Prisoners of the North (32 page)

Cheerfulness in adversity—that was the code that every English schoolboy had soaked up with his breakfast porridge. But it was not an easy one to maintain in those close quarters when the spectre of starvation hovered over them. For Christmas they resurrected a caribou head, which they had saved for two and a half months. Christian told his diary that they “enjoyed the feast as much as any, although we had nothing in sight for tomorrow’s breakfast.… I hope every one in England has enjoyed today, & at the same time hope to God we rustle enough grub for a month from now & not wish we had not feasted today.” There is no sign here of the enthusiasm that marked the earlier entries.

A suspicion of approaching cabin fever appeared in early January when Adlard went for a walk after an altercation. “I think he said nothing all morning before going and never spoke for some time after coming in, which makes things so unpleasant for us.” Powell-Williams suggests in
Cold Burial
that Hornby’s “mindless boasting, yarning and theorizing” may have begun to get on Adlard’s nerves and that having to watch Christian’s passionate devotion to his cousin, he might have felt excluded.

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.