James Critchell-Bullock wrote the date in his diary. “December 24, 1924.” Underlined it, then, in a spate of sharply slanted copperplate, poured forth his woes:
“Discomforts! Such discomforts!
“Alone this Christmas Eve on the Barren Lands of the Subarctic of America, when those outside are contemplating the morrow with hearts full of happiness and pleasurable excitement. Alone in a dug-out beneath the sand and snow.”
He moved closer to the feeble light of the fox-fat lantern his partner, John Hornby, had made from a tin can.
“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 a dying dog whose foot is stinking with decay. Alone with but the howl of the blizzard outside...”
Hornby should be here with him. If he were here, they could play chess or talk of Christmases past. They could break open a bottle of rum from the medicine chest and drink toasts to absent friends, forget the dangers and discomforts of this place for a while.
Hornby should not have left him alone, not on Christmas Eve. He’d gone off this morning, without a thought for the season, to fetch wood he could have brought in any time during the past week. It was maddening beyond endurance the way that man left things till the last minute.
In his agitation, James set aside his diary and went again to look out the doorway. Drifting snow had blocked the entry. He had to shovel it aside before he could step out into the storm. “Hornby! I say, Jack, are you there?”
It would be full dark soon. Hornby was not likely to arrive tonight. He’d have made camp in the shelter of a spruce grove down by the lake, probably, or he may have made his way to the Stewarts’ cabin on the Casba River. Wherever he was, he’d be fine, drinking a cup of tea, no doubt, made sweet and strong, the way he liked it. Hornby knew how to look after himself in the wilds.
James stepped back inside, stopping to pat the injured dog, Bhaie. “I’m afraid we’re on our own, old fellow. No Christmas cheer for us.”
If he let himself go, he could weep with frustration at his situation. It was all Hornby’s fault. When the two men had met in Edmonton last year, Hornby had lured him here with his talk of the Barren Lands, speaking as though they were the northern Garden of Eden, and James had listened, spellbound.
“The Barren Lands lie north and east from Great Slave Lake, just beyond the tree line. Rolling plains, slashed with countless unnamed lakes and rivers, teem with wildlife: caribou and musk-ox, white wolves and foxes, geese, ptarmigan, all following the seasons and the cycles of their lives. It is a land of astonishing beauty, bright with flowers and lichen for a short season, cold and windswept for long months, a vast land and empty of human habitation. It is a land where a man can be truly free.”
Yes, James had thought. Oh yes, I could love a land like that.
“It is a harsh land," Hornby continued in his upper-class British accent. “Dangerous and unforgiving. Death is always close at hand. Any small mistake—a careless swing of an axe, a clumsy fall on a portage, a broken sled runner, a misjudgment of time or distance—can push a man in a moment from the edge of life into the abyss of death.”
James’s eyes shone all the brighter. Oh yes. This would be a land to test a man’s strength and mettle and endurance. Like Scott’s Antarctica. Yes, oh yes.
“Without a word of a boast, I can say that I know the Barrens better than any other man alive." Hornby’s intense blue eyes gleamed with passion. “I could show you how to live there.”
“Yes,” James agreed without hesitation.
He was twenty-five years old, and he had found a new life.
Months of preparations followed. James planned a scientific expedition, like Scott’s. He would take meteorological readings, collect specimens of flora and fauna, take photographs, make notes on the migration patterns of birds and mammals, survey unmapped rivers and lakes. His expedition would make a significant contribution to the world’s knowledge.
From the office he established in Edmonton, he wrote letters to the government outlining his plans, asking for funding. His efforts were unsuccessful. Hornby dropped a note to a couple of people he knew in Ottawa and one of them agreed to supply a grubstake and two hundred dollars.
“Two hundred dollars and food besides!” Hornby was delighted.
“What about the equipment we’ll need?” James asked. "Canoes and transport boats. Tents. Stove. Portable kitchen. Medicine chest. Tools. These in addition to scientific instruments, cameras and film.”
“We don’t want to overburden ourselves with paraphernalia,” Hornby cautioned. “We’ll travel much of the time and we want to go light. Of course we’ll have to den up for the winter. We do our trapping then. Mark down traps on your list there." He pointed to James’s ever-ready notebook.
“Trapping?” James had thought Hornby a British gentleman, like himself, not a backwoods trapper.
“We may as well make something for ourselves out of this. I reckon we could easily collect thirty or forty thousand dollars’ worth of white fox furs alone.”
Hornby was the one who knew the country; his word went on all matters. James added traps to the long list of essentials. If they made their fortunes out of fox furs, so much the better. This trip was costing him thousands.
It was August before they were ready to travel, in the company of four trappers, from the railhead at Waterways up the Athabaska River and across Great Slave Lake. At the east end of the lake, at the place known as Reliance, they cached more than a ton of gear, including most of the scientific equipment.
“We’ll come back for it after we settle ourselves,” Hornby promised. "All this extra gear will slow us down through Pike’s Portage. We need to get in fast and get our cabin built before snowfall.”
Pike’s Portage was long and difficult, and James had to admit it would have been just about impossible with the weight of the scientific equipment.
“We’ll come back for it,” Hornby promised.
“When?"
“Soon.”
From Artillery Lake, the going was easier. Here the party separated. Two of the trappers built a cabin on the wooded lakeshore. Thirty miles further north, the Stewart brothers found themselves a good building site in the sheltered valley where the Casba River flowed into the eastern end of the lake. Stunted spruce trees grew there, along the river bank.
James and Hornby pushed on another six miles into the true Barrens, where no trees grew. A vast unbroken plain, bright with rich autumnal reds and browns, stretched under an equally vast sky, space unbounded. James was enraptured.
Even when the first snowfall engulfed all colour in monotonous white, even when the daily struggle to keep themselves fed and warm turned the adventure of discovery into a wearing routine, James remained under the spell of the land. He loved the serene emptiness, the brief eerie days and the long nights when the earth groaned with the burden of cold. He had known no other landscape so stern, so bleakly, uncompromisingly beautiful.
For their shelter, Hornby and James dug into the gravelly sand on the lee side of one of the long eskers that crested like frozen waves across the plain. They hollowed out a rectangle, ten feet by seven, lined it with spruce boughs they hauled from the woods by the river, and roofed it with poles, covered with a tarp and weighted down with sand.
“We’ll feel no breath of wind here, no matter how hard it blows,” Hornby said.
They might feel no wind, but they felt sand. Sand drifted in between the roof poles, dribbled and sometimes even cascaded down the walls. Sand trickled into their sleeping bags, into pots and pans and clothes and food. There was always the grit of sand in their mouths, in their hair, scratching at their skin.
Hornby didn’t mind.
“Will the roof hold at least?” James asked.
“I should think so. More likely than not.” Hornby was not a worrying man. “We can always stick in an extra prop or two.”
Over the following weeks they stuck in props until the little room was a hazardous labyrinth of crooked columns, and still the roof sagged under its weight of sand and snow.
James was glad to get out of the foul hole during the day to set traplines or fetch wood. But days were short and the nights were long in the den they called home.
Sand drifted down on them and the stove smoked. When they let the fire go out, as they often did to save precious wood, the cave grew cold as a tomb. James’s beard froze solid. "I could cut my own throat by nodding my head,” he complained, but Hornby only laughed.
And then there were the carcasses. When Hornby had mentioned trapping, James thought of furs as he had seen them in Hudson Bay posts, in neat, dry stacks.
In reality, collecting furs meant living in the constant stench and debris of slaughter as Hornby disembowelled and skinned wolves and foxes. “I can’t do the work outside, not in this weather,” he explained to the squeamish James.
Many of Hornby’s habits grated on James’s nerves; the way he cracked caribou bones for the marrow in them, for instance. He’d sit cross-legged on the floor by the stove surrounded by blood and bones and hide and sinew, pounding at the bones with a hammer, scraping them with his hunting knife till he got into the marrow which he would eat from the knife with lip-smacking gusto. Crack and scrape, scrape, scrape and then the noise of the sucking. "You really ought to try some.” He offered a pasty pink mess on the end of his knife. "It’s delicious.” He spoke as if he were passing a plate of cucumber sandwiches or petits fours.
James turned away in disgust, but not before noticing how Hornby dipped his gore-stained fingers into the sugar tin to take a pinch for his tea. All this from a gentleman who had attended Harrow.
“For God’s sake, could you please use a spoon!” James shouted.
“I say, your nerves aren’t going, are they? Do compose yourself.”
James struggled for calm. Of all the dangers of life in the northlands, the worst was a partner who went bushed. You depended on your partner for your survival. You didn’t dare quarrel with him, not in a ten by seven foot space filled with rifles, axes, knives and the smell of blood. There were too many stories of that sort of tragedy.
James calmed himself.
Even more trying than Hornby’s annoying personal habits was his lack of interest in James’s research plans.
He could never find time to go back to Reliance to pick up the instruments they’d cached there. James pined for those instruments. The whole reason for being here, he argued, was the scientific work he’d planned, the careful and accurate amassing of knowledge. If they couldn’t do that, what were they here for? Why were they enduring all the discomfort on the barrens when they could be safe and snug in Edmonton? Even life in one of the trappers’ cabins among the trees would make more sense than this.
“Discomfort?” Hornby asked, amazed. "Are you cold? Are you hungry?”
“Not at the moment, but…”
“Well, then. Anyway, I don’t see the necessity for all that gear to study this place. Go out and look at the caribou. Think about them. Camp out a night or two. You’ll learn about temperatures. You’ll feel them all right.”
“I need my instruments!”
“You’ve got your camera; you’ve taken plenty of photographs. You’ve got your notebooks and that diary you’re forever writing in. Isn’t that enough? What else could you need.”
“Thermometers. Barometer. Theodolite. Specimen cases...” James began.
“Maybe later,” Hornby interrupted.
And now it was Christmas and James despaired of ever getting his instruments. The scientific aims of the expedition had come to nothing. He and Hornby were fur trappers, like the others down on the lake, only not so well housed. He should have given up and left. He’d had an opportunity only a few weeks ago when the Stewarts made the trip back to Reliance for more supplies. But he didn’t go. He couldn’t. The land held him, enthralled him still. And Hornby. Despite all the man’s exasperating eccentricities, James couldn’t help but admire him. Hornby was stronger, more intelligent, more resourceful, more entertaining than anyone James had ever known.
Now, he went one last time to the doorway to shout again into the void, “Hornby! Hornby!” He fired off a couple of shots to give direction in case the man was lost out there, though that was hardly likely. Hornby never got lost.
At five o’clock, when the civilized world would be having tea, or perhaps cocktails on this festive evening, James cooked and ate a solitary meal of caribou steak and oatmeal. He brewed tea. He sang Silent Night defiantly, all three verses. Hornby absolutely forbade singing around him, couldn’t abide music. “Animals don’t sing; why should we?” was his argument.
James bathed Bhaie’s festering wound. The dog, who had stepped on a fox trap and all but severed a foot, whimpered as James worked.
About six o’clock, to save wood, he let the fire go out and crawled into his sleeping bag. A person slept long hours in the northern winters.
He woke Christmas morning to intense cold.
At least he assumed it was morning. To add to his aggravations, his watch had stopped while he slept and no amount of shaking would persuade it to start again.
Bhaie’s foot was looking worse.
James threaded his way through the roof props to the entryway and dug out the door. The blizzard had not abated.
There was only enough wood left for about half an hour’s burning. James lit the stove carefully. He fried a steak, and heated water. He ate, and for a long time sat by the stove watching the ashes crumple. He scoured the dishes with sand and shook out his sleeping furs. The sandy gravel around the dug-out cracked like gun shots as it cooled. The wind howled and the blanket over the doorway flapped and snapped.
James sat by the cold stove and sang Hark the Herald Angels Sing while Bhaie stared at him. The words echoed and lingered in the cramped, cold room.
For Christmas dinner James ate a chunk of the meat he’d cooked at breakfast, and tried to chew some raw oatmeal. The water in the pot on the stove had formed a rim of ice. He broke through it and poured a little into a dish for Bhaie. He drank the rest himself.
There’d be nothing more to eat or drink till Hornby arrived with the wood. There was nothing to do but wait. James crept into his sleeping bag and tried to sleep.
Instead he worried. What if Hornby didn’t make it back? Of course Hornby knew better than anyone else how to survive in this country. “The white Indian” people called him. But sooner or later the time must come when his skills would fail him; he was no longer a young man. He could have a heart attack out there in the frozen wastes. James should have gone with him. He’d been crazy to think Bhaie needed his care, to believe that he could save him by bathing the foot now and then. He and the dog would freeze or suffocate or starve, or all three. It was a terrible way to die. He pulled the blankets over his head and wept till he fell asleep.
When he woke the next morning, or what he thought must be morning, his beard was frozen to the blanket. He pried it off and stood up cautiously. They’d need another roof prop by the stove; an avalanche of sand had fallen there during the night. He could hear the storm still howling as he dug out the doorway. “It doesn’t look as though anyone will come to our aid today,” James said to Bhaie.
As soon as he’d spoken the words aloud, the thought became intolerable to him. He would not wait another day. He could not. He was shivering, like the dog. They couldn’t last more than a day, two at the most with no fuel. They had food but they couldn’t eat it; it was frozen solid.
He would have to try to walk out to the Stewarts’ cabin on the river. He knew the route from his hunting and trapping and wood gathering trips.
But walking in the blizzard would be like walking blindfolded. A person could get hopelessly lost within a hundred yards of his camp. James didn’t even have a watch to time the stages of the journey. It would be insane to venture out in this.
But it would be just as insane to lie down and quietly freeze to death here.
Of course, it was not certain that he would freeze. Hornby might get through any minute. He always cut things fine, but always before had come through when he was needed.
On the other hand, he was known for being vague about supplies. He might assume there was enough wood in the cave for another few days and arrive later, when it suited him better. Then he would find the frozen corpses of a man and a dog.
The longer James waited, the colder and weaker he would get, and the less chance he would have of reaching the Stewart cabin.
The two options spun through James’s mind like wind-driven snow: to wait and risk freezing to death here, or to set out for the Stewarts and risk freezing to death on the way.
In the end, he knew there really was no choice. He could not make himself stay in this frightful, tomb-like cave. “Better to perish in the storm than to lie waiting for death, eh, Bhaie?”
Bhaie wagged a feeble tail.
He attached a rawhide rope to the dog’s collar. Bhaie was unlikely to run away but James felt the need to be attached to some living creature. Then he hooded a blanket around his head and stepped out. The snow fell so thickly it seemed like a solid wall in front of him.
Hornby had taught him how to walk in a storm. “When the snow clears for a moment, look for a landmark, then make for it as fast as you can. The faster you go, the less likely you are to stray from course.” But there were no landmarks on the barrens, only a rolling sea of white.
James clung for a few minutes to the guide pole they’d set to mark the doorway of their cave. He was tempted to go back in and crawl under all the furs and go to sleep. But sleep, he knew, was the very worst temptation for one in danger of freezing. He’d made his decision; he would go.
That’s the way it was in the Barrens. A wrong choice could be fatal, but making no choice could be fatal too.
His course was south-east as far as the lake and then straight east. If we keep the wind to our right and slightly behind we should make it to the lake all right," he explained to Bhaie. But would he recognize the lake when he came to it, or would the snow-covered ice merge with the snow-covered land?
“Hornby!” he called one last time. The worst irony would be if he and Hornby unknowingly crossed paths in the blinding whiteness.
The wind whipped away his words. He let go of the guide post and started out into the storm. Bhaie followed, limping on three legs.
His right side was colder than the left. That was good. And the right side of his face stung more. Excellent. If the wind direction changed they would be lost, but he wouldn’t let himself think about that.
He tried to feel the tilt of the land beneath his feet. He should be going slightly downhill, then more steeply down just before the lake. When they turned east, they’d climb. But the drifts confused him. He seemed to battle uphill and then down, like a ship on a stormy sea.
Above all he must keep the wind to his side. He must not let himself fall into the deception of the circle.
He marvelled at how dark it could be despite the whiteness of the snow. No sun was visible, only a sullen grey light beyond the whirling, stinging snow, a grey that grew darker as the afternoon drew on. There was no question of stopping to camp, for there was no shelter, no wood for fire. "We’ll keep on going till we get there, or till we drop in our tracks," he told Bhaie.
Sometimes he pulled the dog, and sometimes the dog seemed to pull him.
When he guessed they’d been walking for four hours he stopped and peered around him. All he could see was whirling white on all sides. It could be the lake. It could be the plain. He couldn’t be sure. He turned east.
He tried to build a mound of snow as a marker in case he had to retrace his steps but the wind blew the dry snow away like plumes of smoke. He surrendered himself to the power of the wind, now coming from behind and a little to his left. He had committed himself when he let go of the guide pole hours ago. His only hope was to keep going.
To have the wind more behind was a relief. He struggled on through drifts and across wind-scoured ice. As far as he could tell, the landscape was featureless, just how a frozen lake should look. “We might very well be on the right track,” he told Bhaie, trying to imitate Hornby’s careless optimism. The dog limped along with his head down.
They went on for perhaps an hour, perhaps two, perhaps three until Bhaie simply lay down in the snow. “Come on, fellow. It can’t be far now.” James could still walk. The dog could walk, if properly encouraged. They were probably going in the right direction. And if they weren’t, James preferred to meet death walking rather than lying down.
For a moment the wind let up. Searching through the murk ahead, James thought he saw something solid over to the right. He moved toward it as fast as he could, dragging the reluctant Bhaie. Could it be a tree? No, rock. It was rock. Or ice. Bhaie lay down again as soon as James stopped to feel the object in front of him. Rock. A large rock. And wood too. A pole? A sawed off log? He felt his way along the solid surface. Another pole. More rock. Could it, oh, could it actually be a cabin? The Stewarts’ cabin? He pounded with his fists against the hardness and tried to shout.
A door opened inwards. Golden light beamed out into the darkness.
James fell towards it.
The first person James saw as his eyelashes thawed and his eyes adjusted to the light was Hornby. A surge of anger jolted through his chill veins. Trust Hornby to keep himself snug and warm, leaving others to fight for their lives through storm and cold.
But he had fought well; he had made it through. He was safe and soon he would be warm. He was well. Hornby was well. And the Stewart brothers were here, and they were well. Everyone was well.
And Bhaie too. He was glad to see they’d let him in. He was lying on an old fur, worrying at his swollen foot. Smart dog. He’d known where they were. Without him, James might have walked right on past the cabin.
Hornby brought a mug of hot sweet tea and James began to drink in tiny sips.
The Stewarts were taking off his moccasins, one working on the right foot, one on the left. He wanted to fall around their necks and hug these tough, dirty, bearded men. He wouldn’t, of course. They’d think he’d gone bushed for certain if he did.
“You were lucky to get through,” Hornby remarked.
James nodded, still not able to speak. Lucky, Hornby said. Not wise, or brave or resourceful, just lucky.
Well, James didn’t care what these men thought. He was just glad to see them and to sit in the orange-gold light of the cabin after the blackness of the storm and the white snow. He felt the warmth of the fire and the hot drink penetrating his frigid body.
Hornby said, “You’ve saved me a journey. I was planning to run up to the den with the wood first thing in the morning.”
That meant, James realized, that he needn’t have ventured on this trek at all. He would have been quite safe, only a little cold and hungry, if he’d waited in the cave.
Unless the roof fell in.
Or Hornby didn’t make it.
“You mightn’t have made it through,” he croaked.
Hornby laughed off the possibility. “I can get through any storm.”
“Me too!” James boasted back and then began to laugh. He was safe and warm and happy and among men. His feet ached as they thawed into feeling, and the pain felt good to him. He wanted to stay right here, like this, forever. Hornby could crack marrow bones all day long if he wished, and never, ever wash the blood from his hands, and James would still be glad of his presence. And the Stewarts, uncouth, unlettered backwoodsmen, were fine fellows at heart, the best of company.
Andy Stewart, having satisfied himself that James’s feet were only slightly frost-bitten, moved over to examine Bhaie. He looked at the dog’s swollen paw. “That leg is not going to get better. You’ll have to shoot him.”
“I know.” James’s elation sputtered out like a wet fire, faded like the brightness of autumn lichen under snow. “I know. But let’s leave him be till morning,” he pleaded.
“All right, so,” Stewart nodded.
James sipped at the tea. It could as easily have been he who stepped on that carelessly misplaced trap. Or Hornby. Or one of the Stewarts. They wouldn’t shoot a man, but he’d die of the wound or its consequences all the same, only slower and with more suffering. In this country no one was ever really safe—only at ease for a while.
James finished his tea and asked for more.
Katharine O’Flynn lives in Montreal. Her short stories have appeared in various Canadian and American journals, most recently in carte blanche and The Nashwaak Review.
