Steve Rasnic Tem is a widely published poet who sold his first short fiction to the British anthology New Terrors. In addition, he has sold over 180 short stories in the mystery, horror, science fiction, and western genres to such publications as Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Twilight Zone, Robert Bloch’s Psycho-Paths, The Dodd, Mead Gallery of Horror, Halloween Horrors, Year’s Best Fantasy, 100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories, Shadows, Cutting Edge, and the British magazine Fantasy Tales. His recent and forthcoming works are represented in Best New Horror 2, New Mystery, Stalkers 3, Dark At Heart, and Dead End: City Limits, and in the British anthologies In Dreams, New Crimes 3, and Tales of the Wandering Jew.
Tem has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award for his short fiction; he won the British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction in 1988 for his story “Leaks” (Whispers VI).
Sir John Franklin began the exploration north to the Coppermine River and the Polar Coast in the autumn of 1819. He had organized a party consisting of a number of Indians and Canadian voyageurs from the North West Company, two Eskimo interpreters, surgeon-naturalist Dr. John Richardson, Seaman Hepburn, and Midshipmen George Beck and Robert Hood. The trader McTavish told Franklin that he couldn’t travel in Canada as if it were England. The winter in Canada was a wild beast no man could tame. It thirsted for men’s blood.
The note she found on the refrigerator that day (like a reminder to buy more soap) said simply: going north. As if no further explanation were necessary. Alex had always been a direct man, except regarding their dead daughter.
Marion put the groceries away slowly—otherwise she’d never find anything. She thought about dinner: with Alex gone the leftover chowder would be enough.
It was only after dinner that she went upstairs to check his closet. As she expected, he’d moved out completely this time. He’d even taken the ties he never wore, abandoned after he’d given up the law to drive heavy equipment.
Not that she was sorry he had taken them. It would have been unbearable to find them there, ghosts of that early life. Maybe Alex couldn’t stand the thought of their haunting the house where his daughter had died.
Marion went across the hall to Katy’s old room. She pawed the light switch and the room exploded into painful clarity. Katy’s dolls, books, baskets of valentines, magazine clippings—Marion made a frantic and clumsy inventory. It made sense that he had taken nothing of hers. Their relationship was not a physical haunting.
Months after it had happened he’d told Marion that no matter how loud the diesel under his feet he still heard Katy’s final sounds. They’d never spoken of it again. His field jobs had crept steadily northward, to distant map locations whose names sounded imaginary: Tweedsmuir, Ladder Lake, Yellowknife, Port Radium. In rare notes to her he wrote cryptically of his need “to chart a route past the ice.”
This final trip home had lasted only a few days, during which he’d been feverishly buying supplies. When she’d first seen his eyes in the door’s small window (when had he lost his key?), she’d thought him a prowler, so much of his face had changed.
Marion could hear the wheezing, the whistling of damaged lungs. She left Katy’s room, anxious to begin her nightly reading of tragedies and explorations, chanting to herself the names along her escape route to drown out the harsh rasp of air: Tweedsmuir, Leoville, Hay River, Yellowknife, but always with that nagging side trip to Emphysema. Emphysema, mysterious region of white and cold.
From Fort Enterprise they travelled to the Coppermine. Men and dogs kept falling through the ice on the lakes. The weather went through extremes: blasting heat, fog, and rains, bitter snowstorms. Once they were on the river, frequent rapids delayed them. Giant mosquitoes swarmed over them. Low on food, they nibbled on pemmican and drank a wild shrub tea. Great ice-covered cliffs bordered the coast. There were few places to land. They feared the winds would move the bergs and crush their canoes.
Tragedy and exploration. Since Katy died Marion had felt oddly soothed by accounts of exploration, the seeking of answers and locations, especially those in which the goals were never achieved, the party lost, the mystery unsolved. She’d developed a guilty pleasure in other people’s tragedies. Sometimes she fantasized the deaths of a neighbour’s children.
Ashamed, she worried that she had lost part of her humanity. But she could not deny herself the perverse pleasure. Her old sewing room—who was there to mend for now?—was littered with the half-devoured corpses of hundreds of such accounts. Her hunger was insatiable.
Her current interest was the first Franklin overland expedition, 1820-1822, the nine men who had returned, and the eleven who had not. John Franklin himself survived, only to disappear twenty-three years later during his third attempt to find the Northwest Passage. Proof enough for Marion that no one ever escapes.
A soft wheeze of air began in some distant corner of the house. Pages stirred as if small animals scavenged the scattered volumes for food. She thought about Katy lost in white, about Alex lost in the cold of the Northwest Territories, as she took up her explorations once again.
None of the Franklin party was familiar with the way animals lived, and moved, through the Barrens.
Even today it is still possible to walk on ground here which has never borne a human foot.
People suffering from a terrible sadness find the Barrens a natural environment.
Marion woke from her long dream of cold and emptiness, still sprawled in the reading chair. Morning light smouldered in the light brown curtains, creeping around the edges, threatening to catch the exposed pages of her books on fire. She gazed around her at other people’s questionings and disasters. She was hungry, but did not know what she could eat. Her eyes burned. Decided, she pushed the books out of her lap and went to start her preparations for the long venture north.
On August 18, at latitude 68°19’N. and longitude 110°5’W., with winter beginning its rabid approach, Franklin reluctantly decided to return to Fort Enterprise. They could have easily returned the way they had come, along the Coppermine, but Franklin thought the game had been rather sparse in those regions.
Instead they headed cross-country from Arctic Sound, through the Barren Lands where none of the party, including the Indians, had ever ventured.
Marion spent the morning with her station wagon at a local garage getting plastic headlight guards installed and a heavy rubber covering to strap under the gas tank. She had a good windshield, but the mechanic told her to expect some cracks in it by the time she got back. She hadn’t thought about coming back.
He put in a spare tire and gasoline. From the hardware store she added a shovel, an axe, a sleeping bag, and matches.
The mechanic told her, “The monotony of the Mackenzie Highway may make you drive too fast” and “You should tell someone your itinerary” and other trivia which she found difficult to focus on. She wondered how Franklin’s party would have fared if they’d had a local garage-man.
She grabbed brochures at random and purchased a guidebook, although she doubted she would read them. After all, she wasn’t a tourist. She dropped them in the back seat with her books concerning the Franklin expedition.
Sharp stones cut their feet. At night freezing winds and rain made sleep difficult.
Marion left Saskatoon, planning to cross over into Alberta for lunch in Lloydminster. The sky was watery, but not a drop of rain fell. Despite the cool weather, sweat burned past her eyes. She didn’t bother to wipe it away.
Wind whistled past the poorly sealed windows, rattled its nails along the undercarriage. She imagined she could hear the passing houses moan.
She drove through Lloydminster without pause, realizing her body could not yet accept food. If she sampled the local fare she would be tempted to stay. But staying wouldn’t be good for her, and she knew the food would not be nourishing. She tried to focus on local flora and fauna, even though she was breaking the speed limit. She tried to imagine what might be good to eat, what might be fulfilling, but she knew her imagination had not been sufficiently developed as yet. Perhaps farther north.
Breath came hard to her. Her lungs were struggling. Then she realized she was sobbing.
From Richardson’s journal:
“Wednesday Sept 3 1821 Barren grounds: The ground was covered with rolled stones, of gneiss, greenstone, or basalt. There were many old tracks of the rein deer in the clayey soil and some more recent ones of the musk ox.
“Tuesday Sept 4 1821 Barren grounds: Many large flocks of white geese were feeding on the borders of the lakes but the ground was too even to admit of the hunters approaching them. Halted to breakfast at half past ten, and making a fire with the Cornicularia ochrileuca cooked the remainder of the buffalo meat. No berry-bearing shrubs here . . .
“Thursday Sept 6 1821: Heavy storm of wind and snow. Suffered much from the cold but more from hunger.”
Marion jerked her head up and stared out the rain-glazed windshield. She was parked on a side street, but she could not remember having driven here. A young girl was playing in a nearby yard. Marion heard a woman call, and watched as the girl ran up the steps to her mother.
She heard a wheezing, raspy breath in the car. She turned around but no one was there.
She should have eaten dinner by now, but although she was starved, she could not bring herself to imagine what she might consume.
She started the car and pulled away too quickly. She slammed on the brakes as a figure darted into the road. One glance at the slim dark figure and she was convinced it was Katy. But the damp windshield made it too hard to see. She stepped out into the rain. But there was nothing, nothing but the pain in her lungs.
She didn’t even consider finding a hotel. She drove out of Edmonton to Highway 43, bound for Whitecourt, Valleyview, and the North. The wind streaming by the car seemed to increase in volume, even though the speed of the car remained constant.
They could not carry enough supplies with them to last the journey—it would be necessary to gather food along the way. They themselves became food for hordes of blackflies and mosquitoes.
A few deer and a musk-ox were killed, but then meat became impossible to find, except for the occasional rotting carcass which they feasted on greedily. Soon they were living on the lichen tripe de roche, stewed into a bitter jelly, which brought them severe stomach pain and bloody diarrhea.
Marion sat in her car outside the town of Peace River. Her stomach convulsed, but only harsh, painful air left her mouth. Her lips brimmed with salty saliva. She felt desperately hungry, but could not bear the thought of eating.
Finding herself chewing on the slick paper of one of the brochures, she grimaced in disgust, but did not take it from her mouth immediately. It was still oddly soothing. Finally, forcibly, she pulled it from between her clenched teeth.
The chewed brochure warned that the four-hundred-mile stretch beyond the Peace to the Hay River should not be ventured on impulse. She laughed out loud, and the sound of her laughter was almost frightening to her.
Travel was recommended from mid-June to mid-August. It was almost winter now.
The fierce Barrens wind chewed up the canoes they carried. Eventually they had to cobble together a boat from willows and canvas to cross the icy rivers.
Richardson almost drowned at one crossing. They said he resembled a walking skeleton.
The Britons saw themselves as men who remained stoic in the face of the madness of their plight. Morale among the Canadians broke down completely—they did not have the British tolerance for madness.
There was something comforting about the way the Mackenzie Highway led due north, with no appreciable jogs to east or west to dissuade her. Marion had a sense of progress now. Somewhere along the highway she had pulled over to sleep, but had only the vaguest memory of it. Even in her dreams she drove, and starved, intent on catching up with husband and daughter in the great empty North, where at last she might eat.
“Sunday September 23 1821: Soon after we started, the men found some skin and a few bones of a deer that had been devoured by the wolves in the spring. They halted and lighted a fire, and rendering the bones friable by burning devoured them with avidity. They also ate several of their old shoes. The men had become desperate and were perfectly regardless of the commands of their officers.”
Floating ice blocked the ferry passage across the Mackenzie River, forcing Marion to stay in Hay River a few days. Finally the ice broke so that she could proceed to Yellowknife three hundred miles farther on. She had not eaten in days, but hunger seemed to have sharpened her senses. She now missed Alex and Katy acutely.
Two of the Canadians and Midshipman Hood collapsed. Beck, Hepburn, and Richardson stayed with them, feeding them generously of the lichen. Franklin and the others staggered on.
The half-Iroquois Michel volunteered to go back and help Richardson and the others. Franklin reluctantly agreed. Two of the Canadians joined him, but only Michel reached Richardson’s camp. Michel said they must have gotten lost on the way.
The rock here was so dense that the few trees clung desperately to the surface with long, meandering roots.
Just outside Rae she stood on the shore of the Great Slave Lake and watched the movement of rotting ice far out in the quiet waters. The buildings vanished around her, and she was aware of the unplanned emptiness of it all. It occurred to her then that some people must worship just such a loneliness, a solitude so profound as to be primeval, instinctual, and holy. She wondered if she might be one of those people.
It made her want to be constantly looking over her shoulder.
It made her want to hunt, and find the food that she so desperately required.
Michel brought them a piece of meat. He told them it was wolf. But they could not understand why he hadn’t brought along the whole carcass. It tasted like no meat they had ever had before.
Marble-sized pieces of rock sent her car into a skid. She smashed sideways into a granite outcropping. The car was still drivable, but made a strange noise under the hood. A sighing. A soft wheeze.
In Yellowknife, as far as any road went, she walked Franklin Avenue to the museum, studied the photographs of the lost and dead, half expecting to find Alex, or even Katy, in one of the ancient exposed faces.
She passed by several restaurants but was not tempted to eat.
The desire to go farther north burned stronger and stronger inside her.
Michel was sullen. He brooded; he seemed not to care about their situation. He would not stay in the tent with them, choosing to lie at the fireside. He wandered the Barrens during the night. If the missing men were mentioned, he grew frenzied.
The Barren Lands were an immense slab of granite, with numerous small lakes hiding in the hollows ground out by the glaciers. There were no trees except in the occasional river valleys. The lichen-mottled stones here, she knew, were the oldest on the surface of the world.
Moss and lichen coated the empty land. In summer she knew there was a brief, astonishing display of wildflowers, but she could not imagine that now. Winter would be here in a few days, with its hard ice and snow.
On such short notice it was impossible to find accommodation among the nine thousand people of Yellowknife. She spent a freezing night in her car. She studied her maps and brochures in vain for some road or city north of here.
Michel refused either to hunt or to cut wood, and threatened to leave the party. Mr. Hood could eat very little, and was scarcely able to sit at the fireside, and complained that the least breeze seemed to blow through his frame.
Mr. Hood was left sitting before the tent, arguing with Michel while the others were out gathering wood and tripe de roche. When they returned they found him with a bullet through his brain. Michel suggested accident or suicide.
No roads went into the Barrens. She’d have to rent an aluminum canoe, but everyone seemed reluctant to provide her with one. “Ma’am, you just can’t go out by yourself this time of year! You’ll get yourself killed the first day out!”
So, under cover of darkness, with Katy’s dying breath whistling softly in her ear, she stole one, leaving a deposit in a paint can for double the required amount.
The best canoe route, she’d been told, was the Great Slave Lake to the Great Bear Lake. From there she hoped to get to the Coppermine, the Coronation Gulf, and on to the sea and the emptiness beyond.
As she pushed off along the shore she thought she could hear Katy crying for her, her breath ragged, as if her lungs were collapsing.
Dark clouds of blackflies and mosquitoes swarmed over her.
The Indians knew of men who had lost their humanity in this emptiness. These men behaved as beasts, killing and eating their own kind. They called them wendigo.
In the course of their return march Michel alarmed them with his erratic conduct: muttering to himself, claiming that people were telling false stories about him. His eyes were dark, his breath ragged.
Finally John Richardson walked up to Michel, pointed his pistol at him, and shot him dead.
The air blazed whitely all around her. But still she could see the shadows of animals and other creatures along the shore. Caribou, musk-ox, Arctic wolf. But it was Alex and Katy she dreamed of embracing with her lips and teeth.
Starved for the taste of them, she had been reduced to nothing, her tracks erased by the wind. But now, for as long as she could, she would eat anything that moved.