Joe, joking as always, said that he did not want to turn back because he would be unable to face the people in Stony Rapids who had given us such a heroic send-off. Skip and Art admonished him for allowing such a trivial consideration to enter into the discussion of such a serious matter.
I stood off to one side, observing the others. Something wondrous lay ahead.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
I feared now only one thing: Art might be serious about turning around.
Why was he smiling at me?
For more than a month we had been living in the wilderness, but we had not yet been reborn. At twenty-two, I should already have passed from childhood into youth, from dependency to independence, or, in William Blake’s poetic imagery, from lamb to tiger so that one day I might evolve into a shepherd.
Art was shepherding us, but he seemed to want to be released from that burden of responsibility, perhaps so that he would be free to turn the expedition around and return to his wife and daughters, or perhaps so that he might proceed in peace.
Like so many veterans, Art had envisioned his own tombstone before his time on earth was up. He knew the meaninglessness of the quest for gold, the vanity of planting flags on mountain tops, and the futility of fighting for the glory of empires. What was meaningful was to live in harmony with the natural world, in reconciliation with the people around him, and at peace within himself.
Art looked into my eyes. I looked into his and understood little except my desire to continue my pilgrimage wherever it might lead. All I really understood was that if we turned around and went home, I would be trapped in my beetle shell forever.
After breakfast the following day, I washed the oatmeal pot, filled it with water, and climbed the hill where Art lingered by the breakfast fire. I stood facing him. The others were hurrying about loading the canoes. Art smiled at me, but I was too afraid to smile back; I feared he was having second thoughts about turning the expedition around.
There was no danger of our campfire starting a forest fire on that island with its one clump of stunted spruce down in the valley, already drenched by three days of rain. A light drizzle was still falling, but, scowling at Art, I drowned the last bit of warmth there was on that bleak island anyway. The campfire spat and hissed.
The darkness drops again, but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
As the fire went out, Art stood up, looking annoyed, and walked down to the water to launch his canoe.
CHAPTER 12
Caribou
When you become a sheet of music without notes, your song will sing to you.
—JOHN SQUADRA
“Caribou!” I exclaimed in a hushed yell, seeing the creature standing atop a hill overlooking the Dubawnt River, its great antlers arching into the sky. Art had already stopped paddling, and then he quickly turned toward shore and splashed out onto the bank, movie camera in hand.
“Stay by the canoes!” he commanded in a coarse whisper—the only command he had ever issued during the entire trip—and then bounded up the hill. Skip, with a still camera, followed him cautiously at a distance, as did Peter Franck.
“Joe,” Bruce called from the bow seat of the green canoe, “what do you think we should do if Art doesn’t let us kill it?”
“I’ll use my rifle on Art,” Joe replied. “You use yours on the caribou.”
We secured the canoes and sat on the moss waiting for Art to get his pictures. The majestic caribou stood sentinel for a long time before spotting Art, then suddenly leaped into the air and trotted out of sight behind a distant hill. Our mouths watered, our stomachs grumbled, and we feared we would never see another caribou. When the sternmen returned, we pushed off again downriver, not at all pleased at the result of this encounter.
We need not have worried; as we rounded a bend, hundreds of caribou suddenly came into view, then thousands. They were grazing the hills, resting near the river, milling about everywhere. Some retreated when they saw us coming, and others did not even bother to get to their feet as our canoes glided by; they lay on the bank lethargically chewing their cud and watched us pass.
Our joy at seeing them was unbounded—and not at all restricted to the thought of a full belly. These were the first warm bodies we had seen since leaving Stony Rapids more than a month earlier. Somehow, we felt less alone. Art continued to lead us downstream, our eyes bulging and our mouths watering. Eventually Art pulled in to shore to make camp and stood by while Bruce unpacked his .30-.06 and Joe his .30-.30.
I watched Art and wondered whether he would try to prevent the hunt. Finally Art said he would like to accompany Bruce and Joe to film the killing. The huntsmen looked at each other, thoughts of the Moffatt Maternity League in mind no doubt, but said nothing. There were so many caribou, it was difficult to believe that Art would be able to scare them all away.
After the hunters left, Skip asked me to help him try to lasso a caribou that had wandered into camp. I complied, but the caribou, seeming more puzzled by our antics than afraid, just trotted into the river and swam to the other side, where it could graze in peace.
After a while the hunters returned to lead me to their kill. I slit the belly, rolled up my sleeves, and reached through the warm intestines to remove the heart and liver. My arms lingered in the wet warmth of the caribou’s blood while the others stood around and watched. The words I had heard repeated so frequently at Communion in the chapel at Groton rang in my ears: “These are my body and blood, which are given up for you: eat, drink, in memory of me.”
We carried the butchered caribou back to camp and that evening gratefully ate forty-two steaks. I made a ritual of eating the heart and drinking the blood. I needed to affirm that the gods had given the life of this beautiful creature to me.
There is a Buddhist joke about an old man and his friend the rabbit. Becoming aware that the old man is hungry, the rabbit jumps into the fire to roast itself. While eating it, the old man realizes that the rabbit he has just eaten was the Buddha. As I filled my hungry belly, I saw the roasted caribou as Buddha, as Jesus Christ, as the symbol of everything that has become sacred in the world by dying for us.
I had met this god before at the supermarket in the form of eviscerated chickens, minced cows, and the like wrapped in cellophane—the remains of animals that had also been sacrificed, although they had seemed to me then more like dead meat than like God.
Backward along the path of enlightenment, we were being carried. Art had led us from the modern supermarket down a long spiritual path to the world of the Lascaux caves. There is a picture in those caves, painted twenty thousand years ago, of a shaman dressed in caribou fur, his arms and legs poised to mimic a caribou prancing. I wanted to dress like a caribou and prance about also. I wanted to turn the caribou into me by eating it, and I wanted to turn myself into it so that I would no longer feel so alien in this beautiful land. I scraped the hide and wore it under my shirt.
Nuliajuk (Diana in the European pantheon) is the goddess of the hunt, the virgin mother. Individual caribou are born and die; individual men and women are born and die; but the virgin mother lives on forever for she gives birth to us all.
There is a sacred bond between us and those creatures that die to feed us. To meditate on this sacred bond, a shaman would pass in and out of caribou consciousness until spiritually transformed. Similarly, Sufi mystics have a tradition of retiring into caves to meditate, and the Christian Gospels tell of Jesus’s f
orty-day meditation in the desert. Buddhist monks withdraw into meditation sometimes for as long as three years. All mystics meditate. There does not seem to be a fixed length of time for the transformation of consciousness, but the mystic must die to this world in three ways in order to achieve enlightenment: the first of the three meditations is on physical death, the second on nominal death, and the third on spiritual death.
By embodying the spirit of a caribou and meditating on the caribou’s death, the shaman can begin to appreciate what it is like to be physically dead and take the first step toward enlightenment. By withdrawing from society into a cave or the desert and letting the mind empty itself of the memory of friends and family, the shaman is freed of the ties of personal identity and can take another step toward enlightenment.
The final step, toward the death of the soul, is the most difficult to experience, but it is the final step before enlightenment. Having traversed the realms of physical and nominal death, the mystic clings desperately to the idea of God’s existence, thus preserving the soul’s link to some exterior reality, but the final meditation, on the annihilation of God, then becomes the most frightening experience of all. Bathed in terror, the mystic drowns in the abyss of unknowing.
Sometimes the mystic dies in despair, but sometimes a miracle happens, a flash of light, a feeling of great warmth, and the mystic is transported in joy to a heavenly realm surrounded by angels. The mystic becomes aware that individual existence is absolutely nothing without the gifts of other creatures: the gift of identity in the darkness, bestowed by family and friends who pray for us; the gift of life itself given in ultimate sacrifice by the plants and animals that die so we might eat; and, finally, the gift of a soul granted by the One who is unknowable. Having achieved enlightenment, the mystic reappears to the world as a bodhisattva full of understanding, joy, and gratitude.
Art’s method of educating us was very different from the methods used by Groton, Harvard, and the U.S. Army. At Groton and Harvard, I had been trained to become part of the richest oligarchy in world history. In the army, I had been trained to be part of the most powerful military force in world history. But Art’s method was completely different: he waited for the wilderness to do the educating. What Art had understood, and what we did not, is that God is not the one who kills and eats; God is the one who is killed and eaten.
If one walks in the Garden of Eden long enough, one will see the beautiful caribou dying. When one cuts into the flesh of a caribou to abate one’s hunger and drinks the blood to quench one’s thirst, one cannot help but feel gratitude. After thirty-four days in the wilderness, I could see God more clearly now, prancing about the hills.
At Groton, we boys rushed out of chapel to “Hundred House,” where dinner was served at long tables. Masters sat one to each end, and the entire dining room was surveyed from an elevated head table in front of a large bay window. When the Reverend John Crocker Jr. (or the Reverend Jesus Christ Jr., as we called the headmaster) looked down from the head table, he could see all the boys. When the boys looked up, what we saw was the nimbus of the blinding sunlight forming a halo behind his head.
Before meals, two hundred boys stood behind their chairs silently waiting for grace. “Bless, O Lord, this food to our use, and us to thy service.”
As I butchered and ate Jesus Christ in the form of a caribou, part of the Christian liturgy (“These are my body and blood, which are given up for you”) came back to me; but the Groton School grace was more problematic in my mind. In that benediction lay an uneasy mixture of utility and service. As the caribou became my body, its spirit began an argument in my heart: which god did I really want to serve—the god of the caribou that had just died for me or the god of the American empire?
Groton had been founded in the previous century, by the Reverend Endicott Peabody, for the moral improvement of the sons of the rich. For the opportunity of having my morals improved and for the ancillary benefit of getting me out from underfoot, my parents, or rather my great-uncle, George Bird Grinnell, had paid Groton a small fortune.
George Bird Grinnell had followed a slightly different path in life than my other relatives, as he appears to have been interested in things other than making money. He founded the Audubon Society, the American Museum of Natural History, and the magazine Forest and Stream. He went out west to live with Native Americans and wrote numerous books attempting to preserve their stories and their culture. He worked hard to restore to them the lands some of my other relatives were stealing while building railroads across the nation. Before he died, the Blackfoot Nation made him an honorary chief. He was also a close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, and together they founded Yellowstone National Park and Glacier National Park, where Grinnell Glacier and Grinnell Mountain are named in his honor. He had taken my father out west to meet the Native Americans, but the reason he paid my way through Groton is not so clear to me. Groton trained my soul to march, and the caribou taught it to dance, but I could not both march and dance to the same tune.
The Reverend Endicott Peabody had modeled Groton after Eton and Harrow, the boarding schools in England that trained British aristocrats to govern the British empire. Eton and Harrow, in turn, had been modeled after the schools of the Jesuits. The Groton School prayer (“Teach us, O Lord, to give and not to count the cost, to seek and not to hope to find, to labor and not to ask for any reward save that of knowing we do thy will”) was abridged by Peabody (without acknowledgment to the founder of the Society of Jesus from whence he had plagiarized it) and then used at Groton. It has never been clear to me whether we were being trained to follow Jesus or to rule the American empire.
The Groton graduate who is best known around the world is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the United States from 1933 to 1945. Other Grotonians of that era had already infiltrated the Senate, the State Department, and a large number of investment banking firms, including my father’s. Jimmy Roosevelt, Franklin’s son, was a junior partner there.
Once in power, Grotonians created the most formidable war machine the world had ever seen. Before and during World War II, Roosevelt secretly appropriated two billion dollars from Congress to mass-produce nuclear weapons. Two billion dollars is a lot of money, equal in those days to the value of the entire American automobile industry.
Roosevelt is frequently portrayed as a friend of the poor, but then, so was Adolf Hitler. Under the guise of a program of “aid to farmers,” Roosevelt bankrupted the homesteaders for the benefit of wealthy landowners. Today in America, there are no homesteads left, and Jeffersonian democracy, with its ideal that every family should own enough land to feed itself, is dead.
When boys reach the sixth form at Groton, they receive a dark blue blazer with the Groton coat of arms emblazoned over the left breast pocket, the words cui servire est regnare embroidered in gold on a crimson, silver, and black background. If you ask a Grotonian what the Latin means, he will recite, “whom to serve is perfect freedom.” If you read Latin, though, you will know that it really reads, “whom to serve is to rule.”
In the Middle Ages, serfs were obligated to hand over a third of the produce of their labors to the lords of the manor. Today, the few remaining family farmers in America hand over more than ninety percent of their produce to the lords of Wall Street. At the time of the American Revolution, seventy-two percent of the population worked their own farms and were free of debt. Today, fewer than two percent of the population own their own farms, and eighty-five percent of the people are sunk to their ears in debt. The average farmer today works longer hours than a medieval serf and turns over a larger portion of the farm’s yield to the new lords in the form of taxes and interest on bank loans. Roosevelt called this his New Deal. If you are up to your ears in debt and have been dispossessed of American land, you have us Grotonians to thank.
Or perhaps you don’t. There are many reasons for the bankruptcy of Jeffersonian democracy. Groton and Roosevelt’s New Deal are not the only culprits. Once the American
people had been driven from the land and into cities under the guise of farm aid, they had to borrow money to buy a home, a car, and packaged food. Those who could not afford these essential amenities became dependent on the government, which borrowed the money for them. The poor got poorer, the middle class got taxed to desperation, and Grotonians and other investment bankers watched, their hands outstretched to collect interest on all those debts.
Discipline at Groton had been strict. If a first former showed disrespect to a sixth former, he was summarily tossed down the second-floor garbage chute. More severe cases of disrespect were punished by “pumping.” There was only one bathtub at Groton, and it was not used for bathing (we washed in tin basins). The offending lower former would be ordered into the senior prefect’s office and then taken to the bathtub to have his lungs pumped. Before the boy drowned, he would be rushed over to the infirmary to have his lungs pumped out. This practice had to be discontinued when the irate parents of one boy threatened to bring charges of attempted murder against the senior prefect who had pumped him. Likewise, the practice of tossing disrespectful lower formers down the garbage chute was discontinued because of broken bones, but both practices were accepted disciplinary measures when Franklin Delano Roosevelt and my father attended Groton. Beneath the angelic guise of Christianity lay the reality of ruthless submission to the hierarchy.
Despite Japanese inquiries about terms of peace more than a month earlier, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vaporized by a uranium and a plutonium bomb, respectively, detonated at a precise altitude and at such a time of day as to cause maximum loss of life. Roosevelt had died before the bombs were actually dropped, but his quest for world domination had carried the atom bomb project to fruition.
Although Admiral Nimitz and General Eisenhower favored replying to the Japanese emperor’s overtures toward peace, they were overruled by James Conant, then president of Harvard University, by Robert Oppenheimer, later a professor at Harvard, and by Secretary of State Henry Stimson, a Groton graduate.
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