THE NEXT MORNING they woke up on their island in the Lockhart River to fierce winds. The stillness of the night before now seemed like a mirage. This pattern of a golden evening followed by its opposite, of silence as the precursor to violent gusts of wind, wouldn’t register in all its significance until it was too late.
What registered instead was the need to ignore bad weather. From Ralph, Eleanor was learning how it ought to be handled, not as reason for melancholy but as material for rough humour; he was always girding his loins and sallying forth “to be bloody, bold and resolute,” treating as a romp the weather that made Harry so morose. Before breakfast Ralph had been out filling their canoes with rocks to prevent the wind from lifting them and tumbling them hundreds of feet down the shore.
Now it was late morning. Eleanor was in her tent, writing up the events of the day before and describing the terrible noise of unimpeded winds tearing at the nylon, the ropes, the poles on either side. We pass our days in beauty and in drudgery, she wrote, like Cinderella.
Gwen was beside her, stretched out in her sleeping bag, reading Eleanor’s Bible.
“I’m too resistant,” she said, putting it down after a few minutes.
“What are you afraid of?” Eleanor asked gently, looking up from her notebook.
Gwen was staring at the orange ceiling three feet above her head. “I’m afraid of being taken over,” she said at last. “Of having to give up too much.”
“Do you have so much?”
“I don’t have much at all. But what I have is me.”
“You wouldn’t be less you, that’s what I’ve discovered. You’d be more you.”
“Oh, I’m as much of me as I can stand.”
This conversation, once begun, threaded its way through the next little while with Eleanor saying to Gwen that her fear of being effaced was natural, but didn’t she realize that her fears already effaced her? “I’m not trying to convert you when I say that Christ saved me from that sort of narrowness.”
But there were certain words Gwen detested, among them: Christ, goodness, salvation, sin, saviour.
Gwen tried to figure herself out as the tent billowed sideways in the wind and the sound of flapping worked on her nerves. Earlier Ralph had said the wind sometimes blew steady for weeks, it blew for thirty days straight one year in Baker Lake. He’d pointed to willows so tiny they sat an inch or so above the ground, the wood tough and fibrous and lateral. He said it could take a hundred years for one of those roots to reach the size of a thumb. Now Gwen heard a bird call, only one, in the wind. Later, she would hear the sound of a door banging shut, and recognize it as the sound of her own deep longing for permanent shelter. It must have been a rock falling, she thought.
“Eleanor?”
“Yes?”
“What did you mean when you were talking about blind spots? I mean, being in love and not knowing it?”
“Have you noticed the way Harry looks at you?”
Gwen frowned. “That doesn’t mean anything. He’s in love with Dido.”
“That’s what he thinks too. Poor wretch.”
On the second wind-bound morning on their island, Gwen picked up Eleanor’s Varieties of Religious Experience and in the soft orange light of the tent became engrossed in William James. He certainly was a very good writer, she thought to herself, and there was something in his spiritual case histories that thrilled her. What she loved were all the outer details that clothed inner change. You knew a change was coming, you even knew what form it would take, but the details varied, the struggle varied, the language varied. One woman said, “I did lie down in the stream of life and let it flow over me.”
Gwen closed the book and let herself feel the same marvellous thing.
Harry was beside the fire. He was thinking of Dido’s I love you as the elevator closed, of the lingering look on her face. He was thinking of her voice, the way she pronounced Harry as if it were a problem she couldn’t fix.
After she’d gone, there had been a lot of mail from listeners who missed her, who wanted to know what had become of her. One listener wrote that Dido was the first intelligent woman he’d heard on the radio. “Her voice was a balm.” And Harry wrote back to say that Dido Paris had gone on to greener fields. The word balm had stayed with him as a perfect description of her sound. Only a few voices, he thought, were so expressive. And he remembered an old poet he’d heard on the radio once.
“Something’s bothering you.” Those blue eyes, bluer than ever, searched his face. “What are you thinking about?”
He poked the fire with a stick and Gwen noticed his broken fingernails, his banged-up knuckles. Then he looked up, and discovered an exit from his mood in her sunburnt, teaseable face.
“I was thinking about an old poet I heard reminiscing on the radio years ago. He said he was looking out the window when lightning struck the tree in his garden, and it threw off its bark, he said, ‘like a girl flinging off her clothes.’“
Gwen laughed. “ That I’d like to see. But not as much as you would, I think.”
After lunch the wind dropped, and they scrambled to take advantage. They left their island and paddled up the Lockhart River. By evening they’d reached the rapids below Ptarmigan Lake and camped. July 3. Harry made a supper of “beef stew isolé” and Ralph headed up a hill with his binoculars, only to come back with “the foul, dank and dreadful news” that Ptarmigan Lake was also covered in ice.
The next day they moved one mile—over the portage to Ptarmigan Lake and back into a frozen world.
“‘O me, my heart, my rising heart,’” groaned Ralph.
But then he put on his sneakers, stepped into the ribbon of icy water at the rocky edge, and began to muscle his canoe forward. The others followed, sliding, slipping, falling, cursing, until they came to a sheltered bay, where they set up camp in a thicket of small willows.
In the morning they woke to what they thought was rain falling on their tents. But it sounded odd until they realized it was snow. Snow falls more lightly than rain, and, if anything, it’s wetter, the way it clings and melts. July 5.
In their willow thicket, their little rabbit warren, everything they did soaked them through—brushing against wet bushes to gather wet wood, breaking wet branches, cooking with wet dishes. The snow fell like wet feathers into the pot heating on the fire, it cruised down, thought Harry, knowing from Dido that cruise comes from kruizen for the zigzag motion of boats evading pirate attacks at sea. He looked up and for one brief moment saw a bush full of roses, orangey-red roses. But it was Gwen’s tent in the snow.
Ralph was saying, “A day like today makes me appreciate a day like yesterday.” He meant coming to a standstill made him appreciate a day of hard slogging.
“Twenty-two more days,” grumbled Harry, “and the fifth day this week we’ve been weather-bound. Two hours to make bannock.”
“An hour and a half,” said Ralph.
Harry leaned back. Ralph seemed to be getting younger and fitter with each passing day. He was having the time of his life. He was even sleeping well, as Harry knew from having to endure his freight train of snores every night. “You’ve always got something to say. I say two hours. You say an hour and a half.”
“That’s making conversation, Harry. Most people want a response when they say something.”
Gwen turned, grabbed Harry’s foot. Tugged it. “You really want to know the difference between you two?”
“No.”
“I’ll tell you anyway.”
“I’m sure you will,” he said acidly.
But she held her tongue. She turned her face away.
Curious, Eleanor asked her, “What’s really the difference?”
“No. Harry doesn’t want to know.”
A few hours later, when they found themselves alone, Gwen said to Harry, “You don’t want to be here.”
“You’re right. I’d give anything for a plane to come and get me right now. Would you come with me? Would you run away with me, Gwen?”
She gave him a look meant to squelch his nonsense, but not entirely. Not entirely.
Eleanor examined her hands and said they’d aged thirty years in three weeks, they were the hands of an old fisherman. She held them out and they were large and cracked, red and rough in patches, swollen and scraped from sun and weather, from cold and wet. She said her father came to Canada and never wore gloves in the winter, they don’t in England, and his hands were the mottled blue and red and purple of old books on shelves.
They all glanced at their sore hands with a certain amount of wonder and pity, and Gwen asked if they’d ever had their palms read.
No one had, except Gwen herself. She rolled her eyes. “The fortune teller told me I was a natural healer under a great deal of stress. I almost asked for my money back.”
Harry grinned. “You were hoping for fame and glory?”
“At least.”
The talk of colours and turns in fortune had Ralph thumbing through his copy of Farley Mowat, looking for and finding an excerpt from Glimpses of the Barren Lands by Thierry Mallet, a fur trader with Revillon Frères, who published his little book in 1930. One day Mallet came upon two little Eskimo girls helping their blind grandmother gather willow twigs. “‘ Their faces were round and healthy, the skin sunburned to a dark copper colour, but their cheeks showed a tinge of blood which gave them, under the tan, a peculiar complexion like the colour of a ripe plum. Their little hands were bare and black, the scratches caused by the dead twigs showing plainly in white, while their fingers seemed cramped with the cold.’
“What a painting,” Ralph exclaimed.
He read on and the story was unforgettable. Mallet encountered a small band of inland Eskimos fishing through the ice one winter. Like Hornby, they had missed the herds of caribou in the fall and they were starving. Mallet and his guide gave them some of their food—the Eskimos were courteous to a fault—and learned their intentions: if the fishing didn’t improve they would head for a lake twelve-days’ walk to the northwest in the hope of finding muskoxen. In the spring, Mallet’s guide and three others returned to the spot. Finding the camp deserted, they headed northwest and soon came upon the end of the story. First, a bunch of traps. Then caribou blankets. Then a child’s grave, followed over the course of several days by a fish spear, a telescope, an axe, a snow knife, pairs of boots, then bodies, alone, or side by side.
They knew there were seventeen people in the band and three rifles. The old leader appeared to have fallen last, but he had no rifle beside him, and only sixteen Eskimos were accounted for. And so they kept on the trail. Five hours later they came upon the last body, a girl of twelve, who had continued on by herself, carrying the rifle, with nothing but a sense of direction inherited from the old chief.
How quiet they were when Ralph finished the account. After a bit, Harry joked huskily that they don’t make kids like that any more, they won’t leave home without a wallet full of travellers’ cheques. And Gwen reached for the book and said “Thierry Mallet” slowly, as if memorizing the name, and Eleanor very gently corrected her pronunciation. “Tee-ay-ree, I think it is.”
On the Barrens something happened to their sense of time. They were living every second of bad weather in a land that was barely out of the ice age, a place no different from how it had been a hundred years or a thousand years ago. They were seeing what Hornby and Samuel Hearne had seen, what aboriginal hunters had seen when they hunted here, far back. And so seconds ticked forwards and years swept backwards, and they got used to thinking of time passing in tiny increments and huge leaps.
Ralph would say that the long wait for the wind to die down—another two days of being wind-bound and ice-bound—made him think of Agamemnon waiting to set sail from Aulis. The north winds kept blowing day after day until they sacrificed Iphigenia, poor girl; then the winds fell away, the thousand ships set sail for Troy, and one thing led to another, until Aeneas fled his burning city and fetched up on the shores of Carthage, “where he broke poor Dido’s heart,” said Ralph, throwing Harry a sympathetic look.
With tender timing Eleanor and Gwen then compared the bruises on their legs, rolling up their pants and exposing shins that looked as if they had been beaten with sticks, but it was the ice they’d fallen against and battled through. The bruises filled Harry’s mind with memories of his life with Dido. She’d been like a stray, a waif that he’d found by the shore and brought home. During those six weeks, she’d never talked very much. Never really confided in him. The black eye had been her fault, she’d said. And the bruise he saw on her arm happened from banging into a cupboard. He had to suppose that when she was with him she was just resting, recovering, biding her time until she was ready to leave.
Finally, at one in the morning, the sky began to clear. They could make out four or five ptarmigans in the meadow beyond the willows. Through binoculars they studied the male, its red markings above the eyes, its plumage a mottled brown until it flew up, and then its wings flashed white.
“What does ptarmigan taste like, I wonder,” murmured Gwen.
Eleanor remarked that seeing ptarmigans on Ptarmigan Lake was rather like seeing Harry on Harry Lake.
“You mean I washed myself in Harry?” cried Gwen.
“How lovely,” said Harry.
It was noon of the next day. They were almost out of Ptarmigan Lake, having broken free of their snow-locked, weather-bound state by throwing caution to the winds. In the morning they’d hauled their canoes with ropes across the middle of the frozen lake, making several miles of progress. Gwen managed to tape the sound by hanging her tape recorder around her neck and holding the microphone between her teeth; Harry snapped a picture for what he called broadcasting posterity.
They skirted the blackest ice, the last stretch so rotten his feet did a little dance as he sped across. And then they were in open water. July 7.
In the early afternoon, a line of light blue appeared at the lower edge of the sky and in the distance something moved. A palomino boulder was swimming slowly across the lake. They paddled towards it and saw their first caribou, large and handsome, like a heavily built deer with a rack of dark antlers.
By evening the sky was clear. The light luminous and rich. Not brilliant as in the Mediterranean (where Harry once removed a splinter from a woman’s finger on the streets of Sète in light that acted like a magnifying glass). Gentler. Almost autumnal. The hills didn’t have light on them, they were in light, the way something is in water.
To Harry it seemed the Barrens relaxed. One day something relaxed inside and I saw things in a new way. The words came from an old book about an old botanist, and he felt the truth of them as they left behind frozen lakes and entered a land of flowing rivers. On July 8 they were on the Hanbury River, skimming along with the current, running two rapids and making three portages and completing a total of twenty-three miles. A grand day. That night they reached Sifton Lake and it too was melted, the next night they took advantage of an evening with almost no wind to keep paddling, hour after hour, in the pure golden light.
At midnight they beached their canoes and were about to make camp on an invitingly grassy bank when they saw, just across a small cove, something move.
They slipped back into their canoes and paddled closer. The grizzly was smaller than they’d imagined and very curious. It came to the water’s edge, then waded into the water, climbing atop a rock several feet from shore. From there it stood watching them for fifteen minutes, brownish-blond, face like a wide dish, close-set eyes. At a distance of fifty yards, or less, they took pictures in the evening light. Then the bear turned around, waded back to shore, and ambled up onto a grass-covered knoll, where it lay down and went to sleep. They had no firearms, having failed to take Teresa’s advice, and Harry suspected they’d been far too trusting, but the charmed evening had emboldened them. Even so, they paddled a full hour before they set up camp.
Several days after that, on July 13, a muskox in the afternoon. The bizarre beast appeared suddenly after miles of nothing. Dark massive head, down-curved horns, a fur coat like a chocolate-brown kilt, except along the uppermost part of the animal’s back where it was lighter in colour as if faded by the sun. In the 1920s, said Ralph, after the decimation of the buffalo, muskox furs were in such demand for carriage robes that only protective legislation, inspired in no small part by John Hornby’s observations and recommendations, saved them from being wiped off the face of the earth. This fellow stood on the riverbank with the blue sky behind him and sparse leafiness around his feet. After a few minutes he lumbered off into the distance, Ralph in careful pursuit with his camera, Eleanor calling after him to be careful: Ralph!
The next day, a group of three muskoxen. The animals thundered off and the humans inherited their flies. At supper mosquitoes plunged into the soup, kamikaze pilots in love with soggy death. Harry’s emptied bowl had a dozen dead mosquitoes in the bottom. Eleanor took the bowl, turned it three times, and read the mosquitoes like tea leaves.
“I see a boy stung by bees,” she said to Harry. “Six bee stings. No seven.”
“Not a girl stripping off her clothes?” cracked Gwen, handing her own bowl to gypsy Eleanor, who turned it three times and said she saw a sudden change of course followed by a wedding.
Ralph instructed Eleanor to see money in his mosquito-leaves, huge sacks of it, mountains of it. But Eleanor saw, instead, a great expanse of water and suggested to Ralph that he might be going overseas.
By now Gwen’s hair was sun-streaked and her face ruddy. “‘As brown in hue as hazel nuts and sweeter than the kernels,’” remarked Harry, addressing her with a gleam in his eye.
She blushed and raised her hands, which were too dried and cracked to close. “They feel like baseball mitts,” she said.
Harry surprised her by taking one of her hands in his. “I have just the thing.”
From his pack he produced a tin of udder balm for chapped and swollen teats, then proceeded to work the ointment into her skin, especially her split fingertips. “What about your feet? Take off your boots,” he said.
“What is the smoothest part of Gwen?” He reached for her bare foot, only to exclaim, “Not the heel!” His eyes widened. “You could do permanent damage with this heel.”
Gwen’s heels had never been so in the limelight, her rough, raspy heels. Harry would see them again when her tent blew down and she was out flying around in the middle of the night in bare legs and white heels and nightie, trying to restake and prop it up, while Eleanor held it down from inside. From his tent door Harry shouted at her to lay it flat and bring their sleeping bags in here, and Gwen shouted something back that he couldn’t make out, for in the wind their voices tore like fabric.
Gwen later admitted she had seriously underestimated the importance of good shelter by bringing “that shitty tent,” which sagged like a soft berry picked by the weather and manhandled between its fingers.
That night they lay across the floor of Harry’s tent like four slumbering sardines.