all remained inside, edging ever closer to the fire to partake of the heat. Then the nights were twenty-four hours long, and orderly discussion under the flickering lights became treasured. The sessions had been under way for more than a month before Luton thought to include Fogarty as an instructor: ‘Fogarty, if we asked you to address this college on some subject about which you were an authority, what would it be?’ The Irishman knit his brow, then bit his lip and looked almost appealingly at each member of his audience: ‘I could talk about horses, but you gentlemen already know most of what I’d say.’
‘Go ahead,’ Carpenter urged. ‘We can never know enough.’
Fogarty, ignoring this encouragement, said: ‘But I doubt if you know much about poaching.’
‘You mean cooking eggs?’ Philip asked, to which Fogarty said: ‘No, I mean real poaching.’ And forthwith he launched into a detailed account of how a master fish-and-game thief worked: ‘Mind you, I was good at picking off a rabbit now and then, and that’s not an easy thing to do without making a noise, but me great love was to slip out on a moonless night and catch me a prize salmon.’
‘Salmon!’ Carpenter echoed i
n astonishment. His forebears had shot men trying to poach salmon on the streams they commanded and had sentenced more than one to Australia for the crime.
‘Aye, salmon, queen of the poacher’s art.’ And as he talked proudly of his skill and patience he began to reveal just enough about the specific scenes of his triumphs that Lord Luton could not avoid identifying the Irish rivers Fogarty had plundered with the ones he himself owned, and it dawned upon him that this prideful Irishman had long been stealing salmon from the very streams he had been hired to protect.
Shaken by this unpleasant discovery, at one point Luton asked: ‘Aren’t you speaking of the second pool below the stone bridge that General Netford built in 1803?’
‘Aye. The very bridge. They said it had been put there to aid the army in case Napoleon crossed into Ireland.’
Now Carpenter broke in: ‘That’s the pool my uncle Jack wrote about in his book on the upper-central rivers of Ireland. He named it Mirror Pool because it reflected the sky so perfectly.’
‘The same.’ For nearly a century the sportsmen of England had written books about their favorite salmon streams, until every stretch of river in the British Isles that hosted the precious fish had been described and evaluated. Men like Harry Carpenter could sit in India or along the Nile and recall without error entire stretches of river and recount proudly how some distant relative had landed his prize salmon in 1873. Now Fogarty, round-faced and unaware of the agitation he was creating, was relating the poor man’s version of the same chase: ‘I’ve never gone out within three days of a full moon, either before or after, and I used to advise young lads …’
Journey Page 9
