Prisoners of the North (29 page)

The days grew shorter, the cold grew worse, the wind rose to a velocity of sixty knots. Now they were sleeping for fourteen hours; what else was there to do? The weird cacophony of the Barrens intruded upon their rest: the eerie wail of the wolves, the whining of the endless blizzards, and the sudden explosive cracking of the earth as the sand and gravel in the esker expanded and contracted. It was so cold that even with a fire in the stove they were forced to wear their winter clothing when in their sleeping bags.

Two days before Christmas, the restless Hornby set off in the midst of a blizzard to visit the Stewart brothers, and once again Bullock was alone. He realized that without dogs he could not forage for fuel—and Hornby had taken all the dogs except one lame animal. There was plenty of caribou meat stored in the tunnel, but it was frozen rock solid and he needed fire to thaw it. During that night the roof sank further under the weight of the snow. Now it was scraping against his head.

All the fuel that remained was a pile of twelve twigs, none more than an inch in circumference. There were also spruce needles in the walls, and he gathered a few handfuls of these. He managed to start a brief fire to heat the water pail, solid with ice, and the frozen slabs of caribou meat, which he put into a pan with some grease. He gulped his tea—mixed with sand from the walls—and gnawed away at the meat until the fire died. Exhausted, he crawled into his sleeping bag, over which he piled all of Hornby’s bedding. When he woke on Christmas Eve, he found that his beard was frozen solid to the blanket. His lone entry for that day is a cry from the heart: “Alone this Christmas Eve on the Barren Lands of the Sub-Arctic of America.… Alone in a dugout beneath the sand and snow.… 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 but the whole of the blizzard outside to cheer me and the thoughts of peace and happiness and the faces of loved ones coming to mind only to remind me more and more of my deep loneliness.…”

The incredible monotony of the Barrens preyed on his mind. Earlier in Edmonton, Hornby’s enthusiastic descriptions had invested them with a kind of mystique, even glamour. But here, in the actual environment, the magic was gone. The flat, featureless land stretched off in every direction to a hazy horizon, devoid of tree or shrub and unmarked by any physical feature—not a ravine or a hill or even a slope, not a knoll or a depression or a fold in the ground—nothing save for the esker in which he huddled. One is reminded of the recent photographs taken on the red surface of Mars, but the Barrens were even devoid of colour: only a greyish white to match the sullen sky above.

Bullock realized that he would have to move, and with the blizzard abating, he staggered off at last with the lame dog leading the way. He managed to follow the half-obliterated trail for six miles and arrived exhausted at Malcolm Stewart’s shack, where Hornby greeted him laconically. Following a ten-day period for Bullock to recuperate, the two went back to the cave.

Understandably, Bullock’s early admiration for his new partner was fading. In November he had written to Yardley Weaver that Hornby was “the most delightful of companions & what more could I wish for?” By January Hornby was getting on his nerves. In Edmonton, Bullock had been fascinated by Hornby’s tales of his northern adventures. Now his endless boasting, his refusal to indulge in what Bullock considered serious conversation, and his self-aggrandizement were too much. Years later, Bullock described the tenor of Hornby’s talk: “If I were King there would be no wars. There is no man living who could beat me in a straight fight. The Government ought to give me Artillery Lake as compensation for all the hardships I have endured on behalf of the North. The North has never known such a traveller as I. Hardships and the ability to starve like a gentleman are the only criteria of a good traveller. My name will live in history as I have made the greatest of all contributions to the North Country. I am the only white man with whom the Indians and Eskimos know they can safely leave their women.”

The winter dragged on, with Hornby coming and going, setting traps, gathering wood, shooting the odd caribou, and disappearing for ten days at a time. “Cannot imagine what H. is up to,” Bullock confided to his diary in mid-March. “Here we are, dozens of foxes behind the other people, and he is still wandering about.… Again he will set a line of traps, spend days doing it and never trouble to look at it.” Several days later, he wrote: “Never would I allow H. to arrange for my welfare again.… One day’s wood left, but I will get through somehow. Damn everyone and the fates included.”

On April 1, 1925, a police patrol from Fort Resolution, guided by Hornby and Malcolm Stewart, arrived at the cave. Corporal Hawkins of the RCMP and his companion, Constable Baker, seemed perplexed to find Bullock in good spirits and apparently in the best of health. Although they had brought forty-eight letters for him, Bullock was baffled. What were the Mounties doing out here in the Barrens? They certainly hadn’t come merely to deliver the mail. And why was the corporal regarding him with such attention? In the gloom of the cave, he sensed that the visitors were not at their ease. The conversation was desultory: only Hornby was enjoying it. As they conversed in whispers, Bullock noticed a gleam in his eye but could make no sense of it. After a brief two-hour visit, the patrol declined his invitation to lunch, made their way out through the labyrinth of poles now holding up the sagging roof, and tendered their goodbyes, leaving Bullock to read his mail and wonder why they had come three hundred miles just to bring it. Haphazard patrols were not part of their regular procedure. And why were their explanations so brief?

That is the story that Waldron tells in
Snow Man
from his reading of Bullock’s diary. The visit is a murky business. At Malcolm Stewart’s dugout, the police explained that they had received a note from Jack Glenn, Bullock’s erstwhile partner, quoting Hornby as saying that Bullock was dangerously insane. Hornby denied that he had told Glenn to report Bullock’s condition to the police. But now he admitted that in his view, Bullock had been acting strangely, had talked of committing suicide, and was despondent because the long winter nights frustrated him in his goal of making a motion picture of the Barrens. Again and again Hawkins asked Hornby if he was afraid of Bullock. Again and again Hornby denied it.

It was not unusual for two men, especially as different in temperament as this pair and confined to close quarters, as Hornby and Bullock were, to resort to violence, suicide, or even murder. But Hornby had been away from the cave for days, even weeks, at a time. If Bullock was despondent, and he certainly was, it was because he was confined twenty-four hours a day while his cave mate alleviated his restlessness by periodic forays to Fort Reliance or the cabins of his trapper friends. In a letter to his friend Weaver on the same day the police arrived, Hornby had reported that “Bullock is now in fine condition, but I was certainly at times afraid that his rather too vivid imagination might lead him to act stranger than he has done.”

Was all this a practical joke by Hornby at Bullock’s expense? Or was Hornby really alarmed that his partner was going off the deep end? Whalley writes, “Hornby himself probably didn’t know,” but he adds, “it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that at times Hornby was deliberately tormenting, frustrating and humiliating Bullock.”

There were two sides to this maddening partnership. Although Hornby might be infuriating to live with, Bullock was still in awe of his considerable abilities. He could not remain at odds with him for long. Hornby had all the guile of a naughty little boy, but there were moments when, like a naughty little boy, he was lovable. Writing to Glenn three years later, Bullock eulogized him as “the bravest man I ever knew and the finest friend that any man ever had on a backwoods trail. Out in the bush, Hornby was the real Hornby, and [a] better man never lived.”

These qualities were evident when at last they left their cave after burning all non-essentials in order to make their way east by way of the Hanbury and Thelon rivers—a torturous journey that would add up to seven hundred miles of back-and-forth trekking. They could have returned to civilization the easy way—back through Artillery and Great Slave lakes. Indeed, Corporal Hawkins had advised Hornby against using the Thelon route, but, perversely, Hornby rejected his counsel. He wanted to be known as the first to cross the Barrens from west to east—the hard way. On his arrival at Chesterfield Inlet a crowd would gather and ask where he had come from. “Edmonton,” he would reply casually, and already he was hearing in his mind the cries of astonishment that would greet his words. Hornby was building himself a legendary reputation, block by block.

They had sent some fox furs out by the police patrol but had 150 more—half a ton—to take with them across the Barrens. Bullock finally made the long trip himself back to the cache at Fort Hornby only to realize, to his dismay, that most of the expensive equipment stored there for him would be an unwanted encumbrance. He had invested his meagre savings in that outfit, and Hornby, before he left for Ottawa to raise money, had agreed to pay half the cost. Now he was making it obvious that he had no intention of paying a cent. As Bullock wrote later, “He feels that I spent unwisely & that such elaborate equipment was unnecessary. He fails to understand that I bought it for the precise reason that I had every faith in his promise to make the expedition an extensive thing.” The best he could hope for would be the thirty thousand dollars Hornby had claimed they would make when they sold the furs.

They tried their best to lighten their burden for the coming trek. Even without the goods left behind at the cache, they could not get the weight of the staple food, canoes, cameras, and film below one ton. That done, they piled the unnecessary gear into the cave and, using fox fat for fuel, burned it all.

Hornby’s scheme to gain publicity by casually remarking that he had come all the way to Chesterfield Inlet from Edmonton was achieved only at serious mental and physical cost. They faced an epic ordeal, and an unnecessary one. They set off on May 19 over the crusted snow with all their supplies including their two canoes lashed to a single sled—the two men and three dogs straining away on the ropes and harness. Ahead lay tortuous canyons, seething rapids, and portages of sand, muskeg, and slippery rock. The task would not be easy, with each man handling a canoe entirely on his own. Their immediate goal, the junction of the Hanbury and Thelon rivers, was at least one hundred laborious miles away and the going was slow. They drove themselves and their dogs eighteen hours a day, but they had to move the heavy load forward in stages, packing and unpacking, loading and unloading as they advanced toward their goal. For every mile of portage they were forced to travel fifteen. As spring advanced, water from the melting snow ran into a lake, and its weight depressed the ice on the edge so that a channel was created near the shore that ran three feet above the frozen level. They had to unload the sled, move everything into the canoes, and pole or paddle their way along the margin.

For almost two weeks in that confusion of small, ragged, unknown lakes, they were hopelessly lost. “We do not know where we are,” Bullock wrote. “We are both trying to appear unconcerned.” Where was the Hanbury? In what direction were they now headed? Bullock made a fifteen-mile reconnaissance and almost drowned breaking through the thin ice at a lake’s edge. Here were long reaches of water not on the maps and, in that flat country, very little drainage. The day after Bullock’s accident, Hornby set out to get some hint of a route to the Hanbury. He finally succeeded by chopping a hole in the ice and tossing in some bannock crumbs to find which way the current flowed. The movement was almost imperceptible but observable. They followed it eastward, and by June 10 they reached Smart Lake, which is in fact part of the Hanbury. Their destination, the trading post at Baker Lake on Chesterfield Inlet, still a convoluted five hundred miles to the east, was the only human habitation on that route.

The time had come to again reduce the weight they were carrying. Bullock was in agony from an injury to his back incurred on his last trip to Fort Reliance. Hornby, who had opposed lightening their loads, now gave in to his partner’s condition. They stood their sled on end and anchored it with some rocks at the base to mark their cache. Then they dumped twelve thousand feet of motion picture film and most of their winter equipment, including heavy parkas and extra blankets, on top of the sled, lightening their load by two hundred pounds.

They moved on east, paddling and portaging. Hornby quietly took on the heavier loads to ease Bullock’s suffering. In mid-June they saw their first muskoxen. Finally, on the twenty-third they reached the point where the Hanbury flows into the Thelon. Here, after five weeks on the trail, Bullock could at last begin filming.

Things were looking up. They camped at a bend in the river that would later be called Hornby Point. That day they managed to cover forty miles, a record for the trip. But that night Bullock cut his foot so badly with an axe that they could not move for two days, and by then they had lost the last of their dogs. On August 2, they were able to move twenty-five miles, with Hornby acting as nurse and filling his partner with doses of caribou soup.

The following day, with Bullock unable to handle a canoe and on the verge of collapse, they began a three-day recess. Bullock now faced another concern. He was dead broke because of his expenditure on the discarded equipment. What would he do when they reached civilization without funds? The howling winds and incessant rain that night increased his despair.

A new problem nagged at them. By August 21 they were out of meat, half starved, their bodies skeletal, subsisting on whatever fish they could catch. In this condition they entered the lower Thelon. In spite of a recurring blizzard, Hornby managed to kill a caribou “that just about saved our lives.” They took a day off and feasted, gulping down an enormous meal: all the caribou liver, both kidneys, all the fat they could gather from the carcass, four one-pound steaks, and thirteen pounds of fish. Bullock felt so lively that in spite of the storm, he took a bath in ice water. It was at this point that Hornby, finding his partner in good spirits, confessed why the police had come to the esker cave. There is no record of Bullock’s reaction.