January had arrived—the worst month of all on the Barrens. Hornby told his two charges that the weather was not likely to improve before the end of March, and the caribou could not be expected back before then. Spring would arrive about mid-May; could they hold out until then? On January 12, “all measured out grub today.” They had enough fat for two months, enough flour for twenty days at the present rate, meat for one day and bones.
The heart-rending story of the eighteen weeks that followed comes almost entirely from Edgar Christian’s diary, which he maintained faithfully if sporadically as he and his companions wasted away to shadows in their little cabin on the Thelon. We can see today that tragedy was foreordained from the moment that Hornby agreed to take Edgar Christian into his unrelenting realm. Hornby was a man incapable of planning for more than one day in advance—indeed, he made a fetish of his ineptness in this field. He should have learned from his own experience when he had come close to starvation at Fort Reliance. Luck had saved him that time, and he had always counted on it; but now his luck was running out and his young companions would bear the burden of his misplaced optimism. Here on the Barrens, as the thermometer dropped to −54 degrees Fahrenheit, there would be no second chance.
At the end of the month the weather relented, and Adlard, the best hunter of the three, shot five ptarmigan. On February 1, he spotted caribou crossing the river, shot one and wounded a second. Christian recorded his elation: “a great day of feasting.… Now we have grub on hand things are better and gives one a chance to have a damn good square meal even if we go shy a little later on.”
Of course they did go shy in this land of feast and famine, and the ebullience Christian felt after his feast faded. “This game of going short of grub is hell,” he wrote on February 16. A week later there was further tension in the cabin. Adlard had been laid up with frostbite while the other two, wrapped in blankets, checked the traplines. “A nice warm day & Harold thinking it warm declined to cut wood as Jack asked him to but suggested going for a walk in the afternoon. Not quite playing the game considering that we have been out on intense cold days all this month and cut wood on the cold days as well while he makes some excuse of his face freezing. Today I stayed in all the time feeling rotten.…”
The grumpiness ended when, two days later, Adlard shot a young bull caribou. Renewed by the fresh meat, Harold began to argue against Hornby’s plan of clinging to their base camp. Christian noted that his cousin was beginning to flag after a long day, but he went along with Adlard’s urging that they make one more hunting trip to their winter cache. They were in no condition for such an ordeal, but on March 5 Hornby and Adlard set off, leaving Christian resting in the cabin. The following day Hornby unexpectedly reappeared, explaining that they needed an extra rifle for hunting. Christian reluctantly agreed to go back with him, hoping that Adlard had managed to bring down a caribou or muskox in his absence. It was a hopeless venture. Gaunt, half starved, and exhausted, existing on rations of flour and pieces of caribou hide, they lost their way in a blizzard, stumbled across a large lake, and snowshoed over its surface hoping to find the river. That four-mile hike took three hours. They camped in a thicket of trees, and there Hornby and Adlard stayed awake to keep from freezing to death while Christian slept.
The following day, March 13, they gave up any attempt at hunting. They realized they must expend all their flagging energy in returning first to the cache and then to their cabin. They made it back to the cache in the late afternoon but were snowbound the next day with nothing to eat except a hide mat that had once done duty as tent flooring and was stored in the cache. On March 15 they gathered all the supplies the cache offered into their bulky packs and onto their sled and set off. They had no choice. They knew unless they made the full sixteen miles back to the shelter of their cabin that day they would die out on the Barrens. They trudged for ten hours through the soft snow long after darkness fell, “all feeling as weak & feeble as anything & intensely cold.”
At eight that night they dumped all the dispensable food they had salvaged from the cache in order to lighten their loads. The exhausting journey had been useless. Two hours later they stumbled into their cabin. Hornby, in spite of suffering a bad fall on the trip, cut firewood, lit a fire, and made tea while the others slept. The next morning he was the first awake and shot a ptarmigan. But there is a note of alarm in Christian’s diary. Hornby, who had exhausted himself more than the others because of his double trip back to the cabin for another rifle, “looks very poor and must feel it though he will keep agoing and doing most work and heavy packs.” Now they made a heart-breaking discovery. While they had been exhausting themselves on a fruitless search for caribou, the caribou had come to them. The evidence was all around the cabin—hoof marks and wolverine tracks in the snow. Had they stayed put they could have bagged a caribou by simply thrusting a rifle through the window. With this revelation their morale probably reached a new low. The struggle back to the cache had sealed their fate, and they must have known it.
Hornby’s mind now went back to February 1, when Adlard had shot a caribou. After butchering it they had left the paunch behind, and Hornby became obsessed with the idea of locating it. On April 2, he somehow managed to make the trip to that site and returned with some frozen blood but nothing else. Two days later, in spite of Christian’s concern, he started out again, “all muffled up Looking as Cold as Charity and could hardly walk.…” After four hours spent creeping around the site he returned empty-handed. On April 6, he struggled out one final time looking for ptarmigan, and again with no result. Neither Adlard nor Christian was strong enough to fell any more trees and so were taking the small storehouse apart to keep the stove going.
They were all suffering from constipation, the result, they thought, of their diet of ground bones and wolverine hair. They improvised an enema-syringe from a glass test tube, but it didn’t work for Hornby. For him the effort was too great.
By April 10, Hornby knew he was dying. On a torn page from his cousin’s notebook he wrote out his will bequeathing everything to Christian. In the days that followed he wrote six short letters to relatives. “A farewell line,” he scribbled to Colonel Christian. “Edgar is a perfect gem. Our hardships have been terrible & protracted.”
He told the other two that he might live only two days and pointed out that since Harold, the better shot, could still walk, he should try to go after game and bring in the caribou paunch. Edgar should conserve his strength and wait, hopefully, for the arrival of spring and the coming of the caribou. Their only food at this point was five wolverine hides, but on April 15 Adlard shot a ptarmigan, the only fresh meat they had had since March 30. By this time, however, Hornby was too far gone to eat it. Yet he brightened up and was almost euphoric, a state that puzzled the others who did not understand that this was a final stage in death by starvation.
On the night of April 16, the hermit of the Barrens—“the finest man I have ever known”—died peacefully. Christian was knocked out by his passing and it was Adlard who comforted him. “He talked to me so wonderfully and Realized my Condition I am sure.… He kept fire during night and brought me tea and Aspirin to help along which was a relief as I was able to sleep.” The following morning Adlard parcelled up the wasted body in a groundsheet, sewed it up to make a shroud, and dragged it toward the door.
Hornby’s two young survivors were exhausted by starvation. They existed on whatever sustenance they could scrounge, and it was never enough: a few scraps here, then nothing, and later a few scraps more. Within a few days, Christian realized that his partner, too, was dying. What little energy he had was dissipated by the effort required for him to totter into the snow to salvage scraps of skin and guts and the occasional bit of raw meat that had been tossed away. Then he remembered the remains of a fox killed the previous December. He brought it back, kept the fire going by pulling down more of the storehouse for fuel, and gave himself an enema, which worked. Now he found that his appetite was “simply ravenous
,” which he put down to being bound up.
On April 27, Adlard’s body went weak on his left side—a mild stroke, perhaps brought on as an effect of starvation. His condition worsened, but on May 3 he told Christian that he felt better and had shaken off the illness though he felt weak, a condition that jibes with Hornby’s euphoria on the day of his death. Christian left the cabin to cut wood and get more water. When he returned Adlard told him that “he felt very queer and knew not what to do although not painful.” He fell asleep that night never to awaken, leaving his younger partner alone in the cabin.
Christian closed the dead man’s eyes, crossed his arms over his body, covered him with a blanket, and exhausted by these exertions, slept. The following day he rolled the corpse off the bunk, tied the blanket-shroud in place with packing twine, and dragged it to the door, head to toe with Hornby’s remains. Harold Adlard died on May 3, 1927. Edgar Christian, younger by ten years, lived alone for the month that followed, his diary his only friend: “Having no one to talk to I must Relieve the desire by writing my thoughts.” That diary, he knew, would be a monument to Hornby, whom he continued to worship, blind to the older man’s shortcomings.
To say that he lived is an exaggeration. More accurately, he existed, eking out the days with discarded offal that he dug out of the snow with a small hand axe. By now his limbs and joints were those of a starving man. He awoke after one ten-hour sleep and noted to his surprise that he was “as thin as a rake about my Rump and my joints seemed to jerk in and out of position instead of smoothly.” He could feel bone grinding on bone as he tried to stand and his body fat wasted away so that his joints lost their cushioning. His movements were more than sluggish; it took him two hours to write three hundred words in his diary.
Still, he kept at it, suffering both chills and a fever brought on by his wasted condition, shivering in the cabin, sweating in his blankets. “My shoulder blades and joints still seem to jerk in and out of place,” he wrote on May 10, “and my nose gives way to bleeding.” He was down to one meal a day—or what passed for a meal—and his appetite was failing, a sure sign of his condition. By this time he was tearing up the floorboards of the cabin and gathering wood chips from around the stumps of trees to feed the fire. On May 17: “If I cannot get grub tomorrow must make preparations.” He didn’t need to expand on that.
For the next ten days there were no entries in his diary. But when he took it up again he reported with some satisfaction that on May 22 he had “found lots of meat under snow and 4 good big meaty bones covered in fat and Grease.” That put him on his legs for three days. He had cut his last piece of wood to cook his food, and he was weaker than ever. “Have eaten all I can. Have food on hand but heart petering … Make preparations now.” Two more lines followed later: “Got out too weak and all in now. Left Things Late.”
A passage from the journal kept by Edgar Christian a little more than a week before his death. He hid it in the stove to protect it from the damp.
He still had a few sheets of paper he had taken from the Windsor Hotel in Montreal, and on these he wrote brief letters to his parents. He crawled over to the unlit stove, shoved his diary in the ashes of the firebox, gathered a few more necessary papers together including the unfinished letter Harold Adlard had written to his parents, then shut and latched the stove door. That done, he managed to lay another blank sheet on top of the stove and write: “whoever finds this look into the stove.” His preparations complete, he managed to latch the cabin door, crawled to his bunk, pulled the red blanket over his face, closed his eyes and slept—for the last time.
Such is the isolation of the Thelon country that the cabin with its three corpses went undetected for some fourteen months. Then, on July 21, 1928, a prospecting party of four led by Harry S. Wilson, a mining engineer from Cobalt, ventured down the river in two canvas-covered boats. The police at Fort Smith had asked Wilson to keep a lookout for the Hornby party, and as he stepped ashore and saw the cabin he thought he had located their camp.
The dilapidated condition of the campsite—the window glass shattered, the roof sagging—gave him pause. The door was latched, but lying against the outside wall were two elongated bundles. One of the party attempted to make a hole in one with a clasp knife. He finally separated the edges with his fingers, and there staring at him were the sightless eye sockets of Harold Adlard. A rent in the second bundle revealed the skeleton of John Hornby.
They hammered on the door and shouted, but there was no response. Two put their shoulders to it, and as the latch broke the door swung open. Inside, the air was foul. A cooking pot containing the skull of an animal stood on a small box stove. On a rough table they found a half packet of tea, some ammunition, and two caribou skulls. Nearby were three leather suitcases, a tin trunk and a rattan cabin trunk, three homemade beds—two badly splintered—and one intact bed, in which lay the body of a man covered in a blanket. The body slid a little way down the bunk and the skull rolled sideways. Then an entire skeleton toppled over and dropped to the floor with a clatter.
The visitors left hurriedly, having missed the message underneath the cooking pot, a message half eaten away by damp and mould: who … look … stove. On August 10, the four prospectors told their story to Staff Sergeant Joyce at Chesterfield Inlet. Four days later, the international press had the story, identifying Hornby and his two companions as the victims.
Another year went by before the RCMP investigation patrol reached the cabin. The date was July 25, 1929. Inspector Trundle found the contents in “deplorable condition,” and now he unearthed Edgar Christian’s diary (which would later be published under the title Unflinching) and other papers, all of which had been preserved against the damp by the ashes in the stove. The skeletons of the ill-fated trio were collected and buried under crosses on each of which their initials were carved. There was no epitaph, but Hornby’s remarks to Denny LaNauze, when he said he wished he had been born an Indian, might have served as one:
In civilization there is no peace. Here, in the North, in my country, there is peace. No past, no future, no regret, no anticipation: just doing. That is peace.
That, of course, was integral to the Hornby legend—a legend he himself had gone to some lengths to create. But it does not excuse him for the tragedy of which his own purposeless life was the root cause.
The graves of Christian, Hornby, and Adlard in the Thelon country.
CHAPTER 5
The Bard of the North
Robert Service on the porch of his Dawson City cabin, now a heritage site and tourist mecca. It was here that he wrote his first novel, The Trail of ’98.
—ONE—
Robert W. Service is a hard man to define. Perhaps the best-known English-language poet of the twentieth century, and certainly the richest, he refused to call himself anything more than a rhymester. A shy man and a dreamer, he played a dozen roles in his lifetime, often with costumes to match, while plunging into each masquerade—a cowboy in Canada, an apache in the Paris underworld—with the intensity of a professional. A self-described vagabond, he soaked up the background for his hugely successful novels and poems wherever his wanderlust took him—Tahiti, Hungary, Soviet Russia—difficult corners of the globe where, to his delight, he was unrecognizable.
Service has been a presence in my life since childhood. My mother knew him when she was a young kindergarten teacher in Dawson City; he even asked her to a dance—the kind of social affair he usually avoided. His original log cabin stood directly across from my childhood home under the hill overlooking the town. Early in my television career I spent three days with him in Monte Carlo—the last interview he ever gave. Three decades ago I published a short character sketch about him in My Country. Yet I cannot say I really understand him—a poet who refused to call himself a poet, a hard worker who claimed to be the world’s laziest man, a brilliant storyteller who invented himself in print.
I find it fascinating that he was able, thanks to his royalties, to purchase five thousand book
s for his library, yet scarcely any of them are books of poetry. “I’m not a poetry man,” he once remarked, “though I’ve written a lot of verse.” He made this clear in his autobiography, Ploughman of the Moon. “Verse, not poetry, is what I was after—something the man in the street would take notice of and the sweet old lady would paste in her album; something the schoolboy would spout and the fellow in the pub would quote. Yet I never wrote to please anyone but myself; it just happened that I belonged to simple folks whom I liked to please.” He amplified these remarks in—what else?—a poem, which he called “A Verseman’s Apology.”
The classics! Well, most of them bore me
The Moderns I don’t understand;
But I keep Burns, my kinsman, before me,
And Kipling, my friend, is at hand.
They taught me my trade as I know it,
Yet though at their feet I have sat,
For God-sake don’t call me a poet,
For I’ve never been guilty of that.
By his own admission, the “Canadian Kipling,” as he was universally dubbed, suffered all his life from an inferiority complex that made him keep his distance from many fellow writers of whom he stood in awe. In his comfortable years, when he retired to the Riviera, his neighbours included such luminaries as Somerset Maugham, Bernard Shaw, and Maxine Elliott. “Oh my, I’d be scared to meet Shaw,” Service remarked to a friend. “Somerset Maugham was a neighbour of mine but I’m scared of these big fellows. I like eating in pubs and wearing old clothes. I love low life. I sit with all the riff raff in cafes and play the accordion for them.”
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