Prisoners of the North

by Berton, Pierre

  James Critchell-Bullock was first entranced, later disillusioned by Hornby.

  Their expedition to the Barrens was planned for the following summer. It would take three years and had two purposes. Bullock, who had been Allenby’s photographer in the Middle East, planned to make a motion picture of his Barren Ground experiences; Hornby hoped to get a government grant to study muskoxen and caribou. It would also be a business trip, one that Hornby claimed would bring them a gross profit of thirty thousand dollars in white fox furs. For a retired army man looking for some type of challenging enterprise in the colonies, it seemed attractive, even entrancing: a well-planned, well-ordered, and highly profitable venture with the added benefit of exploring an obscure but romantic corner of the country—and all in the company of an experienced and trusted guide. Bullock wrote to his brother that Hornby was held in high esteem “above everyone else in the whole North country,” but added, offhandedly, that “success only depends on getting him to be business-like.” That was like saying that success only depends on getting a one-legged man to run the hundred-yard dash.

  In the interim, Hornby had befriended a vivacious Welsh woman, Olwen Newell, a recent arrival in Canada some twenty years his junior. It was his idea that she would go north with the expedition and write an account of his travels. She had responded with enthusiasm and soon found herself employed in the expedition’s office under Bullock, who was acting as a pro-tem business manager. It was obvious that she was attracted to Hornby, whom she found “a chivalrous man, fastidious in conversation and in his attitude to women … an unassuming man, conservative in dress.” A close friend warned her, however, that Hornby was not the marrying kind. Hornby saw her as “clever but a simple, affectionate and rather highly strung girl.”

  He left early in February for Ottawa hoping to raise funds for his projected expedition, but there he met with a cool response. In his absence, Bullock concluded, wrongly, that Hornby and Olwen Newell were engaged and intended to marry. That would put an end to the expedition. He fired Miss Newell, and a flurry of letters and telegrams ensued between Hornby, Bullock, and Hornby’s friend Yardley Weaver, now an Edmonton lawyer. Hornby did his best to make it clear that he had no intention of marrying anyone. “I candidly told her, that I had never loved any girl,” Hornby told Weaver. “Besides I mentioned she was young & I am old.”

  Bullock, with the military efficiency that was his nature, continued to prepare for the journey, collecting stores and equipment, studying meteorology and geology, practising photography with various cameras, and pestering civil servants in Ottawa to subsidize the project. “I am entering upon this expedition … because Mr. Hornby has honoured me by saying that in me he has found a perfect assistant and partner,” he wrote in April. “Unknown to him I am assisting the enterprise financially in such a manner that its failure will leave me penniless.” Bullock, in short, was staking everything on a man whom he had known for only a few brief months. The former Bengal Lancer had not done his homework.

  Neither of these two adventurers who looked forward with such eagerness to travel to the very heart of the Barrens really knew very much about the other. Bullock was mesmerized by his older partner to the point where he had invested his savings in the proposed expedition, believing that the payoff in white fox pelts and the proceeds of his documentary film were as good as money in the bank. Hornby, after all, had agreed to underwrite his share of the costs that Bullock was incurring. He had also undertaken to raise funds for the expedition in Ottawa and New York—or so he said. Actually, Hornby had no intention of contributing anything. After Hornby met a dead end in Ottawa there was no further talk about New York. Instead, he went off to England to see his parents and ostensibly to raise money, although there is no evidence that he tried.

  Ottawa finally came up with a pittance for Hornby—three hundred dollars a year and rations to study the Barren Ground caribou and muskox—but nothing for Bullock, who was still forking out thousands to launch what he thought would be a major scientific expedition. Hornby made a fetish of travelling light. His usual equipment, even on a journey of months, seldom cost more than two hundred dollars. Malcolm Waldron, who based his narrative Snow Man on Bullock’s diaries, wrote that Hornby would have writhed to see Bullock’s list of “necessities.” Here were thousands of feet of motion picture film; a standard motion picture camera as well as a portable motion picture camera; a Graflex camera and three hundred reels of Graflex film; a complete developing outfit; a portable darkroom; a botanical outfit with presses to preserve specimens; an entomological outfit with preserving fluid for small mammals and insects; a series of thermometers, theodolites, and three watches for surveying; a surgical kit with anesthetic, sutures, and dressings; and a small library of books on natural history and the Barrens.

  In England, Hornby was maddeningly indecisive. His elderly parents were pleading with him to stay with them while Bullock was asking him for an estimate of what the expedition would cost, as Ottawa required. Hornby’s response was a blunt cable: “cancel expedition.” “I certainly wish now I had not crossed to England,” he wrote in the explanatory letter that followed, “so you can realize how miserable I feel here. This senseless life is detestable.… How can people be justified in leading an aimless existence?”

  This decision was a body blow to Bullock, who had become enmeshed in the expedition’s plans psychologically as well as financially. He had every intention of carrying on alone. With the venture already publicized in the Edmonton press, he could not bear the shame of now dropping everything. He would need a helper and so advertised for a fellow adventurer to go with him to the eastern end of Great Slave Lake and then down the Thelon to Chesterfield Inlet on Hudson Bay. He cabled Hornby for permission to use his old cabin on the edge of the Barrens and was astonished to receive an immediate reply: “returning next steamer. wait for me.”

  What had caused Hornby to change his mind? Bullock was not yet aware of his would-be partner’s jealousy of those who would invade “his” domain. Nor had it occurred to Hornby that Bullock would go off without him. After all, Bullock was his responsibility. What would become of him, a stranger, in that unfriendly territory?

  On Hornby’s arrival in Edmonton on June 15, 1924, the Journal hailed him as a man “who prefers life in the Barren Lands to anything that civilization has to offer” and hinted at the haziness of his plans by reporting that he “isn’t very particular whether the party spends one year or two in their efforts to secure the pictures.” The paper mentioned that Hornby had lived for several years in the area “and knowing every mile of the country, it will be like going home for him.” This public attention marked the real beginning of the Hornby legend in the North.

  Hornby baited Bullock about the extravagance of his equipment, which the captain had spent some four months assembling. He was more than suspicious of Jack Glenn, the strapping ex-policeman who had answered Bullock’s newspaper advertisement and had signed a contract to join the expedition. Hornby insisted that Bullock fire Glenn, largely, he said, because he would never trust a man with brown eyes, but really because he resented a stranger exploring the Barrens. He temporized when it was agreed that Glenn would bring his wife and that the pair would settle in one of Hornby’s cabins near Fort Reliance to remain as a kind of backup, a good distance from the treeless tundra.

  As usual, Hornby’s planning was haphazard. When the day came for the expedition to leave for the North, he held back, suggesting that Bullock and the Glenns go ahead by canoe and wait for him at Fort Smith. That caused a major delay. The short summer season was advancing and every day counted if they were to establish themselves in the Barrens before freeze-up. Hornby was expected to arrive by July 7 but to Bullock’s frustration did not turn up. Bullock and the Glenns went on to Fort Resolution without him.

  They were in for a long wait. Bullock was beside himself; apparently Hornby had changed his mind again about the expedition. Bullock had depended on his partner to bring along several art
icles of equipment including an engine and gasoline, which, in Hornby’s absence, he had been forced to buy himself.

  Hornby arrived at last—six weeks later—with a party of four acquaintances in an old scow whose engine was continually breaking down. He had picked up two brothers, Malcolm and Allan Stewart, both trappers, an older trapper, Al Greathouse, and a youth known simply as Buck for his last name, Buckley.

  This loose group headed off from Fort Resolution to the far eastern end of the lake. There they dropped the Glenns at Hornby’s old cabin—dubbed Fort Hornby—directly across from the ruins of Back’s Fort Reliance. Also, under Hornby’s direction and with help from the trappers, they put up a small log cache (on poles to keep out wolverines) to hold their surplus supplies. By this time Bullock the ex-cavalryman had begun to realize something about Hornby—that his only interest lay in existence from day to day and that any aim of keeping records, gathering statistics, or planning ahead was foreign to his nature. All of Bullock’s scientific gear was to be left behind in the cache (save for one still camera and a portable movie camera) to be sent to him when the need arose. The outfit had cost Bullock something close to four thousand dollars. When he protested this waste of money, Hornby simply asked if money was of any ultimate importance.

  With the northern winter fast approaching, the various members of this party of convenience began to shuttle their gear and their canoes—some five tons in all—across twenty-five miles of short carrying places that go under the name of Pike’s Portage after the big-game hunter and explorer Warburton Pike. That led them to Artillery Lake, a fifty-mile-long finger of water that reaches into the Barrens.

  For Bullock, packing 110 pounds on his back was misery enough, but Hornby’s shiftless conduct made it worse. “Cannot understand him,” Bullock told his diary. “He becomes more untidy and hopeless every day. He is obviously more in favour of supporting schemes of commercialism than our own scientific endeavours.” A fortnight later he noted: “Hornby regularly eats raw caribou marrow, cracking bones noisily with a large dirty hunting knife sitting among a most awful mess of blood, sinew, and untidiness imaginable. Apparently the dirtier the job the more he relishes the product, particularly his hands are a mess of blood and hawk entrails.”

  It took the party two weeks to navigate Artillery Lake. With ice beginning to form around the canoes, it was time to arrange for winter quarters. The group split up. The Stewart brothers dug out a shelter built with frozen turf on the Casba River (now the Lockhart) where it met the timbered area. Bullock and Hornby pitched their tent on top of a big esker that overlooked the country to the north and west of the Casba.

  But what kind of shelter to build? Certainly not a log cabin; the nearest timber was fifty miles behind them. It was too distant for dog sleds to fetch, and logs could not be floated to them because the river ran in the wrong direction. An Inuit iglu wouldn’t work because the Barren Ground snow was too soft to pack. There was no sod for a prairie-type sod hut—just the sand and gravel left behind by the subglacial watercourse that had created the esker. The only solution was to dig a cave in the esker’s flank. They hacked it out of the frozen ground, ten feet by seven, with a six-and-a-half-foot ceiling. The inside walls were faced with spruce brush and ground-willow twigs and caulked with moss in a vain effort to keep out the sand. Their canvas tent was spread out to serve as a roof, which they covered with sand. Hornby, as rugged as ever, made the long trip to a stand of timber to cut a ridgepole. A twelve-foot trench served as a storehouse. Covered with old hides and strips of tarpaulin, it led to the cavern’s entrance, which was marked by a length of black stovepipe sticking out through the snow. It wasn’t much, this makeshift hovel, but for that winter it would be home.

  Shortly after the job was done, the ever-restless Hornby took off to visit the Stewart brothers six miles away. That was the first of many absences that left Bullock alone and fuming. He could not fathom Hornby, as the variety of adjectives used in his diary suggests: “puzzling” … “irresponsible” … “disgusting” … “tireless” … “superhuman” … “profound.” Malcolm Waldron, in his account of this period, tells us that Hornby, who had only one tooth, wore dental plates for pride’s sake in civilization but in the cave dropped them into the nearest receptacle, a tin can in which he kept his freshly killed mouse specimens. In the cabin, he ate without teeth, tearing at his meat with his single incisor, “giving it a perfunctory prod or two with his gums, and swallowing it at a gulp.”

  Hornby had a pet aluminum spoon, twisted and dented, that he stuck in the sand by his bed and never washed. Each time its use was called for, he picked it up and scooped out the grease and sand with his thumb. “He would drag a whole carcass into the cave and squatting on his sleeping bag, disembowel it, creating a frightful mess.”

  Ribald talk was of no interest to him. Any time the conversation with Bullock verged on sex, Hornby cut him off. Bullock suffered tortures trying to keep himself clean with a shallow pan full of freezing water, but Hornby never bathed and, to Bullock’s chagrin, did not seem to need any kind of a wash. It was as if the dirt fell away from him as soon as it was formed.

  By November the nights were sixteen hours long and the makeshift candles provided scarcely enough illumination to allow them to read and re-read the crumpled six-month-old newspapers that had served as wrappings. Hornby again set out, this time for Fort Reliance, on an absence that left Bullock alone in the cave for three weeks. Hornby’s purpose, ostensibly, was to bring back the weather instruments that Bullock needed to make his observations. In fact, the puckish Hornby had decided to play a trick on Bullock—at least that was how he saw it—a capital jest in which he would spread a rumour that Bullock had gone off his head and was trying to murder his partner. In his bizarre reasoning, Hornby, who was always concerned about his public image, believed that the rumour of Bullock’s mental condition would shine a spotlight on the expedition, which he thought needed to be called to the public’s attention. It would be Hornby’s way of presenting himself as a rugged adventurer, meeting and overcoming all odds.

  Because of the rumours of Bullock’s madness, Hornby reckoned that when they finally reached Hudson Bay a large crowd would be waiting for them, astonished and overcome with admiration that they had come all the way from Edmonton. But Bullock must not know his scheme. That would spoil the joke.

  To his partner’s frustration, Hornby returned from Fort Reliance without any of the instruments that had been the one reason for his hundred-mile journey. “… Poor Hornby is becoming more untidy,” Bullock complained to his diary. “His only care is in setting traps, cutting up meat, and chasing and talking about caribou. Apparently my elaborate equipment is going to be wasted.”

  Hornby always seemed to be on the move, visiting the trappers, looking for vagrant bits of timber to prop up the roof, or hunting for caribou, while Bullock languished in the cave. Then one bitterly cold December day, Hornby collapsed. Bullock dragged him inside, believing his partner to be on the point of death. But after forty-eight hours the tough little man recovered.

  The days grew shorter, the cold grew worse, the wind rose to a velocity of sixty knots. Now they were sleeping for fourteen hours; what else was there to do? The weird cacophony of the Barrens intruded upon their rest: the eerie wail of the wolves, the whining of the endless blizzards, and the sudden explosive cracking of the earth as the sand and gravel in the esker expanded and contracted. It was so cold that even with a fire in the stove they were forced to wear their winter clothing when in their sleeping bags.

  Two days before Christmas, the restless Hornby set off in the midst of a blizzard to visit the Stewart brothers, and once again Bullock was alone. He realized that without dogs he could not forage for fuel—and Hornby had taken all the dogs except one lame animal. There was plenty of caribou meat stored in the tunnel, but it was frozen rock solid and he needed fire to thaw it. During that night the roof sank further under the weight of the snow. Now it was scraping against his head.r />
  All the fuel that remained was a pile of twelve twigs, none more than an inch in circumference. There were also spruce needles in the walls, and he gathered a few handfuls of these. He managed to start a brief fire to heat the water pail, solid with ice, and the frozen slabs of caribou meat, which he put into a pan with some grease. He gulped his tea—mixed with sand from the walls—and gnawed away at the meat until the fire died. Exhausted, he crawled into his sleeping bag, over which he piled all of Hornby’s bedding. When he woke on Christmas Eve, he found that his beard was frozen solid to the blanket. His lone entry for that day is a cry from the heart: “Alone this Christmas Eve on the Barren Lands of the Sub-Arctic of America.… Alone in a dugout beneath the sand and snow.… Alone in this awful shack of continual discomfort with its subsiding walls and crazy roof likely at any moment to fall and entomb me in a living grave. Alone with sufficient wood to make only one more fire.… Alone with but the whole of the blizzard outside to cheer me and the thoughts of peace and happiness and the faces of loved ones coming to mind only to remind me more and more of my deep loneliness.…”

  The incredible monotony of the Barrens preyed on his mind. Earlier in Edmonton, Hornby’s enthusiastic descriptions had invested them with a kind of mystique, even glamour. But here, in the actual environment, the magic was gone. The flat, featureless land stretched off in every direction to a hazy horizon, devoid of tree or shrub and unmarked by any physical feature—not a ravine or a hill or even a slope, not a knoll or a depression or a fold in the ground—nothing save for the esker in which he huddled. One is reminded of the recent photographs taken on the red surface of Mars, but the Barrens were even devoid of colour: only a greyish white to match the sullen sky above.

  Bullock realized that he would have to move, and with the blizzard abating, he staggered off at last with the lame dog leading the way. He managed to follow the half-obliterated trail for six miles and arrived exhausted at Malcolm Stewart’s shack, where Hornby greeted him laconically. Following a ten-day period for Bullock to recuperate, the two went back to the cave.