ON 10 JUNE 1898, ten months after they departed from Edmonton, the Luton party was ready to resume its journey toward the Arctic Ocean, and their departure from the cabin which in its two locations had housed them for so long contained elements of sadness. Luton said the official farewells: ‘I doubt if any other five men could have occupied so small a space for so long without even a suggestion of friction. Gentlemen, I shall be forever indebted to you.’ And each of the men said goodbye to some particular aspect of this strange hibernation. Harry Carpenter took one last circuit of his running track, its surface muddy now but nonetheless still one of the agencies for the good health the men had enjoyed. Philip, clad once more in his treasured boots now that the freezing weather was over, sat by the dead fire and read a few pages of Great Expectations; he had acquired much useful information beside that fire. Luton saluted the cabin, and Fogarty gazed for some time at the surrounding hills he had come to know so intimately. Trevor Blythe had the most painful farewell, because although his raven was reluctant to move near the boat, it was obviously loath to leave the poet. It rode on Trevor’s shoulder down to the water, but when the young man stepped aboard the craft, Othello flew off. In bewilderment it circled a few times, then cawed hoarsely as if bidding a dear friend farewell and flew inland to where its companions waited.
As the carefully reloaded Afton eased into the fast-moving waters of the Gravel, she seemed eager to complete her journey and fairly leaped forward to rejoin the Mackenzie. Carpenter had been nominated to get the voyage started properly and he was steering when the rushing waters of the Gravel veered suddenly to starboard, throwing the little boat right at the spot where the huge cake of ice just days before had gouged out the chunk of bank, leaving the dangerous sweepers.
Too late Harry saw that he was powerless to prevent the Afton from being driven under the branches of this fallen tree, but he did have time to shout a warning: ‘Down! All down!’
The men, remembering Harry’s warning, obeyed, except for Philip Henslow, who was striving to save a rope that might be lost and remained standing aft as he reached for it. Before Blythe could shout his own warning, the sweeper caught Philip in the back and pitched him into the icy waters.
‘Help!’ shouted Blythe, leaping to that end of the boat, but now the mighty current of the Mackenzie took over, and by the time the others sprang into action, Philip was far out into the larger river. Even so, the agility with which Carpenter shot the Afton into the main current, plus the frenzied power when the others started paddling and rowing, would have enabled them to save Philip had it not been for those dreadful boots, rubber and heavy and reaching well above his knees; they filled immediately with water and made swimming impossible.
Had he been wearing short, loose footgear, which the knowing did, he could have kicked them off and saved himself, but impeded as he was, he could kick neither swiftly nor strongly and was unable to keep afloat until the boat overtook him. In the first terrible moment when he struck the water and felt his boots becoming dead weights, he tried with super-human valor to stay afloat. His lungs took in more oxygen. His heart beat faster. His arms produced unbelievable pulling power, and he battled to keep his head above the swirling waters of the Mackenzie.
But inexorably the boots, heavier than lead, pulled him down, and as he fought vainly to counteract their pull to death he uttered a wild and piercing scream: ‘Help me!’ Each man on the boat heard it, and would hear it for many nights, and even months, but each was powerless. Trevor Blythe tried to leap into the water but was restrained by Harry Carpenter, who did not wish to lose two members of the team. However, he could not prevent Lord Luton from diving fully clad into the icy waters.
The gesture was fruitless. Luton did not come even close to his drowning nephew before the boy, with one terrible last scream, disappeared forever.
When the three men in the boat finally dragged Luton back aboard, they threw a blanket about him and sat beside him as the Sweet Afton floated swiftly down the broad crest of the river. ‘You did your best,’ Carpenter said, and Fogarty added: ‘No force could save him, Milord. You tried.’ But Blythe, standing at the rear of the boat, could only look through stinging eyes aft toward the dark waters that had taken his friend to their bosom. He remained there through that long, dreamlike spring twilight which seemed to last forever.
As the Sweet Afton continued down the Mackenzie the four survivors became painfully aware that each mile it carried them along took them farther from the Klondike. It was infuriating, yet inescapable, to be drifting down this great river and to be allowing it to divert them from their target, but that was the nature of the Mackenzie: one of the great rivers of the world, it led nowhere but its own end.
Harry spotted Trevor writing quietly, as he had done so often during the winter on the banks of the Gravel. Saying lightly ‘Examination time,’ he drew the book toward him, and what he saw was so pleasing that he did not stint his praise: ‘I say, Trevor, I do believe you’ve done it.’ Rapping for attention, he read aloud some dozen lines, which ended sardonically:
‘Reluctant paladins we
Who seek our Golden Grail by fleeing from it.’
Returning the book, Harry told the author: ‘See how much better it is when you compact your words and place among them images we can respond to?’ and Trevor fell silent, for he was wishing that Philip had been alive to share this encouraging assessment of his first mature poem.
Shortly after dawn on the next day, Luton saw from his position in the bow the post at Fort Norman, and without alerting the others, he fired two salutes into the crisp morning air. The shots brought the Canadians to the head of their stairs, where they waited, but the Métis, George Michael, recognizing the boat and its occupants, leaped down the steps, shouting: ‘Duke! Duke! Throw a line.’ When he had it firmly under control, he drew the Sweet Afton to him as the Canadians hurried down to meet the Englishmen and renew their acquaintance with Luton, whom they remembered with respect.
When all were seated in the post’s dining area, Luton opened the meeting with an acknowledgment: ‘Good friends, I want you to know that if your man Michael had not accompanied me home last time, all of us might now be dead.’ When the Canadians looked at one another in surprise, he explained: ‘He warned us to move our cabin and our boat to higher ground … against the day when so many ice floes would come roaring down that they would pile onto the land and crush all. He not only gave warning, he helped us move upland, and saved our lives.’
As the Englishmen nodded toward their savior, the Métis looked carefully at each man and asked: ‘The other one, with the light hair? You leave him, maybe?’
Slowly and with visible pain Luton told the Hudson’s Bay people the kind of tale with which they were familiar: ‘Drowned in the Mackenzie. A sweeper caught him in the middle of his back.’ There was silence—broken by Carpenter, who added: ‘Lord Luton dived into the icy water to save him. Hopeless. A dreadful loss.’
The Canadians were so pleased to see Luton again that they wanted him to lay over two or three days, but they understood when he declined: ‘Our job is to get over the mountains and into the Yukon.’
‘We remember,’ said one of the men who had drawn him some maps of the delta area. ‘We certainly hope you’ve changed your mind about trying the Peel.’
By the austerity of his look dismissing that ticklish subject, Luton let it be known that he would not welcome further discussion of routes, but he did express interest when the head of the post said: ‘We have few goods for sale this time of year. Our big supply ships don’t reach here till July, but we can let you have a few things you might be able to use.’ While Luton disappeared with him to check what might be available, the other Canadians took Carpenter aside and advised him strenuously to argue some sense into Lord Luton, show him the folly of his plan to travel the Peel: ‘You will not be able to get through the rapids before the freeze sets in. It’s as simple as that.’ But Carpenter silenced them: ‘It’s his expedition and he’s gone into difficult spots all over the world.’ One man replied with unmasked contempt: ‘Not at our degrees, he ain’t. In Fahrenheit forty-five minus, in latitude sixty-six north.’
The post people were able to provide Luton with six cans of meat, but nothing else, and as the Englishmen walked down to the Afton they assured the Canadians that they had sufficient stores to carry them into Dawson. The farewells were hearty, with Lord Luton at the last moment slipping a ten-dollar note into George Michael’s palm: ‘For saving us with your help,’ but it was not till some time after cast-off that Trevor Blythe, wreathed in smiles, revealed his secret: ‘Look what George Michael slipped aboard when the Canadians weren’t watching!’ and he threw back a tarpaulin to reveal eight boxes of hunting ammunition.
Some days later, as they moved north of the Arctic Circle, Lord Luton for the first time lost his composure: ‘Damn it all! I wish we could leap over those mountains and land in Dawson,’ but this was not to be. At the conclusion of a river trip that had no parallel in the world, the Luton party approached the incredibly tangled delta where the Mackenzie fragmented into a score of separate rivers, each winding its way haphazardly toward the ocean. It was a jungle of swampland and muddy streams that not even the local Indians could thread, and Harry, who was at the wheel, shouted: ‘Everyone! Help me find the Peel or we drift out into the Arctic Ocean!’
All eyes scouted the left bank, but found no indication of where the Peel debouched into the Mackenzie; however, they were able to move slowly ahead, still looking, for at this time of year no night fell in this far latitude. As they crept along, Trevor Blythe, suddenly overcome by the thought of leaving the majestic Mackenzie, cried: ‘I cannot allow poor Philip to lie in the bosom of this icy river without a word of Christian farewell.’ For although each of the others had mourned privately for Philip, they had done so during the lonely night watches and at the rising sun of each new day. They agreed with Trevor and gathered with him at the rear of the Afton, where the young poet borrowed Carpenter’s Book of Common Prayer, searching the pages for the service for the dead. When he found it, he passed the book along to Lord Luton, who read the noble words in stately cadence. A young man they had loved was gone and they eased his soul to rest. And when the prayers were ended, Trevor produced his copy of Palgrave, opened it to a place he had marked, and said softly: ‘I should like to read a farewell to my dear friend. And he began in a clear voice: ‘John Milton lost a young friend, drowned in the Irish seas, and wrote “Lycidas” to express his grief:
Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,…’
On through the majestic phrases he read, until it seemed as if some celestial organ were paying tribute to the dead young man, and it was improbable that Blythe realized how appropriate the final lines of this elegy were going to be when heard by Lord Luton’s beleaguered party:
‘And now the sun had stretch’d out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the western bay:
At last he rose, and twitch’d his mantle blue:
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.’
‘That’s the command,’ Luton said, ‘spoken from the grave. Tomorrow we head for the conclusion of our journey.’ Trevor, listening to these harsh, practical words, thought: How callous. But quickly became contrite: It was I who chose the poem. It was I who did not foresee the ending.
On through the silver night the Sweet Afton drifted, passing and ignoring one branch of the Mackenzie after another as the river fed off to the east. ‘We’ve got to find something leading in from the west,’ Carpenter said repeatedly, the edge in his voice betraying his unease, and when the hours from eleven at night through three in the morning passed with no sign of the Peel, even he began to lose confidence: ‘Could we have missed it?’ The others frantically consulted their inadequate charts, as he prepared to turn back and research the west bank.
He was prevented from this mistake by the appearance on the near shore of a group of smallish dark men, apparently Indians, who leaped in the air and made wild noises, which, when Harry steered the Afton toward them, turned into the exciting words: ‘Peel! Peel!’ With a deep sigh that revealed the tension under which he had been steering, Carpenter headed for the shouting men, and as the midnight dusk brightened into full arctic daylight Lord Luton’s team left the broad and many-mouthed Mackenzie to enter its tributary—the narrow, unknown Peel.
They were in the new river only a few minutes when they came upon the ramshackle Indian encampment from which their guides had come; it was not a permanent village, nothing more than a collection of tents and improvised shacks to which a group of some three dozen Han Indians from the Yukon district had come to barter their furs with the Company men on the trading ships that would soon be probing such gathering sites. From the nervousness of the Indians, both Luton and Carpenter deduced that this might be one of their rare encounters with white men.
‘They speak no French,’ Luton said. ‘Probably never traded with Hudson’s Bay people. Or traveled with Métis hunters.’
As he stepped forward and away from the Afton, the Han uttered screams, raced to gather their women, and fled far from their shacks. Dismayed that he had frightened them, Luton extended his hands, palms upward and empty, and moved slowly toward them, uttering reassuring words in French, hoping that someone among them would understand even one word. He accomplished nothing, for the Han continued to withdraw, but from the direction to which they were addressing their frightened looks he concluded that he was not the focus of fear, and when he looked back over his shoulder, he saw the cause of their anxiety.
Trevor Blythe, hungry for one last sight of the Mackenzie, had taken out the expedition’s long black telescope, and after exploring the tangled mouths of the great river had turned it to look up the dark banks of the Peel. The Han, thinking the scope to be the white man’s rifle with deadly power, assumed that Trevor would soon be shooting at them. They would have continued to flee had not Luton dashed back, taken the telescope, and held it sideways across his upturned palms above his head.
As he approached the terrified Han he began to laugh, not loudly or derisively but in accents of friendship, and when he had the first cautious Indians about him—all clad in the simplest of leather garments, with dirty matted hair and evasive eyes—he showed first one, then another how the telescope worked, and soon he had them pacified and genuinely friendly.
Everyone wanted to see the distant shore, the white birds on the mud flats, and before the Afton was allowed to move on into the Peel, there had to be a feast and dancing and the chanting of good-luck songs. It was a greeting of such amiability, so different from the austerity of the Blackfoot ceremonial at Edmonton, that Luton actually cried to Carpenter: ‘Harry, have we aught to give these good people?’ and odd bits of cargo were distributed. Fogarty, with his peasant agility in solving simple problems, was soon talking in sign language with the Han, and learned that they had actually come from the Yukon or some other western river to the west as powerful as the Mackenzie.
‘Is it far?’ Luton asked, and the little men indicated that they had walked it in half of one moon, which caused Harry to say: ‘They must be talking of the Porcupine.’
His pronunciation of that name excited the Indians, and with a jumble of signs they explained to Fogarty that, yes, it was the Porcupine, but beyond it there was this other huge river, and all members of the Luton party were both relieved and excited to learn that they were so close to the Yukon. They quickly made their departure, but as they poled their way up the Peel, for there would be no more easy downriver drifting, Luton asked his crew: ‘How is it possible that in a modern country like Canada, or the United States, there can still exist such hopeless savages? Little better than animals, really.’ Harry replied: ‘They knew where they were, and we didn’t.’
Two days later, as they sweated their way up the sluggish, unpleasant Peel, which seemed such a mean river after the clean, swift-moving Gravel, they were faced by one of those moments that determine human destinies, but it did not present itself with any sounding of trumpets or a glowing sunset at end of day. On the starboard side of the Afton, that is, the left bank of the Peel, they saw two men, heavily bearded and bare to the waist, engaged in sawing their small boat in half.
‘What’s the plan?’ Carpenter called out as he headed his own boat for shore.
‘Strippin’ down so we can portage over the pass just ahead.’
‘What way you taking?’
‘Rat, Bell, Porcupine. Quickest route to Dawson.’
Lord Luton, hearing this conversation and not liking it, broke in peremptorily: ‘You’re wrong about that. The Peel is much shorter.’
“But not quicker,’ the men said, ‘not by a long shot. Join up with us, more hands, more speed.’
Luton stared at them with distaste, prodded Carpenter, and said: ‘Let’s move her up the Peel, Harry,’ but Carpenter felt that he must in obedience to common sense argue once more for what he knew to be the saner route, since all knowledgeable hands had recommended it.
Speaking quietly and using once again a formal mode of address to emphasize the gravity of his message, he said: ‘Milord, we shall never find a better spot to penetrate the Rockies than by the pass at the headwaters of this little river.’
‘Harry!’ Luton snapped almost peevishly. ‘It’s been decided. The pass at the headwaters of the Peel takes us much closer to Dawson,’ and he was correct. It would be closer, but over a route much higher and much, much more difficult.
He grasped the tiller and headed the Sweet Afton southward up the Peel. For half an hour he steered the rugged little craft in that direction, his jaw grimly clamped. At the end of this arrogant performance he handed the tiller over to Carpenter and said: ‘We’re well started, Harry. Keep her steady.’
As they left the Rat behind, Carpenter closed his eyes and for some moments did not breathe, knowing that a decision of terrifying importance to him and the others had just been made. Then he opened his eyes, sighed deeply, and saw ahead of him the uninviting Peel, a river of little grace or character whose once-sluggish current now ran far too swiftly for its banks, signaling that rapids lay ahead. Furling the sails and directing Trevor to stow them neatly, for they would no longer be of use, he reached for one of the long poles and started pushing the boat upriver.
By July 1898, a full year after having left London, Lord Luton’s party was far into the Peel, all hands poling fourteen or sixteen hours a day and covering so many miles that even Carpenter was beginning to think that transit by this route might prove possible, but that dream was short-lived. Early one morning, when Trevor Blythe had been put on shore to run ahead to scout what the Sweet Afton would soon be facing, he came back ashen-faced, to shout from the shore: ‘Oh, Lord Luton! Worst possible news!’ And as the three aboard strained to hear, he delivered the foul message that would characterize the remainder of their trip up the Peel: ‘Heavy rapids and canyon, no shoreline from which to drag.’ As the import of these dreadful words was absorbed, all hands began wondering what to do.
First they took Blythe back aboard, then they poled ahead to where the rapids ended their cascade down a fairly steep incline, and there three facts became inescapable. Harry, scrambling ahead, shouted back the reassuring news: ‘Enough water beyond the rapids to keep us afloat,’ but Trevor confirmed his earlier report: ‘Absolutely no shore footing from which we could pull.’ Luton recalled with a shiver the warning of one of the Schnabel brothers: ‘When there’s no path, you catch your breath, step down into that cold mountain water, and hike right up the middle of the Rat …’ At the reappearance of that fated name his breath really did catch, and he thought: Oh God! Should we have taken that little one after all? But he dismissed such self-recrimination, telling his men with a show of confidence: ‘We’ll have to tow and push whilst wading, but we can’t do that with a boat so big. Haul her ashore, break out the saw, and let’s get started.’
There was, of course, another option and a sensible one: don’t cut the boat, turn around, drift back with the current, go up the Rat, and cut the boat there as everyone had advised. But since the others realized that Luton would not hear of this, the possibility was not discussed. Instead, the trustworthy little boat which had given such excellent service was hauled ashore, unloaded, and sawed in half, following exactly that red line painted by one of the Schnabels back in Athabasca Landing. When they saw how wee the half they proposed using was going to be, Carpenter said: ‘Not much sailing in this one. Pushing and pulling.’
With good heart, now that the worst of their position was known, the four men laid out the driftwood they had been collecting, cut timbers from it, boarded and caulked the gaping hole left by the sawing, and carefully stowed their diminished cargo, discarding nothing. As a last gesture to the half not taken, Lord Luton saluted her and turned his face resolutely toward the waiting canyon and Dawson City, which lay only a hundred and ninety miles to the west.
A new routine was quickly set. Two teams were established: Luton and Fogarty in front hauling ropes, Harry and Trevor in back pushing. As might have been expected, Lord Luton was first in the water, and although he must have winced inwardly at the sudden coldness, not much above freezing, his face revealed nothing. ‘Heave, men! And with good heart, we’ll make it.’
That first day in the water was horrible, for the bouldered footing allowed no steady progress and the depth of the river in places plunged the men to their necks in icy water. Since they had to waste half their energy fighting to remain erect, forward motion was minimal, and all hoped for a sudden ending to the canyon so that they might find solid footing ashore and a decent chance to tow in an organized manner. But most of the day passed with no shore available, and Carpenter thought: This is going to be pure hell if night falls and we’re stuck in here, but that fearful emergency was avoided, because the canyon did end and good footing was available on the left bank. By this time the men were so exhausted they could not avail themselves of it, and as night approached, they dragged their half-boat ashore and pitched their camp.
Before they fell asleep they conducted a fascinating conversation, for as men of sturdy will they were interested in such matters. ‘I say, Carpenter, how do you figure?’ Luton asked. ‘Who had the more difficult task out there, we pullers or you pushers?’ Without a moment’s reflection Harry said: ‘You men,’ and when Luton asked ‘Why?’ he received the correct answer: ‘Because we in the rear had the boat to lean on to steady our feet amongst the boulders,’ and Luton said: ‘I wondered. From now on we’ll alternate at intervals.’
Of course, when there was no canyon eliminating the shore, the four could make a respectable day’s run, and then their hopes quickened as they visualized a short but demanding portage over some mountain pass and a swift descent into Dawson. But with appalling frequency, rapids, usually less formidable than that first one, impeded, and then the men had to grit their teeth, plunge into the frigid water, fight the boulders and haul-push their half-boat westward, but the worst punishment came when they climbed out of the water, drenched, and had to shiver in the increasing cold until they slipped awkwardly out of wet and into dry clothing.
One day in mid-August, when they still faced one hundred and sixty miles on the river, Trevor Blythe was in the pushing position when he suddenly awakened to the hideous fact that they could not possibly be able to cross the Rockies before oncoming winter froze the Peel and piled snowdrifts over all the passes. ‘Dear God,’ he whispered to himself as he struggled along the rocks. ‘Another winter holed up. And we have so little food to see us through.’
He said nothing that day, but he did begin to scan the faces of his companions, trying to ascertain whether they appreciated the impasse into which they had quite literally stumbled and in which they were continuing to stumble day after taxing day. He could not deduce their inner thoughts or their fears, but he did notice they talked less and in the evenings were too exhausted to do anything but collapse in their crowded tent. The seminars were held no more. Now it was a matter of survival.
During the last week of August, Lord Luton broke the silence. At supper one night—beans and no meat—he said abruptly: ‘I suppose you realize we shall soon have to pitch permanent camp.’
“No other way,’ Carpenter said. Fogarty remained silent, and Trevor, too, said nothing, relieved that at last their predicament was in the open.
By mid-September, when the upriver poling and dragging was at its worst, the men put on extra bursts of effort to get through this horrendous part of the Peel before the fall of snow and while they still had time to select a livable spot. They succeeded, breaking into an inviting plateau at the foot of the Rockies. During the second week of October, when the temperature was close to zero, they dragged the half-boat ashore, emptied it of the pitiful amount of gear they still had, leaned it against rocks to form a protection from the northwest winds, and began to search for trees or scraps of river-borne timber that could be used to build a kind of cabin, well aware that it would not duplicate the first, comfortable shelter they had enjoyed the previous winter.
As they worked, each man thought to himself at one time or another: Good God! This time even closer to the Arctic Circle! And each man swore that he would conserve his energy, eat meager rations without complaining, and do everything possible to maintain his health. And each prayed for inner strength.
As winter began, sixteen months since their departure from Edmonton, the men were in as good condition as could have been expected. Carpenter and Blythe had shin cuts acquired while hauling and all were markedly underweight, not from lack of food but from the endless hours of exertion. No one had any perceptible sickness, nor bad teeth, nor malnutrition, but all would have to face a most taxing winter, with temperatures lower than they had known along the Mackenzie and with a frightening lack of proper food.
This year there had to be new rules, as Lord Luton explained: ‘Latrine same as before. Daily run the same, and do not shirk. No one, and I mean no one, no one at all, is to eat anything except in the presence of us all. You must give me your word on that.’ And the men swore to share food equally and openly. ‘We shall pray that our distinguished poacher, Fogarty, will put his talents to good purpose.’ Plenty of hunting shells the group did have, thanks to the gift of George Michael. Fogarty said that he would do his best, but he hoped Major Carpenter would assist, since he was a practiced shot.
Strangely, it was Fogarty who evoked the first revelation of the lurking terror which these men had so far successfully hidden. The latrine had been positioned as before, a respectable distance from the lean- to cabin, but the cold this winter was frightful, and Fogarty noticed that the other three were failing to visit it as often as he thought they should. One night he warned them about constipation: ‘In Edmonton they told me it was the curse of cold climates. Gentlemen, do not ignore those little messages from your bowels.’
He was prepared to squat at the latrine for as long as necessary. ‘His bottom must be lined with bear fur,’ Harry suggested, but at the latrine Fogarty would stay. It was what he did when he returned that caused trouble, for always when he came into the warm room he sighed with deep satisfaction, saying the same four words: ‘Better out than in.’ Since this was true, and was also a kind of reproof to the others with less hardy bottoms, it occasioned resentment. No one did anything about it until one night, when the routine was lustily repeated, Lord Luton suddenly reached for his revolver and shouted, indeed, he almost screamed: ‘Say that one more time and I’ll blow your brains out!’
There was an awed hush, during which each man acknowledged how desperate their situation was. No one apologized for what Luton had done, and he said nothing. Fogarty, aware at last of how offensive he had been, said: ‘I am sorry, Milord.’ And then he added as if nothing had happened: ‘I think I spotted where the caribou cross.’ Luton laid his revolver down and said calmly: ‘I hope so. We shall have to rely on you, Fogarty.’
For several weeks the poacher failed to bring in fresh meat, and even when Carpenter accompanied him as second gun they returned empty-handed. Food now became the problem that superseded all others, and as the supplies purchased in Edmonton began to dwindle, everyone had to go on severely reduced rations, watching with deep apprehension as one can after another was carefully opened and scraped of every morsel. For some curious reason, which no one could have explained, the six cans of meat acquired by chance at Fort Norman were considered sacrosanct, not to be touched until the ultimate extremity. They stood neatly stacked in the corner, representing a fighting chance for survival. That pile became the religious icon that kept hope alive.
The savage deprivation had to have visible consequences: the men grew leaner, their countenances ashen as blood fled their faces, their movements more carefully considered. Also, their tempers frayed, but of this they were aware, so that they spoke to one another with a more careful courtesy, as if they were members of some ancient court in which formality was required. And then one day Trevor Blythe shattered the make-believe with a startled cry of real anguish: ‘Oh, Jesus! Look what’s happened!’ And he held forth in the palm of his left hand one of his back molars, unblemished and sound as a walnut but nevertheless ejected from his weakening upper gum.
‘Scurvy,’ Luton said without showing his fear. ‘We must eat more carefully,’ but how this was to be accomplished he did not suggest.
One very cold afternoon as Carpenter and Fogarty were trying to find a stray caribou or the cave of some hibernating bear, Harry suddenly went lame, and when Fogarty inspected his left leg he saw that the open wound caused by the rocks in the Peel had not healed. This was bad enough, but when he pressed his fingers about the wound to see whether putrefaction had set in, he saw to his and Harry’s horror that the prints of his fingertips remained indented in the graying flesh. Harry, never one to avoid reality, pushed his own fingers in, with the same result.
‘Necrotic,’ he said.
‘Is that what you told the young men about?’ Fogarty asked, and Harry replied: ‘Yes. Scurvy.’
‘What can we do?’ Fogarty asked, and he was told: ‘Catch us an animal. We heard fresh meat will cure it.’
Of course, both Luton and Carpenter, as experienced explorers and students of British naval history, knew that this was not totally true; fresh meat did help combat scurvy because it strengthened the body and thus made it somewhat more capable of withstanding the attack, but they knew that this was merely a delaying tactic, not a cure. They were also aware of the remarkable work done in the previous century by Captain James Cook, who almost single-handedly eradicated scurvy as the curse of seafaring men. By almost forcing his crew to drink what they described as ‘a nauseating mix of things’ containing ingredients like vegetables, seaweed, roots and the brine of fermented sauerkraut, he had sneaked into their diet the specific nutrient that would eliminate scurvy. Later experimenters said: ‘Cook had eight items in his mix and seven were totally useless, but somewhere in there he had lucked upon something which provided ascorbic acid, and that saved the day.’
Luton and Carpenter knew that ascorbic acid in minute but life-saving amounts could be obtained from digging up a mess of roots, boiling them, and drinking the water. But what roots? Explorers never knew which particular ones carried the treasured acid, but a wide mix always seemed mysteriously to provide the necessary. But Luton’s party could not dig for roots and grasses, for the arctic land on which they were camped was frozen so solid and for so long each year that normal roots could not thrive in it. Those that might have proved helpful were locked into the ground, frozen so deep that they were not attainable. Potential salvation was everywhere under their feet, but they could not get at it.
The condition of Harry Carpenter’s leg was ominous but not yet fatal; a strong man like him, with tremendous inner courage and determination, would have a good chance of survival. So when Fogarty and Harry returned to the camp they both refrained from adding to Lord Luton’s worries by informing him that a second member of his party had scurvy, but they did say that it was imperative to find meat. Luton, Carpenter and Fogarty went out to scour the countryside—Blythe was far too weak to join them—and although they shot nothing that day or the next, they could not allow their exhaustion to stop them, and on the third day they did shoot a small caribou, and with joy they butchered it and hauled it home.
It was a miracle. Harry said of it: ‘When that roasted meat hit my stomach, I could feel the proper juices rushing to all the starved veins,’ and Blythe said the same. They were self-deluded, of course, for not even fresh meat could halt the inroads of this terrible disease—only a replenishment of lost acids could accomplish that—but the salutary effect of the savory meat in their systems created such a sense of renewed well-being that Trevor believed his gums were strengthening and Harry was sure his necrotic leg had begun to mend.
But that was the last fresh meat they would enjoy for weeks. One night when the men were really starving, Lord Luton, as protector of the six cans of meat, announced almost merrily: ‘Gentlemen, we celebrate!’ and with exaggerated ritual he placed one of the precious cans on their rude table and watched approvingly as Fogarty slit it open with an ax, tossed the contents in a saucepan, and threw in odd bits of everything he could find. As they waited for it to heat, they became aware of the arctic wind howling at their shack, and for some reason not one of them could have explained, they began to hum and then sing softly the Christmas carols of their youth. When they came to that grand old English one not favored in other countries, ‘The Holly and the Ivy,’ Trevor Blythe’s high tenor sounded so sweetly throughout the tent that one could imagine the sound of sleighbells echoing in the frigid air outside. They talked of home and family and of the grand Christmases they had known in England and Ireland. Then, one by one, each returned to his own sad silence, and only the thunder of the wind was heard.
Two nights after the caroling the others heard Trevor gasp, and when they looked in his direction he was holding in his palm two more of his big back teeth, flawlessly white and glimmering in the lamplight like the malevolent eyes of some ghost. Before anyone could commiserate with him, he said softly and with profound resignation: ‘I doubt I shall see spring.’
‘Now look here, Trevor,’ Luton began to bluster, but the young fellow said with the gentleness that always marked him: ‘Evelyn, will you please fetch my Palgrave?’ and when the precious little book was found, Trevor asked: ‘Will you read some of the short poems?’ In his strong baritone Luton read those wonderfully simple lines, those thoughts that seemed to represent the best that England had ever offered the world: ‘ “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains …” ’ and ‘ “She dwelt among the untrodden ways …” ’ and ‘ “Tell me where is Fancy bred …” ’
As this essence of love and beauty and the longings of youth filled the cabin, Blythe sighed. Soon thereafter his breath became uneven and labored, and he whispered: ‘Evelyn, please read me the Herrick.’ Luton could not find the right poem, so Trevor with his trembling hands leafed through the pages for Number 93 and found the magical six lines:
‘Whenas in silks my Julia goes
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.
Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free;
O how that glittering taketh me!’
When Luton finished reading, Trevor reached for Carpenter’s hand and whispered in a voice so weak it could scarcely be heard: ‘When we reached home I intended speaking with your cousin, Lady Julia. Please tell her. And my Treasury … I want her to have it.’ Then he turned his ravaged body toward Luton: ‘Oh, Evelyn, I’m so sorry.’
‘For what?’
‘For having let you down,’ this in a gray, deathly tone.
‘Forget that!’ Luton said heartily, trying to mask his emotion. ‘Sleep now and mend yourself.’
He was long past mending. That remorseless killer, scurvy, had so depleted him, stealing his sources of strength and destroying his capacity to rebuild, that all he could do was look pitifully at his three companions and gasp for breath, even though he knew the cool, clean air would do him little good.
Fighting valiantly to maintain control, he reached out to clasp Evelyn’s hand, failed, and watched with dismay as his fingers fell weakly onto the blanket. Knowing that he was near death, he tried with harsh rasping sounds that formed no syllables to bid farewell to his companions, fell back, and with one last surge of energy turned his face to the wall to spare them his distress. Thus isolated, this compassionate young man, so full of promise but with his love undeclared, his poems unwritten, died.
As before, the end of February was the time of hell and ice, except that this year there was no springlike break in the middle, and much of the misery it brought stemmed from the fact that the days were lengthening, visibly so, but the rate was slow and the persistence of the cold so deadening that it seemed a perversion, a teasing of the spirit. Spring was due but it did not come.
Camp routine continued as before. Lord Luton shaved, and tended his clothes, and protected his five cans of meat, and marched erect rather than bent over as the others did in order to keep whatever heat they had trapped in their bellies. He ran three laps in this winter’s version of a track and he goaded the others to do the same. He ate sparingly, preferring that the others take larger portions, and he did everything possible to sustain the spirits of his two remaining partners. He was an impeccable leader, and barring that one dreadful night when he had threatened to shoot Fogarty, he never lost his composure. His party had fallen upon rough times and he intended leading the survivors to safety. Never, not even in his lonely, unspoken reflections, did he acknowledge personal culpability for the growing disaster; he viewed it as either a capricious act of God or the manifestation of the malevolent forces of nature.
Harry Carpenter was the regimental major. His big mustache had proliferated into a beard, but he kept it clipped, and when he sat in the cabin divested of the heavy clothes he had to wear when outside, he was a handsome man, not so rugged as before and somewhat drawn about the face because of scurvy, but still a proper officer whose upright bearing was relaxed rather than stiff. Had he stayed in India and become the colonel of his regiment, his men would have called him ‘Good old Harry,’ and here in the wastes of northern Canada he was the same. He did not run every day; he couldn’t, but when he felt that Luton was silently chiding him he tried; after one lap he would return to the cabin, exhausted.
He was reading Great Expectations for the third time, not aloud this time, for Luton and Fogarty claimed they had not cared much for it the first time around and had more or less resented the waste of time during the second reading. He was sorry that he had confided to Fogarty his concern about his incipient scurvy, but now he wished he had someone with whom to discuss the matter; to do so with either Luton or Fogarty seemed quite impossible, and what was worse, improper. He suffered his debilitating disease mutely, supposing that Fogarty had informed Luton of the matter. Throughout the cabin, night and day, there was a conspiracy of silence regarding his affliction, and he allowed it to continue.
Fogarty resembled his master in his stolid acceptance of conditions. He ran with Luton on those days he was not searching vainly to find the meat that would ensure their safety, and he maintained that stubborn cheerfulness which made any good Irish servingman a model of his calling. Though not required to wait on his companions, he still found pleasure in heating Lord Luton’s shaving water in the morning and in honing and stropping the razor. He helped Carpenter in a dozen ways and strove to maintain good spirits in the cramped quarters. He was appalled that they should be spending a second winter in such surroundings, and he watched almost breathlessly for even the slightest promise of spring: ‘Soon we’ll be over the mountains, that I’m sure, and there’ll be gold for the finding!’ He was the only one who mentioned gold; the other two had never been obsessed with it and were now concerned only with survival.
As winter waned, so did Carpenter’s reserves; each day he grew weaker, until once toward the end of the month he was unable to get out of bed in the morning, which now showed a clear difference from night. When Luton asked: ‘You joining us for a bit of running?’ he grinned and said: ‘I shall sit this out in the tea tent,’ as if they were participating in a cricket match.
On the next day, when Fogarty returned from the latrine, he saw a pathetic sight: Harry Carpenter was on his weakened hands and knees, trying with the shovel, whose long handle he managed poorly, to grub away the surface of the frozen earth in what the Irishman knew was a search for elusive roots that might help stem his rampant scurvy. He was obviously not having any luck, but with the quiet determination that had always marked him he continued his futile scraping until he fell forward, exhausted, the heavy shovel falling useless beside him.
Fogarty considered for some moments whether he should run to Carpenter’s aid, but some inner sense cautioned him that a man like this would want to solve his own problems and would, indeed, resent intrusion from another, so he withdrew out of sight, taking a position from which he could maintain watch over the fallen man. In due course Harry rose, took almost two minutes to steady himself, then walked slowly back to the hut, dragging the shovel behind him. When he saw Fogarty, he brought it sharply up and placed it against his shoulder as if it were a rifle and he on parade.
‘I’ve been giving a touch to our track,’ he said as he walked past, but when Fogarty saw his ashen face he breathed a silent cry: Dear Jesus! He’s going to die.
No matter how courageous and determined Carpenter was, he could not avoid brooding about the awfulness of dying in these bleak surroundings, where every means that might have enabled him to fight off his debility was missing: the medicines, the proper diet, the good doctors, the nursing, the supervised recuperation … How valuable these things were, how clear an indication that the society which ensured them was properly civilized.
However, his painful reflections did not always center on himself. He thought often of his cousin Julia, nineteen when last he saw her, and a young woman who would never be beautiful in the ordinary sense of that word; she did not even have what was described as a ‘flawless English complexion,’ but she did have what Trevor Blythe had recognized, a positively glowing inner fire that made whatever she said sound reasonable and whatever she did seem humane. ‘Best of her breed,’ Harry whispered to himself as he visualized her running freely across the lawn, to greet him after a safari in Kenya, ‘bubbling with life’s infinite possibilities.’
Then came the gloom, for he had in his life of moving about, especially among English families living abroad, seen a score of young women like Julia, radiant and of great power but not particularly marketable in the marriage bazaars, and if they failed in their twenties to find the one good man who could appreciate their inner beauty, they might find no one, and have to content themselves, in their forties, with playing the cello, reading good books and doing needlework.
When such thoughts assailed him he recalled Trevor’s commission: ‘When we reached home I intended speaking with your cousin, Lady Julia. Please tell her.’ He was certain now that he would not be reaching home, that Julia would never know that a young poet of marked talent had loved her, nor would she receive the gift that would express this love. He became so obsessed with the thought that he would fail to fulfill this mission that for two days he chastised himself, then asked for one of the last precious pieces of paper, on which he tried to tell Julia of Trevor Blythe’s death and of the young man’s last request: that she be told he would have been coming home to marry her. But he had neither the strength nor the concentration to finish the letter, and as the pencil fell from his almost lifeless hand he realized the true significance of death and murmured in a voice too low for his companions to hear: ‘It means that messages of love will not be delivered.’
That night Lord Luton, seeing the desolation of spirit which had overcome his chief lieutenant, cried brightly: ‘I say, men! Isn’t it time we attacked another can of our Fort Norman supply,’ and as before, Fogarty chopped the can open and brought out the saucepan. This time he was able to throw in a small collection of roots he had grubbed from the thawing soil, and when stew was rationed out, it was twice as tasty as before and the three diners leaned back and smacked their lips, remarking upon what a civilizing effect a substantial hot meal could have upon a hungry man.
But Carpenter was so debilitated that his high spirits did not last the night, and in the morning he had neither the strength nor the resolve to leave his bed. Luton, sick at heart over the weakening condition of his friend, sat beside Carpenter and took him by the shoulders: ‘Look here, Harry, this won’t do. It won’t do at all.’ Harry, thinking he was being rebuked for purposely malingering and unable because of his illness to see that Luton was merely using the hale-and-hearty approach of the regimental marshal, took offense at his friend’s chiding.
Hiding his distress, he rose on pitifully weakened legs whose sores had never healed but only worsened, put on his heaviest clothing, and said cheerfully: ‘You’re right, Evelyn. I could do with a bit of jog,’ and walking unsteadily, he started to step out into the bitter cold, pausing for one fleeting moment to whisper to Fogarty. But what he said, Lord Luton could not hear.
The two men remaining in the hut agreed that spurring him to action had been salutary, but since they did not continue to monitor him as he ran right past the track, they did not see him slow down because of gasping pain near his heart, nor when he was out of sight, begin to take off his outer garments one by one. Heavy parka, gone! Woolen jacket with double pockets, thrown aside! Inner jacket, also of wool, away! Now his good linen shirt came off and next his silk-and-wool undershirt, until he stumbled ahead, naked to the waist in cold that had returned to many degrees below zero.
There was no wind, so for a few minutes he could move forward, but then his scurvied legs refused to function and his lungs began to freeze. Grasping for the branches of a stunted tree, he held himself upright, and in that position froze to death.
When Harry’s return was delayed, Lord Luton said to Fogarty: ‘Good, Harry’s whipping himself back into shape,’ but when the absence became prolonged, Luton said with obvious apprehension: ‘Fogarty, I think we’d better look into Harry’s running.’ From the cabin door they stared at the track, but they saw nothing.
‘Whatever could have happened?’ Luton asked, and Fogarty had no reasonable surmise. They walked tentatively toward the running oval, and Fogarty spotted the red-and-gray parka lying on the ground and rushed forward to retrieve it. As he did so, Luton, coming behind, spotted the woolen jacket, and then the inner jacket and not far beyond the erect corpse of Harry Carpenter, already frozen almost solid.
When they returned to the shack, a distraught Evelyn could not accept the death of his friend as merely the kind of accident one could anticipate during a protracted adventure. In a voice trembling with anguish and self-doubt he asked: ‘What did he whisper to you, Fogarty?’ and the Irishman replied: ‘He praised you, sir.’
‘What did he say?’ Luton cried, his voice an agitated demand, and Fogarty whispered: ‘He told me “Keep Evelyn strong for crossing the mountains.” ’
“Why would he have said that?’ in higher voice.
‘Because he knew we were trapped … by those mountains Mr. Trevor wrote about.’
Luton and Fogarty were to experience an additional horror in Harry’s manly suicide. Unable at that moment to dig a grave, and not wishing to bring the corpse into the cabin, they collected his strewn garments and placed them like robes over the stiff body, which they laid in the snow. When they returned the next day they discovered what food the ravens of the arctic fed upon.
March was especially difficult, for with the coming of the vernal equinox, when night and day were twelve hours long at all spots on the earth, the two survivors had visible reason for thinking that spring was already here, and desperately they wanted the snow and ice to melt so they could be on their way. But this did not happen, for although the days grew noticeably warmer and those fearful silent nights when the temperature dropped to minus-sixty were gone, it still remained below freezing and no relaxation of winter came.
It was a time of irritation, and one day when Luton was beginning to fear the onset of scurvy himself, he railed at Fogarty: ‘You boasted last year that you were a poacher extraordinaire. For God’s sake, let’s see you bag something,’ and Fogarty merely said: ‘Yes, Milord,’ but was unable to find anything to shoot.
Even in the closeness of the cabin, Lord Luton maintained separation by caste. Fogarty was a servant, an unlettered man who had been brought along to assist his betters, and never did either man forget that. During two winters, each more than seven months long, Luton never touched Fogarty, although Fogarty sometimes touched him when performing a service, and it would have been unthinkable for Luton to have addressed him by a first name. And had Fogarty referred to His Lordship as Evelyn, the cabin would have trembled as if struck by an earthquake. From these strict rules, hammered out over the centuries, there could be no deviation. If Fogarty had to address Luton directly, it was ‘Milord’ and nothing else; Luton would have considered even ‘sir’ too familiar.
And yet there was mutual respect between these men. The Luton party had started with five, and now only two were left, and at times Luton had entertained but never voiced the judgment that if in the end there was to be only one to reach Dawson, it would probably be this happy moonfaced Irishman. ‘Damn me,’ he muttered to himself one day as he watched Fogarty running his laps on the oval track where mud was beginning to show. ‘Peasants have a capacity for survival. I suppose that’s why there’s so many of ’em.’
In fairness to Luton, he never demanded subservience of a demeaning kind. The original rule still prevailed: ‘Fogarty is the servant of the expedition, not of any individual member.’ And in a dozen unspoken ways he let the Irishman know that the latter’s contribution was both essential and highly regarded. It was an arrangement that only two well-intended and thoroughly disciplined men could have maintained under these difficult conditions, and they knew that if they remained obedient to it, they had a fighting chance to bring their odd combination safely to Dawson and its gold fields.
Despite their shared determination to avoid any differences of opinion that might exacerbate tempers already in danger, each had a strong individual attitude toward what should be done with the four remaining cans of meat. Lord Luton, as the descendant of gentlemen for fifteen generations and noblemen for nine, insisted upon living by the code of the endangered aristocrat: ‘Decency says we must save the cans till the very last. Stands to reason, Fogarty, it would be unconscionable to devour them now, when they may be required in some great extremity.’
Fogarty, on the other hand, was descended from some of the shrewdest, self-protecting peasants Ireland had ever produced, and like the sensible pragmatist he was, he saw even the precious cans of meat only as means to some worthy end, and if there was a good chance of getting to Dawson alive, he would use them now, when they were obviously needed: ‘I say, with all due deference, Milord, we ought to chop one of them open right now and fill our bellies.’
‘We’ll have none of that, Fogarty. Those cans are for an emergency.’
At this very moment, in a small Scottish hamlet many thousands of miles distant from this segment of the Arctic Circle, a sentimental little Scottish writer, James Barrie (later Sir James), was brooding over a winsome idea for a stage play, one which would later fill theaters of the world with joy and chuckles. The Admirable Crichton dealt with a situation somewhat like the one in which Luton and Fogarty found themselves: a spoiled and pampered family of the English gentry is marooned on a tropical island along with a trusted retainer, their butler Crichton, and as the family falls apart in this crisis, displaying a lack of both common sense and will power, Crichton reveals himself as a master of every emergency. Only his courage, inventiveness and inexhaustible good sense save the family, but when rescue comes, he, of course, reverts to being their servant. It was neat, amusing and reassuring, and people loved it, especially the upper classes who were the butt of the joke.
That was not to be the case on the frozen banks of the Peel. Lord Luton did not reveal himself as a giddy fop; he was tougher than walrus hide. Nor did Fogarty suddenly step forward as all-wise or possessed of the masterful characteristics that Luton lacked. Fogarty was a good factotum, and Luton was more than able to care for himself, but gradually through the pressure of circumstances and the necessity for decisions of great moment, the two men seemed to reach a status of equality, each complementing the other and necessary to the partnership. This was never better exemplified than during the days following the equinox when they had to make up their minds as to how they would operate in the more fortunate weeks they could be sure were coming when summer returned. All depended upon one crucial decision: ‘Since we’re through the canyons, shall we put the half-boat back in the water and pole our way to the headwaters and then hike over the mountains, or shall we abandon the boat here and start walking immediately?’ They whipped this back and forth, with Luton now asking Fogarty for his opinion, because at long last the noble lord was beginning to suspect that his earlier obstinate decisions might have been largely to blame for the deaths of Blythe and Carpenter.
Pleased that finally Luton sought his advice, Fogarty would propose: ‘Let’s keep the boat, Milord, because with it, we can carry more stuff,’ and Luton would respond: ‘But if we head out swiftly on foot with the simplest backpacks, we can certainly make it before another winter.’
At the next discussion, Fogarty would defend the backpacks and Luton the retention of the boat, and in this way each calculated danger or emergency was voiced and assessed. It was Luton who had the courage to investigate one of the most painful situations: ‘Fogarty, we’ve seen men die … from causes they could not control. If only one of us survived, which way would be better?’ Without hesitation Fogarty replied: ‘If he lived and was alone, he’d have to leave the boat, because otherwise …’ and that settled the matter: ‘Since we’re both going to live, we’ll keep the boat until the last practical moment.’
The choice having been made, the two men spent much of April deciding in minute detail what would be carried by boat to the headwaters and which articles would be taken forward in each of the backpacks. They must take the tent, and the tools for survival and all available food, which was not much. Looking at the dried beans and the other edibles that kept the body alive but allowed the extremities to die, Luton again felt intimations of scurvy—a loosening tooth, a sensation of numbness in his toes. When Fogarty was absent he saw with horror that when he pushed his forefinger into the flesh of his right leg, the indentation remained.
At this moment in the twenty-first month of the doomed expedition, he almost lost heart, but when he heard the approach of Fogarty he stiffened and presented his servant with the obligatory posture of a gentleman still in control: ‘Fogarty, we really must see if we can get ourselves some meat.’ That was all he said, but the Irishman knew that Lord Luton was not going to make it through the mountains unless he, Fogarty, brought home some game.
He thereupon started the most significant hunting journey of his life, traveling each day up and down the frozen Peel looking for anything that moved, and each night when he returned empty-handed, to the terrible disappointment of his waiting companion, he could see His Lordship’s shoulders not sag but stiffen with determination: ‘Good try, Fogarty. I’m sure you’ll get something yet.’
Luton’s journal now lacked the easy flow and broad philosophical base that had characterized it the preceding winter, when five able men were really exploring life in a cramped cabin in the arctic. One night, after Fogarty had once more returned empty-handed, Luton wrote in disjointed, trembling phrases:
Again no meat. Pushed right forefinger in leg, mark remained hours. Am slipping. If I must die terrible isolation pray God able to do it with grace of Trevor Blythe, courage of Harry Carpenter. Right now pray Fogarty finds caribou.
Shortly after this admission of despair, Luton left the cabin and tried to run his customary laps, but as he used the oval which Harry Carpenter had tramped into the snow, he began to see images of that good man whom he had brought to his death, and of Philip lost in the Mackenzie, and of the poet Trevor Blythe, perhaps the greatest loss of all. He started to stagger and duel with phantoms, so that Fogarty, who was watching from the cabin, having learned from Carpenter’s suicide, saw that his master was in difficulty.
Running to help, he heard Luton cry to the phantoms: ‘I am strangled! I am cursed with grief! Oh God, that I should have done this to these men through my ineptitude!’
The Irishman, who was not supposed to hear this confession, jogged methodically behind Lord Luton, overtaking him on a turn, where he said in his best matter-of-fact voice: ‘Milord, we’ll be in sore trouble if we don’t chop more wood.’ Luton, rattling his head to drive away the cruel images, said: ‘Fetch the axes,’ and as they exorcised their terror through sweating work, Luton’s head cleared and he said: ‘Fogarty, unless you bag us something …’ and Fogarty knew immediately what he must do: they were starving and to allow this to continue when the four cans of meat were available was stupidity.
Ignoring orders and grabbing the ax before Luton could stop him, he strode back to the cabin, took one of the sacrosanct cans, chopped off the top, and placed the meat in a saucepan, adding one of the last onions and handfuls of his arctic roots. When the stew was bubbling, he ladled out a bowlful and set it before Luton, who looked down at it, breathed its ravishing aroma, and with a fork neatly picked out one small piece of meat after another, never wolfing it down and never berating Fogarty for disobeying him.
Refreshed by the unexpected food, he slept soundly, rose early and shaved as usual. Refusing to acknowledge even to himself how close to surrender he had been the night before, he dressed in his meticulous way, took down his gun and a pocketful of George Michael’s shells, and said: ‘Time comes, Fogarty, when a man must find his own caribou,’ and off he marched, thinking as he went: This may be the final effort. My legs. My damned legs.
Fogarty, of course, trailed behind, and during that long cold day whenever he tired of climbing the snowy hummocks, he knew that this was for Luton the do-or-die effort, and he had not the heart to stop him. It was good that he didn’t, for toward evening when he joined up with Luton, the pair came upon spoor which excited them to the trembling point. A herd of the large deer called wapiti, moving north for the summer, had recently crossed this way, leaving fresh signs.
The animals could not be impossibly distant, both agreed on that, so the chase began, the men following the signs with desperate intensity, but when the silvery night fell, the wapiti had not yet been overtaken. There had to be a great temptation for them to go back to the safety of their cabin, but without speaking, Luton pointed to the spot where they stood, indicating that here he would shoot his deer or die, and Fogarty, feeling deep affection for the austere man, nodded. Through the early hours of the shortening night they remained in position, each man striving to catch a little rest against the demands of the coming day. At midnight, when the waning moon stood high, Luton thought he heard a movement to the east: ‘I’m going to scout over that hill. Watch sharp if I rouse anything and it comes this way.’
When he had crept quietly to the crest of the hill covered with sparse snow, he broke into a sweat, for below him in a cleared space grazed five wapiti, incredibly beautiful, and big, their huge antlers gleaming in the moonlight. Should I try to call Fogarty? he asked himself. Rejecting that idea lest the animals be alerted, he tried to control his shaking wrists and mumbled: ‘I do it myself or I die along this cursed river.’
Moving like a ghost, for he was nearly that, he closed upon the unsuspecting animals, saw once more how glorious they were, bowed his head in silent prayer, then raised his rifle slowly and squeezed the trigger. Fogarty, hearing the shot from behind the hill, cried: ‘Good God! He went off to shoot himself!’ And when he clambered up the hill, he saw four or five deer running free across the tundra and a dreadful panic gripped him. But then he saw Lord Luton leaning on his gun over the body of a dead animal whose great antlers shone in the moonlight.
When Fogarty rushed up to the lifeless beast, he nodded deferentially to Luton, who nodded back. Both men then began gathering brush, and after Fogarty had built a substantial fire, he dressed out the big deer. By unspoken agreement he ripped out the liver, and that was the first portion of the meat they roasted on sticks over the flames. Jamming it down their mouths half raw, they allowed the blood to trickle down their chins, and they could almost feel the lifesaving juices running into their own livers and down the veins of their legs, which only a few minutes before had been doomed.
But Fogarty, who had been listening to all the talk about scurvy, was not deluded into thinking that Luton had been cured; he had been no more than temporarily strengthened, and in an effort to capitalize upon this temporary improvement, the Irishman adopted as his credo Harry Carpenter’s final commission: ‘Keep Evelyn strong for crossing the mountains’ and he directed his efforts toward that seemingly impossible goal.
Adopting a routine he would doggedly adhere to throughout the remainder of this devastating journey, he went out three or four times each day with a spade and a digging stick made from one of the wapiti’s antlers and began digging in all those thawed places where the looser soil and gravel of the upland terrains had proved hospitable to roots. He dug for half an hour at a time, probing downward through thin ice and into stony soils which contained networks of roots, some capable of producing low trees, others attached to shrubs and some merely connected with grasses. But like others who had saved their lives in this way, he accepted whatever the earth provided, shook off the dirt, and carried it back to the hut, where he kept a pot simmering in the ashes.
With his precious roots, gathered at such great expense of labor and affection, he concocted a witches’ brew that in some mysterious way contained the precious acids. As he and Lord Luton drank this acrid broth as an act of faith, believing that it would cure Evelyn and prevent Fogarty from becoming afflicted, the magic worked. With deer meat to make the muscles stronger and acids to revitalize the blood and the body’s protective systems, the day came when Luton was able to bare his legs for Fogarty and allow the Irishman to press his thumb into the flesh. To the joy of both men, the flesh proved firm and resilient; no longer did it remain indented in the gray mark of death; it sprang back in the reddish sign of health.
But still Fogarty continued grubbing and replenishing the vital powers of his master, until the spring day when Luton said: ‘Fogarty, I do believe we’re both strong enough to tackle the Divide.’ So the half-boat was loaded, the deadly campsite was abandoned, a final farewell was said at the rude graves of Harry and Trevor, and the two men, their legs strong, resumed their journey up the Peel, poling and pulling as before.
Now there were no rapids to be forded in icy water, and in time they reached a place where the Peel branched, one tributary leading to the west, the other to the south, and the two men debated at their camp that night which course to follow. The maps were consulted once more, as if each man had not already memorized their every detail. At last Luton stood stiffly, and placing them on the ground, anchored them with a large stone and said: ‘They have served us well, but we are beyond them now,’ and he left them. Then he added: ‘I fear we would be headed to America if we press west. We shall steer to the south.’ Their compass direction would remain south-southwest until, at some point farther along, they intercepted some west-flowing river, several of which had to lie beyond the mountains.
As Luton and Fogarty muscled their half-boat up the remaining miles of the Peel, they reached the upland where the final tributary of that river contained so little water that it could not keep their craft afloat. They had to bid the Sweet Afton farewell; as a whole boat it had served them well on the Mackenzie River, and had its half been steered up the correct sequence of Canadian streams, it would have long since deposited them at the gold fields safely. They were sad at leaving it beached at the foot of the mountains they must now attack, and Lord Luton said as he patted its gunwales: ‘Proper boat properly built. No fault of yours.’ After a formal salute, he and Fogarty were off to tackle the Rockies.
For two days they struggled in their attempts to find an easy procedure for carrying everything on their backs, and many ingenious stratagems were explored as they packed and repacked their gear. After numerous promising solutions proved futile, each man hit upon some adjustment which suited him best, and when Fogarty hefted his burden, feeling it pressing down upon his shoulders, he told Luton: ‘Every packhorse I treated poorly for his lazy ways is laughing at me now.’
Their goods were divided into four properly tied bundles: two forty-pound rucksacks, one for each man, and two much smaller knapsacks which they could carry in one hand or under an arm. In allocating them, Lord Luton was meticulous in seeing that he received the heavier of the pairs, and it was always he who stepped out most boldly when the day’s journey began, but Fogarty, trailing behind, monitored him carefully, and during the course of the day he would wait for a halt, after which he would slyly appropriate to himself the heavier burdens, and in this manner they approached the mountains that separated them from the gold fields. Luton, of course, realized what his ghillie was doing, and normally as a gentleman and head of the expedition, abbreviated though it was, he would have protested, but even though he had recovered from his attack of scurvy, it had left him so debilitated that he needed the assistance Fogarty provided and was grateful for it. But each morning, when they set out afresh, Luton would heft his own packs and cry as before: ‘Let’s get on with it, Fogarty!’ and he would forge ahead in full vigor.
The land they were entering sloped upward to a range of low rounded mountains from which in some ancient time loose boulders and scree had tumbled in vast drifts. As they scrambled up, in places skidding back in one minute what ground it had taken ten to gain, Luton said: ‘Mark it, Fogarty. These mountains are very old,’ and when Fogarty puffed: ‘How can I see that?’ Luton explained: ‘Erosion, snow in winter, wind in summer, has worn their jagged tops away,’ and the Irishman replied: ‘Then they should be called hills, not mountains.’ Luton accommodated him by saying: ‘When we cross over to the next range you’ll see real mountains. New ones. All craggy and pointed peaks. Then the climbing becomes a test.’
As they descended the gentler western slope they caught their first glimpse of the splintered, craggy mountains behind which Dawson lay. But between where they stood and that stern jumble of waiting peaks and ragged troughs lay a wide valley so bleak that each man shuddered to think that he must first cross this unforgiving arctic tundra. This was desolation, as alien as any land Luton had seen in his many travels, a land without even the slightest sign of hope.
In those first moments of inspecting the inter-montane wilderness and the mountains beyond, Luton saw three aspects that terrified him: there was no defined path through the wasteland, nor even a continuation of the fragmentary trail that had led them from the Peel to the mountains; the bleak area was speckled with a plethora of little lakes indicating that boggy swampland probably lay between, linking them together; and the distant mountains gave no hint of any pass. The prospect was so forbidding that he halted to assess the chances of even reaching the opposite mountains. The clear path they had followed up the Mackenzie River and along the gloomy Peel had deserted them. As he surveyed the terrain he and Fogarty must now try to cross, Luton beckoned the Irishman to his side and said: ‘We did not anticipate this. Mr. Harry, who studied the maps so carefully, did not …’
His voice betrayed the anxiety he felt at standing on the edge of this desolate land, but then he sniffed, cleared his throat as if beginning a new day, and said: ‘Stands to reason, doesn’t it? If we’ve been following a footpath, and we have … you certainly saw that … well, the path must come from somewhere. It must be from Dawson City lying just beyond those far mountains. Our job is to cross this wretched vale and climb them,’ but Fogarty cautioned: ‘Milord, they are too sheer. We cannot cross them unless we happen upon a low pass to take us through, and I can see no pass. We must follow the valley westward until we spy a break in their wall,’ for the Irishman knew that Luton’s strength would not endure the scaling of such precipices, and feared also that his own vigor might be too much spent. Luton remained quiet for a moment, then said: ‘No! There’s got to be a safe route through there and it’s our job to find it. Eyes sharp, Fogarty!’ and they left the relative security of the low mountains to plunge into this hostile wasteland.
As evening came on that first day it was clear to both men that they were lost on this trackless plain. A mist had obscured the distant mountains so that no fixed beacon drew them onward, and the interminable lakes, little more than collected swamps with marshy edges, obliterated whatever tracks there might have been between the two mountain ranges. They slept only fitfully that night, assuring each other: ‘Tomorrow we’ll find the way,’ but neither man believed they would.
The next day, their first full one in the barren tundra, was a horror of wrong choices and blind guesses as the light mists of the previous night turned to heavy cloud and pelting rain. At times they seemed to go in circles, or get bogged down in swamps much deeper and tenacious than before, so that any hope of completing an orderly transit of the valley vanished. Fogarty, always the realist, said at dusk when the rains ceased and the clouds in the east lifted: ‘Milord, we are close still to the hills we left yesterday. I can see where we came out of them. I know where the trail back is, and if we start right now, we can retrace, go down the Peel, and get back to Fort Norman before another winter.’
Luton, poking about among the bogs to find a place to catch some sleep, stopped his search, turned to glare at Fogarty, and said very quietly: ‘I did not hear what you just said. Tomorrow, bright, I shall explore some distance in that direction. You’ll do the same in the opposite, each of us keeping the other in sight, and we shall try to intercept the missing path. It has got to be here. It stands to reason.’
So on the second full day, when the thick clouds closed in once again and the escape route back to the Peel was no longer visible, the two men scouted exactly as Luton had devised, he to the north flank, Fogarty to the south, until each was almost lost to the other. Finding nothing, they would shout, wave arms, and reconvene in the swampy middle, march forward, then launch a new probe outward. They accomplished nothing, and at dusk had to acknowledge that they were truly lost.
But not hopelessly so, for Luton said grimly as they ate their meager rations: ‘There has to be a path through this morass. Tomorrow we find it and hurry down to Dawson.’
On the third day of fog and rain they succeeded only in penetrating ever deeper into this hellish vale of lakes and hummocks and ankle-deep swamp. At dusk Lord Luton could no longer deceive himself: ‘Fogarty, for the first time I fear we are getting nowhere.’
‘Milord, I’m sure I could find the way back to those first hills.’
‘They’re mountains,’ Luton said almost primly, ‘and we shall not see them again.’
‘You mean to press on?’
‘I do.’ He said this so simply and with such finality that any gentleman would realize that no adverse comment would be entertained, but Fogarty persisted in his blunt way: ‘So you mean …?’
Before he could phrase the question, Luton said: ‘Fogarty, when a man sets forth upon a journey, he completes it.’
‘And if he can’t complete it? If there’s no way on God’s earth he can complete it?’
Luton did not respond, and that night he slept apart from the Irishman. At dawn they rose with new hope, as the heavy mists had thinned. But even before they made their start the two travelers were thrown together in self-defense, for they were about to be assaulted by one of the most terrible of arctic enemies. It began with a low humming sound, which Luton heard first but could not easily identify. The enemy scouts, after an exploratory pass, flashed back a signal to their waiting army, and within moments a devastating horde of buzzing creatures descended upon the men, launching an attack that terrified them.
‘Fogarty!’ Luton shouted with unlordly vehemence. ‘Mosquitoes!’ and before the Irishman could protect himself, thousands of the arctic terrors had engulfed him.
The first minutes of the attack were horrifying, because no one unfamiliar with the arctic wastelands could imagine what an assault of this nature was like. Many lands are famous for their mosquitoes, but their breeds are positively docile compared to those of the arctic, and Lord Luton had led his partner into the heart of a breeding area: the swampy land of little lakes which provided endless wet grounds for the winged tormentors.
Before the two men had a chance to break out their mosquito netting—to have traveled along the Mackenzie without it would have been suicide—they were blackened with the insects, and the biting was so incessant and painful that had they not quickly found protection under the nets, they might well have been bitten to death by nightfall, so tenacious was the attack. When the two men finally arranged themselves under the green netting, they were able to survive, even though thousands of the insects swarmed over them, battling to find even one opening in the clothing through which they might gain entrance to the target within.
Within minutes of the opening assault, the ankles of the two men were a mass of inflamed bites, and not until Luton showed Fogarty how to tie cords about his pant legs were the terrifying beasts kept away. It was a long and terrible day, and the men were so busy protecting themselves that any thought of trekking farther toward the western mountains, wherever they might be, was preposterous. When night finally came, and a smudge fire was coaxed from damp twigs to keep the insects at bay, Luton and Fogarty had to sleep side by side to share and tend the fire, and before they fell asleep, Luton said: ‘This was not a good day, Fogarty. A few more of these …’
‘I’m sure I can still find the Peel …’
At the mention of that repugnant river Luton shuddered and said: ‘We’re engaged in a challenge, Fogarty, and the more hideous it becomes …’ The Irishman, formulating his own finish to the sentence, thought: He intends to move forward until we perish. Making the sign of the cross, he vowed: And I shall stay with him till he does. But then he added: The minute his eyes close for the last time, back to the Peel and Fort Norman.
The next day was the worst the two men would know, for with the coming of dawn and the dying of the smudge fire, the hordes struck with renewed fury, attacking any centimeter of exposed skin. They simply engulfed an area, sinking their proboscides deep into the skin, and their bite carried such a potent irritant, that once they struck, Luton and Fogarty had almost uncontrollable desires to scratch, but if they succumbed, they exposed more skin, which was immediately blackened by new hordes. ‘My word, this is rather frightening,’ Luton cried as he adjusted his netting to keep the little beasts from his face and eyes, but Fogarty expressed it better when with ghoulish humor he muttered as they attacked him in a score of different places: ‘Stand fast, Milord, or they’ll fly off with you.’
The two men found macabre delight in chronicling the ingenuity of their foe. Luton said: ‘Look at this rivet on my glove. You’d think not even a gust of air could force its way in there, but they do.’ Belatedly, Fogarty found that the insects were assaulting his face by forcing their way through a minute hole in his net; they had detected it in the first moments of their attack. No opening, no gap in clothing could be so insignificant but what these murderous creatures exploited it. And they were murderous, for tradition in the arctic was replete with stories of unprotected men who had been caught in summer and driven to suicide by millions of mosquitoes which assaulted them without respite. There were many cases in which caribou or horses had been killed by overwhelming and relentless attacks.
In all of nature there was no comparison with the arctic mosquito; mercifully, it appeared only for a few weeks in late spring and summer, but when it did men shuddered and animals sought high ground where breezes would keep the pests away.
On this hideous day the two men were not to find their escape on high ground, for there was none that they could see, only the remorseless tundra swamp populated by myriad mosquitoes which maintained their attack in unbroken phalanxes. At one point in the early morning Lord Luton was so beleaguered by a black swarm—perhaps five hundred thousand coming at him in waves that darkened the sky—that he clawed at his face in despair as hordes broke through a tear in his netting. In that moment he realized that if the assault were to continue with such fury throughout the day, he might indeed go berserk as caribou were said to do when the mosquitoes pursued their relentless assault.
Fortunately, Fogarty spotted the break in Luton’s protection and repaired it with grasses that he wove through the surrounding interstices, and in this way Luton was saved, but neither man had much hope that if such conditions persisted for several days, they could survive, especially since they had only limited food and no clear understanding of where the western mountains lay.
They did have drinking water, of course, and Fogarty suggested: ‘Milord, that was a sad attack you suffered. Fill your belly with water. It gives a man courage to feel something down there … anything.’ But when the Irishman led Luton to one of the pools and they bent down to drink, they found the surface covered with millions of black and wriggling larvae that even as they watched were transforming themselves into mosquitoes. The insects rose in swarms from the lake to enjoy their brief two or three weeks chasing across the tundra in search of any living thing that carried blood. Finding Luton and Fogarty delivered right into their cradle as it were, they swarmed upon them so mercilessly that drinking became impossible, and in this extremity Lord Luton very nearly lost control: he shivered, he fought the attacking hordes with shadowy movements of his hands as if he were a doomed boxer, and looked helplessly at Fogarty.
But before he could speak and reveal his near-disintegration, he saw behind the Irishman an animal moving, or was it a pair of animals? Believing that he was to be attacked from yet another quarter, he ran back to retrieve his gun, and would have fired at the creatures had not Fogarty anticipated his wild action and knocked the gun aside, so that the bullet sped harmlessly through the horde of mosquitoes rising from the lake.
‘Milord, they’re Indians!’ and when Luton lowered his gun he saw two Indians of the Han tribe whose representatives he had seen at the mouth of the Peel. Toward them walked a robust man, dark-faced and with black hair neatly cropped above his eyes, and a lively little woman adorned with strands of seashells around her neck and with intricately beaded shoes upon her feet. They halted a few yards before the two men and dropped to their knees. From their manner of probing into everything and even inspecting the knapsacks, Fogarty concluded that they had come, with friendly intentions, across the tundra to see whether the white men were lost and needed help.
Luton, with a bounding joy which cleared his tormented brain, rushed toward the startled Indians, shouting to Fogarty: ‘You see! There is a track through this wilderness! They’ve come to show us!’ But when he reached the Indians he stopped short, as if a mighty hand had been thrust in his face, for the Indians were engulfed in a most putrid stench. However, when Fogarty came close he burst into laughter and pointed to the man’s face: ‘Some kind of animal grease, probably rotting. Keeps away mosquitoes, but it does stink.’
Luton was correct in guessing that the Han had come to help; they had seen the wanderers from a distance and had deduced that they were lost and in grave trouble. Their tribe made their summer camp along the edge of this inhospitable land and various members had made the long excursion to the Hudson’s Bay establishment at Fort Norman, where they had traded furs for the rifles, axes and iron cooking pots they treasured. They were not engaged in such travel now, for it would have been unlikely that any Han man would take his wife on such a trip, trading among strangers, especially when the latter were white. They were in this harsh land only to hunt the arctic hare, but this intent was discarded now, for to succor men who were obviously lost was another matter.
However, Lord Luton could conceive of no way to converse with these people who had no command of English and no proficiency in any language other than their own, and he was angry with himself at being unable to explain to them the extremity in which he and Fogarty found themselves. But the Irishman was encountering no difficulty in discussing his predicament with the Indians, for with vigorous and imaginative gestures he described Fort Norman, and the Mackenzie River, and the Peel with its ugly rapids, and the journey through the western range, and the mosquito attacks.
When this was understood, with the Han nodding in enthusiastic agreement and adding comments of their own, also in sign language, Fogarty turned his attention to the gold fields at Dawson, and he had dug only half a gold mine with his lively gestures when the Indians indicated that, yes, they understood about the find on the Klondike because several of their men had worked there and others had acted as guides from the headwaters of what had to be the Porcupine or some similar river into Dawson. Yes, they knew the mosquitoes were horrendous at this time of the year. Yes, there was some game among these many lakes. And what was most important of all, yes, they would guide the two men through the myriad lakes and the endless swamps along the paths which gained high ground where the mosquitoes were less ferocious.
When Fogarty gestured a question about a route directly through the distant mountains, the Indian man shook his head and pointed insistently along the valley, indicating that if they kept to the lower elevations, they would at the far end of the valley reach a spot from which two relatively easy passes led through the mountains. Then he turned toward the nearby range Luton had proposed to climb, and started to scrabble in the air as if hauling himself up sheer rock and then collapsed suddenly on the ground. His stunned audience realized that they would have perished had they attempted to climb those heights; fallen to their deaths down some monstrous chasm.
That night the two Indians took from sacks about their waists odd bits of dried meats they carried with them when traveling the tundra, and after assuring the strangers that they were going to make a kind of stew in an iron pot they carried, they went to the shore of the very lake that Luton had refused to drink from because of the mosquito larvae and dipped up a copious supply of the water. Fogarty, seeing that the water was still crawling with future mosquitoes, indicated that perhaps the Indian would want to skim off the violently swimming creatures, but the woman shook her head vehemently, indicating that the larvae, when properly boiled with bits of venison, were not only palatable but also nourishing.
After they had eaten, the Han built a smudge fire, using an aromatic grass they had gathered that repelled the insects most effectively, and the men slept well, with Luton whispering to Fogarty before they fell asleep: ‘They’ve saved our lives. We must pay them well.’
It was what happened the next day that shocked Lord Luton, making him not a scorner of the primordial Han but a devotee, for after leading them to a footpath and pointing out the pass through the mountains, they insisted that the two strangers leave the path, which Luton was reluctant to do, and visit a site on a little rise beside a clear lake. There Luton and Fogarty found three mounds, each the size of a grave, and where the headstones might properly have been, rested three small piles of stone.
‘Who?’ Fogarty asked in sign language, and so clearly that it could not be mistaken, the little Han woman indicated that the three corpses had been white men like himself, that they too had become lost, and that they had perished from mosquito bites and madness and starvation. To indicate madness she rotated her forefingers about her ears, crossed her eyes, and staggered to her imaginary death.
Luton was tremendously affected by this account: ‘Damn me, we’ve got to give the poor souls a Christian burial,’ and to Fogarty’s astonishment, Luton stood bareheaded facing the graves and recited long passages from the Book of Common Prayer, saying at the close: ‘Heavenly Father, accept belatedly the souls of these good men who perished in their Wilderness of Gibeon.’
It required three days for the Han couple to lead their guests across the desolate plateau to the first rises of the jagged mountains, and when they had deposited them safely, they indicated that from this spot two well-marked tracks led to Dawson; they would accompany the men no farther. That evening as the four travelers shared their last frugal meal, Lord Luton addressed his saviors in flowing and gracious words they could not possibly have understood: ‘Beloved friends, guides and helpers, when I first saw your people engulfed in the strangeness of Edmonton, I saw you as savages. When you helped us find the mouth of the Peel, I chuckled at your confusion about the telescope. And even when I saw you coming as our saviors as I knelt by that fetid mosquito lake, I tried to shoot you as if you were animals. I was vain and blind and arrogant, and I pray you will forgive me, for I owe you my life.’
They could make nothing of his words, of course, but Fogarty repaired that deficiency by indicating that he, Luton and the Indians had shared the same camps and the same food. They had marched together, had fought the mosquitoes, had prayed together at the graves, and had crossed the land of death. This sharing had made them brothers, and as members of mankind’s common family they would place their final beds side by side. Before they fell asleep Luton whispered: ‘I’ve almost grown to like their stench. Reminds me of salvation from mosquitoes and that wilderness of lakes.’
Next morning they faced an impasse, for although the travelers were safely through the desolate land, where assistance from the Han was vital, they still faced a taxing journey to Dawson, and they must now choose which of two radically different routes to follow. Each path, as the Han indicated, had been well marked by the passage of many Indian feet in centuries past and even by some white men’s traces in recent years.
The first was the easiest and most inviting: a northwest trail which lead over relatively low mountains to the Yukon some miles down the river from Dawson, where the travelers could catch an American boat that would carry them upriver to the gold fields. The alternate path led off to the southwest, plunged immediately up into the higher mountains and quickly led down into Dawson; it would require real climbing. But there was one more significant difference: the route to the right edged toward the American portion of the north; the way to the left stayed completely within Canada, and although Luton could not verify that this would be the case, for his discarded maps had lacked accuracy, he still was so determined to avoid America that he said resolutely: ‘We’ll take the mountain route.’
When the Han saw the two men actually start for the more difficult climb they protested, showing by labored steps and bent backs that the route being chosen was bad, then springing easily along the lower pathway and even indicating a boat on the river. For the first time in their days together, Fogarty was unable to devise any hand symbols which would explain to the Indians that Lord Luton was driven by an obsession to complete this tortured journey on Empire terrain and to avoid even in the last painful moments any trespass on American soil. Indeed, the Irishman found it difficult to explain to himself why Luton was choosing the more difficult route, but in a restatement of the decision he had made that night as they plunged blindly into the pathless tundra, where they would surely have perished had not the Indians saved them, he now told the Han in words neither they nor he could comprehend: ‘He leads. I go,’ and he resolutely followed Luton onto the path leading to the high mountain.
Now came the moment of farewell, one that moved Luton profoundly, for he had developed a bond of deep affection for these two Indians who had saved him from the mosquitoes and the feral tundra and who had gone so far out of their own way to guide him to safety. He saw them now as remarkable human beings, living at their own level of civilization and doing it with competence, for they knew their vast wasteland as well as he knew his London, and such mastery he could respect. But he really did not care to embrace them as brothers any more than he would have wanted to clutch Fogarty to his bosom in gratitude for what the Irishman had done, so stiffly he stood before the two small brown people and bowed, saying: ‘I shall remember you with affection all the days of my life.’ Then he handed each a pair of Canadian bills, which he delivered with another bow.
For one frightening moment he feared that the Han woman was going to clutch his hands in gratitude or even throw her arms about him, but her intentions were quite contrary. She placed her hands not in his but in the air close to her ears, where she revolved them as she made funny faces and wobbled about to indicate that Luton, in choosing the more difficult route, was out of his mind. As she danced her pantomime of insanity, Fogarty muttered to himself: ‘I think he’s crazy, too,’ but unlike her, he had to follow Luton as His Lordship attacked the final range that rose between them and the gold fields.
The first half-mile into these newer mountains with their sharp peaks and deep gorges proved that the concluding segment of their journey was not going to be an easy one, for although the range was not excessively high—little more than six thousand feet—it was rugged, and at times the well-marked track could be so steep that real effort was required to master it. Indeed, the climb proved so demanding that the two men reacted as other climbers had throughout history: the more their path led upward, the more encouraged they were to dispose of trivia they felt they no longer needed, and this impulse was intensified by the realization that they were closing in upon their goal. So quietly they began to cast aside the burdens which, though once of vital importance, they now calculated they could do without: a hammer, a valuable rope, two books without covers, one of the axes, a score of things once treasured but now too heavy to lug.
There was one bundle, however, of concentrated weight which Lord Luton alone carried, the remaining cans of meat, for since Fogarty had once opened a can without permission, he could not be trusted to guard these, for Luton knew that upon their rich contents might depend the safe conclusion of his expedition. Once as they started the day’s climb, Fogarty hefted the rucksack, containing the cans and said: ‘Heavy, Milord, too heavy,’ but Luton said as he took the burden himself: ‘Not if our salvation depends upon it.’
The angle of upward climb was sharper than Luton had anticipated, a steady, grinding ascent up a barely discernible rock-strewn trail, not precipitous like the Alps, but fearfully exhausting for climbers in their debilitated condition. Luton could feel the heavy weight of the meat cans pulling him back, but in a curious way this added burden inspired him, for whenever he became aware of its familiar weight he assured himself: Well, we won’t starve on the mountain.
But as the trail grew steeper, Fogarty, struggling along behind with his own burden, saw Luton’s steps begin to waver and his pace to slow; at times it would look as if he was in danger of plunging forward onto his knees, so exhausting was his pack. Then the Irishman would quietly maneuver to take the lead, from where he would search for a resting spot, and when he sighted one he would cry out as if it were he who was at the end of his tether: ‘Milord! This one looks inviting. I’m near spent,’ and he would throw down his pack as if he could proceed no farther.
This enabled Luton to play the game of wanting to forge ahead but agreeing grudgingly to a pause for his companion’s sake. After a rest, which each man needed, Luton would be the first on his feet, as if he were impatient to get on with the climb, but almost without betraying that he was doing so, Fogarty would hoist Luton’s heavy rucksack onto his own back, and the two would resume their climb.
Now the miracle of the arctic abetted them, for the days of late spring were practically endless, more than twenty hours long during which they could climb as they wished. They kept pushing painfully upward through the silvery dusk, stopping for rest and even unplanned sleep, then rising again, as if it were dawn, to strike for higher ground. However, real night, shadowy though it was, did eventually come upon them, forcing them to face the problem of what to eat, and this caused tension.
‘We can’t go on climbing like this without something to eat,’ Fogarty said on the second night, staring at the rucksack in which Luton kept the remaining cans of meat. Luton replied: ‘It’s up to you. You’re the hunter. For God’s sake, get going,’ and desperation glared in his eyes. Luton absolutely refused to discuss the possibility of slashing open one of the cans: ‘No! No! We must still have scraps of that meat the Indians gave us,’ and they searched their bags for fragments of food, chewing on them in triumph when they found a few edible morsels.
When they neared the top of their exhausting climb, Fogarty succeeded in bagging an adventurous goat, a remarkable feat considering the wariness of that beautiful animal. And on each occasion when they built a fire with such twigs as they had gathered during that day’s struggle, and they could smell the meat beginning to roast, Luton said generously: ‘Excellent shot, that one, Fogarty. Never seen better.’
The upward climb was merciless, but no matter how steep the rude pathway sketched out by earlier travelers to and from the gold fields, the pair were consoled by the knowledge that the Yukon could not be far distant, and they did not allow their spirits to flag. At the close of one extremely difficult climb, when Fogarty who carried the slightly heavier load was exhausted, and there was no more goat meat, he went boldly to Lord Luton’s rucksack, ripped open the package of cans, took one out and chopped it through the middle, handing Luton one half. Since the meat had been well cooked by steam before packing, they could eat it as it was, but they did so in grim silence, for Luton felt himself aggrieved. At the conclusion, knowing that he must in decency say something lest they go to sleep embittered, he observed: ‘Up here we aren’t bothered by mosquitoes.’
This wasn’t good enough for Fogarty: ‘Milord, I almost staggered today. My rucksack is far too heavy. We must finish with those cans and you must help me with my burden.’
Very quietly, and with not the slightest show of temper or resentment, Luton replied: ‘You are right, Fogarty. We need the nourishment and you need help, but if you try to touch these cans I shall shoot you.’
Fogarty did not blink. Putting a finger to his forelock, he said easily: ‘That’s the second time you’ve threatened that. Once for me crapping, now for me eating. I do seem to run into danger of me life because of me digestion.’ He said this with such easy good humor that Luton did not resent the familiarity which would have appalled him a month ago.
On the next evening Fogarty ended the day’s climb so famished that he feared he might topple over, and he pleaded: ‘Milord, let us open another can,’ but Luton was adamant: ‘We shall hoard them against the day we face a desperate crisis,’ and Fogarty asked weakly: ‘Will my death be considered such a crisis?’ Luton replied: ‘I am determined that we shall reach Dawson, you and I. And these cans may be the agency that enables us to do so.’ Ostentatiously he used the rucksack containing the cans as his pillow, and fell asleep with the rifle across his chest.
They struggled up the last rocky tor, sustained only by their primordial courage, which all men can call on in extremity but which only a few are ever required to exercise. Fogarty, gasping up the final slope, was in the van, with Luton’s extra pack draped about his shoulders, when he saw with mute joy that the apex had been reached. Staring down the forested valley that awaited to the west, he turned and said quietly: ‘From here on, Milord, it’s all downhill.’
Luton affected not to hear, nor did he look ahead to the route that lay revealed before them; he stood with his back turned to his destination, his gaze reserved for the dreadful steeps they had climbed with such pain. As he stood there exhausted, his back bent, even though Fogarty was bearing half his burden, his thoughts wandered down the slopes, beyond the horizon and the hidden Peel River, to the lonely shack in which Trevor had died and from which Harry had walked to his death. It was impossible for him to experience any sense of triumph in having conquered the mountains.
But then Fogarty tugged him away from the doom-ridden past, turning him to face the more promising future, and when he had Luton’s attention he repeated his encouraging words: ‘From here on, all downhill.’ Luton, ignoring Fogarty’s efforts to inspirit him, continued looking back at the brutal path they had taken, and his shoulders sagged so perceptibly that the Irishman wondered if Luton was weeping. Then, with a sigh that caused Fogarty to shudder, the noble lord said: ‘There must have been a simpler way through the tangled rivers and the mountains but we were not allowed to find it.’ Even at this near-conclusion to their terrible ordeal he resisted accepting responsibility for the fatal choices taken: it was still implacable nature that was to blame.
But as he spoke these words by which he absolved himself, he felt intuitively that he really must present a more resolute impression to his servant, so he straightened suddenly, hoisted his heavy main pack, recovered his secondary one from Fogarty, and stepped boldly into the lead, uttering a command that fairly rang with enthusiasm and authority: ‘Let’s get on with it, Fogarty! Dawson’s got to be hiding behind that bend.’ Off they strode on the last leg of their journey, elated to know that they had at last penetrated the mountains that had opposed them from the beginning.
Then on a memorable day in June, Fogarty in the lead position went around a bend and shouted: ‘Milord, there it is!’ When Luton hurried up he felt dizzy and had to shake his head to clear his eyes, for below him, on a narrow ledge of land fronting a great river, stood the tents and false fronts of what had to be Dawson City. Seeing it nailed down in reality, and not a chimera, the two men stood silent. They had defeated scurvy and temperatures of minus-sixty, and rapids up which their boat had to be hauled by bare hands, and murderous mosquitoes, and they had reached their destination after twenty-three months and nearly twenty-one hundred miles of hellish travel.
Neither of the men exulted or gave cries of victory, and neither revealed what prayers or thanks he did give, but Lord Luton, in this moment of extraordinary triumph, knew what any gentlemen must do. Instructing Fogarty to conceal their camp in the treed area that sloped away from the river, lest anyone down in Dawson see them before they were prepared, he said: ‘Fogarty, we’ll enter in style.’ For two days he kept himself and the Irishman less than a mile from their destination while they cleaned their gear, dusted their clothes, and made themselves generally presentable. From a tiny military kit which he carried, Luton produced a needle and thread, and for much of the second day he perched on a rock mending the tears in his jacket. Fogarty’s beard presented a problem. ‘It must come off,’ Luton insisted. ‘It would look improper for me to present myself clean-shaven while I allowed you that wandering growth. Would look as if I didn’t care.’
‘I’d like to keep it, Milord. It was most helpful with the mosquitoes.’ But there was no reprieve, and during most of the second afternoon, Fogarty heated water, soaped his heavy beard, and hacked away at its edges, wincing when the pain became unbearable. Finally he threw down the razor: ‘I cannot,’ whereupon Luton retrieved the razor and cried: ‘Well, I jolly well can.’ And for the first time during this long journey Lord Luton touched his manservant voluntarily.
Perching him on a log and covering his heavy beard with as much lather as their last shreds of soap would produce, he grabbed Fogarty by the head, pulled his face upward toward the warm June sun, and began almost pulling the hairs out by the roots. It was a process so painful that finally Fogarty broke loose, leaped to his feet, and cried: ‘I’ll do it meself!’ and the rest of that day and into the evening, using the tired old razor which he stropped at least fifty times, he fought the battle of the beard, exposing always a bit more clean Irish skin. At bedtime he looked quite presentable, a lean, capable, rosy-faced man who, as much as Lord Luton, had held the party together.
That night when Fogarty was not looking, Lord Luton took from his pack one of the two remaining cans of meat, placed it on a flat rock, and laid the hatchet quietly beside it. When Fogarty finally spotted it, he was overcome, and after a painful joyous pause in which neither man spoke, the Irishman lifted the hatchet by its cutting end and pushed the wooden handle toward Luton: ‘It’s your can, Milord. You got it here and you shall do the honors.’
When the can was neatly severed, Fogarty ransacked the gear for whatever scraps were still hiding and made one final stew, which he served elegantly to his master: ‘One spoonful for you, one for me, and, Milord, never on this entire trip did any of us break that rule about eating. We never ate secretly nor at expense to the others.’ When Luton made no response, the Irishman added: ‘And you arrive as you said you would, with your meat to spare. You got us here.’ Only then did Luton speak: ‘It’s like dear Mr. Trevor said that night in the tent. A good poet always has in mind the closing lines of his poem. So does the leader of an expedition. He intends to reach his target.’ He fell silent for just a moment, but then his voice hardened: ‘Scurvy or arctic freeze, pushing or pulling, he does reach his target.’
Real trouble arose at dawn when Fogarty wanted to throw into a nearby ravine the unnecessary gear that he had lugged so laboriously and which was now useless. ‘Let’s toss all this in the ditch, with the last bloody can of meat!’ he cried, but before he could do so, Luton restrained him with a warning cry, and when Fogarty turned he could see His Lordship’s face was gray with anger.
‘Fogarty, we have come so far, so very far. Let us today march into Dawson as men of honor who remain undefeated,’ and to Fogarty’s bewilderment he spread on blankets what gear their rucksacks could not contain and gave a demonstration of how it should be properly packed, with the corners neatly squared.
When all was in readiness, Luton supervised the placement of Fogarty’s pack on his back and then inspected the Irishman’s clothes, brushing them here and there: ‘Let us enter that sprawling mess down there as if we were prepared to march another hundred miles,’ and when Fogarty said truthfully: ‘Milord, I could not go another hundred,’ Luton said: ‘I could.’
At eight in the morning of 21 June 1899, Lord Luton, tall, erect and neatly shaven, led his servant Tim Fogarty, who marched a proper three paces behind, into Dawson City as if they were conquerors. When Superintendent Samuel Steele of the Mounties heard that Luton had arrived, he hurried down the false-fronted street to meet him, bringing several packets of mail and a list of inquiries from London. But Luton could express no interest in such things; his only concern was to dispatch immediate telegrams to the families of his three dead companions. Each message concluded: ‘His death was due to an act of God and to human miscalculations. He died heroically, surrounded by his friends.’
Satisfied that he had discharged his obligations, he was about to leave the rude shack that served as telegraph office when Fogarty said quite forcefully: ‘I’d like to inform my people, too.’ Luton, striving to mask his astonishment at a servant’s presumption, said: ‘Go ahead,’ but Fogarty said: ‘I have no money, Milord,’ Luton asked: ‘All that money you earned cutting hair? Four customers, almost two years.’ Fogarty looked squarely at the man who’d brought him so far from Ireland and said: ‘I’m keeping that money, as I may need it to buy me a gold mine.’ Luton smiled icily at the cheekiness of his ghillie and told the clerk: ‘I’ll pay for one more. To Ireland.’ Fogarty, after careful calculation, sent his wife seven words: ARRIVED GOLD FIELDS ALL WELL WRITING SOONEST.
While Fogarty was drafting his message, Steele informed Luton that a generous supply of funds had been received from London ‘to be delivered to Lord Luton’s party, should it ever arrive.’ The sender, the Marquess of Deal, had expected his son to reach Dawson in the summer of 1898; he was a year late.
Steele’s message reminded Luton of the package of mail he still held, and he tore open a thick envelope addressed in his father’s strong hand and quickly read the first page. His back stiffened, and Steele inquired if the letter had brought bad news. Luton stared at the man as if he were not there, folded the page, and slid it back into its cream envelope. His older brother, Nigel, dead in a hunting accident on their Irish estate. Luton’s stern, imperial face betrayed no hint of the conflicting emotions sweeping over him: shock at his new responsibilities as heir to the marquisate; grief at news of his brother’s death, for he had loved and respected him; and confusion regarding his cheerless victory in having at last reached Dawson despite intolerable defeats along the way. Head bowed, he mumbled: ‘Mostly it was bitter gall. But there were moments. And every man on our team did behave well. They really did, including Fogarty.’
When Steele asked: ‘Will you be heading for the gold fields?’ Luton stared at him in amazement and said nothing. Gold was not on his mind or even in his consciousness; he could not recall how he had ever become interested in it, and certainly it was no concern of his now. Later, when Steele related the story, he said: ‘He looked as if he had never heard the word. But then most of the people who reached Dawson from Edmonton never went to the gold fields. They seemed content merely to have got here alive.’ Steele’s people later compiled this summary of the Edmonton traffic:
There left that town in the years 1897–1899 some fifteen hundred persons, men and women alike, Canadians and foreigners with no distinction. More than half turned back without ever reaching the Klondike. At least seventy perished en route, and they among the strongest and best prepared of their societies. Of the less than a thousand who reached the gold fields there is no record of anyone who found gold and only a few cases in which claims were actually staked, invariably on nonproductive streams. Most who did succeed in arriving here turned right around and went home without trying to visit the fields, which they knew had been preempted, the most famous case being that of Lord Luton, the future Marquess of Deal, his older brother Nigel having died.
Luton achieved local immortality by the boldness of his actions that day in Dawson. He arrived with Fogarty at eight, received his accumulated mail at nine with indifference, not even bothering to open most of the letters, sent his cables, and at ten, after having given depositions concerning the deaths of three members of his party, spotted the old stern-wheeler Jos. Parker anchored at the waterfront. Inquiring as to its destination, he was told: ‘The young feller at Ross and Raglan can explain.’
Hesitating not a moment, he marched down the muddy street to the store and demanded two passages to Seattle. A bright young clerk said: ‘Boats from here have too shallow a draft. Ours goes only to St. Michael.’
‘What do I do then?’ Luton asked severely, and the clerk replied: ‘Oh, sir, one of our fine, new steamers bound for Seattle will be waiting to pick you up the moment you arrive.’ As Luton signed his name to the manifest, the young man said: ‘Evelyn, that’s a funny name for a man,’ and the noble lord stared down at him as if from a great height.
As he started to leave he grumbled to himself: ‘I came through Edmonton to avoid America. Now I’m heading into the heart of the damned place.’ He shook his head: ‘The only other course is to return the way I came, but that would be insanity.’
Turning to Fogarty, he held out a ticket for the steamer, but he did this with a gesture so impersonal and demeaning as if to say: ‘Here it is, come aboard if you wish,’ that the ghillie ignored it, and to Luton’s surprise, said rather blithely, ‘No, Milord, I came to find me a gold mine and I shall.’
‘You mean …” Luton fumbled, ‘you’re not coming?’
‘No, Milord,’ Fogarty said brightly. ‘We’ve come to a free land and I aim to run me own gold mine … me own way.’
There was no rancor in what he said or how he said it, and that afternoon when the flustered nobleman started for the gangway that would separate him forever from Fogarty, the Irishman demonstrated his good will by offering to carry Luton’s two small pieces of luggage, one containing new clothes he had purchased in Dawson, the other the rucksack he had carried so far and with such uncomplaining determination. ‘No,’ Luton said, returning the rucksack, ‘this is for you. To help you on the gold fields,’ and he strode on ahead as was his custom.
But as he approached the steamer he knew that he could not in decency part from this faithful helper without some gesture of appreciation toward the man who had saved his life by grubbing for roots. Reaching out with his lean left arm, he grasped Fogarty’s left shoulder and said in a voice so low that no passengers could hear: “Stout fellow, Fogarty,’ and started onto the boat, indicating that the Irishman had been dismissed.
But Fogarty, as if already imbibing the spirit of raucous freedom that animated Dawson, reached out and grabbed Luton’s arm, swinging him about: ‘I have a name, Milord. Me friends call me Tim. And I have a little something for you.’ Rummaging in the rucksack Luton had just given him, he produced the treasured final can of meat and with proper deference handed it to Evelyn: ‘You guarded this faithfully during our long trip. I’m sure you’ll want it for remembrance.’
Luton, neither flinching nor showing color at this forwardness of his erstwhile servant, accepted the can with a slight bowing of his head as if expressing gratitude, then said evenly: ‘It served its purpose, Fogarty. It got us here. And now, as you expressed it so eloquently, “Let’s toss this in the ditch …” ’ and with an easy swing of his arm, as if he were once more bowling in county cricket, he tossed the can far out into the waters of the Yukon. Then, turning on his heel without a gesture of any kind, he stalked toward the waiting ship. But he was not destined to board it on this first try, for as he stepped onto the gangway he was stopped by a rough voice accustomed to giving commands, and when he turned he saw Superintendent Steele, who was saying: ‘Lord Luton, this young woman came pleading to my office. Said she had come to see you,’ and he pushed forward the one woman in all Canada that Luton was least eager to meet.
It was Irina Kozlok, the North Dakota castaway he had rescued from that bleak shore along the Great Slave Lake, the one who had caused him such anxiety as they drifted together down the Mackenzie in the crowded Sweet Afton. What could she be doing in Dawson? And how in God’s name had she got here?
In his first agitated glance he saw that she was as trim and self-assured as ever, with her freshly laundered military uniform, her heavy boots and her neat little kepi still cocked at a jaunty angle so an ample supply of silvery hair shone below. Against his better judgment he had to concede: Gad, she keeps herself appealing. What kind of story will she tell this time?
Before Luton could speak, Fogarty saw her, and with an almost indecent yell rushed forward, grabbed her by her slim waist, swung her in the air, and gave her a resounding kiss before he plumped her back on her feet: ‘How did you get here, Madam North Dakota?’
Half ignoring Fogarty, she straightened the suit he had rumpled and addressed the man she had been so eager to meet: ‘Like I told you that day on your boat, Lord Luton, I was always determined to reach the gold fields, and as you see, I did.’ She said this with just enough of her old icy force to make her point, but having done so, she quickly softened and said: ‘I never forgot how you rescued me from certain death … how out of Christian generosity you paid my fare back to Edmonton … how in fact you enabled me to do the things I’ve done.’
She said this with such an engaging accent, with such an appropriate smile that Luton was almost forced to think: Now that she’s not endangering a young Bradcombe, she’s really not such a bad sort, and he shuddered to think that he had once considered pushing her off his boat in the dark of night. To make amends, he asked with unfeigned interest: ‘How’d you get here?’ and she was glad of the invitation, because she desperately wanted to tell him of the sequel to their exciting but abortive acquaintanceship.
‘That big ship you put me on, and thank you again for paying my fare, steamed its way up the river just as ice formed behind us. I got into Edmonton in October, I guess it must have been, and just like you advised, everyone wanted me to go back to North Dakota. But I’d have none of that. I got me a job as waitress. Last autumn in Edmonton anybody could get a job.’
‘What miracle happened to get you here?’ Luton asked, and she said almost demurely: ‘There was a big Australian who had dug for gold in his country and was eager to try his luck on the Klondike, but like all sensible ones he hadn’t rushed north when your team and mine did. He sat the winter out in a warm boardinghouse in Edmonton. He came to our restaurant for his meals, and what with one thing and another we got married. That’s him, standing over there. He jokes that he’s the only man in Alaska with no neck, but he’s fierce in a fight.’ Then she added one of those extraordinary touches that distinguished her, amusing, revealing and just a bit self-deprecatory: ‘An unmarried woman in Edmonton, especially a widow with no children working in a public place, I do believe I received six proposals of marriage a week, and Verner had three big fights before he drove the others off. It was dreamland, Lord Luton, and it seems so long ago.’
Then, putting her own affairs aside and grateful for the domestic felicity she had attained, she asked: ‘Where are your other three? That delightful young fellow who cared for me so thoughtful? Wasn’t his name Philip?’
When Luton could not bear to answer, Fogarty said gently: ‘Drowned. Those boots you warned him about. They dragged him down.’
Uttering a cry of grief, she covered her face and soon was sobbing: ‘I told him he was too young to go.’ Then she recovered her poise and asked: ‘Carpenter, the nice one?’
‘Dead. Scurvy in the second winter.’
‘You spent two winters? How about the one who quoted poetry?’
‘Dead.’
‘Oh my God! What happened to you men? Did you miss the easy route or something?’
Neither Luton nor Fogarty dared answer that terrible question, but after a moment Evelyn asked: ‘And you? How did you negotiate the Mackenzie? On your second try, that is?’
‘Come early spring we’re back at Athabasca Landing, same four Germans sell our group, three couples, a new boat, bigger and stronger this time, and the rest was easy.’
‘Easy?’ Luton asked in a distant, displeased manner.
‘Yes. That fall when you put me on the big boat, ice chased us up the river. In the spring in our boat, we chased it down. Like everyone advised us, we found the Peel, then the Rat, where we cut our boat in half along the line the Germans had painted on it, and we hauled it inch by inch—what hellish work—over the Divide, but when we reached that other little river … what do you call it?’
‘The Bell,’ Luton replied in a drained whisper.
‘Once we hit it, no more trouble. It fed into the Porcupine, and after being careful to turn right at that junction we sailed so fast, first thing you know we were on the Yukon, where we bought six tickets for that steamer right there, the one you were boarding, which whisked us into Dawson in a proper hurry.’
‘How long did it take?’ Luton asked, and he listened almost benumbed as she calculated: ‘Well, we left Edmonton earlier than most, maybe twentieth of May, so we could beat the crowd to Athabasca and get one of the good boats. The rest, pretty normal except that portage was no fun. We got into Fort Yukon, where we bought our tickets for Dawson …’ Losing count, she beckoned for her husband to join them, and the big Australian, a veteran of gold fields, ambled over. ‘Verner, what date did we reach Dawson last year?’
‘Eighth of September. Everyone said it was one of the speediest trips. So it would be twenty May till early September, fifteen, sixteen weeks.’ He said this in such a barbarous Australian accent that Lord Luton almost winced to think that this man, and a million like him, were full-fledged members of the British Empire.
‘What are you doing now?’ Fogarty asked, and the couple, taking turns, explained: ‘We arrived here too late to hit that big strike on the Klondike, but so did most everyone. Anyway, Verner said he was tired of mining. We operate what you might call a pawnshop, buy and sell anything,’ and Irina added: ‘You can make surprising money if you’re sharp.’ Luton gasped inwardly: A pawnshop. This couple is right out of Dickens. But Fogarty cried: ‘That’s wonderful! You have your own store and all?’ and Irina said: ‘We do. Verner built it. We used the timbers from six Yukon riverboats abandoned by those who couldn’t wait, they were so eager to be off to the diggings. We bought two for one dollar American each.’
But now, in her moment of triumph, Irina, like the responsible woman she had always tried to be, wanted to repair ancient damage, and she asked: ‘Lord Luton, could we please sit over there?’ When they were apart from the others, but still within the shadow of the steamer that would separate them forever, she said quietly: ‘You never liked me, and I didn’t like you. But I did understand you, and I pray you understood me. You were a man frightened by the onset of winter, I was a lone woman who had just survived a terrible tragedy.’
Luton started to speak, but she held up her hand, and when it was in the air she used it to brush off her cap, so that her wealth of silvery hair fell free to frame her face: ‘No, let me finish, then you. I knew your problem. You were terrified that your nephew would fall completely in love with me. As a proud man from a proud family you couldn’t allow that. You would do anything to prevent it and so would Mr. Carpenter, because you understood how such an affair … the woman six or seven years older … it could unbalance a young man for life. You knew that, but so did I, Lord Luton. I would never have allowed it to happen …’
‘But you encouraged it. Harry and I could both see that.’
‘I was not thinking of Philip,’ she said contritely. ‘I was thinking of myself. I had suffered terrifying loss. At the end of the world. With no one. With not one penny there or back in Edmonton. Lord Luton, I needed assurance. I needed the affection of some other human being. In that cold, cold land I needed warmth.’ Covering her face, she wept silently for several moments, then said as she wiped her nose with her sleeve: ‘He was such a dear boy, so good, so promising. I share your grief at his loss.’
Luton, a man who had in the last year also suffered defeats few men experience, needed to exorcise himself, and confessed: ‘At one point I was so distraught I contemplated shoving you overboard in the dark of night. Harry prevented me. He thought I was joking, but I wasn’t.’
Irina stared at Luton, who averted his eyes, and she wondered what alchemy the deaths of his friends had wrought on his soul that he would now admit this monstrous thought to her, his intended victim. A few moments later she asked: ‘Why did things go so wrong that three of your team died?’
‘Nature dealt us a series of dreadful blows … much like the storm that sank your first boat on Great Slave.’ He was still unwilling to admit that he had abetted an uncharitable nature, had indeed invited her retaliation for his blunders: ‘You could call it rotten luck.’ Then, to his own surprise, he asked: ‘Have you ever known anyone who stood this close to death from scurvy … the slow rotting away of the human body?’ And he held his thumb and forefinger only a millimeter apart.
‘So now it’s back to England and a castle somewhere, I suppose?’
‘Yes, I do now have a castle and many new responsibilities.’
A gush of tears overwhelmed her, and at the end she said: ‘I can see the faces of each of your three men, of my own three farmers. They will be with us forever.’
When Luton said nothing, she concluded: ‘On the first time we parted, you refused to accept my kiss of thanks. Don’t refuse me again.’ He rose, stood very erect, and striving to mask his distaste, he allowed her to kiss him but she had to stand on tiptoe to do it. Then he asked: ‘What will you do when the gold runs out?’ and she shrugged her shoulders as she replaced her kepi: ‘Who knows? Verner might rush off to another gold field. Who can guess what we will do? We are voyagers headed for destinations we cannot see. But like traveling the Mackenzie, if you get thrown back the first time, you keep trying.’
Signaling to Fogarty and her husband that she was ready, she joined them and watched Lord Luton briskly climb the gangway and turn at the railing of the Jos. Parker to salute her in farewell. ‘Where are you heading?’ the big Australian shouted, and he called down: ‘Back to civilization,’ and with a kind of sardonic amusement Evelyn lingered there, watching the three as they walked jovially away: There they go, an upstart Irish peasant trying to be better than he is, a hulking Australian with no neck nor any command of good English, and a Yankee farm girl of no background whatever. He shook his head in a gesture of surrender and mumbled: ‘Barbarians take over the world while proper men huddle like bears in icy caves.’
But that cynical comment was not to be Lord Luton’s final evaluation of his well-planned expedition to Dawson. It could not be; he was too good a man for that. As he watched Irina Kozlok disappear from view, swinging along with her mates in a free and easy stride, her fine uniform glistening in the sun, her kepi properly cocked, he suddenly uttered an anguished cry that startled others lining the rail, and he felt no embarrassment in disturbing them in this highly improper way.
‘Oh God!’ he cried, his heart torn with anguish, his brain finally prepared to face the truth. ‘She spent fifteen weeks going the right way. I spent one hundred going the wrong, and I lost three companions in doing so.’ He trembled, still looking at the space she had just vacated, and then like some penitent anchorite in his medieval cave he mumbled, his proud head bowed at last: ‘Merciful God, let the souls of those precious three men forgive me.’