Death on the Barrens

by George James Grinnell

  Art pulled the gray canoe into an eddy and went ashore. He climbed a hill, built a fire, and brewed a pot of hot chocolate. Under the golden light of dawn, we watched the clear water flow beneath us and around a bend to the north as it tumbled through a rapids.

  Although we had already paddled all night, we continued our journey down the river because the wind was calm and the sky clear.

  So much for the United Bowmen’s Association. We had learned that what Art told us was true: the wind does not blow on schedule, nor the rain fall on schedule.

  CHAPTER 8

  Separate Ways

  But when I breathe with the birds,

  The spirit of wrath becomes the spirit of blessing

  And the dead begin from the dark to sing in my sleep.

  —THEODORE ROETHKE, “JOURNEY TO THE INTERIOR”

  When Peter and I entered our first rapids, we knew the real adventure was beginning at last, so I dug my paddle strongly into the river to drive our canoe forward with all my strength. The blade of my paddle bent. We shot down the rapids at full speed, totally out of control.

  I could feel Pete’s agitated shifting back and forth on his stern seat as the canoe careened this way and that and finally slammed into a boulder on the bank. I heard the stem crack. The current swung the stern around and carried us sideways downstream. We straightened ourselves out in time to run full speed over another boulder. I heard the ribs cracking under my right foot as I drove the canoe over the top with all my strength.

  Our Chestnut canoe was wonderful. Too bad the company went out of business. The many layers of canvas seemed to be more than a quarter-inch thick, and the ribs were close together and strong; they cracked, but the canoe did not break apart.

  Before we reached the bottom of our first rapids, we smashed into yet another boulder. This was Pete’s first rapids as a sternman, and when we were done, Art asked him if he wanted to shoot any more. Pete never uttered a word of complaint about my uncontrollable technique, or lack of technique. He just nodded.

  Peter was a silent man. He worked hard and said little, and although we shared a tent and canoe, I could have counted the number of words we had exchanged during the first month of the trip on my left hand. We might have been mistaken for two Trappist monks on a pilgrimage. There were, however, some exceptions.

  One evening early in the trip, my air mattress had encroached an inch or two onto his side of the tent. He protested, so as a solution we dropped a plumb line down from the center seam to the floor. He made a mark, and the issue never arose again. As the poet Robert Frost noted, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

  I liked pitching our tent high on a hill where the view was good and where the wind kept the bugs away. The others generally pitched their tents as close to the campfire as possible so that they did not have to carry their packs too far and could be more sociable. At first, Peter did not seem to mind where I pitched the tent, and I thought he was happy to be away from the others. One evening, however, when our tent was pitched on the peak of a small mountain, a frightening thunderstorm struck, and a blue ball of lightning rolled through the tent between our two air mattresses. A few days later, I again pitched our tent on the highest point around, but when I tried to return to it after dinner, I discovered that Pete had moved it to a more secure location. Frequently thereafter, I would find our tent moved.

  Peter and I did have some minor disputes, but they tended to be nonverbal. When we set off in the canoes in the mornings, my back was sometimes stiff. I generally attributed my discomfort to the load in the canoe being unbalanced, so I would slide over in my seat and sit closer to the gunwale, thus tipping the canoe to the side on which I paddled. Inevitably, I would feel a jerking motion in the stern as Peter slid over in the opposite direction. My response was to slide farther to the right, then he farther to the left, until we were both hanging out of the canoe on opposite sides. Eventually we would stop paddling and “adjust the load.” He would move packs over in one direction, and I in the other. This would go on for the first hour or so until my back limbered up, and then we would give up shifting around and paddle down the lake, half asleep out of boredom.

  Once, I turned in my seat and suggested to Peter, partly to relieve the tedium, that we should change the sides we always paddled on. He did not reply. “If we don’t change, we’ll become lopsided,” I argued.

  Pete hesitated, thoughtfully, and finally responded, “Art’s not l-l-lopsided.” We both looked over at Art. His left shoulder was hanging noticeably lower than his right. “Art n-n-never changes,” Peter affirmed, then picked up his paddle and resumed his stroke on the port side, just as he and Art had always done.

  Other silent confrontations occurred when we kicked the poles back and forth in the bottom of our canoe. Early in the trip, Art had cut fifteen poles of black spruce averaging about twelve feet in length. He used nine of these to build a frame for the kitchen tarpaulin: six for the two tripods at the ends, a ridgepole to throw the tarp over, and two more at the sides to lash the ends down. We also carried six spares in case anything wooden broke on the Barrens, where no tree grows bigger than knee high. The Chipewyans call the Barrens the “land of the little sticks.” So we carried our own big sticks.

  We were very glad that Art had had the foresight to cut these poles while the wood was still available south of the height of land. They were useful in many situations, such as in shallow rapids, when we used them to pole the canoes through the rock gardens. While in transit, they were kept at the bottom of the canoes and served to elevate the packs and keep the oatmeal and hardtack from getting wet and growing moldy. Our canoes were not covered and frequently took in water: on the lakes, high waves could wash aboard; in rapids, spray constantly drenched us; and on rainy days, the drops collected and sloshed around the bottoms of the canoes. Our packs were made of canvas, which repelled the spray and the rain, but they were not waterproof. Setting them on top of the poles helped to keep our oatmeal dry, or more or less dry—sooner or later, of course, everything went moldy that could go moldy.

  Although these poles were extremely useful to have, they were uncomfortable to transport. They extended the length of the canoe from Peter’s feet to mine. At some point during any given day, the poles underfoot would annoy me. In order to relieve both my discomfort and my boredom, I would nudge them slowly back toward the stern. A half hour or so later, I would notice that the poles had returned to their original position. For three months those poles migrated from stem to stern and stern to stem, Peter’s toe kicking them toward the bow and my heel kicking them back, without either of us ever saying anything.

  Our almost total lack of verbal communication was both advantageous and not. The advantage was that we were each able to inhabit our own little world, our orbits rarely overlapping, except when the poles got underfoot, my air mattress infringed on his, or I pitched our tent in a location of which he did not approve. The disadvantage, however, became apparent when we tried to shoot that first rapids.

  One morning I had been lying in our tent, reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, when the walls suddenly collapsed around me. I poked my head out the portal to see Peter pulling out the tent pegs. I pointed out to him that Art was still sitting by the fire sipping his breakfast tea and showing no signs of packing up or getting ready to leave, but Peter went on about his task without replying. Soon he had loaded and boarded our red canoe. I assumed he was planning to leave without Art, but I was wrong. He just sat, stoically, in his stern seat, paddle in hand for two hours, waiting.

  Peter and Art had gotten along when they had descended the Albany River together two years earlier. They were both slightly built, both strong and quiet in a determined sort of way, and they seemed to share a mutual respect; but now Peter, like us bowmen, was beginning to drift away from Art.

  Art’s previous trips had been run more or less on schedule. Art had been down the Albany six times and knew what lay around every bend. There were three Cre
e villages along its banks where he was able to replenish supplies, and he had always arrived at Fort Albany in time to catch the boat to Moosonee and deposit his charges at the railhead back to civilization, on schedule.

  Pete was sixteen when he joined Art on that earlier venture. His parents had paid Art for the trip, and it was Art’s job to see that Pete, Skip, and their other young companions returned home safely and on time. But Art had organized our Dubawnt trip with a different purpose in mind. He was not being paid by our parents to look after us, and his attention was focused elsewhere.

  Peter was the type to express his desires through action. He was almost always the first across the portages, the first to get ready in the mornings, and the first to launch his canoe, but Art did not seem to get the message. In his diary, Art noted only of this determination that Pete and I were “iron men.” We never rested on the portages, and our canoe tended to ease ahead of the others on the lakes if we did not hold ourselves in check.

  As time passed, Peter, like us bowmen, became increasingly worried about running out of food before we reached Baker Lake. About once a week his rear end could be seen sticking out from under an overturned canoe while he made an inventory of our remaining supplies. By the end of the third week he had begun to save empty jam tins and peanut butter jars, into which he placed bits of his lunch ration in preparation for the inevitable day when our food ran out.

  Joe noticed this and teased him, “If we ran out of food and were starving, surely you would share your little cache with us?”

  Joe had been teased earlier in the trip when we discovered that he had packed a supplementary personal supply of gourmet chocolate and cheese in his extra large pack.

  When Pete did not reply, Bruce LeFavour repeated the question. Pete’s reluctance to speak may have had something to do with his tendency to stammer, but finally he replied firmly, “S-s-save y-y-your own.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The Second Sugar Dispute

  There are joys which long to be ours; God sends ten thousand truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.

  —HENRY WARD BEECHER

  Early in the trip, the sole of Bruce’s right boot had come unstitched, causing him to hobble around with a worried expression on his face. Art pretended not to notice, which was unlikely because Bruce made a point of flapping the sole in Art’s face at every possible opportunity.

  His subtle method failing, Bruce confronted Art directly during a smoke break when the canoes were adrift on Black Lake: “Say, Art, what do you think I ought to do about my boot?” Art did not answer while Bruce stared hopefully across the water at him.

  Bruce was wearing L. L. Bean boots; in fact everyone was wearing L. L. Bean boots but me. Bruce’s boots were new, bought specially for the trip because Art had recommended them, and now they were falling apart. I had admired the soft, oiled leather of the L. L. Bean boot. Shod in this light footwear, Art glided over the rough, rocky terrain with amazing agility, but when I saw what happened to Bruce’s boot, I was glad not to have traded in my clumsy old army boots.

  The worried expression on Bruce’s face deepened. I had wondered if Art would turn around and head back to the Hudson’s Bay post at Stony Rapids so that Bruce could order a new pair of boots. Any further delay would effectively kill the expedition. I waited silently and wished Bruce would just shut up and fix his damn boot.

  Finally Art replied, “Well, Bruce, if I were you, I would write a letter to Mr. L. L. Bean: ‘Dear Mr. Bean: You son of a bitch! Love, Bruce.’” Everyone laughed, except Bruce. The worried expression deepened.

  Art flicked the minuscule butt of his cigarette into the air; it made a slow arc, fell into the water, fizzled, spat, and died. He then picked up his paddle and, without further comment, continued down the lake into the night.

  Skip leaned forward in the green canoe and whispered reassuringly to his bowman, “There’s stuff in the repair kit, Bruce. You’re welcome to use whatever you need to fix your boot.”

  Bruce and Pete, the two youngest members of the expedition, expressed their fears differently: Peter rose early, worked hard, and saved bits of food in discarded peanut butter jars, while Bruce tried to ease his fear by seeking someone to rely on. Initially, that someone had been Art. Bruce had not been able to do anything without asking Art’s permission. At first Art was patient, but slowly he became callous. The final straw came when Bruce expected Art to fix his boot for him, or, failing that, turn the entire expedition around.

  When recruiting us, Art had made it quite clear that the expedition would be dangerous, that there would be no hospitals, radios, or L. L. Bean stores on the Barrens. If something went wrong, we either had to deal with it ourselves or suffer the consequences. Bruce had been forewarned, but it was only when his boot actually fell apart that reality sank in.

  One by one, we picked up our paddles and followed Art down the lake. Bruce picked up his paddle too, but this incident was a turning point for him. He was no longer following Art; from that moment on, his allegiance belonged to Skip.

  Skip was handsome, resolute, and idealistic; he was also three years older than Bruce. Before the trip, he had been a senior at Dartmouth, while Bruce was a lowly freshman. Now, with degree in hand, Skip knew the essentials of philosophy, literature, ethics, etiquette, mountain climbing, shooting rapids, and personal grooming, and he was not averse to delivering homilies on any of the above at the slightest provocation.

  Young, lanky Bruce, trying to make the transition from adolescence to manhood, could think of no more ideal a role model than Skip. Unlike Skip, Bruce was not especially good looking, with his round cherubic face and undershot chin atop an awkwardly tall and loosely built frame that gave the impression of having grown faster than his ability to control it. He walked with a perpetually bowed head, his legs and feet flopping out in front of him. Fortunately, Art had assigned Bruce to Skip’s canoe, and therefore also to the same tent, where, at night, Skip could instruct Bruce on how to improve himself while Bruce nodded in appreciative adulation.

  Although Bruce and Skip were very different, they did have two things in common: they had both been the butt of Art’s unmerciful sense of humor (Bruce the victim of Art’s L. L. Bean joke and Skip the victim of Art’s satirical belches), and they both came to the conclusion that Skip would make a better leader than Art. Yet when Bruce tried to play the role of Lady Macbeth and seduce Skip into deposing King Moffatt, Skip hesitated; he was not yet ready to betray his leader.

  Toward the end of July, we came to a rapids about which Art and Skip disagreed. As with most things, there is more than one way to shoot a rapids. In the old-fashioned style, the bowman provides the power while the sternman uses his paddle as a rudder to keep the bow pointing downstream. The idea is to smash through high standing waves at full-speed to prevent swamping and to strike boulders head-on rather than broadside to prevent capsizing. If there is plenty of water in the river, this technique works well.

  Modern canoeists, however, have largely abandoned the traditional methods in favor of a more gentle approach by which the bowman draws the canoe to port or to starboard while the sternman eases the canoe down the rapids by back-paddling. If the canoe is decked over, the modern canoeist can “play” in the rapids, ducking into backwaters, quartering the standing waves, ferrying across the current, and weaving through the rock gardens.

  Art had taught himself how to shoot rapids alone on the Albany River at seventeen. He had had no bowman to provide power, so he negotiated rapids slowly and carefully, working his way down with the current and the back eddies. Art’s philosophy of shooting rapids was generally the same as his philosophy of life: he did not believe in slam-banging through anything.

  Art studied the standing waves at the foot of the rapids and frowned. Our fully loaded eighteen-foot Prospector canoes gave us only three inches of freeboard and carried no deck to s
hed any waves that should happen to break aboard; they were slow to turn and quick to swamp. Using his gentle technique, Art feared foundering in the standing waves below the rapids. He suggested we portage.

  Skip disagreed. Art shrugged and told him to try it if he wanted to. The green canoe, with Skip in the stern and Bruce in the bow, descended the chute at full speed, crashed through the standing waves, and negotiated the rocks below without mishap. Skip pulled into a back eddy and raised his paddle triumphantly.

  Peter and I followed in our red canoe. Because we made up in power for what we lacked in skill, we also experienced no difficulties, but the gray canoe, with Art in the stern and Joe in the bow, moved at a gentler pace and took on water just as Art had feared. He managed to maneuver into a backwater near the shore before the canoe, full of water and gunwales awash, capsized. Art and Joe were able to rescue all the packs and boxes, so nothing was lost, but it was a triumph for Skip and further proof, from Bruce’s perspective, that Skip should be our leader rather than Art.

  Near the rapids, an outcrop of ancient gneiss worn smooth by the passing of the last ice sheet was carpeted with pale green caribou moss. A stunted black spruce with gnarled roots and a gray weather-beaten trunk clung precariously to a crevice; the rest of the rocky shore was bare of trees and provided excellent ground for laying out the soaked bags of oatmeal to dry in the sun. Although we had made little progress that day, Art called a halt for the remainder in order to dry the food and other supplies he carried in his gray canoe.

  Despite the unfortunate swamping, it was a beautiful campsite, and all would have been peace and harmony had Skip not taken advantage of the delay to make an inventory of our supplies. After dinner, he called us to attention. “Gentlemen!” he announced, as was his custom, his eyes fixed upon us disapprovingly while he waited for silence. When all was quiet, he announced that since going on Art’s honor system we had consumed even more sugar than we had before. If we did not reform our ways, we would run out in a few weeks, before the expedition was even half over.