AS ANNE ABRAHAM PREPARED TO fly in to Ramah Bay in the Torngat Mountains, the northernmost part of Labrador, which was already itself in the far north of Canada, she copied into her journal a passage from a Forbes travel guide about the area:
Stretching away into the interior as far as the eye can see, rise innumerable peaks. […] In almost any properly illustrated storybook may be seen just such fantastic mountains as these. Invariably they harbor the castles of ogres and giants and other bad characters.
The landscape carried within it the promise of magic. The name Torngat came from the Inuktitut word Tongait, or “place of spirits.” The name, she wrote in her journal that night, “is an evil spirit, and how excited I am.”
Though this was going to be her first time in Ramah Bay, it was Anne’s sixth season in Labrador on Bill Fitzhugh’s expedition. She had grown close to the Fitzhughs over the years. Her first time had been five years before in the summer of 1971, the Fitzhughs’ first expedition up in Labrador. Her brother Ted, who had Bill as a teaching assistant in a course at Harvard, had been invited, and her older sister Dorothy and Anne, fourteen, were also allowed to come along.
Anne impressed everyone on that first expedition with her unique combination of fearlessness and sensitivity. Lynne Fitzhugh, Bill’s wife and the camp manager, remembered: “She was the first person when we had a storm at night…to go rushing out, jump into the freezing cold water, to get the speedboat that had dragged its anchor and was floating away. Everybody else just kind of stood there. She didn’t hesitate for anything. She just went.”
Life on the expedition was hard—they traveled by trap boat and got rolled around in the rough seas, avoiding icebergs that peeled off the coastline like scabs—but Anne thrived. Lynne, who was taking care of her two young kids in addition to the archaeologists, recalled, “I was washing diapers in the stream and the wind’s blowing and storms [are threatening], and Ben would fall and cut his head, and we would have to call the small emergency plane to come.” But Anne was always there to swoop in. “It was very hard and I loved it, but I probably wouldn’t have loved it as much if it hadn’t been for Anne.” On the rare occasion when neither of them had to watch the kids, Anne was the one who Lynne asked to go on adventures, like finding a rhubarb patch rumored to be growing in the next valley over. And at night, as the neighboring settlers and Inuit families gathered to play the harmonicas and recorders the crew had brought, Anne would pull out her fiddle. Somehow, under the Arctic skies, it worked.
* * *
On one of her last mornings with the rest of the team before heading up to Ramah, Anne went on a long walk before breakfast. She came across an old campsite and, just beyond it, a beach. Anne shrank back in horror when she realized the sand was strewn with dog carcasses. There were five of them, all teeming with maggots. She was sure they had been shot by the Mounties. Anne continued on and saw a woman in a 1950s dress looking seaward and singing. When Anne approached, the woman stopped, and when Anne asked what she had been singing, she turned to Anne and howled.
The beauty of Labrador was inseparable from its violence. It was as much “the land God gave to Cain,” as Jacques Cartier once called it, as it was Eden, “pure, grandiose country, stark and elemental and wild, softened by wildflowers and lingering golden twilights, with clumps of dwarf birch and willow, scattered spruce, myriad birds and animals, spectacular views and pulsating northern lights,” Bill Fitzhugh wrote.
Lynne captured it best in her oral history of the place, a book dedicated to Anne: “Labrador’s is among the most lethal climates on the continent not because it is the most harsh, but because it is so utterly disarming. The balmy southwest breeze that glorifies a summer morning can slam around in a heartbeat—dark shadows racing across the limpid sea like chills, stripping the skin from the flattened water and hurling it against the land so hard it makes the ledges flute and scream.”
Back on the plane, Anne knew the coming 1976 season was going to be a challenge. The mission was to find the mythic Ramah chert quarries—the source of a very special kind of stone that flaked so well, it was prized for toolmaking by the native communities. Chert, a kind of quartz, was normally gray and dull like flint, but Ramah chert was semi-translucent. It looked like milky ice. But finding the quarry would mean hiking up and down the unforgiving slopes of Ramah. Anne had taken rock climbing and geology courses in preparation for the trip, and she hoped that her co-leader, Mike Gramly, an assistant professor of geology at Stony Brook, was as good as he seemed on paper. They had met only once before, at a seminar in the Peabody Museum in February of that year. Fitzhugh had hired Gramly as an expert on lithic sources for the quarry mission, and Anne volunteered to accompany him. The others would be 175 miles away at base camp in September Harbor, and in the cliffs of Ramah it was only going to be the two of them.
Stephen Loring, whom Anne had been dating since they met on last summer’s expedition, arrived before nightfall. They held each other until the morning, when it was time to load the plane.
The last time Lynne Fitzhugh saw Anne was when she walked inside the fisherman’s shack that had been repurposed as that season’s headquarters. Lynne had been laid up with a headache, and Anne walked up to the bed and kissed her right on the mouth. Lynne would remember that moment years later: “It was like she was really saying a final goodbye.”
* * *
The flight to Ramah Bay was uneventful. From Thalia Point where Anne loaded in, the pilot picked up Mike from Mugford before dropping them off at the remote site.
They set up a camp in the footsteps of an old Moravian mission. The landscape was marshier than the guidebooks had made it out to be. Sure, there were the majestic fjords and cliffs, but there were also brooks where trout swam and thick moss that made the ground spongy underfoot, and even a little beach area where the pebbles kicked into the ocean.
In Ramah, there was no equivalent to Dog’s Nose, a big basalt cliff overlooking the ocean, where, in years past, Anne and Lynne and the Fitzhugh children bathed in the rain pools while humpback whales swam up beside them, their mouths open, scooping up capelin. But the landscape was not without its promised magic. On clear days, in some areas of the range, sound traveled so clearly you could almost sing a duet with your own echo across the valley. From the tent, Anne could hear the waterfall near base camp gurgle like boiling water. She wrote in her journal, “The surf unrhythmically plays on the shore.”
They spent their first few days hiking around the area looking for the quarry. Anne didn’t like that Mike had the tendency to go on ahead without her, and she found his constant talk tiring. “My ears are tired of his voice, though it is all interesting, I don’t care for the deep, back of the throat attempt-to-be mature tone […] and his mustache—another subject all together,” she wrote in her journal. At night, sleeping in the same tent, Mike would tell Anne about his time in Africa—fantastic tales of giant snakes called mambas—which he defended as true stories.
But they got along well enough, and the days quickly blended together; Anne’s journal entries lost their time pegs. One morning, Mike hiked so far ahead, Anne could no longer see him. “I went up a chimney and the shale is so crummy that I had a close call with the rock crumbling as I tried for a hand hold, important. Mike finally waited after I yelled my gut out.”
They hiked together along the ridge above the valley where the stream flowed. Their goal was to climb down into the valley and follow the stream to its mouth. Mike took the quickest, steepest route down the talus slope, but Anne took her time, climbing down a more diagonal route. Anne was just above the stream when she looked down and saw a boulder that gleamed with that milky translucence of Ramah chert. Anne picked up a flake and pitched it to Mike. It fell short, and he teased her about her throwing arm, but they both knew what it meant. Anne had found a Ramah chert quarry.
Anne in the Ramah chert quarry. Mike Gramly captured this moment––one of the last photos of her ever taken.
The quarry was enormous––one-quarter of a mile long––and made of solid chert. Anne and Mike spent the rest of the day walking up and down it, picking up flakes. The hike back was tiring—there was no quick way back to camp except by going all the way around again—but Mike surprised Anne by making dinner for her while she rested in the tent. She realized that she must have lost her gray cap the day before, and Mike said, “’Twas a sacrifice to the mountains.”
They returned the next day, and the excitement had not diminished. “Time went unrecognized,” Anne wrote. She noted that a lot of the chert was naturally iron-stained. “Perhaps this was an inspiration for red ochre.”
Later that day, Mike signaled to Anne that he was heading to camp. Again, Anne was left to scramble the crumbling rock alone. As much as she wanted to catch up to him, she resisted rushing because she didn’t trust the ground beneath her. The rock in Ramah Bay fractured in clean, large sheets, and it was all too easy to imagine a whole section breaking clear from under her. Anne was relieved to find that Mike had been waiting for her at the steepest part of the slope, but afterward, he left her again. Anne took her time downclimbing and entered into another world alone. Grasshoppers, asters, dandelions, so many butterflies. A white-breasted bird circled as if examining her. A few black bears had been spotted in the distance in recent days, but there were none that evening to spoil her renewed good humor. Anne returned to camp, singing.
The following day was overcast and rainy, and the weather the one after wasn’t much better––windy and cold––so it wasn’t until Thursday that Anne put on her waders and tried to make her way along the shore to see if there was a quicker way to get to the quarry. She tried four different routes up the cliff from the shore, but the wind was still too strong, and she didn’t trust the “nasty, fracturing shale” to hold both her and the load she was carrying, so she walked back to camp to help Mike roast the goose he had shot the previous afternoon. After their feast, they talked and talked, and this time it was Anne who found herself providing the majority of the conversation. She talked about how she was doing at George Washington, and how much she loved her family while nevertheless desiring to get away from home. Anne was grateful for a break from the chat when she left camp to watch the sunset by herself. She wrote by candlelight that evening, enjoying the smell of woodsmoke on her clothes, until the wick had nearly run out: “I feel good and bad for telling him so much,” she reflected, and went on a bit before ending on, “I love Stephen.”
The next morning was so still it felt strange. The air was heavy and overcast, and there wasn’t a breath of wind. Because of the stillness, she and Mike decided to try again to find a shortcut around the shore to the quarry. As they prepared for the day’s hike, she noticed Mike was hacking at a caribou antler he had picked up, sharpening it into a back scratcher. In her journal, Anne also noted that Mike had set up the radio.
About twenty-four hours later, the morning of August 7, 1976, Mike would reach Bill Fitzhugh at base camp by radio for the first time. Anne, he said, had vanished.