A Discovery of Strangers (27 page)

Our hunters killed nothing today, but just before we halted the carcass of a reindeer which had been strangled and partly eaten by a wolf was found. This afforded one meal to the party
.

SaturdayJuly 7th I82I Coppermine River

At
7
a. m. our united party with Bigfoot’s followers encountered The Hook’s encampment situated on the summit of a sand cliff whose base is washed by the river where it turns due north towards the Copper Mountains. The Hook had only three hunters with him, the rest of his band having remained at their reindeer snares on Great Bear Lake, but his party was increased by Longleg and Keskarrah with his family who preceded us. A formal conference was held with The Hook when he was decorated with a medal by Lieutenant Franklin and he cheerfully gave us all the provision he had, sufficient to make
2½
bags of pemmican. Having completed these arrangements, we embarked the next day at
11
a. m
.

Here the Yellowknives all left us, except for the hunters who will accompany us to the sea, to proceed to their summer hunting grounds. Broadface, one
of Bigfoot’s
hunters being enamoured of Keskarrah’s daughter, chose to go with them and The Hook to Great Bear Lake, a vast body of water we are told lies to the west
.

Thursday July 26th I82I Polar Sea

A great deal of ice drifted into the strait overnight. Embarked at
4
a. m. and attempted to force a passage, when the first canoe got enclosed and remained in a very perilous position, the pieces of ice crowded together and pressing strongly on its feeble sides. A partial opening, however, occurring, we landed without serious injury. Sea covered with ice as far as the eye can reach
.

Since leaving the mouth of the Coppermine River we have encountered neither Indians nor Esquimaux. Our small stock of provisions is waning rapidly, and to add to the evil, part of them have become mouldy from dampness
.

Saturday August 18th 1821
Point Turnagain

This then is the limit of our voyage along the coast, which has occupied us for a month, but in which we have traced the open sea only five degrees and a half eastward of the mouth of the Coppermine River. But if the length of our voyage round the much indented coast is considered, we have sailed our bark canoes upwards of 550 miles through icy sea, which is very little less than the estimated direct distance, in a straight line, between the Coppermine and Hudson Bay
.

Thursday August 23rd I82I Bathurst Inlet

The last of our pemmican gone, we embarked at
2
a. m, without breakfast and steering for Point Evrette, and we made, without the least remonstrance from the Canadians, an open traverse of 25 miles, running all the time before a strong wind and a very heavy sea. The privation of food under which our voyageurs are at present labouring absorbed every other terror, otherwise the most powerful eloquence would not have induced them to attempt such a traverse. The swell and the height of the waves was such that the mast-head of the other canoe was often hid from our view, although it was sailing within hail of us. We put ashore at last through surf on the open beach, without further injury than smashing the sides of one canoe and splitting the head of the second
.

The whole party went hunting but saw no animals
.

Sunday September
23rd 1821
Barren Grounds

The men found some skin and a few bones of a deer that had been devoured by wolves in spring. They lighted a fire and devoured the remains with avidity, and also ate several of their old shoes
.

Our last canoe was broken today by the men falling and left behind, notwithstanding every remonstrance. They are desperate and perfectly regardless of the commands of their officers. We have now walked over the barren grounds in direct distance from Bathurst Inlet
184
and 1/2 miles, though in actuality much farther due to lakes, rivers and rocky terrain
.

Thursday September 27th I82I Obstruction Rapids

The day was mild, though the strongest among us is reduced to little more than a shadow of what he had been a month ago. The Coppermine River here becomes a huge double rapids with a narrow lake between them, which we must cross to reach Fort Enterprise. But on this east bank of the double rapids no wood large enough to make rafts could be found, though the carcass of a deer was discovered in the cleft of a rock into which it had fallen in the spring. It was putrid, but not the less acceptable to us, and a fire of willows being kindled a large portion of it was devoured on the spot. The men scraped together the contents of its intestines and added them to their meal
.

A raft of the largest willow that could be found, bound together as faggots, proved too little buoyant to support a man. We named the double rapids Obstruction Rapids
.

Thursday October
4th 1821
Obstruction Rapids

Strong winds with snow all forenoon. The sensation of hunger is no longer felt by any of us. St. Germain embarked in the shell he had in four days of heavy snow fashioned of willows and fragments of painted canvas in which we wrapped up our bedding. To our great joy and admiration of his dexterity, he at last succeeded in reaching the opposite shore of the rapids with a double line. The shell was then drawn back, and in this manner we were all conveyed over without serious injury, though we were all wet through and no wood could be found to make a fire sufficient to dry our bedding
.

We estimate we are now no more than
55
direct miles from Fort Enterprise, where we hope to meet the Indians
.

10
O
FFERING
S
TRANGE
F
IRE

Prayers stagger through Robert Hood, like the footprints that waver away from him through the riven snow of the tundra
what may befall me this day O God I know not but I know that nothing can
he can no longer walk. Not even with the exhausting drag and thump the others manage to force from themselves, one foot and then the other.

But Richardson and Hepburn refused to leave him alone and motionless in this labyrinth of their disaster, within their Great Lone Empire of the Arctic Snows. The twenty-man-strong united “Expedition determined by His Majesty’s Government to explore the Northern Coast of America from the Mouth of the Coppermine River to the eastern extremity of that Continent” has been forced, still very far from that geographical extremity, to attempt a return to the assumed safety of Fort Enterprise. But the Expedition has begun to break into pieces: first a translator left behind here, then a Canadian voyageur
— and then also a second — left behind there, solitary in the alarming maze of their track. And now, while Lieutenant Franklin and Mr. Back lead the remaining voyageurs onwards across the barrens, three Englishmen have stopped and wait, hunched together in this hollow beside a bare dusting of brush above snow, wait. For what? May God be willing, anything.

At noon the sunlight winks on the sloping hills everywhere around them, where their final salvation of meat may be sleeping, hidden. They have learned from the astounding brevity of arctic summer that motionlessness is of all possible postures most dangerous, but what can they do? Hood cannot walk, no one has the strength to carry him. Three men so feeble they can barely erect a small tent —

And suddenly there is a fourth! Of all the men in the Expedition, the Mohawk voyageur, Michel, has returned to them from those who have gone ahead. Michel Terohaute! as George Back with his French quibbles always mocked him among the officers — certainly never to his black face — o high and lofty land, who is like God indeed!

Michel with a written message from Lieutenant Franklin, informing them that he has sent Mr. Back ahead with St. Germain and the two strongest Canadians, and that he with eight others (I. Perrault stopped to rest near some bushes earlier) are proceeding as best they can. However, J-B. Bélanger and Michel T. can no longer keep up even with them, still toiling as directly as the terrain permits via compass towards the hope of Fort Enterprise — they are, he is confident, now very nearly within sight of Dogrib Rock — and the meat the Indians have surely cached there for their sustenance, and so these two are returning to Doctor Richardson’s group to assist as they can and
await rescue with them. Lieutenant Franklin affirms that Mr. Back will send meat back to them as soon as he and his men, who may very well by now have already reached Fort Enterprise, when they find “the Yellowknives who alone can save us all.”

Richardson hesitates in his eager reading of the muddled note, but cannot avoid declaiming the final phrase of most uncharacteristic recognition into the rigid air. In fact, he repeats it, so strangely convincing, “ … the Yellowknives who alone can save us all.” And looks at the Indian from far away, Michel, standing there alone: J-B. Bélanger is not with him. And this message, barely decipherable on a page torn from the back of the Lieutenant’s Bible, the letters as if drawn one after the other by a concentrating child. Only Michel, looking fixedly at Richardson and Hepburn, then an instant at Hood covered flat in the shelter — Bélanger supposed to come too? The paper says? The Canadian didn’t follow, he never see him, never for two days, he come along the track, back to them, never see him once.

Turning before them, Michel seems suddenly very powerful: so deliberately intense and muscled it is obvious that he could walk wherever he pleased. Perhaps it is because he carries only his bedding and a long rifle with powder and shot — which Lieutenant Franklin has now assigned to him, he says. But beyond specific hunting forays, no voyageur has ever before been permitted a loaded rifle; especially not this one.

And even more unbelievably he has brought meat, both a ptarmigan and a hare! For them, who for days now have eaten only bits of boiled leather or painfully scraped-off lichen, burning or cooking that while it somehow remained as repulsively inedible as ever. Hepburn exclaims, gnawing his mouthful of meat,

“O God, maybe this one won’t tell lies, like all the others.”

Resting, they have continuously discussed food as the hungry will, making sounds to vary the moan of wind among small brush, their tent too thin to be worthy of assault.

“If we could see sky,” Hood on his back could still speak with some precision, “we might see … ravens. Ravens always eat.”

“They will reach the Fort,” Richardson asserted calmly, “and the Indians. They always have food.”

“Not always, I think.”

“This is their place.”

“Yes,” Hood mused, “it
is
their place.… ‘And dwelt at a place by the brook Cherith, and the ravens brought Elijah bread and flesh in the evening, and he drank from the brook.’ ”

Hepburn chuckled, “Sir, if only you were a prophet in Israel!”

“And the barrel of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail, according to the word of the Lord, which he spake.’”

“I don’t want so much.” Hepburn could say things the officers could not. “Just one wee pig, one of the suckers that almost knocked you down, sir, in the mud of Stromness. I’d slit its throat an’ we’d drink blood an’ eat its liver raw, like the Indians say, because it gives such quick strength, o, I’d fry its fat so crisp an’ tender we’d dance the flings in a week!”

“My teeth seem rather loose,” Hood murmured, “for fat crackling.”

“Aye sir,” Hepburn said quickly, “but our Orkney women fry them somehow crisp an’ tender, I don’t know how, maybe because there’s always three of them for every man returning home from the sea. It do make the juices run.”