Prisoners of the North

by Berton, Pierre

  This restlessness was exacerbated by his mother, who kept urging him to stay in England and give up his northern adventures. For Hornby that would be like giving up his right arm. He loved to talk about his hardships on the Barrens and his adventures on the lakes, but for that he needed an audience—someone who would listen wide-eyed to his tales, prod him with questions, and then enthusiastically demand more. His mother did not want to hear accounts of her son’s moments of peril and privation. Only when he received an invitation from a cousin, Marguerite Christian, to visit her family at Bron Dirion in northern Wales did he find an attentive and enthusiastic listener in the person of his seventeen-year-old second cousin, Edgar. Just out of public school, Edgar gave him the adulation he craved.

  There are few portraits of Edgar extant, but one tells us a great deal about this teenage hero-worshipper. Blue-eyed and blond, his childlike face unlined, young Edgar Christian is the picture of innocence—a guilelessness all the more heart-rending when we comprehend his ultimate tragedy.

  The English had a special fondness for those adventurers who insisted on doing things the hard way, especially those who failed nobly. Hornby, with his tales of near starvation and his record of close calls, dovetailed neatly with the imperial credo, emphasizing “pluck” and “playing the game.” Edgar peppered him with questions: had he really hiked hundreds of miles over the snowfields? Had he chopped a hole in the ice to catch a trout? It was the kind of wide-eyed adoration that spurred him on. Had he actually shot a bear? Had he seen herds of caribou? Hornby responded gratefully and spun tales about la foule tramping through the forests and muskoxen loping across the Barrens.

  Edgar Christian’s hero worship of Hornby later led to his own death by starvation.

  He had no intention of staying in England in spite of or perhaps because of his mother’s pleas. “She curiously thinks that money or an easy life are all that one can wish for,” he wrote to Bullock. “Money, I admit, is all right but the latter does not appeal to me.” But what would he do in Canada? Where would he go? He had already turned his back on Great Bear Lake. Any form of civilization appalled him. The Barren Ground beckoned him, but he needed an excuse to return to the tundra. He found that excuse in Edgar Christian’s idolization. Christian, in turn, found in Hornby an acceptable excuse to leave home and seek adventure. Hornby would go to Canada as Christian’s guide and mentor. Christian would fulfill Hornby’s need for an appreciative one-man audience. Christian could set off with the assurance for his family that he was travelling under the guidance of the most experienced backwoodsman in Canada. What an opportunity! His aunt, his mother, and finally Colonel Christian all agreed, brushing aside his sister-in-law’s objection. Why—it would make a man of him!

  What were they thinking of? Here they were, dispatching a boy not old enough to vote and with little outdoor experience to accompany a man whose own plans for returning to the wilderness were vague and ephemeral. They do not appear to have made any searching inquiries in Canada about Hornby’s abilities or qualifications. No doubt they, too, were impressed by Hornby’s yarn spinning. There was an appealing quality about Hornby that charmed some, as it had once charmed Bullock. But there were enough old Northern hands available to dampen some of the enthusiasm that Hornby inspired. A less suitable companion for the Northern wilderness would have been hard to find. The family had no idea where he and Edgar were headed. Hornby probably didn’t know himself. But Edgar had absolute faith in his fabulous cousin. “The more I get to know Jack, the nicer he seems to be,” he wrote in the diary his father had urged him to keep. “His extraordinary knowledge on some subjects is really wonderful considering how long he has been living so far away from civilization.”

  They embarked for Halifax on April 19, 1926, and on arrival made their way to Ottawa where Guy Blanchet, the government surveyor, expressed concern about Hornby’s plans, or lack of them. Christian, in a letter home, had written vaguely about trapping around Great Slave Lake or even prospecting near Fort Smith. In Toronto, Hornby made contact with George Douglas’s wife, Kay, who was staying with friends and whose father, as George Douglas later recalled, “was full of forebodings as to what might happen to Edgar.” Hornby talked vaguely about joining the gold rush to Red Lake in northwestern Ontario by way of Winnipeg. But when they reached Winnipeg there was no further talk about Red Lake. Hornby had apparently used that ploy only as an excuse to look up his old girlfriend, Olwen Newell, now living in Winnipeg. There, to her astonishment, he proposed marriage. She declined, using the excuse that she was returning to England as soon as she could afford the fare. Hornby, impulsive as ever, bought her a first-class ticket and told her he was redrafting his will to leave his entire fortune to her, a promise he never bothered to fulfill.

  Olwen, who met and liked Edgar, also did her best to persuade Hornby not to take the boy farther north than Athabasca Landing, but now, with the prospect of a settled life with her fading, Hornby’s resolve hardened. To see the real Canada—the uncivilized Canada beyond the trees—Edgar must experience the Barren Ground.

  When they arrived in Edmonton, Hornby resumed his acquaintanceship with his cousins in Onoway and there ran into an old friend, twenty-seven-year-old Harold Adlard, behind the counter of the general store. Adlard reminded him of a vague promise he had made two years before. A veteran of the Royal Naval Air Service, Adlard had tried to join Hornby and Bullock on their earlier expedition, but Bullock had vetoed the idea. Hornby, feeling sorry for Adlard, had promised to take him on the next trip. Now he had a further reason to go back to the tundra; as Service had written, “a promise made is a debt unpaid and the North has its own stern code.” There was also the safety factor to consider. Hornby and Bullock had concluded that three was the minimum number needed to take on any expedition into the Barren Ground. So three it would be, and the Barrens would be their ultimate goal.

  Harold Adlard shown before the ill-fated trek to the Barrens that cost him his life.

  The outfit that Hornby assembled for the venture was practical enough, indeed luxurious by his standards—a ton of supplies, excluding comestibles. It included a sheet-metal camp stove, a canvas tent and groundsheets, a Primus stove, a meat grinder, a felling axe, binoculars and a camera, three sheets of window glass, hammer, nails, files and drills, metal cutlery, and three rifles. Hornby undoubtedly had his critics in mind and also his responsibility to his two green companions; this outfit was a little out of keeping with his personal asceticism. There were deficiencies, however, in the provisions he assembled and these would have fatal consequences. Because of his unsupported conviction that anybody could live off the land, even in the Barrens, he did not take enough dried food. In spite of his experiences with the cold on his previous journey, he took only one caribou-hide parka for three people! Worst of all, he was leading his young greenhorns into a region where game birds were reasonably plentiful, yet he declined to bring along a shotgun. Hornby’s eccentricities came to the fore when he refused to allow Christian to bring a Bible—a superfluous piece of weight—while at the same time he took along his formal dress suit, complete with gold cufflinks, in his own suitcase.

  Again attempts were made by seasoned Northern veterans to talk Hornby out of this newest enterprise. At Fort Chipewyan they encountered Guy Blanchet, the government surveyor, who again did his best to talk Hornby out of wintering on the Thelon. Blanchet was reasonably sure that this was a summer breeding ground for the migrating caribou but not a winter one. No one really knew because no one had ever wintered in the verdant Thelon oasis, separated from the treeline by miles of empty tundra. Hornby’s stubborn response was that he had already made his plans and meant to keep his promise to Adlard as well as to Christian.

  In Edgar Christian’s eyes, Hornby could do no wrong. From Fort Smith he wrote an enthusiastic letter to his family with the reassuring words, “I am as safe as a house with Jack.” Although the flies were bad, it was “a wonderful life and one could not wish for better. After going on this
trip with Jack I shall never be in need of a Job if I want one. I can be independent of any man because I can make my own headway in Lots of ways.”

  When they reached the site of old Fort Reliance, Edgar’s enthusiasm had not waned. The Barrens lay just ahead, and he was eager to see the land that Hornby had boasted about. “Jack is going into a Country which has never been trapped by any one else before because it is too hard to get into with Supplies,” he wrote to his family in a letter that suggests how thoroughly he had absorbed Hornby’s offhand attitude to Arctic travel. “… & most men take Supplies and don’t rely on the Country …” he told them.

  It had taken three weeks to thread their way by canoe through the tangle of narrow lakes that led to Fort Reliance. The real back-breaking work, however, began when they took the portage route named for Warburton Pike to Artillery Lake. They were now forced to pack their ton of goods on their backs not once but at least eight times around rapids and waterfalls going from one small lake to another. By the time they left Artillery Lake they were beyond the treeline and into what the Indians called “the Stickless Land.” The blackflies were almost unbearable, and hours were wasted seeking out brushwood to build smudges and cooking fires.

  About August 12, at Sifton Lake near the headwaters of the Hanbury, Harold Adlard began a letter to his parents noting that it had been more than a month since they had seen another human being. “For a month now, I have lived on caribou and tea and like it,” he wrote, explaining that they were heading for the oasis of woodland in the Thelon country. “About a dozen men all told have been through so far.… If you don’t hear within three years make enquiries from the Royal Northwest Police.” It was the first hint, and no more than a hint, that there might be trouble ahead.

  By September they were canoeing down the broad and slow-moving Thelon below its junction with the Hanbury and making good time. In the heart of the wooded oasis they found, at last, a suitable camping spot overlooking the broad sweep of the river, and here they set about building a cabin.

  This was not as easy a task as it would have been in wooded country. Setting aside the problem of getting logs, which was partially alleviated by the presence of a thicket of spruce trees, one must consider the problem of time: a shelter has to be complete before the harsh winter season advances. There is one other consideration. Three men jammed into a confined space and forced to wait out a storm or blizzard are often driven to that psychological condition, so familiar to Northerners, known as cabin fever. Hornby’s original cabin at Fort Reliance was only six feet by eight. Opposed as he was to any kind of luxury in the wild, and with October fast approaching, he settled for a three-man domicile that was no more than fourteen feet square. The rear wall was a vertical bank of earth, revetted with spruce and brush and reindeer moss; the other three were composed of spruce logs between eight and eighteen inches in diameter, all felled with an axe because Hornby had balked at bringing along a crosscut saw. The roof was thatched with spruce branches, earth, and river shingle. What was left of the felled spruce was used to build a small adjoining storehouse. It was slow going: it took almost two months to complete the cabin while they shivered in a tent pitched against one side. They were short of tools, and besides, precious hours had to be used up in the continual search for food.

  Had they missed the caribou, which, in the natives’ famous phrase, “come like ghost, fill up the land, and vanish”? Hornby had been certain that la foule was a regular occurrence, always in late August or early September, when their meat was nutritious and edible. If the caribou were in prime condition, he reasoned, it would not be difficult to kill, freeze, and store the fifty carcasses the trio would need for the coming winter. He had selected this point on the curve of the Thelon believing that a considerable number would winter here. He based his forecast on his previous experience at Artillery Lake, but that was two hundred miles to the southwest.

  All this was arrogant and wishful thinking on Hornby’s part. It was obvious that they had missed any mass migration through this section of the Barrens if, indeed, there had been one. The evidence was flimsy since no one had ever wintered here. Moreover, as we learned in the Yukon, the migrating herds did not necessarily follow exactly the same routes season after season.

  Equally serious was Hornby’s decision not to take dogs—a view at odds with conventional wisdom. Without dogs to handle the loads it was not possible to travel any distance overland in the North. Hornby, who tended to believe he was a superman, and certainly wanted to give that impression, overruled the obvious.

  He still clung to the unsubstantiated belief that small, isolated herds of caribou could be found near the woods that bordered the river. But what if he was wrong? What if it turned out that small breeding herds were farther away? It would not be possible to kill enough meat and transport the burden dozens of miles back to camp without dogs and sleds. What then? Bullock, after the fact, said he believed that Hornby, if driven to it, was prepared to kill muskoxen. They were a protected species but could be shot in the face of extreme destitution. If that was Hornby’s fail-safe plan, it depended again on whether these elusive animals existed near the campsite.

  Hornby had the only trapper’s licence among the trio. Nonetheless it was Christian who kept an eye on the trapline whenever weather permitted. The results in the first three weeks were disappointing: three weasels, one marten, two whisky-jacks (Canada jays), some mice, a wolverine, and only one white fox, whose fur was to be the main harvest of the enterprise. That scarcely jibed with Hornby’s earlier assertion that he was going “to make a fortune in fur for the boy.”

  The sparseness of the catch emphasized the other problem. The absence of a quantity of small fur-bearing animals suggested the absence as well of larger game, for the rodents habitually took advantage of leftovers from wolf and Indian kills of caribou.

  Hornby had pooh-poohed Blanchet’s belief that this was not a caribou winter range. He was still sure that caribou could be found somewhere in the area. In the absence of dogs, he suggested that a small cache be established some sixteen miles upstream where rations could be stored and where any killed meat could be held for later collection. This was done, but Christian’s diary gives no details. It was written in spurts with gaps of days, even weeks, between. On November 21, after a silence of almost a month, he mentions being held up all day by a storm, “which meant 1 day’s less hunting owing to lack of grub,” an ominous note. The next morning he went out again but on return faced a strong, bitterly cold wind. “Could not keep hands and face warm at all.” He had managed to travel the sixteen miles through the snow but with no useful result.

  The cabin on the banks of the Thelon as a prospecting party found it a year after the tragedy. They missed Edgar Christian’s diary, hidden in the stove.

  During one severe windstorm, all three were forced to huddle in the cabin for fear of frostbite. Wind chill is the curse of the Barrens, making it, in Clive Powell-Williams’s description in Cold Burial, “the most inhospitable place in North America.” Though exposed skin does not freeze until −50 degrees Fahrenheit, a twenty-five-mile-an-hour wind will have the same effect at −15 degrees. With only one parka among them, they could not even hunt for caribou when a strong wind was blowing. And, to what must have been Hornby’s chagrin, they saw no muskoxen.

  Now the food supply began to occupy them to the exclusion of all else. Edgar Christian’s brief diary entries underline their growing concern:

  25 November: Jack set net in Willow for ptarmigan … Harold looked at hook but no fish.…

  26 November: All took it easy being cold all day and having no meat. Went with Jack to look at Ptarmigan net and disturbed about 20 from close by but none in the net, a stroke of bad luck.

  27 November: A fine day but we are taking Life Easy to economize in grub. I went out to barrens and got 1 fox and reset trap. Jack dug up all the fish left, 60 in all, which will last just 2 weeks and then, if we have no meat we will be in a bad way.

  On
December 4 Hornby outlined their situation: no caribou and no muskox in any quantity; no wolves around and very few small mammals; with the river ice thickening, fishing was becoming difficult, and the ptarmigan nets didn’t work. Christian wrote in his diary the following day that “we must throw up trapping and practically den up and get hold of any grub we can without creating big appetite by hunting in short cold days.”

  They had enough food for fourteen days at two fish a day and only one hundred pounds of flour until spring. He got one “damn thin” fox that day (December 6) and Harold Adlard got a wolverine, “so that’s a good meal.” By this time his diary was concerned entirely with food—a fish here, a fox there. Without a shotgun it was difficult to bring down a ptarmigan, nor did they know how to net one. The Inuit made a funnel out of willow sticks with a snare at the narrow end, but this technique was unknown to Hornby.

  Cheerfulness in adversity—that was the code that every English schoolboy had soaked up with his breakfast porridge. But it was not an easy one to maintain in those close quarters when the spectre of starvation hovered over them. For Christmas they resurrected a caribou head, which they had saved for two and a half months. Christian told his diary that they “enjoyed the feast as much as any, although we had nothing in sight for tomorrow’s breakfast.… I hope every one in England has enjoyed today, & at the same time hope to God we rustle enough grub for a month from now & not wish we had not feasted today.” There is no sign here of the enthusiasm that marked the earlier entries.

  A suspicion of approaching cabin fever appeared in early January when Adlard went for a walk after an altercation. “I think he said nothing all morning before going and never spoke for some time after coming in, which makes things so unpleasant for us.” Powell-Williams suggests in Cold Burial that Hornby’s “mindless boasting, yarning and theorizing” may have begun to get on Adlard’s nerves and that having to watch Christian’s passionate devotion to his cousin, he might have felt excluded.