Journey Page 13

  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 improvis
ed 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 positi
on 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.’