Prisoners of the North

by Berton, Pierre

  Understandably, Bullock’s early admiration for his new partner was fading. In November he had written to Yardley Weaver that Hornby was “the most delightful of companions & what more could I wish for?” By January Hornby was getting on his nerves. In Edmonton, Bullock had been fascinated by Hornby’s tales of his northern adventures. Now his endless boasting, his refusal to indulge in what Bullock considered serious conversation, and his self-aggrandizement were too much. Years later, Bullock described the tenor of Hornby’s talk: “If I were King there would be no wars. There is no man living who could beat me in a straight fight. The Government ought to give me Artillery Lake as compensation for all the hardships I have endured on behalf of the North. The North has never known such a traveller as I. Hardships and the ability to starve like a gentleman are the only criteria of a good traveller. My name will live in history as I have made the greatest of all contributions to the North Country. I am the only white man with whom the Indians and Eskimos know they can safely leave their women.”

  The winter dragged on, with Hornby coming and going, setting traps, gathering wood, shooting the odd caribou, and disappearing for ten days at a time. “Cannot imagine what H. is up to,” Bullock confided to his diary in mid-March. “Here we are, dozens of foxes behind the other people, and he is still wandering about.… Again he will set a line of traps, spend days doing it and never trouble to look at it.” Several days later, he wrote: “Never would I allow H. to arrange for my welfare again.… One day’s wood left, but I will get through somehow. Damn everyone and the fates included.”

  On April 1, 1925, a police patrol from Fort Resolution, guided by Hornby and Malcolm Stewart, arrived at the cave. Corporal Hawkins of the RCMP and his companion, Constable Baker, seemed perplexed to find Bullock in good spirits and apparently in the best of health. Although they had brought forty-eight letters for him, Bullock was baffled. What were the Mounties doing out here in the Barrens? They certainly hadn’t come merely to deliver the mail. And why was the corporal regarding him with such attention? In the gloom of the cave, he sensed that the visitors were not at their ease. The conversation was desultory: only Hornby was enjoying it. As they conversed in whispers, Bullock noticed a gleam in his eye but could make no sense of it. After a brief two-hour visit, the patrol declined his invitation to lunch, made their way out through the labyrinth of poles now holding up the sagging roof, and tendered their goodbyes, leaving Bullock to read his mail and wonder why they had come three hundred miles just to bring it. Haphazard patrols were not part of their regular procedure. And why were their explanations so brief?

  That is the story that Waldron tells in Snow Man from his reading of Bullock’s diary. The visit is a murky business. At Malcolm Stewart’s dugout, the police explained that they had received a note from Jack Glenn, Bullock’s erstwhile partner, quoting Hornby as saying that Bullock was dangerously insane. Hornby denied that he had told Glenn to report Bullock’s condition to the police. But now he admitted that in his view, Bullock had been acting strangely, had talked of committing suicide, and was despondent because the long winter nights frustrated him in his goal of making a motion picture of the Barrens. Again and again Hawkins asked Hornby if he was afraid of Bullock. Again and again Hornby denied it.

  It was not unusual for two men, especially as different in temperament as this pair and confined to close quarters, as Hornby and Bullock were, to resort to violence, suicide, or even murder. But Hornby had been away from the cave for days, even weeks, at a time. If Bullock was despondent, and he certainly was, it was because he was confined twenty-four hours a day while his cave mate alleviated his restlessness by periodic forays to Fort Reliance or the cabins of his trapper friends. In a letter to his friend Weaver on the same day the police arrived, Hornby had reported that “Bullock is now in fine condition, but I was certainly at times afraid that his rather too vivid imagination might lead him to act stranger than he has done.”

  Was all this a practical joke by Hornby at Bullock’s expense? Or was Hornby really alarmed that his partner was going off the deep end? Whalley writes, “Hornby himself probably didn’t know,” but he adds, “it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that at times Hornby was deliberately tormenting, frustrating and humiliating Bullock.”

  There were two sides to this maddening partnership. Although Hornby might be infuriating to live with, Bullock was still in awe of his considerable abilities. He could not remain at odds with him for long. Hornby had all the guile of a naughty little boy, but there were moments when, like a naughty little boy, he was lovable. Writing to Glenn three years later, Bullock eulogized him as “the bravest man I ever knew and the finest friend that any man ever had on a backwoods trail. Out in the bush, Hornby was the real Hornby, and [a] better man never lived.”

  These qualities were evident when at last they left their cave after burning all non-essentials in order to make their way east by way of the Hanbury and Thelon rivers—a torturous journey that would add up to seven hundred miles of back-and-forth trekking. They could have returned to civilization the easy way—back through Artillery and Great Slave lakes. Indeed, Corporal Hawkins had advised Hornby against using the Thelon route, but, perversely, Hornby rejected his counsel. He wanted to be known as the first to cross the Barrens from west to east—the hard way. On his arrival at Chesterfield Inlet a crowd would gather and ask where he had come from. “Edmonton,” he would reply casually, and already he was hearing in his mind the cries of astonishment that would greet his words. Hornby was building himself a legendary reputation, block by block.

  They had sent some fox furs out by the police patrol but had 150 more—half a ton—to take with them across the Barrens. Bullock finally made the long trip himself back to the cache at Fort Hornby only to realize, to his dismay, that most of the expensive equipment stored there for him would be an unwanted encumbrance. He had invested his meagre savings in that outfit, and Hornby, before he left for Ottawa to raise money, had agreed to pay half the cost. Now he was making it obvious that he had no intention of paying a cent. As Bullock wrote later, “He feels that I spent unwisely & that such elaborate equipment was unnecessary. He fails to understand that I bought it for the precise reason that I had every faith in his promise to make the expedition an extensive thing.” The best he could hope for would be the thirty thousand dollars Hornby had claimed they would make when they sold the furs.

  They tried their best to lighten their burden for the coming trek. Even without the goods left behind at the cache, they could not get the weight of the staple food, canoes, cameras, and film below one ton. That done, they piled the unnecessary gear into the cave and, using fox fat for fuel, burned it all.

  Hornby’s scheme to gain publicity by casually remarking that he had come all the way to Chesterfield Inlet from Edmonton was achieved only at serious mental and physical cost. They faced an epic ordeal, and an unnecessary one. They set off on May 19 over the crusted snow with all their supplies including their two canoes lashed to a single sled—the two men and three dogs straining away on the ropes and harness. Ahead lay tortuous canyons, seething rapids, and portages of sand, muskeg, and slippery rock. The task would not be easy, with each man handling a canoe entirely on his own. Their immediate goal, the junction of the Hanbury and Thelon rivers, was at least one hundred laborious miles away and the going was slow. They drove themselves and their dogs eighteen hours a day, but they had to move the heavy load forward in stages, packing and unpacking, loading and unloading as they advanced toward their goal. For every mile of portage they were forced to travel fifteen. As spring advanced, water from the melting snow ran into a lake, and its weight depressed the ice on the edge so that a channel was created near the shore that ran three feet above the frozen level. They had to unload the sled, move everything into the canoes, and pole or paddle their way along the margin.

  For almost two weeks in that confusion of small, ragged, unknown lakes, they were hopelessly lost. “We do not know where we are,” Bullock wrote
. “We are both trying to appear unconcerned.” Where was the Hanbury? In what direction were they now headed? Bullock made a fifteen-mile reconnaissance and almost drowned breaking through the thin ice at a lake’s edge. Here were long reaches of water not on the maps and, in that flat country, very little drainage. The day after Bullock’s accident, Hornby set out to get some hint of a route to the Hanbury. He finally succeeded by chopping a hole in the ice and tossing in some bannock crumbs to find which way the current flowed. The movement was almost imperceptible but observable. They followed it eastward, and by June 10 they reached Smart Lake, which is in fact part of the Hanbury. Their destination, the trading post at Baker Lake on Chesterfield Inlet, still a convoluted five hundred miles to the east, was the only human habitation on that route.

  The time had come to again reduce the weight they were carrying. Bullock was in agony from an injury to his back incurred on his last trip to Fort Reliance. Hornby, who had opposed lightening their loads, now gave in to his partner’s condition. They stood their sled on end and anchored it with some rocks at the base to mark their cache. Then they dumped twelve thousand feet of motion picture film and most of their winter equipment, including heavy parkas and extra blankets, on top of the sled, lightening their load by two hundred pounds.

  They moved on east, paddling and portaging. Hornby quietly took on the heavier loads to ease Bullock’s suffering. In mid-June they saw their first muskoxen. Finally, on the twenty-third they reached the point where the Hanbury flows into the Thelon. Here, after five weeks on the trail, Bullock could at last begin filming.

  Things were looking up. They camped at a bend in the river that would later be called Hornby Point. That day they managed to cover forty miles, a record for the trip. But that night Bullock cut his foot so badly with an axe that they could not move for two days, and by then they had lost the last of their dogs. On August 2, they were able to move twenty-five miles, with Hornby acting as nurse and filling his partner with doses of caribou soup.

  The following day, with Bullock unable to handle a canoe and on the verge of collapse, they began a three-day recess. Bullock now faced another concern. He was dead broke because of his expenditure on the discarded equipment. What would he do when they reached civilization without funds? The howling winds and incessant rain that night increased his despair.

  A new problem nagged at them. By August 21 they were out of meat, half starved, their bodies skeletal, subsisting on whatever fish they could catch. In this condition they entered the lower Thelon. In spite of a recurring blizzard, Hornby managed to kill a caribou “that just about saved our lives.” They took a day off and feasted, gulping down an enormous meal: all the caribou liver, both kidneys, all the fat they could gather from the carcass, four one-pound steaks, and thirteen pounds of fish. Bullock felt so lively that in spite of the storm, he took a bath in ice water. It was at this point that Hornby, finding his partner in good spirits, confessed why the police had come to the esker cave. There is no record of Bullock’s reaction.

  A few miles out of Baker Lake, with their goal almost in sight, they had another near disaster. There were rapids ahead, but in the bright sunlight Bullock didn’t see them and was swept forward in his canoe. He looked back and to his horror saw his partner standing up in his own canoe trying to get a better view of the rocks and shoals. He too had missed seeing the rapids. Now, as Hornby teetered in the canoe, the waters seized it and he dropped onto one knee. “I’m all right, Bullock!” he shouted over the roar of the rapids. Both craft struggled with the waters for a mile and a half until calm was reached, but it had been a near death thing. Hornby could not swim; once again he had survived through pure luck.

  They reached the Hudson’s Bay post at Baker Lake on August 27, 1925, having travelled 535 miles in 107 days on a journey only a handful of men had made before them and one that future travellers would not find necessary. With the coming of the airplane and the parallel improvement in electronic communication, Hornby and Bullock’s feat of endurance would not need to be repeated. They had crossed the Barren Ground at the end of an era that began with Samuel Hearne. It is ironic that Hornby, who wanted to keep the land of the tundra virtually untrammelled, would serve as a reminder of the passing of the old ways.

  The Hudson’s Bay Company’s post and that of Revillon Frères stood side by side on the slope above the point where the Thelon empties its waters into Baker Lake, which is connected to the great bay by Chesterfield Inlet. A curious group made its way to the water’s edge to greet the newcomers, who were tying up their canoes. Here was a puzzle. No canoes had gone up the Thelon that summer. How could two be coming down? The Hudson’s Bay factor held back his curiosity until the canoes were properly fastened. Then he asked: where did they come from? This was the moment that Hornby had been waiting for. This was the reason why he had chosen to go back to civilization the hard way; this would add another chapter to the legend he had helped create about himself.

  “From Edmonton,” he remarked nonchalantly.

  “From where?” the factor asked.

  Oh, yes, Hornby repeated. They’d had a fine trip. Couldn’t be better.

  Up at the trading post, the factor repeated the question again. Just where had they come from? Hornby repeated his answer, to general bewilderment. Then he and Bullock told their tangled tale.

  At dinner that night at the neighbouring Revillon Frères, Bullock noted that Hornby seemed ill at ease and realized that the little man was sorry the trip was over. “A week of this, Bullock,” he said, “and we’ll wish we were back in the Barrens. They live by routine at these posts.” Routine had no part in Hornby’s way of life.

  The Hudson’s Bay motorboat took the pair to Chesterfield Inlet. The schooner Jacques Revillon took them across Hudson Bay to Port Harrison, and the steamer Peveril brought them to St. John’s, Newfoundland. Here Bullock suffered a devastating blow. The fox pelts they had brought out were worthless. When the candles in the cave had run out, wolf and fox fats had had to be used instead, providing such poor light that careful cleaning was impossible. During the summer’s heat the residue of animal grease boiled into the hide and loosened the fur. Seasoned trappers were aware of this problem and knew how to deal with it. Once again Hornby’s slapdash methods, together with his partner’s inexperience, had nullified the commercial aspects of the onerous trek across the Barrens. It had all been in vain.

  As one Arctic expert, Lawrence Millman, noted in his introduction to Malcolm Waldron’s Snow Man, “Hornby and Bullock courted misfortune like a pair of dogs rooting up truffles.” The long, hazardous journey had added nothing to science, resulted in no new maps being drawn up, and produced no new ethnographic data on the native peoples. No documentary was ever made of Bullock’s Barren Ground footage: the lack of a telephoto lens and the absence of proper light were to blame.

  Bullock himself was unable to get backing for another Arctic expedition. He lived a purposeless life in England, emigrated to Kenya, and invested in a local asbestos mine, which failed. Both his marriages failed, too. In 1953, he checked into the elegant Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi and put a bullet through his head. “The last of the Bengal Lancers,” The Times called him, making no mention of his trip with Hornby. As Whalley wrote, “Bullock is an interesting phenomenon: he was the only person who ever proceeded on the assumption that Hornby was a competent Northern traveller, and survived that curious assumption.”

  All true. And yet in spite of Hornby’s many deficiencies—his refusal to plan ahead, his inattention to detail, his devil-may-care attitude to danger—his Barren Ground trek had a positive and lasting legacy. After his return he sent to the Department of the Interior at Ottawa a sixteen-page single-spaced document titled Report of Explorations in the District Between Artillery Lake and Chesterfield Inlet. In it he recommended that immediate measures be taken to protect the Barrens wildlife from human exploitation. The department took the suggestion seriously and passed it on to the Advisory Board on Wildlife Protection. />
  As a result, the government established a 15,000-square-mile sanctuary in the upper Thelon country. Today it is extended to 35,000 square miles and is one of the continent’s largest protected wilderness areas. It is harder for a Canadian to cross that border than it is to travel to the United States. This great remote reserve has some of the toughest restrictive laws in the world, as I discovered myself when I managed, with difficulty, to get a permit to venture into the Thelon country by air.

  Every desert has its oasis, and the Thelon sanctuary is no exception. Here, where the two rivers—Thelon and Hanbury—meet, are fat clumps of spruce with grassy meadows and green copses of willow growing on the bottom of an ancient lake, complete with sand dunes and beaches as white as Waikiki. Here the glossy muskoxen come to graze and grow fat at the edges of the round blue lakes. It was here that John Hornby wanted to spend his last days, far from the confusion of the civilized world. In effect he got his wish, although under tragic and unforeseen circumstances. But the great sanctuary remains his legacy, and he could not have wished for more.

  Hornby in Northcote, Ontario, in 1925, looking very much the proper Englishman.

  —THREE—

  John Hornby returned to England in December 1925 in time to attend the funeral of his father, who had succumbed to a stroke. He felt awkward and ill at ease in the family home, Parkfield. The society in which he moved, with its public school accents and its emphasis on sport, was far removed from the frontier life for which he longed. “Here, no one is sincere,” he wrote to his friend George Douglas, “and I feel like an absolute stranger. I am like a wild animal, caged.”