Death on the Barrens

by George James Grinnell

  It was this beautiful land that Art had come to explore and to record, and there his teacup—his last tangible reminder of the family he had left behind—lay shattered at his feet. The rest of us continued to carry our gear down to the canoes in preparation for launching, but Art lingered by the rock upon which his teacup had shattered.

  Before the trip, Art needed money to feed his family and was faced with two choices: go look for a job in New York, a city he abhorred, or double his life insurance and strike out across the largest uninhabited wilderness in North America. For his sake and the sake of his family, through the hoped eventual success of his film, he had chosen the latter, but now his last link to his wife and family lay shattered, and he sat on the rock, silent, unable to move.

  A forest fire was burning nearby. Finally Skip intruded on Art’s meditation to suggest that the fire might provide some good pictures. To our surprise, Art stood up, picked up his camera, and launched his canoe. We all followed him into the fire.

  The dry, pale-green caribou moss (actually a lichen) crunched underfoot as we crossed the perimeter of the fire. There was little danger because the trees were small and far apart. The fire advanced by feeding along the lichen until it reached a tree, and then it would climb the bark to the higher branches, suddenly causing the sap to explode; flames would shoot into the sky as the moisture in the tree boiled off into steam. In a matter of minutes, only a blackened trunk would be left smoldering, the flames creeping meanwhile along the lichen to their next victim.

  There had almost always been forest fires burning around us, some days as many as five, but this was the last fire we would see because it was also the last forest. The Barrens are a strange kind of desert: because of the cold, very little rain or snow falls, and what moisture does reach the ground cannot be absorbed through the permafrost but pools to form small lakes. Dry lichen ignites easily on a summer day and will burn and burn until the wind finally blows the fire into a lake.

  After a couple of hours of filming, Art became quite cheerful, and we continued north, over the height of land, down toward the Arctic Ocean, miles and miles away.

  CHAPTER 7

  The United Bowmen’s Association

  Sometimes I go about pitying myself, and all the time I am being carried on great winds across the sky.

  —OJIBWA SAYING

  A month earlier, it had been a happy time; we had been eager to follow Art wherever he might choose to lead us. “Enjoy it while it lasts,” he had commented prophetically, and now we could agree on little. We three bowmen had never been on a long-distance canoe trip, and we had necessarily been eager to learn from Art. But now, after crossing the height of land, we bowmen felt we knew all there was to know, so we formed a union and went into revolt. The two sternmen, Skip and Pete, did not join us, but they also began showing signs of discontent with Art’s leadership.

  At first, the most mysterious part of the expedition had been the provisioning. How had Art planned, packed, and preserved enough food to get six hungry men safely across North America’s largest uninhabited wilderness, where the unexpected would become a way of life?

  Art’s provisioning technique was amazingly simple. From his previous trips, he knew how much oatmeal a person consumed each day (about three times as much as someone back in the warmth of civilization would have believed possible). He multiplied this figure by six, for each one of us, and by eighty days, for the anticipated duration of the trip, and then added a little extra for emergencies. He thus purchased one hundred bags of oatmeal at the Hudson’s Bay post at Stony Rapids. So much for the mystique of planning breakfast.

  Lunch was almost as simple. In northern Hudson’s Bay stores, hardtack is an easily available staple. These are slow-baked flour biscuits equivalent to three or four pieces of bread from which all the moisture (and probably much of the nourishment) has been removed. Art discovered that if three of these biscuits are washed down with enough water, the biscuits expand in the belly to give the impression of fullness. To top off this feeling with a touch of actual substance, he coated each biscuit with cheese, peanut butter, or jam.

  As with the planning of the day’s first meal, the arithmetic was simple: three hardtack biscuits per man times eighty days worked out to be about one hundred boxes of biscuits. Likewise with the cheese, peanut butter, and jam. He divided one package of Velveeta processed cheese six ways each day, times eighty, yielding one case of cheese. A small can of jam or a jar of peanut butter lasted two or three days, so we carried a couple of cases of each.

  Because we were getting plenty of exercise, vitamins were less important to us than calories, and we all looked eagerly forward to each meal. The secret to Art’s amazing success as a provider was his ability to choose the cheapest items in the Hudson’s Bay store and then buy not quite enough of them. In preparation for the trip we handed over to him two hundred dollars apiece for our three-month supply of food, or about two dollars a day each, which we felt was reasonable enough until we had spent a month hungry in the wilderness.

  For dinner, again the arithmetic: two boxes of macaroni, two cans of tomato paste, two cans of Spork or Spam, and two packages of dehydrated soup, times eighty. Everything was simple, provided we were all content to eat the same food every day, and provided we reached the Hudson’s Bay post at Baker Lake before it ran out.

  Bruce LeFavour, who liked to cook, had become miffed at Art for his lack of interest in the culinary arts, and we other two bowmen were also displeased because, as the trip progressed, we became increasingly aware that we did not carry enough food to reach our destination. It seemed to us that Art’s only recipe for a good meal was to make sure we all came to dinner hungry. When you’re hungry, everything tastes good, even moldy oatmeal. Why bother with any extra expense?

  As for the other aspects of planning the trip, we bowmen felt that we had unveiled the mystery of these as well. Traveling seven or eight hundred miles across the Barrens may seem an exciting notion, especially when viewing, on paper, great splotches of white designated as “unmapped,” but as activities go, paddling and portaging can be as tedious as any other daily routine. One spends the day paddling toward that distinct line where sky and water meet, and while one is trying to reach that horizon, a new one is revealed with every stroke—identical to the last, but farther away.

  Heavily laden canoes travel about two miles an hour, or about ten miles in a five-hour day. Some days are too stormy to paddle, of course, but it is perfectly possible to paddle twenty, thirty, or even forty miles on a calm day, so our slow rate of travel had become another source of annoyance.

  Before reaching the height of land, our slowness was easily excused because we were paddling upstream and portaging uphill around rapids. We averaged only one mile a day on portages because we had to make four or five trips, walking seven or nine miles back and forth for every mile of progress, and our loads were heavy, between sixty and a hundred pounds per trip. Later we were to discover that our slowness resulted from other causes. Ten miles a day would have been a reasonable average for a trip from Hudson’s Bay post to Hudson’s Bay post across the Barrens, but not for a spiritual pilgrimage into the Garden of Eden, where the true voyage was an inner one, and the external reality of starvation was regarded by Art as secondary; it did not seem to matter to him at all.

  When Art called a break for lunch the day after his teacup broke, we bowmen, as the routine went, threw a leg over each other’s gunwales to keep the canoes from drifting apart. Art scrounged around in the lunch pack for the biscuits, prepared them, and passed them up to us bowmen on the blade of his paddle. While we were munching our biscuits, the eighteen-foot length of the canoes separated us, making us bowmen and those sternmen two distinct social groups, each more or less free to gossip about the other with impunity—except that from the stern point of view, we bowmen were not of sufficient consequence to even bother slandering.

  “Say, Joe,” began Bruce on this occasion, “what are your thoughts about Art�
��s schedule?” Bruce was always considerate enough—or insecure enough—to ask our opinions before expressing one of his own.

  Joe’s dark eyes flashed angrily under his black hair. “What schedule?” he exploded. Bruce nodded encouragingly. Joe had high cheekbones and an angular nose. He was born in Brazil and was known as Indian Joe among staff at National Geographic when he became an editor there after the trip. “Art takes off on one of his ‘spiritual’ bird walks,” Joe elaborated. “I never know when he’ll return!” The more Joe’s nostrils flared, the more vigorously Bruce nodded. “Leaves me to do all the packing …”

  By the end of Joe’s diatribe against Art, Bruce’s head was nodding up and down with such rapidity that I feared it might bob right off his neck. But eventually Joe’s complaints were spent, so Bruce stopped smiling and turned to me with a more serious expression, until I began complaining too, which started his head nodding again with even more vigor than it had for Joe. Bruce reminded me of my psychiatrist.

  Bruce and Joe had been roommates at Dartmouth, and the three sternmen had all been on at least one trip together before. I was the only member of the expedition who was a complete outsider, so I was grateful to be included in their discussions and to have Bruce approve of my opinions.

  In the beginning of the trip, I had thought myself more than willing to put aside my personal interests for the benefit of the group, but after my panic set in, all I wanted to do was turn around and go home or flee across the Barrens as quickly as possible. My panic subsided in time, but so also did my desire to sacrifice my own interests for the welfare of the expedition. I no longer followed Art around but spent more time reading in my tent. I liked the idea of a schedule so that I would know in advance when I would be free to go for a walk, relax, or write in my journal. Most important, I wanted some assurance that we would arrive at the Hudson’s Bay post at Baker Lake “on schedule”—which is to say, before our food ran out.

  Because Bruce nodded encouragement at every word I spoke as he had done for Joe, it appeared that we three bowmen were in total agreement.

  We decided to name our alliance the United Bowmen’s Association and to go on strike if the sternmen did not accede to our demands. At first it seemed like a joke. Joe and I were fond of laughing and did so frequently. The idea of forming a labor union out in the wilderness and going on strike was ludicrous, but as we were finishing up our hardtack biscuits and getting ready to pick up our paddles, Bruce turned to me and suggested that I, as the eldest of the bowmen, be the spokesman for the association. “Art likes you,” he said. “He’ll listen to you.” I began to feel uneasy, not unlike the way I had felt when my mother encouraged me to rebel against my father. Bruce and Joe watched me expectantly.

  I turned in my seat and addressed Art in the language of the Socialist Labor Party—to which I had once belonged—hoping that our complaint would not be taken personally: “We, the underprivileged working class, demand …”

  Before I had finished the sentence, there was great jeering and guffawing from the sterns at the notion that we bowmen knew the meaning of the word work. Once the banter died down and I had the opportunity to explain what we wanted, Art replied that “the wind does not blow on schedule, and the rain does not fall on schedule.”

  That was the whole point! We bowmen were tired of being governed by the anarchy of wind and rain as interpreted by a mystical guru whose only desire seemed to be to surrender to forces more powerful than he. We wanted to be masters of our destiny and captains of our fate. We wanted a leader who would help us conquer Nature—and our own fears.

  In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky has Jesus kiss the Grand Inquisitor. Like Dostoyevsky, I had been a rebel, but now my rebellion was of a different nature, although not so much against authority as against Art’s refusal to be an authority. Who would have thought that I would have so quickly abandoned my own rebellious nature in favor of the hierarchies of civilization that I believed would protect me from this wilderness anarchy—that I, this atheist, Marxist, pacifist, would have preferred for Art to assume the role of an army sergeant, a wealthy banker who could afford to feed us, or a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church?

  If only he would become the Grand Inquisitor and get us safely across the Barrens, I would kiss not only his cheek but also his feet, so desperate was I that Art become an archetypal male tyrant, any tyrant, if only hierarchical tyranny would carry me safely back to civilization where I could again fill my belly and have the luxury of rebelling against all the evil strictures of civilization in warmth, comfort, and safety.

  As I became more afraid, I developed more and more doubts about Art’s spiritual status. Standing on his wilderness stage and dressed in a cardinal’s scarlet robes, he and all his spiritual wisdom seemed irrelevant amid the “miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles” that comprised the terrifying extent of this endless voyage.

  Though I felt uneasy about Art’s authority, I felt even more uneasy about rebelling against it. Bruce reminded me of my mother, nodding and smiling encouragement at my adolescent proclivity to challenge all authority. At Groton I had received an unprecedented number of black marks on my record, prompting the Headmaster to recommend to my parents that I be sent to summer school, not to improve my grades, but to curb my rebellion. When that did not work, the school suggested a psychiatrist. At Harvard I had managed to get myself kicked out by denouncing capitalism on all my midterm exams. In the army, I had been court-martialed for disrespect to my commanding officer. Self-righteous, as always, I had defended six friends who were accused of something they had not done. My captain discovered his error, let them go, and placed me before the court-martial for disrespect. “You’re too smart to be a corporal,” he said. “You should either be a captain or in the guardhouse.”

  In the army, there are three kinds of courts-martial: summary, special, and general. In mine, the judge, jury, and prosecuting attorney were conveniently embodied in one person, a lieutenant who was a personal friend of my captain and outranked by him. The standing joke in the army about the impartiality of courts-martial is that the presiding officer opens such proceedings by calling for the accused with, “Bring the guilty bastard in.” As the inspector general later explained to me, in civilian life the law is designed to protect the individual; in the army, it is designed to protect the army.

  I lost my corporal’s stripes and my pay and was sentenced to three months in the stockade. However, my outfit was called out on maneuvers in the nick of time, and since my skills were required as a signal corps technician, I never did serve my stockade time. When the inspector general asked if I would like to be transferred to another outfit, I answered no.

  Four months later, when my two-year tour of duty was up, my captain called me into a room along with the other “short timers” to give us all a pep talk about reenlisting.

  When he had placed me before a court-martial, my captain was new to the outfit. He later learned that I was an exemplary soldier. Now, as I was about to be discharged, he turned to me and said, “The army has need of good soldiers.”

  This captain was an African American man who had won an athletic scholarship to college. Everywhere but in the army, he had been greeted with prejudice. He loved the army, and now he turned to me and invited me to join him. He had actually been a good officer, and, despite our initial run-in, I had come to respect him. Nonetheless, I shook my head.

  “What will you do on the outside?”

  “Shine shoes, I guess.”

  My captain looked at me.

  One hundred and twenty-six of my ancestors had been officers in the Continental army during the War of Independence. Earlier, during the French and Indian Wars, one of my ancestors, Major General Jedidiah Preble, outranked George Washington when they both served in the Colonial Forces, and, well over a century later, still another had been the commanding officer at West Point while my black captain’s ancestors were presumably shining shoes.

  My captain looked at his
shoes. Prejudice had caught up with him at last, even in his beloved army.

  There is a joke about a husband who finds the bishop in bed with his wife. The husband goes to the window and begins blessing the people on the street. Incredulous, the bishop asks, “What on earth are you doing?” “Because you have taken over my duties,” the husband replies, “I thought I should take over yours.”

  I suppose that, unconsciously, I felt I should be playing the role of commanding officer, while he polished my shoes. But unlike the bishop, my captain had performed his duties faithfully, and unlike the injured husband, I had not been betrayed. It was not a blessing, but the curse of prejudice I was dispensing. I was not worthy to shine my captain’s shoes.

  “We, the underprivileged working class, demand …”

  Every time I rebelled I succeeded only in hurting good men the men I loved and respected—I, this self-righteous angel of destruction.

  Perhaps it had been just coincidence, but January 19, 1953, the day I was thrown out of Harvard, was also the day my father, that gentle, peaceful Wall Street banker, committed suicide.

  The shadow of doubt had fallen across the stage of my dreams on which Art stood with such an aura of power. But while I struggled with my perception of him, Art had other concerns. He did not reply to the demands of the United Bowmen’s Association. Instead, he dipped his paddle into the water and propelled his canoe down the lake. Shortly thereafter, so did the rest of us.

  Two days after our failed revolt, a storm came up and the six of us were held on a spit of land for four days.

  At midnight on the fourth day, although waves were still breaking on the rocks, Art began to pack his canoe. The wind had finally died enough for us to continue our journey. Three hours later, still picking our way cautiously through the shoals, we felt currents sweep the canoes out of the lake and into the fast Dubawnt River. The rising sun burned the mackerel skies a brilliant crimson.