Prisoners of the North

by Berton, Pierre

  It was perhaps the last straw. That winter Hornby decided to leave the North and, after nearly six years, venture into the Outside. He was a disillusioned man. The loneliness of his life, the loss of his precious specimens, and, most important, the tension between himself and the overbearing priest were all contributing factors. He was not the same man who had arrived at Great Bear Lake in 1908. The North had turned him into a creature who differed from those who had not experienced it as he had. Hornby was not one to plan his future, but it must have concerned him to realize that he was one of Service’s “men who don’t fit in.”

  Inuit from Coronation Gulf with Hornby (background) on the edge of the Barrens.

  He had no plan for what he would do once he left the Great Bear Lake country. He spent a short time in Edmonton and went on to Lakefield, Ontario, where he was reunited with George Douglas. There and at Northcote, Douglas’s birthplace, the two friends had much to talk about, with Hornby relieving his frustrations.

  At least he finally knew where his immediate future lay. World events made up his mind for him. The Great War had broken out; every able-bodied man was needed, and certainly Hornby, who thought nothing of packing 125 pounds on his back, was able. Douglas suggested he go to England, join the Imperial Army, and take a commission. Instead, in September 1914 Jack Hornby took the train to Valcartier, Quebec, and joined the 19th Alberta Dragoons.

  However, as George Whalley has pointed out, “There can have been few men worse suited for army life than Hornby—by habit, temperament and desire.” The disciplined life of the parade ground and barrack room was as far from the free and easy vagabond existence as it was possible to get. Hornby didn’t look like a soldier, especially on leave. He turned up at the Royal Paddington Hotel in London to meet Douglas and was saved from rejection only by the timely interference of his friend. “He looked like a tramp—dirty trousers, a dirty pale blue silk shirt with pale yellow attached collar with ragged lace ribbon bands across the breast, and heavy moth-eaten astrakhan fur collar and cuffs.” Hornby was totally out of place, and Douglas steered this lost soul into the darkest corner of “a very gloomy dining room.”

  Hornby’s unit embarked for France just in time to go into action in the second Battle of Ypres, notorious for Germany’s first use of poison gas. According to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel F. C. Jamieson, “Everybody liked him. He was cheerful and never complained” and was also willing to go out on patrols. Inwardly, however, he had no heart for the military life. “My thoughts are forever of the North,” he wrote to Douglas. “… I have lived too long with what here one calls the uncivilized races … to ever get accustomed to the continual wrangle & utter selfishness of the white races.…”

  Douglas had written to tell him that no one had had any word of the two priests Rouvière and LeRoux. Hornby impulsively replied that he would try to get away and outfit a search expedition—a naive suggestion for a soldier in action at the front, especially one who had already applied for a commission. He was eventually gazetted as a second lieutenant in the South Lancashire regiment and must have seen considerable action, for he was mentioned in dispatches, then awarded the Military Cross for bravery, and wounded a month later. He told a friend that he did not expect to come out of the war alive and, as a result, was careless of danger.

  Reports of his war service and subsequent activities are vague and confusing. A local newspaper near his hometown reported that he had been shot through the shoulder and was in hospital in London, which suggests his wounds were serious. But a fellow traveller who later crossed Great Slave Lake with him reported that “he had seven machine gun bullets through his body under his ribs and could get out of his sleeping bag only by hauling himself up by the tent pole.” Did he take convalescent leave from the hospital in London or did he just walk out, as Colonel Jamieson suggested? One thing is clear: though the war was still raging, he did not return to the trenches but took passage on a ship for Canada, ended up in Vancouver, and was posted Absent Without Leave.

  The military authorities tried to track him down through George Douglas’s sister, but he proved elusive. He didn’t draw his pay and left no clue as to his whereabouts. Finally he turned up in Edmonton for a medical examination and was allowed to relinquish his commission on grounds of ill health caused by his wounds. He was granted the honorary rank of second lieutenant, an unusual reward for a flouting of army rules that might have led, had he gone AWL in action, to a firing squad.

  The Great War affected many men, but the changes it wrought in Jack Hornby were deep and permanent. He was never quite the same man again. Flanders Fields were about as far from the limpid waters of Great Bear Lake as the moon itself. For half a dozen years Hornby had experienced the silence of the North, an eerie quiet broken only by the spectral laugh of the loon, the lonely howl of the wolf, and the whistle of the wind. In Flanders, his ears were assailed day and night by the cacophony of cannon and mortar, the chatter of machine guns, and, what was worse, the haunting cries of dying men. And there was more: the wretched trenches were filthy and sodden, the colourless landscape was pocked by shell holes and a confusion of mud and wire that bore no relation to the white world he had grown to love.

  Mentally and emotionally, he was in bad shape. The noise of the guns, he told a friend in Edmonton, had driven him crazy. Worse, in his view, the army had turned him into a murderer. Civilization had gone mad. His only solution was to retreat again to the Far North; he was unfit for anything else, couldn’t work under others, and felt himself unable to take a job. “I wish I had never gone to the army nor had ever left the North,” he wrote to Douglas, who was working on an engineering job in Mexico. He asked at the same time for a loan of a hundred dollars. Douglas responded with a cheque.

  “I’m going back home,” Hornby told the Edmonton Bulletin. “Along the Barren Lands and in the Arctic is my home.” Off he went, with only the money he had borrowed and very little equipment. The hotel keeper at Fort Smith described him as “this desperate man running away from civilization … making the tremendous trip in a little boat no better than a broken down packing case.” Hornby’s loathing of the civilized world and his obsession with the untrammelled North had reached the point where some who encountered him thought him out of his mind. His last gloomy winter on the big lake plus his war experiences had increased his eccentricities.

  Hornby reached Dease Bay in September 1917, but it was not the hospitable place he had originally encountered. Once he had taken a proprietary interest in it; now it was “his” no longer. A new personality, Darcy Arden, a respected trader and prospector, had replaced him as the key figure among the Indians and had married Arimo, his one-time mistress. Hornby made his way across to Caribou Bay to the cabin he and Melvill had built, and here he crippled himself with an axe to the point where he could only crawl.

  Though it was six months before he could stand upright, he was faced with struggling every second day to get a fish net through the ice, three miles from his cabin. This was his only source of fresh food. It turned out to be the coldest winter on record with the temperature reaching −70 degrees Fahrenheit. In a letter to Douglas written the following summer, Darcy Arden described Hornby’s plight: “He is not fit for this country now. The war has affected poor Hornby very much and he is not the man like he was when you were here before. Some time last March I went over to see him and found him starving and completely out of his head. I think if he stays at the lake this winter something will happen to him.”

  Hornby welcomed hardship and put himself, apparently deliberately, into situations where the absence of food became a way of life. “No one but Hornby would live in such discomfort in the Northland,” Denny LaNauze, the Mountie inspector, once remarked. Hornby’s movements during the winter of 1918–19 were driven by aimless hunts for caribou, ranging from various points in the Great Bear Lake area to the big bend of the Coppermine. But he was finally finished with Bear Lake; he never wanted to see it again; it invoked too many
unhappy memories. In the spring he left it for good. He headed out to Edmonton but got no farther. “The post-War flurry irked me,” was the way he put it. He dawdled before going north again, this time by way of the Peace, but he had left too late in the season and found himself frozen in near Chipewyan. He spent that winter in an enlarged wolf den.

  The Barrens continued to engross him, to occupy his imagination, and to haunt his mind. Why? What was it about this bleak and friendless land that bewitched him? Apart from the few glimpses caught during his trips down the Coppermine, he had very little knowledge about the tundra and virtually no experience. Yet here he was, musing about spending a winter alone in an unforgiving realm that even the native Indians avoided. That, one suspects, was its appeal for Jack Hornby. He would do something few men had ever done in the history of the North, and if his ambition was fulfilled, he would be applauded for it. Hornby belonged to those among us who have a dream. With some it is an acceptable vision: to make a million, to write a masterpiece, to swim the English Channel, to scale a mountain peak. Hornby’s dream was unique: to live alone in the Barrens—alone and free—to thumb his nose at civilization, to seek out and revel in all the hardships this bleak and windswept terrain had to offer.

  When spring came his plan was to travel east by way of Great Slave Lake from Fort Resolution to Fort Reliance at its eastern end, a distance of some two hundred miles. After that he would make his way by Artillery Lake to the tundra. At Fort Smith he organized supplies for the venture—two outfits, one for trapping white fox or valuable furs, one for trading. He set out in June and reached Fort Reliance in September. The Indians were off on their seasonal caribou hunt, leaving Hornby to build his winter quarters, a small cabin, six by eight feet, directly across the bay from the chimneys of the original fort put up by the Arctic explorer George Back in 1833.

  He really had no firm idea of what he would do or how he would fare after he left the shelter of the treeline. He was supremely confident that he could live off the land, but he had made no preparation to do so. He did not even understand the migrations of the caribou, which are the key to existence on the Barren Ground. He did not take into account the possibility of accident or injury, nor did he realize that he had chosen an unlikely region in which to justify his theories. He had settled upon a poor place for caribou and also for fishing. Worse, with winter coming on and his cabin yet unfinished he was taken ill, unable to lay out his nets. When at last he had recovered enough to finish his new quarters and had just started trapping, the accident-prone hermit fell against his small tin stove and burned his leg badly.

  Ill luck continued to bedevil him. He finally managed to mount a four-day caribou hunt, but that proved fruitless. When he returned he found the Indians had come back in his absence and looted his cabin, leaving him only a meagre supply of food and one pair of snowshoes. He and his dogs were reduced to living on bannock and the small trout that he found in his nets.

  “I am now practically destitute,” he told his diary in January. In order to get enough bait for his traps he would have to hunt for caribou. But that took time and energy, and in the meantime he was forced to feed his dogs from his supply of staples. Now he admitted, “The urge to get fur blinded me to the consequences of running short of supplies.” At that point he was down to fifteen pounds of flour and only enough fish from his nets and hooks to feed the dogs and himself for a single day. To stay alive he would need between twelve and fifteen pounds of fish each day, but his right arm was partly paralyzed and his right hand badly swollen from a neglected injury. Chopping wood was painful and his fishing ground was three miles away.

  It was bitterly cold. He had no skin clothing, and he was losing the body fat that might have kept him warm: he was little more than a walking skeleton, reduced to skin and bones. His dogs were also growing weak on a starvation diet. On February 23, he scrawled a wan note in his diary: “No trout, no bait, no caribou, nothing.” And outside his cabin a fierce blizzard was blowing.

  The bad weather continued, making it impossible on certain days to visit his trapline or his fishing ground. When he did, he often found nothing. On March 6, two days after his biggest dog died, he told his diary: “At times this life appears strange. I never see anyone, no longer have anything to read, and my pencil is too small to permit me to do much writing. It is not surprising that men go mad.” There is no self-pity here, no wail of despair; Hornby was merely examining a way of life he had chosen for himself and commenting upon it.

  A few Indians came and went. They too were starving: that was their way of life. Hornby fed them fish when he had any. On March 11, he came in from examining his rabbit snares and collapsed on the cabin floor, too weak to reach his bed. Yet his powers of recuperation were remarkable. Two days later he was out again and after twelve hours returned to his cabin with a whitefish and a fox. In this hand-to-mouth fashion the days dragged on. Spring came; the fishing improved. On June 17 he gorged himself on a thirty-pound trout, but there was no way in which he could accumulate enough for the daily hundred pounds he would require for the next season. Although his plans to establish himself on the Barrens by way of Artillery Lake were dashed, he still clung stubbornly to his original dream. Now that the ice was breaking up he would return to Fort Resolution for more supplies; then, perhaps, he could set out and reach his destination in the fall.

  Of course he couldn’t. Exposure and long periods of starvation had turned him into a wraith. “It is a bad business having to go back to semi-civilization in such a shocking physical condition,” he scribbled in his diary with the last bit of his stubby pencil. “But it can’t be helped. I shall avoid the people I know as much as possible.”

  He left his camp on June 21 and reached Resolution by July 10, so famished he could not put down solid food. For the rest of the day he slept under the Hudson’s Bay woodpile. He had survived a terrible winter but had accomplished nothing. As government surveyor Guy Blanchet said, “A normal man would not have got into such a situation but, if he did, neither could he have come through as Hornby did.”

  Incredibly, in spite of all the trials he had faced, he planned to return to the east end of Great Slave for a second winter. He had learned little from his experience. He built another cabin not far from the site of the original one. He must have known by now what the winter held. It is hard to discover exactly what he planned to do; the record is clouded. Perhaps he didn’t know himself. He had written to George Douglas from Fort Resolution that he would like to spend a winter on the Thelon River at the very heart of the Barrens. That was wishful thinking. The winter that followed was a repeat of the one he had survived; he emerged once again emaciated and exhausted by the experience and with very little to show for it. For the moment, Hornby had had enough of the North. He went out to Edmonton, made a little money guiding for a group of big-time American game hunters, and drifted about until one day he met a man who would change his life. Or, more to the point, he met a man whose life would be changed nearly to the point of suicide by the year he spent with Hornby in the Barrens.

  —TWO—

  If you searched the country over, you would be hard put to find two characters who differed from each other as much as did James Critchell-Bullock and John Hornby. In matters of temperament, personality, outlook, and habit they were opposites. To confine the pair of them to a cave in the Barren Ground might be forecast as a folly, and a murderous one at that. Yet that would be their home for much of the winter of 1924–25. That they survived was largely because Hornby, ever the wanderer, was absent from the cave for days, even weeks, at a time.

  They met, accidentally, at the King Edward Hotel on Front Street, Edmonton, in October 1923: two figures that fitted the images of “Mutt and Jeff,” a leading comic strip of the day. Hornby, at five foot four, was Jeff; Bullock, at six foot two, was Mutt (and twenty years younger than his new acquaintance). As they were both public school boys with appropriate accents, they fell into conversation. Bullock wrote to his brother that “
for some unearthly reason [Hornby] … has taken a fancy to me.”

  Bullock was an army man who had served as a subaltern with the Bengal Lancers in India and also with Allenby’s desert mounted corps in Palestine. Now he was an honorary captain, retired from the army after a bout of malaria. He was everything Hornby was not: fastidious, disciplined, punctual, well scrubbed, and well tailored. Before he quite realized it, Hornby had talked him into a vague scheme to study the Barren Ground, its flora and its fauna, and to trap white fox. He had no idea what he was getting into. Hornby, who was never one to downplay his own wilderness background, intrigued him and undoubtedly flattered him by offering him a partnership on such short acquaintance. He could be charming and open-hearted, as many who encountered him remarked. To Bullock, searching about in Edmonton for a new career in the Canadian North, he must have seemed the ideal companion and mentor.

  In November 1923, Hornby, to test his companion’s stamina, took Bullock on a three-week excursion into the Rockies to gather specimens of mountain sheep and goats for the Edmonton Museum. That last purpose was abandoned as so many of Hornby’s plans were, but from his new partner’s viewpoint the trip was a success. He gained a boundless respect for Hornby, who packed the heaviest loads despite his small stature, showed less fatigue, and endured the bitter cold with only two blankets.