Journey (16 page)

“Strangers can be told anything,” Luton snapped as he took back his maps.

One morning, apropos of nothing that had been said before, he told the men: “At Fort Norman, I felt absolutely naked. Those huge men with their beards as big as bushes. Said they never shaved after the fifteenth of October—tradition, they assured me.” Then, looking about the cabin, he pointed to Trevor Blythe, whose beard was so skimpy and faded-straw in color that it made a poor show: “I say, Trevor, want to borrow my razor and scrape that foolish thing off?” but the younger man parried the suggestion by admitting, with some embarrassment: “I simply abhor shaving. At home I allow Forbes to do it for me, and I wish he were here now.”

But in some ways it was Blythe who accommodated most perfectly to the winter isolation, for he was attuned to the changes of nature and relished what he was witnessing: “Have you ever seen more heavenly pastel colors than those out there? I feared the night would be perpetual, but these midday hours are superb. Just enough light to bathe the world in beauty.”

He attracted the admiration of everyone by an astonishing accomplishment. The men were surprised that even in the remotest and coldest parts of the arctic, ravens appeared, huge black creatures with an ugly cry. “What do they live on?” Blythe asked. “In this frozen waste what can they possibly find to eat?” In time, the ravens were eating scraps which he provided and shortly one of the more daring was coming close to his feet and snatching crumbs from the snow. To the other men, all ravens looked alike, but Trevor found in this one some identifying sign, and whenever the bird appeared, Trevor lured it always closer. Othello, he called it, and it seemed as if the raven recognized its name and responded to it.

One morning while Trevor was outside feeding Othello, the men in the cabin heard a soft cry: “I say, come here. But quiet.” And when they opened the door slowly they saw the raven perched on Trevor's left arm eating crumbs which the young man offered with his right hand.

“Remarkable!” Luton cried, whereupon the bird flew off with a slight beating of its black wings, but on subsequent days it returned, and grew bolder, until finally it elected Blythe's left shoulder as an
assured resting place. When the others saw this extraordinary spectacle of a young man swathed in arctic clothing, flaxen hair exposed, with a raven perched on his shoulder, all silhouetted against the blazing white of the snow, they tried to lure the bird, but Othello, sensing that Blythe was the one to trust, stayed with him.

The men had agreed back in Edmonton, when it became obvious that they must spend a winter in the far north, that they would keep a record of how extreme cold and prolonged night affected them, and they learned to their relief that any healthy man who did, as Luton insisted, “observe the niceties,” survived rather well. “There is disruption,” Luton conceded in his notes. “We eat less, seem to require more water, and have to guard against constipation. We also suffer minor eye irritation from incessant lantern light. But we can detect no negative mental effects, and as the worst part of winter approaches, we have no apprehensions.”

Fogarty in the meantime was scouring the countryside for game, and sometimes the men would see him approaching the far side of the deeply frozen Mackenzie at the conclusion of some foray to the east, and they would watch his distant figure grow larger. They would study closely to see if he signaled for them to cross over and help him drag home a side of caribou, and if he did wave his arms in triumph, they would pile out, cross the river, and grab hold of whatever it was he had dragged behind him, and that night their cabin would be rich with the smell of roasting meat.

As January waned, Carpenter warned his companions: “February is the testing time. No part of the year colder than February.” In 1898 it was especially bitter along the Mackenzie, with the spirit thermometer staying below forty for days at a time, but when the cold was most oppressive Carpenter would say: “When it breaks, we'll have summer in winter!” and he was right, for in late February the cold mysteriously abated and the men had a respite as lovely and as welcome as any they had ever known.

The thermometer rose to four-below, and since there was not even a whisper of wind, it was indeed like summer. Harry and Philip actually ran their laps with shirts off, chests bare, and experienced no discomfort. Othello made two turns of the snow-packed course on Blythe's shoulder, and Carpenter accompanied Fogarty on a long excursion to the other side of the Mackenzie, where they bagged a moose.

This reassuring respite heightened the spirits of the men, who
restudied their maps and made plans for when the spring thaw would allow them to resume their journey to the gold fields. “What those bearded ones at Norman reminded me,” Luton said, “is that when we have to saw our boat in half, it might well be at a spot where there's no timber to be had to shore up the open end. So what we must do on our way downriver, as soon as it's ice-free, is bring on board any logs that look as if they might be sawn into short planking.”

“And where do you calculate the site for sawing the
Sweet Afton
apart might come?” Carpenter inquired, not in unduly curious fashion but merely to prepare his thinking, and Luton pointed almost automatically to a spot well up the Peel River. Carpenter was about to launch one final protest against taking a route which was sure to be perilous, but before he could voice his objections, Lord Luton anticipated them, swept up his maps, and disappeared before Harry could force the issue.

So the vital decision was never submitted to an honest criticism and evaluation. When Harry studied his own maps in secret they reinforced his apprehensions about the inherent dangers in trying to force a way up the Peel: The entire trip on the river is against a current which has to be swift. The rapids cannot be easy to portage if there's no path to walk on shore. And those damned high mountains at the end. Not promising, not promising at all.

Now when he did his daily turns on the new track, some fifty feet higher than the old, he calculated the odds on each of these impediments. At the end of one imaginary survey he ruefully cast the score: Impedimenta barring the way, nineteen; Lord Luton's party, nothing. And he could foresee no way to change those odds unless Evelyn entertained a revelation when he faced that lonely spot where the Rat River led to safety across the low divide: If he refuses to see or to listen, we're doomed.

He was certain of this, and yet he did not enforce his judgment upon his cousin. Luton was younger than he by six years and less experienced in the field by seven or eight major explorations. He was in no way superior to Harry in intellect or in his university performance. He was courageous, of that there could be no question, but he had never been tested under fire the way Harry had been. And although he had a stern moral fiber, what some would term character, it had not yet been required to assert itself in time of real crisis, the way Harry's character had been tested in India and Africa.

With the scales weighing those virtues that really mattered in
Carpenter's favor, why did he defer to his younger cousin? Because in the prolific and noble Bradcombe family it was the custom out of time to pay deference when facing difficult decisions to the man who held the marquisate of Deal, and remote though the possibility was, Harry knew that Evelyn might one day be that man. This rule had served the family well, and if an occasional marquess had been a ninny, most had not, and Carpenter could see that when Evelyn had a few more years under his belt, he would be eligible, if called upon, to be one of the best. This expedition to the gold fields of Canada could be the final testing ground that would make Lord Luton a whole man, one forged in fire, and Harry Carpenter would stand by him in the testing period, for in that regard, he, Harry, represented all the Bradcombes. Their leader was under scrutiny and they stood with him.

With the arrival of warmer weather in April the men assumed that the Mackenzie would begin to thaw, and it was Blythe, least experienced outdoorsman of the group, who pointed out: “Fellows! It's still ten degrees below freezing!” and Philip replied: “But it feels like summer.”

It did, and the realization that the winter hibernation would soon be coming to an end spurred the men to start casting up their assessments of what their adventure in the arctic winter had meant. Lord Luton took it upon himself to make the summary statements in the official log, and he came close to the truth when he wrote:

As I look back on this splendid adventure, I see that we were a team of five who respected nature and wished to test ourselves against the full force of an arctic winter. Harry Carpenter had wide experience in frontier situations in all climates. My nephew Philip Henslow was a keen sportsman and a reliable shot. His friend Trevor Blythe displayed an uncanny aptitude for domesticating wild ravens, something never before attempted to our knowledge, and even our trusted ghillie, Fogarty from Ireland, had an unmatched knowledge of the way of salmon. I had traveled to many distant areas, loved boxing and cricket and the dictum of Juvenal:
Mens sana in corpore sano
.

At the beginning of our long hibernation we laid down sensible and healthful rules which all obeyed, and as a result we suffered not one serious illness or accident. Rigorous daily exercise seems a sure preventative for the idleness of an arctic
stay, and our experience is that it should be enforced out of doors even in the roughest weather. Among other benefits, it inhibits constipation.

But the remarkable fact about our stay is that all team members displayed unusual and unflagging courage. Never were spirits allowed to fall or pettiness to invade our daily regimen. When meat was needed, our members were willing to roam very far afield, even under the most daunting circumstances. Hard work was greeted almost as a friend, and we proved once more what honest Englishmen can accomplish in adversity, and even Fogarty caught the spirit, for his extended forays in search of provender were little less than heroic. Harry Carpenter was an older exemplar without parallel of such deportment and our two younger men were faultless, displaying great promise for future development.

In all modesty I make bold to claim we were a gallant bunch, and the arctic was powerless to defeat us in our quest.

When the others heard these lines read aloud, they protested that in the coda Lord Luton had not mentioned his own laudable behavior, and when he disclaimed the right to any special notice, Harry Carpenter took the journal and wrote, reciting the words aloud as he did:

“The other members of the Lord Luton party wish to record the fact that in all contingencies their leader was salutary in his own display of courage under difficult situations, none more so than when he went on foot fifty miles in each direction, alone and in the dead of winter with the thermometer at minus-forty and storms brewing, to find us data regarding our next target. In this feat, performed during days that allowed only two hours of daylight, he performed as none of the rest of us could have.”

There were murmurs of assent when Carpenter laid down his pen, but as he himself looked at the final words of his encomium he realized that he had omitted the salient truth of Luton's journey: And he returned from his venture without having listened to a word of the advice given him.

—

In May came unmistakable signs of approaching thaw, but it was not until June that Fogarty set out for one last hunting trip on the opposite bank of the Mackenzie; he returned immediately up the Gravel, shouting: “Gentlemen! Come see the river!” When they did, they witnessed one of the most savage displays of nature, for the various tributaries lying far to the south where the sun returned early had long since thawed and sent their burden of melt-water and floating ice crashing northward. Now, as this icy flood reached areas still frozen, the whole river began to writhe and crack and heave. With astonishing reports, like the firing of a battery of cannon, thick ice off the mouth of the Gravel, locked there since October, broke asunder in wild confusion.

“Good God!” Luton shouted. “Look out there. That one's as big as a house,” and when the men stared toward the middle of the Mackenzie they saw that he was wrong. It was bigger than three houses, a huge chunk of ice, and as it ground its way past the mouth of the Gravel, pulverizing the smaller floes which that small river had contributed, the men gained an appreciation of what an arctic river could do when it was shattered by the surges of spring.

Blythe and Henslow stood side by side, watching in awe as a gigantic iceberg came thundering down the river, holding embedded within its massive walls of ice a collection of intertwined evergreen trees that it had ripped from a hillside eight hundred miles distant. On it came, “a frozen forest,” Trevor said as he tried to imagine the journey the trees had made. “That iceberg must hold a thousand bird's nests, and when they come flying back to find their homes the landlord will tell them: ‘We've moved them to the shores of the Arctic Ocean. Start flying north.' ”

For more than an hour the two young men watched little forests floating past, but then their attention was directed to Carpenter, who shouted: “Look what's coming to greet us over here!” and everyone turned to see what their relatively tiny Gravel could produce, for tumbling down it came a monstrous block of ice traveling at harmful speed. As it roared past, twisting and turning, it swept with awful crunching force right over the spot where the original cabin had been, and with such grinding power that it would have reduced both craft and cabin to pulp.

No one, watching the total erasure of their former homesite and means of escape from this wintry prison, could keep from thinking: My God! If we had remained in that spot! And all recalled George
Michael's rhetorical question: “What would you do if you lost your boat?” Carpenter summed up their reactions: “Thank God, Evelyn did go to Fort Norman and bring back that Métis. We escaped a terrible trap.”