Death on the Barrens Read online

  Art also returned to his alma mater, Dartmouth College, to solicit volunteers from among the students to occupy a third canoe as insurance in the event of one being lost in the wild waters of the Dubawnt. Bruce and Joe were roommates there, and Bruce wanted to go, but Joe did not. Art needed either two additional people or none at all, so Bruce persuaded Joe to sign up.

  Bruce was long and lean and, like Peter Franck, was self-conscious about his age, claiming to be twenty when he was really only nineteen. He seemed a very obliging fellow.

  Joe was shorter, stockier, and gruffer. He made it no secret that Bruce had pressured him to join the expedition against his better judgment. He attempted to compensate himself against the prospect of future discomfort by buying the largest pack, the warmest parka, the heaviest sleeping bag, and his own private supply of gourmet chocolates and cheeses. He looked to be the strongest of us three newcomers, so Art chose him as his bowman.

  Art was thirty-six, a good number of years older than the rest of us, which was old enough to be more experienced and more wise but not so much older as to be out of touch with our youthful longings for adventure.

  I was the last one to arrive at Stony Rapids, our embarkation point in northern Saskatchewan. I had been subject to an army court-martial, and my discharge had been slow coming through, which delayed my arrival until June 27, about two weeks later than Art had originally planned to embark. Even at that, we did not leave immediately.

  Earlier that spring, Art had made arrangements to have our canoes and all our supplies shipped to Stony Rapids by barge from Fort McMurray up the Athabasca River. The canoes and other equipment had arrived on schedule, but our food had been left off the manifest. Art had no choice but to scrounge a three-month supply from the Hudson’s Bay post and from a private trader. He was able to fill the canoes to the gunwales, but the makeshift supplies were heavy, and the only case of peanut butter available was in glass jars. Art preferred plastic for obvious reasons. He radioed out to Prince Albert to order another, but the case of peanut butter did not arrive on my flight, or on the next. So, after too many delays, we loaded our ton of food and equipment onto Stony Rapids’ one truck and headed around the impassable cascades on Stony Rapids’ one road, to Black Lake, with our peanut butter still in glass jars.

  Trollenberg, the owner of the truck, complained that our supplies were too heavy, but Art answered that he could not afford to pay for two trips by truck and that we would have to portage the excess. Trollenberg relented, but his truck experienced difficulties even in low gear; he had to stop frequently to let the engine cool and to refill the radiator with water. Our progress, which was slow by truck, became a great deal slower at the end of the road; the supplies that were too heavy for his truck were the supplies that would be too heavy for our backs as we portaged to the height of land and then over that great divide into the Barrens.

  As we stowed away boxes and packs, the large Prospector model canoes from the Chestnut Canoe Company settled low in the water and became so stable that we could walk along the gunwales without tipping them over. We soon discovered the cause of this amazing stability: the canoes were resting on the bottom of the lake. When we pushed them into deeper water, they floated, but only barely. Even small waves sloshed over the gunwales and collected in the canoe bottoms.

  Our progress soon came to a halt. “Are the spare paddles in your canoe, Skip?” Art asked.

  There was a long silence.

  Matches … bullets … fishing lures?

  On the Barrens, the ground lies frozen year round. There were no trees. If we should lose or break a paddle, there would be no way to replace it; the next Hudson’s Bay post was eight hundred miles away; we carried no radio; should we go back for the spare paddles; what else had we forgotten …?

  Art decided to make camp.

  We recovered the paddles the following day and resumed, but by then the wind had come up; the canoes took on too much water and forced us to return to camp. “If I were superstitious,” Skip commented, “I would almost believe we were not meant to go down the Dubawnt.”

  “There’s no hurry,” Art replied. “We’ve got all summer.”

  Because summers are notoriously short on the Barrens, we laughed and repeated the joke during the next several days while the wind blew. Art put a brave face on our situation while the rest of us followed him around with smiles, believing he would carry us through all adversity, but inwardly Art was not laughing. In his diary he admitted to feeling “sad, apprehensive, and gloomy.”

  Eventually, the wind calmed and we were able to embark. It was a lovely night, the northern horizon glowing pink just above the sun, freshly set. I thought I saw the lights of houses along the far shore, as if I were looking across Long Island Sound, but there were no lights, nor any people. Three months would pass before another human being would cross our path, and those human beings would be speaking a language incomprehensible to us.

  Art dreamed that night that there was a toll at the end of the lake, which he could not afford to pay.

  CHAPTER 3

  Art Moffatt

  Wilderness holds answers to questions

  Men have not yet begun to ask.

  —NANCY NEWHALL

  It took us a week to complete our first portage out of Black Lake to a navigable stretch of the Chipman River. By the end of it, I was happy to have severed contact with civilization. I reflected with pleasure on our autonomy, on our new status as a law unto ourselves. We carried no radio; no one would know where we were, nor could they check up on what we did—not that they would likely be interested—leaving me to believe that we were able to do as we pleased, to live beyond those absent constraints of civilization, to be totally free. If something were to go horribly wrong out on the Barrens, or if we were to commit some heinous crime, who would ever know the truth?

  But I reflected on such matters in the abstract only. During those early days of the trip, I was on my best behavior. I loved everyone, and I worshiped Art. He was more than my leader: he was my teacher, my role model, my spiritual guru, my surrogate father. Here was a person I would follow to the ends of the earth.

  During the first month of the voyage, I had three dreams about Art. In the first, he was dressed as a sergeant in the army, which was not surprising because I had just been discharged from the army and was still dressed in army clothes myself. Superficially at least, I felt toward Art much as I had felt toward sergeants in the army: I respected them because they were older and wiser.

  My stint in the army came while the Korean conflict was on. I considered myself an antiwar protester (which, perhaps, really only meant that I did not want to get myself killed), but after falling in love with Virginia Teague, I felt that I had no place to escape but into the army. I spent my early days there explaining the benefits of pacifism to my fellow soldiers until a sergeant took me aside and told me gently that preaching pacifism was quite unnecessary. “In the army,” he said, “we are all pacifists.”

  I looked into my sergeant’s eyes and saw that he spoke the truth. What I found in the army were not soldiers who liked to fight, but soldiers who liked to eat, and the army fed them at a time when jobs were scarce.

  Until then I had thought that soldiers enjoyed getting their parts blown off by land mines and other weapons of destruction and therefore must always be eager for war, but this particular sergeant had joined the army during the Depression because there were no other jobs available, and he had the misfortune to end up on Corregidor shortly before it was overrun by the Japanese. Like Art and other veterans, his experiences in war had confirmed his desire for peace.

  The revelation that almost no one in the army wanted to be there made me feel guilty about my own cowardice and about my earlier attempts to dodge the draft, so I volunteered for combat in Korea. The sergeant at headquarters tore up my application and threw me out of the orderly room, threatening that if I came around again he would give me a “Section Eight”—a discharge on the grounds of
mental instability.

  What the old sergeants taught me were two things: don’t “bug out” and don’t volunteer. If you bug out and desert your comrades under fire, you leave them to die. If you volunteer, you stand a good chance of being killed yourself. The morality of my sergeants had pragmatic foundations: it began and ended with concern for the men around them. In order for the squad to survive, everybody had to obey, but it was not our job to get killed unnecessarily. The old sergeants were like fathers to me, looking out for me, telling me what to do, and I wanted Art to play that role too, but my dream image of Sergeant Moffatt did not entirely fit. Art did not dress like a sergeant, he did not give orders, and the militaristic chain of command was totally alien to him. But when I looked into Art’s eyes, I saw the same thing I thought I had seen in the eyes of that sergeant: compassion for the foolishness of my youth, stoical resignation, and, in the depths of his soul, a sanctuary of inner peace.

  But sergeants, no matter how wise, gave orders. “You ain’t being paid to think, soldier,” they had reminded me on a daily basis. In contrast, Art never gave orders. Instead he sat quietly by the fire and listened. From day to day, we waited. When Art stood up, we all stood up. When he struck his tent, we all struck our tents. When he loaded his canoe, we all loaded our canoes. But he never told us what to do.

  In the army, sergeants are expected to know the whereabouts of their men at all times. If they do not, it is either the absent soldier who is brought before a court-martial, for desertion, or the sergeant, for dereliction of duty. Art, however, never seemed to care where we were.

  At a point early in the trip when we had been held up by wind for several days, I checked in with Art to seek permission to go for a walk. He was sitting on a rock, his back to me, staring at the waves on the lake. “I don’t care what you do,” he said without turning around. Perhaps he was having second thoughts about the trip, but I felt hurt and stood there in a quandary. Finally, he turned around and said in a more friendly voice, “Be back when the wind dies.” Art, I realized, was as vulnerable as the rest of us to forces beyond his control.

  I turned and headed into the forest. Caribou trails diverged here and there through dense tangles of black spruce. As I wandered, the smoke from a forest fire obscured the sun, and I became lost. I carried no compass. Suddenly I realized where I was: in the largest uninhabited wilderness north of the equator. If I walked in the wrong direction, I could be lost forever.

  Eventually I came to the shore of a lake and hoped it was the lake we were camped on. I turned right, on a whim, not really knowing which way to go, and finally wandered back into camp, but I was scared. The protective structures I had come to rely on were no longer there, and the image of Art as a sergeant responsible for my well-being soon faded from my imagination. If I were to survive in the wilderness, I would have to rely on my wits, not his.

  I had learned to watch and to wait—not to obey Art, but to imitate him. After getting lost, though, I was no longer quite sure of what I should be imitating, and as the trip wore on, the image of Art changed in my dreams, and I began to question my blind adulation of this peaceful guru who had turned his back on civilization in order to surrender his will to the wind and the waves. Art had repudiated not just war, but the entire structure of Western civilization. In the wilderness, he recognized only the authority of whatever natural forces happened to be prevailing at the moment.

  Yet, though it seemed that according to Art we were perfectly free to do whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted, there remained that one anchor: like dogs, we never strayed far from the source of food.

  Before we had been out of Stony Rapids ten days, Art declared a holiday to rest. Physically, we were still not up to the constant rigors, and we suffered the further ravages of black flies during the day and mosquitoes at night. Although we were far behind schedule, we welcomed the holiday and the opportunity to celebrate our complete liberation from civilization.

  At dinner that evening, young Bruce LeFavour, his lanky frame illuminated by the pink glow of the evening sun, opened the conversation by asking what we thought the greatest adventure of all time had been.

  Bruce was a brilliant conversationalist with a keen ability to pick out the subject that was foremost in our minds. At that point, before the reality of the wilderness had raised our consciousness into fear, we were all mentally measuring our crossing of the Barrens against great feats of heroic past adventures.

  Bruce directed his question first to Joe Lanouette, his former roommate at Dartmouth College. Joe had spent the previous week swearing at the black flies, at the heavy loads, and at Bruce for having talked him into coming on the trip. But now that we were resting on a rocky ledge overlooking a lake that promised respite from the last seven days of portages, with a wind to scatter the bugs away, Joe began to warm to the subject. Sitting comfortably on a rock, smoking a tailor-made cigarette, and sipping a cup of hot tea laced with a generous heap of sugar, Joe pontificated authoritatively—as he was apt to do on all subjects—about the heroism of the British expedition that had recently “conquered” Mount Everest for the first time.

  Bruce nodded his head vigorously, seeming to agree with everything Joe was saying. Bruce had picked up some tricks from his father, the owner of a newspaper in upstate New York, on how to conduct a successful interview. He rarely expressed an opinion of his own but always supported, with nods and encouraging words, whatever his interviewee was saying.

  When Joe finished speaking, Bruce turned to Skip Pessl, and, as Skip spoke, Bruce nodded even more vigorously than he had for Joe, as perhaps befitted Skip’s elevated status as our noble second-in-command. Skip proved more knowledgeable than Joe about the “assault” and about previous attempts to “conquer” Everest.

  Art remained silent, which was his custom, but eventually Bruce drew him into the conversation by asking him directly what he thought.

  Art took a sip of tea and answered, “I admire more the Sherpas, who have learned to live in harmony with the mountains, than the British, who have learned only how to plant flags on them.”

  After Art had spoken, an embarrassed Skip reversed himself, and everybody else, with the exception of Joe, immediately followed suit, backpedaling on the sentiments they had so recently expressed. How ridiculous to “assault” a mountain! How pretentious to plant a flag! How arrogant to stand on the summit for fifteen minutes and talk of “conquest”!

  Joe just sat on his rock, sipped his tea, and looked sullen.

  In 1940, before the United States entered World War II, Art had volunteered with the British Eighth Army in Africa. Because he was a pacifist, the British High Command allowed him to remain unarmed and to carry only the dead and the wounded back from the front.

  He soon became convinced that this war, like all other wars, was total madness, and his sympathies turned toward the desert Arabs whose lands were being overrun by the British, German, Italian, and, shortly, American armies. From the Arab point of view, which Art came to share, there was not much to choose from between one Western army and the next.

  By the end of the war, Art had had quite enough of the British empire. He dreamed of the peace of the wilderness and longed to hear the whistling of the wind, the rush of water through the rapids, and the gentle songs of birds instead of the roar of cannons, the explosion of bombs, and the screams of the wounded and the dying.

  Before joining the British army, Art attended Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Dartmouth prides itself on giving scholarships to Native Americans, and its students are the type to romp through the White Mountains with packs and tents on their backs.

  Most of the students at Dartmouth were privileged, but Art arrived there from a different background. His father tended the horses of a wealthy gay man who lived on Long Island (not far from Southampton, where my father’s family had a large summer house). Art had been born and raised on his estate, and because there was no heir apparent, its master had adopted Art as a surrogate son and had
paid his tuition at Dartmouth and even dispensed a small annuity, which Art ultimately used to purchase the little house where he and his wife and two daughters lived at the end of that dirt road in Norwich, Vermont.

  During his years at Dartmouth, Art never quite fit in. Physically, he was smaller than his stocky peers; socially, his background was not comme il faut. But what he lacked in outward appearances, he more than made up for through inner courage, agility, and determination.

  When he was seventeen, Art loaded a canoe onto a westbound Canadian National Railway freight train and disembarked at Sioux Lookout, headwaters of northern Ontario’s longest wilderness river, the Albany. Art descended it alone, “scared to death the whole time,” as he said, but the quality of fear was different from what he had felt among the roar of cannons: the wilderness fear was a fear elevated through peace and beauty into awe; the fear during the battles of World War II was just fear degenerated into horror by the meaninglessness of the slaughter.

  His wilderness trip down the Albany River at seventeen was an attempt to prove to himself that he was “un homme de fer du nord,” as he said with an ironic smile—“an iron man of the north.” But what he had found in addition to the need for bold self-reliance was the warm sympathy of the Cree women living in their simple villages along the banks of the river. When these women discovered this motherless teenager paddling into their campsites alone and scared, they adopted him. Art’s mother had died when he was three.

  After the war, he took Carol, his new bride, down the Albany to meet the Cree. Art’s pride and joy was a moose-hide jacket the Cree women had sewn for him. When Carol produced their first child, they named her Creigh (after a friend of Carol’s), pronounced “Cree,” and Art always said the name with a smile.