Prisoners of the North

by Berton, Pierre

  Here, too, as Hornby discovered, one finds the bizarre geological formations known as eskers—high ridges of sand and gravel looking like railway embankments, some a hundred feet high and a dozen miles in length, their crests flattened by the hooves of thousands of migrating caribou. These snake-like ridges, which provide the only shelter from the winds that howl across the treeless plains, are deposits of sediment made by streams of meltwater that flowed in tunnels under the ice when the glaciers were decaying. It was in a dugout in one of these eskers that Hornby and a companion took shelter for an entire winter.

  The Barrens made him and in the end the Barrens destroyed him. He would have had it no other way. As an early biographer has put it: “Without the Barrens there could have been no Hornby. Without them, he would have been a misfit—one of society’s drop-outs.” The settled world was not for Jack Hornby. “You can fully realize how miserable I feel here,” he wrote from England to a former partner between forays into the tundra. “This senseless life is detestable. How can people feel justified in leading an aimless existence?”

  Yet Hornby himself led an aimless existence, wandering about the North without any real objective, usually ill-prepared and ill-equipped for misfortune or disaster. He liked it that way. As his erstwhile companion Captain James Critchell-Bullock put it, “No argument could persuade Hornby that any Arctic or sub-Arctic explorer was worthy of consideration unless the principals have gone out on a shoestring and returned by the skin of their teeth.”

  Hornby, on the edge of the Barrens, travelling light with his dog, Punch.

  Many of those qualities he had absorbed from the native Indians, with whom he had a love-hate relationship and to whom, at times, he showed the generous if impulsive side of his nature. They might steal from him; but when they were starving he shared his meagre rations with them, and when he was close to death they brought him food. It was the same with his trail mates. In periods of stress he was not above carrying the heaviest loads on a portage or cutting back on his own rations to sustain a comrade. Hornby remarked more than once that he wished he had been born an Indian, and a good many of those who knew him tended to think of him as an Indian. He walked in a kind of crouch, and he learned to move quickly through difficult country, keeping his loads to a minimum, living off the land, and making himself an expert on the movements of the caribou. Max Cameron, chief geographer at the Department of Mines, who had little sympathy for the natives, once remarked that Hornby “was remarkable for his Indian characteristics: improvidence, periods of intense energy, alternating with slovenly, lazy slipshod.”

  “Slovenly” may not apply to Indians, but it did apply to Hornby, who was in the habit of cracking open caribou bones with a hammer and sucking out the marrow, who used a single knife, which he never washed, for every operation from eating to butchering, and who cleaned his rump with a stick after relieving himself. He took the English love of tea to extremes, brewing himself a potful on every conceivable occasion, waking his fellows at two in the morning when necessary to heat the water over fires fuelled by anything combustible—a side of bacon, books or newspapers, fox fat, his own filthy trousers, or the shirt off his back.

  More than one observer described him as Chaplinesque, a gaunt little man, only five foot four, weighing no more than one hundred pounds. He had a swarthy complexion, a prominent beak of a nose, a head of long, tangled, matted black hair, and intensely blue eyes. He would never travel with a brown-eyed man, he said; they were not to be trusted. He dressed like a street beggar in ragged trousers, an old shirt, and a grubby overcoat; yet at the bottom of his pack he carried a dinner jacket, black bow tie, dress shirt, two hairbrushes mounted in monogrammed silver, and two silver-capped bottles of cologne—indispensable, no doubt, for a man who rarely washed.

  His remarkable stamina contributed to his legendary status in the North. A powerful and relentless walker, he had once run a hundred miles between Edmonton and Athabasca Landing on a bet. On another occasion he had managed to keep up with a galloping horse at fifty miles an hour and had even run side by side with a speeding locomotive. Once in Edmonton, he had decided to visit his cousins in Onoway, fifty miles distant, only to learn that the train would not leave until the following morning. “No good for me,” he declared, and headed off in moccasins, without an overcoat. The next morning he headed right back. These are legends, told over the years, and no doubt built up in the telling. But no one disputed the claim of the Edmonton Journal, which declared that he “could outrun any Indian on the trail, could outlast any Indian in endurance, and could outstarve any Indians when there was nothing left but starvation.” Hornby relished this kind of praise and encouraged it. It sustained him in those wan moments of cold, starvation, and despair that he made his lot.

  Much of what we know about Hornby comes as a result of the careful research and investigative skills of George Whalley about half a century ago. Whalley was able to cover the actual ground as well as to interview the most prominent actors in the Hornby drama who were still alive. Hornby wrote no memoir, though he had planned a book about the Barrens to be called The Land of Feast and Famine; fortunately, Whalley was able to uncover some of Hornby’s correspondence, especially with his friend and comrade George Douglas, for his biography, The Legend of John Hornby, an eloquent work that is essential reading for those who want to delve further into the land of the caribou and muskox.

  Hornby, Whalley tells us, came to Canada in 1904 on a whim—he seemed to do everything on a whim—with no particular purpose in mind. He came of a family of wealthy cotton merchants and was educated at Harrow. His father was a champion cricketer, one of the most famous in England, and a Rugby Blue. The evidence suggests that Hornby, at twenty-three, was running away. From what? The settled, upper-middle-class life was clearly not for him. He had no need to scrabble for funds. One suspects that Hornby was bored and that to him Canada represented adventure. But he chose Edmonton as a destination only because he had a cousin in the area and not because the city was the gateway to the Canadian North. In fact he did not seem to have any burning desire to travel farther than Athabasca Landing. He had no plans for the future—he never seemed to have any plans—and hung around Edmonton for the next four years taking occasional jobs (a railway gang, a survey party) and lounging about in the town’s hotel bars.

  Much of this early period is a blur, enlightened by occasional reminiscences such as those of Yardley Weaver, with whom he shared a survey tent in the Athabasca country. One night they heard a movement outside and Hornby sat upright in his blankets to declare that the pack horses were trying to get water from a nearby creek. He plunged out immediately into the freezing cold, bare-headed and barefooted, chopped a hole in the ice so that the animals could drink, came back to his blankets, and immediately fell asleep. It is a revealing story; Hornby was an animal lover who was forced in trying times to hunt for food but never for sport. One thing that bothered him was the thoughtless and inhumane treatment that the natives dealt out to their dogs.

  Edmonton in those days was the jumping-off point for the Canadian Northwest. A steady wave of trappers, prospectors, and miners moved in and out of the community, which buzzed with tales of the hinterland, some true, some apocryphal. Yet there is no evidence that Hornby had any desire to experience the frozen world. He was simply lolling about Edmonton when he encountered a big-game hunter named Cosmo Melvill who changed his life. The six-foot son of a Shropshire cotton merchant, Melvill was fascinated by the Barren Ground muskoxen, mysterious and little known animals in those days. He was mounting an expedition to the Arctic to hunt for this dwindling species and invited Hornby to come along. They set out in May 1908, travelling by York boat and sternwheeler down the Mackenzie as far as the Great Bear River.

  Melvill’s party of four struggled up the Bear, “the swiftest stream I have ever seen and also the clearest,” for seventy-five miles. After all the back-breaking portages, it must have been a relief to enter the navy blue waters of Great Bear Lake. H
ere was a vast biological desert, one quarter the size of England, so cold that no plankton could live in its deepest waters and no fish could stray far from the shoreline. “It is rather a hard thing to describe Bear Lake; it looks like the sea,” Melvill said. Like the other great inland seas of Canada, it lies on the rim of the Precambrian Shield, rent by subglacial valleys, gouged deeper and broader by the rock-shod ice sheets. Into these great hollows the melting glaciers spilled their runoff. Great Bear is always bitterly cold. Its transparent waters never rise more than a few degrees above freezing.

  Here, on the extreme northeast corner of the huge lake, not far from Caribou Bay at the mouth of the Dease River, the Melvill party built a camp and trading post. This would be their home for the winter of 1908–9. Caribou Bay (which would come to be known as Hornby Bay) was well named, for here were thousands of Barren Ground caribou, migrating west from the tundra for the winter. On November 17, Melvill estimated that one thousand or more had passed their camp in the course of twenty-four hours.

  The caribou migration—la foule, the throng—is an awesome sight that I remember from my own northern days: thousands of animals flattening the birch and poplar saplings as they thundered through the woods and tumbled down the high banks of the Yukon River, slipping and sliding, the does pushing the fawns forward with their snouts and the whole valley pungent with the sickly smell of rotting flesh from those who had not survived the crossing. A century ago in Hornby’s day, the caribou made the difference between life and death for whites as well as natives. When they changed the pattern of their migration, as Hornby himself would discover, it could mean death on the Barrens.

  The following April, with the weather growing warmer, the Melvill party with four Indians set out from the Coppermine River to look for muskoxen. The river, which had been explored by Samuel Hearne, had never been mapped, and they could not be sure exactly where they were. They had reached a country into which even the Indians would not venture.

  But white men had been there, for among the trees they found the ridgepole of a tent, something the Indians never used. One of the party, Pete McCallum, examined the old cuttings in the trees and, comparing them with the later growth, figured that they must be sixty years old, suggesting that this could have been the site of one of the camps of John Richardson, Franklin’s partner.

  For Hornby, drifting down the Coppermine with the others, these were happy, carefree pre-war days, and he would remember them fondly. This was storied ground, for it was here that Hearne, to his horror, witnessed the massacre of an entire Inuit village by his Indian followers. “The shrieks of the poor expiring wretches were truly dreadful,” Hearne wrote, “and my horror was much increased at seeing a young girl, seemingly about eighteen years of age, killed so near my feet that when the first spear was struck into her side she fell down at my feet and twisted round my legs, so that it was with difficulty that I could disengage myself from her dying grasps.” Hearne was helpless to intercede, but the memory of what had happened here at Bloody Falls prevailed, which explains why the Melvill party saw no Inuit on their journey.

  They found no muskoxen either, though they came upon a pile of bones from some sixty of the mysterious animals. At this point they climbed one of the round-topped hills above the river and, to the north, looked upon a spectacle that must have brought a shiver of excitement. It was a corner of the Arctic Ocean, rimmed by the dark bulk of Wollaston Land, sharply visible against the cloudless skies. But the next day was foggy and the Indians indicated they had no intention of going farther north. Melvill had two choices: go on alone without the Indians or return to Great Bear Lake.

  Had Hornby been in charge they might have plunged on north impetuously, but Melvill was both sensible and cautious. “I expect most people will think us awful cowards,” he wrote, “but the fact was that we had no dog food and unless we got plenty of caribou going back, not only the dogs but ourselves would be on pretty short commons.” They had come to the Arctic not as explorers but to get muskoxen, and since the Indians intended to take them back by a different route where muskoxen had actually been encountered, discretion was wise. Indeed, a few of them were spotted on the way back—a small band of seven that Melvill was able to glimpse for a moment, noting that the animals ran like sheep. They had been on the way for the best part of a month but had not managed to take any muskoxen or been able to encounter any Inuit.

  For the next three years, Hornby spent his time in the Great Bear Lake area. The record here is vague, but one thing becomes clear. In this empty country, much of it unexplored, Hornby was remarkably reluctant about helping the occasional explorer or trader who came his way. George Douglas, who headed a meteorological expedition bound for Coppermine, remarked on Hornby’s attitude when he asked him specific questions about the area. Hornby’s answers were misleading, often facetious, and sometimes incoherent as he chatted away “just like a monkey.” At first Douglas thought that the wiry little man was bushed, a not uncommon problem with those who had been confined for months or years in the savage land. At last he realized that Hornby was purposely holding back information. Why? Douglas could not know that this oddball was attempting to distract him from his purpose: to invade what Hornby considered to be his territory.

  Hornby’s friend and long-time correspondent, George Douglas, in his cabin.

  Hornby knew the country well. He had been down the Coppermine and the Dease for short trips and through the screen of trees that bordered those rivers had been able to view the Barrens in all their starkness. In that vast and gloomy expanse of clay and rubble, scoured clean of its topsoil by the advancing ice sheet, he had been given a brief view of what to him was something close to paradise—a lone land unmarked by the hand of civilization. Seen from the air, the Barren Ground is undeniably haunting, as I myself can testify. The claw marks of the ancient ice sheet are still visible, radiating out, like spokes of a wheel, from the original glacial core. It was this formidable realm, glimpsed by Hornby on his travels northeast of Great Bear Lake, that began to obsess him and that would in the end consume him. He could not accept the prospect of all this tranquility being disturbed by the intrusion of strangers.

  There was a childlike aspect to Hornby’s character, which though it undoubtedly appealed to many who encountered him also created difficulties. He was not able to stick to any task for long. This was apparent in his relations with the newly arrived Oblate missionary Father Jean-Baptiste Rouvière, who was intent on establishing a mission to the Inuit of Coronation Gulf. Hornby established a firm friendship with Father Rouvière, with whom he whiled away many an hour over a chessboard. Hornby had attached himself to the mission, unofficially, and the two had started work on a small cabin on the north shore of Dease Lake (later renamed Lake Rouvière). Yet the job was scarcely underway when Hornby drifted off, leaving the priest to finish it himself over the following month. Where he went and why no one could tell, but in the coming years, his unexpected departures followed a pattern.

  Hornby was easily bored and would lose interest in any project, abandoning it without any explanation, only to return later without a word. In this case there may have been a plausible reason for his actions. About this time he built another cabin for a young Sastudene Indian widow, Arimo, a charming and intelligent woman who was for a time his native “wife.” Hornby, if not in love, was certainly attached to her; she was one reason why he stayed so many months in the Dease Lake country.

  By the spring of 1913 he had been five years in the North, out of touch with civilization. The events of the outside world—the death of Edward VII, the sinking of the Titanic—reached him long after the fact. His friends the Douglas brothers, George and Lionel, had departed, and a new priest, Father Guillaume LeRoux, had arrived, ostensibly to work under Father Rouvière in establishing the mission to the Inuit. LeRoux was a different creature from the easygoing and likeable Rouvière—hard-headed and hot-tempered, quick to flare up and confident enough to assume authority over the older priest
, who was actually his senior. When LeRoux learned about Hornby’s dalliance with Arimo, he made his strong disapproval of the arrangement so clear that he managed to alienate her from Hornby.

  With the priests occupying cabins at Hodgson’s Point, Hornby withdrew to his own domicile six miles away. It was not a happy winter, marked by a further quarrel between LeRoux and Hornby over a quantity of stores left behind by George Douglas for Hornby’s use, which LeRoux refused to let Hornby take from the storehouse.

  Alone and lonely, Hornby, who had from time to time yearned for the solitary life, now found it oppressive. His disenchantment with the Great Bear country was beginning. On October 8, the two priests set off for the Coppermine, having learned that the time was ripe for establishing their mission on the northern coast. It was late in the season, and they were inexperienced travellers, badly provisioned and ill-clothed. Most of all, they had little understanding of the Inuit temperament.

  Arimo, Hornby’s one-time mistress, and her son Harry, on the Dease River, 1909.

  Hornby, who had had a run-in with two Inuit, apparently had told the priests before they left that the natives were “getting ugly.” It was a prescient warning. Neither priest was ever seen again, but their decomposed bodies were found in 1916 at Bloody Falls. The two Inuit who had earlier threatened Hornby, Sinnisiak, and Uluksuk, were eventually brought to trial for murder, found guilty, and given the death penalty. That was quickly commuted to life imprisonment, and with good reason, for these were Stone-Age people with a limited knowledge of the white man’s law. In the end they served two years of light detention in the Royal North West Mounted Police post at Fort Resolution and were then released to their own people.

  None of this, of course, was known to Hornby, who had his own disaster to cope with in the fall of 1913. That October, he set off across the lake in the York boat Jupiter with an eclectic collection of Inuit artifacts he had put together during his years in the Dease country that he intended to present to the Edmonton Museum. It included a quantity of Inuit tools and clothes as well as a variety of specimens—flowers, bones, insects, and whatever furs and skins he had gathered. As he travelled down the lake a vicious gale blew up, buffeting the frail craft and throwing sheets of water into the boat, which was finally washed onto the shore and wrecked with the loss of most of its unique cargo.