Journey: A Novel Page 8

  Disgusted with his nephew, Luton whispered: ‘Damn me, Harry, we’ve got to do something,’ but what he did not know. During one conversation he told Carpenter: ‘When the others aren’t looking, we could shove her overboard,’ but as the last word left his lips he felt his arm caught in a tight grip and heard Harry’s voice coming at him with unprecedented force: ‘Evelyn! Even to think such a thing in jest is a mortal sin.’ Then, asserting his elder status for the first time on the journey, he said almost menacingly: ‘We’ll have none of that, Evelyn. None, I warn you.’

  Shaken by the fury of Harry’s words, Evelyn asked contritely: ‘But what shall we do?’ and Carpenter replied: ‘God obviously sent us to save her, so she’s our obligation until we can rid ourselves of the burden. Good Samaritan and all that.’

  But this did not ease Luton’s feelings, which were intensified when he watched as Irina sat forward with Philip, kepi off and the wind blowing her silvery hair attractively about her face. Her little gestures in pushing it back were, Luton thought, so damned Slavic she could be a Russian princess, and then he found himself speculating on whether Estonians were Slavs; he decided they weren’t.

  He was not merely frustrated; as leader of an expedition and at present the captain of a ship, small though it was, he could not stop himself from reviewing scenes from British naval history in which disruptive forces had destroyed otherwise solid explorations, and in his distress he called Harry aft for a serious consultation: ‘Have you ever read the old accounts of how this chap Bligh, an untidy sort, lost his ship that had been commissioned to carry breadfruit from Tahiti to Jamaica?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What did him in? Native girls corrupting his sailors. And did you follow what happened when the mutineers fled to that tiny island somewhere?’

  Harry hadn’t, for that part of the old naval tragedy was not so well known, but Luton had: ‘Same thing. The English sailors handled things quite well, really, if you forgive them their mutiny, but they fell to squabbling over native girls, and I believe they killed one another. None survived.’

  The two veterans contemplated this for some moments, agreeing that to have any woman penned up with five men in a small cabin over a prolonged winter was running a risk that was formidable, and, said Luton, pointing forward to where Irina’s silvery hair was once more tumbling about in the wind: ‘To have that particular one amongst us would be suicidal. I could see Philip and Trevor battling for her at first, and ultimately, believe me, you and I would be at it. And she would sit there all the while in the corner of the hut like some Circe, smiling and combing her hair and plotting to turn us into her swine.’ His fear of what Irina might very possibly do had generated a hatred so intense that he could not think rationally.

  Nor did she help. Eager to prove to the men that she would not be a hindrance to their voyage, she kept discovering ways to be helpful and performed more than her share of the tasks: she prepared the meals once Harry laid out the rations that only he controlled; she cleaned up afterward; she was remarkably alert in moving out of the way if the men had duties in adjusting the sails; and regardless of what she did, she maintained her appearance of responsible gravity, broken now and then by that ravishing smile which seemed to fill her entire squarish face. In short, she made herself an ideal passenger.

  For Lord Luton that was the problem, because he could see that her impeccable behavior was winning over not only youthful and impressionable Trevor Blythe, who read her poems from Palgrave, but also Harry Carpenter, a married man who should have known better. After carrying out her voluntary duties, she would move to the front of the boat, ‘where everyone has to look at her,’ Luton grumbled to himself, ‘and take off her kepi, allowing her beautiful hair to dance in the breeze.’ At such moments he saw her as one of the Sirens, perched not on the prow of his boat but on a jagged rock toward which she was luring his men to their destruction; he imagined she carried a lyre which she strummed as she worked her charms.

  Even Fogarty proved susceptible, and one evening Luton caught him staring as she fixed her hair, his eyes glazed over. ‘Fogarty!’ Luton cried snappishly. ‘Tend the sails!’ The Irishman’s response was most unfortunate: ‘She does remind me of me wife, Jenny.’ Luton, infuriated, wanted to cuff some sense into his ghillie, but controlled his temper, muttering: ‘Him too?’

  Realizing that only he was impervious to her seductive plotting, he resumed his study of ways to dispose of her: I could maroon her at some promontory where the trading ships would have to see her; of course we’d leave food for her. But I doubt the men would permit this. Or when we make camp, we could build a little hut for her, off to one side. But I’m sure the others would sneak over there at night, after I was asleep. And then came that hideous image, of pushing her off the Afton on some dark night, and the others running about: ‘Where is she? What could have happened?’ This hateful nightmare he tried to chase out of his mind, but he was powerless to exorcise it.

  Reprieve came in the sudden appearance on the Mackenzie of a sizable river steamer hurrying back to civilization at the completion of her last trading trip of the brief summer season, and when Luton signaled frantically, her captain hove to while the men in the Afton explained how they happened to have a castaway woman aboard: ‘Bunch of Dakota farmers wrecked their craft at Great Slave. You’re to take her back to Athabasca so she can go on down to Edmonton and on to her home.’ When the captain asked: ‘Who pays her fare?’ Lord Luton with indecent haste leaped forward to cry ‘I do!’ and he gave the captain not only the requested fare but also a bonus of five dollars. While this was happening, Carpenter quietly slipped Irina a handful of bills and a fatherly admonition: ‘Go back to Dakota, Irina. Give up your dreams of gold.’

  In gratitude she went to each of her saviors in turn and kissed him. When she reached Philip he blushed furiously, but the reaction was quite different when she came at last to Lord Luton. Stiffly, with his best silent-sneer, he drew back, refused to kiss her but did accept from a proper distance her warm handshake.

  Ignoring this rejection, she transferred to the larger ship, and after reaching down for her tiny package of clothes the men had given her, she remained at the railing as the two craft separated there in the center of the great river, with never a tree or a hut visible. As Philip watched her slowly vanish upstream, his heart felt a heaviness it had not known before. He acknowledged to himself that she was much older than he, and that she was an American of uncertain lineage, but he also knew that she was a vibrant, heroic woman with a sense of humor and compassion, and he was aware that her naturalness had overwhelmed him. But his two older companions who were watching him closely, Evelyn and Harry, knew from their own experiences as young men that this sense of romantic tragedy would pass. It always did.

  Luton and his party continued their journey on the Mackenzie without seeing one evidence of human habitation and scarcely a sign that others had ever passed this way. As they stared at the banks lined with increasingly dwarfed trees they agreed that this was indeed one of the ends of the earth.

  When they finally turned northwest for the climactic run of nearly seven hundred miles to the delta, they had an opportunity to see the great river at its most powerful; at times it broadened out to two or three miles, until Philip and Trevor thought they were entering another lake, but then it would contract into a swift-moving channel. The vistas were endless and the loneliness almost terrifying, but the grandest part came during the night runs when occasionally the heavens would be charged with electricity as the enormous northern lights filled the sky with luminous patterns.

  One night as Luton and Trevor Blythe tended the craft while the others slept in the little deckhouse, the display lasted for three breathless hours, at the end of which Trevor said: ‘I’ve headed a new page in my notebook Borealis. Wouldn’t that be a wizard title for a small book of poems about the arctic?’

  Now Luton’s party became willful players in one of the most tantalizing and fatal games of g
eography. Always aware that the Mackenzie was running roughly parallel to their target river, the Yukon, which lay a constant three or four hundred miles to the west, they asked continually: ‘Where will it be most practical for us to leave the Mackenzie and leapfrog over to the Yukon, which we can then use to float down to Dawson or row up, depending upon where we make our interception?’

  The variables in this game were many, for numerous inviting streams, some considerable rivers, joined the Mackenzie from the west, and if one paddled and portaged upstream to their headwaters, one would be close to some other stream which dropped down to the Yukon. But even the most inviting route posed two harsh requirements. It would be murderously hard to row upstream against the current, and when one did reach the headwater, one still had to portage a heavy boat and all gear over the Continental Divide, as Harry Carpenter had pointed out repeatedly and kept reminding them as they drifted north.

  Now the travelers entered into a kind of hypnotic trance which rendered sensible decisions impossible, for even though they knew that winter was approaching, the days remained tantalizingly inviting, and often they sailed with no covering but their flimsy shirts. The sun continued visible and warm, and the mighty river itself almost lulled them to sleep, so purposefully did it seduce them northward, always bearing them closer to the Arctic Circle. It ran so steadily, its current was so smooth and rapid that it seemed to sing: ‘I’m not luring you away from the gold fields; I’m carrying you always closer to the goal.’ But the goal to which it was speeding them was the river’s goal, the arctic, and not the men’s.

  Every man aboard the Sweet Afton was aware of two conditions. Winter was perilously close, requiring them to find a place to pitch camp and dig in for seven or eight months, and they were drifting along without the courage to make a hard decision as to how they were to survive the winter and then get across to the Yukon. They were men morally disarmed by the vastness of the north, the complexity of the decisions they must make, and the sweet seduction of the Mackenzie. ‘We must soon make up our minds,’ Lord Luton said several times at sunset, as if on the morrow he would force a decision, but when day broke, and the peaceful river rolled northward, it carried them along, and decision was postponed.

  The apt simile for their curious behavior came, as might have been expected, from poet Trevor: ‘We go forth, like all significant voyagers, in quest of our Holy Grail, but we approach it by running away, as if we were afraid to challenge the rim of Dark Mountain behind which it hides in self-protection.’

  Toward twilight on a day in October, Luton was inspecting carefully a stream which debouched into the Mackenzie from the west, and after some minutes of close study he said: ‘I do believe it’s got to be the Gravel.’ Everyone crowded the port side to see this ominous yet fortuitous river, for they knew that it was the last viable escape route to choose if they wished to avoid the difficult tangle of rivers at the delta, where the Mackenzie would finally break through to the Beaufort Sea.

  If they elected to leave the Mackenzie here and row up the Gravel, they would encounter at its headwaters the easiest portage over the Rockies and a fine free-flowing river, the Stewart, to whisk them down to Dawson in the spring. Lord Luton, aware of the amiable possibilities, cried: ‘We’ll anchor in her mouth tonight and decide in the morning whether to keep drifting down the Mackenzie,’ and his men steered the Sweet Afton hard to port and into the Gravel for an overnight stay and some tough decision-making in the morning.

  But that harsh obligation could once more be postponed because as soon as it was light Harry Carpenter announced: ‘I think our spot for the winter has been chosen for us.’ And when the others looked, they saw that the edges of both the large river and small had begun to freeze. The ice did not yet reach out far from shore but frail fingers did enclose their boat, a stern warning that soon the entire system would be frozen.

  ‘Well!’ Luton said as he studied the situation. ‘This comes a mite sooner than I had intended. I was so eager to have us reach Fort Norman. It can’t be more than eighty miles downstream.’

  ‘Milord,’ Harry said, and by using his friend’s formal title he indicated the gravity of what he had to say, ‘you’re right. It is only a few miles to Norman. But in Edmonton and Athabasca, too, they warned us that the Mackenzie can freeze like that,’ and he snapped his fingers. ‘If we were to be trapped in the middle of this powerful river, with blocks of ice crushing down upon us, we could vanish in the midst of some floe, with our boat reduced to kindling.’

  Luton required only a few moments to appreciate the inevitability of this judgment: ‘We’ll build our cabin a hundred yards up the Gravel. To escape the ice.’ So, aided by long ropes carried ashore and tied to trees, the men warped the Sweet Afton out of the larger river and berthed her safely a short distance up the left bank of the Gravel.

  Ironically, Luton had been forced to choose the Gravel, after all, but he was putting it to the wrong use, a haven for the winter rather than a highway westward toward the safety of the Yukon.

  TWO

  COURAGE

  THE REGIMEN LORD Luton’s party adopted in their refuge on the left bank of the Gravel was evolved through committee discussion, for Evelyn did not act dictatorially except when a decision might mean the life or death of his enterprise. He was a shining example of the ancient English principle of noblesse oblige, always mindful that as a noble man, he had the moral obligation to act honorably and generously toward those about him. In reaching decisions which might affect Fogarty, Luton even allowed the Irishman to participate in the discussions. ‘We’re civilized human beings,’ Luton was fond of saying, ‘and shall conduct ourselves accordingly.’

  His style of leadership was manifested immediately as the Sweet Afton was safely drawn onto the shore, for he sought advice from all members of his team regarding the location and size of their winter quarters: ‘You’re to be living in them October to May, so share with me your best thoughts.’

  He began by stepping off what he considered an adequate living-and-sleeping area, and marking the proposed corners with small piles of rocks, and as soon as he had completed this, Philip, Trevor and Fogarty lay down within the indicated space to demonstrate where the beds would have to be. When Luton himself dropped to the ground, inviting Carpenter to do the same, it became apparent that his first estimate for the size of the living area was ridiculously small, and he began to adjust its confines outward, warning his men: ‘With each step I take, your work is doubled.’ After some silent calculations, Carpenter agreed: ‘You know, men, he’s speaking the truth. Enlarging in any direction increases the work tremendously.’

  Harry eased the problem by an ingenious suggestion: ‘Let’s pull the Sweet Afton up here to ground level, wedge her on her beam ends, and use her as one flank of our cabin,’ and Philip elaborated the proposal with one of his own: ‘Let’s orient the Afton so she protects us from the north winds.’ Carpenter countered: ‘Sound idea, Philip. But on this spot the winds will come howling down the Gravel out of the west,’ and the boat was shifted to provide protection in that quarter.

  So Luton transferred his piles of corner rocks to the new terrain: ‘Harry, that was a splendid idea. See how it obviates one entire wall. A lot of chopping saved by that device and we can use the cabin jutting in as our cupboard.’ But Trevor Blythe chipped in with one of the best suggestions: ‘Let’s tie our largest canvas into this free end of the Afton. Lash it down securely and provide ourselves with a kind of protected storage area. Too cold for sleeping but valuable as a place to hold things.’ He smiled at Fogarty: ‘Say the frozen carcass of a moose you’ve shot.’ And this idea, too, was incorporated into the overall plan, with the canvas being erected immediately and tied securely to the Afton.

  When Luton visualized his finished three-part winter dwelling he christened it ‘Our Hermaphrodite Igloo,’ and when the others protested that this part of the world had never known an igloo, he said: ‘In my storybooks there were nothing but igloos, and I’ve
always wanted one,’ but Harry said more soberly: ‘You know, what we’ll have here is pretty much what the Eskimos along the oceanfronts have always had. A big canoe lashed down on its side to protect a kind of dugout in the earth. An entrance area much like this tent.’ Surveying the site, he said: ‘We’re in the grand tradition. And if thousands of Eskimos have survived the arctic winter in dwellings like this, so can we.’

  Then the philosophizing and the frivolity ended, for the laborious work of building a fairly large cabin had to be accelerated against the coming of blizzards, and each of the men went studiously about his assigned tasks. Philip and Trevor were given ropes and sent to search for usable timbers from the bleached driftwood that cluttered the banks of the Gravel. Like all arctic rivers that passed through an almost treeless terrain, its shores contained such an inexhaustible supply of wood that Trevor cried: ‘Where can it come from?’ and naturally they asked Carpenter.

  ‘Simple. The banks here contain few trees. But up in the mountain, small forests.’

  ‘How does this tangle reach us?’

  ‘Winter snow blankets the forest. Spring thaw erodes the banks, and down come the trees. Voilà, the next flood brings them right to our doorstep.’ Within a short distance east or west along only the left bank they had at their disposal enough straight, fine wood to build a cathedral; choosing only the best timber, they worked far into the dusk hauling up to site level the wood that would be needed to face their cabin.

  Carpenter and Fogarty, meanwhile, had taken upon themselves the most arduous task, that of felling and trimming the four stout poles that would form the corners of the cabin. With the expedition’s two hefty axes they sought out larch or spruce, girdled the chosen tree as close to ground level as practical, then took stances on opposite sides of the trunk and chopped away until the tree was felled. Then, by common agreement, they took turns resting and hacking off the lower branches and the unneeded crown of the tree, so that the end result was a sturdy corner post. It was strenuous work but necessary, for although driftwood of nearly proper size was available, both men feared it might have been so weakened by floodwater and bleaching and rough transit down the Gravel that it could not withstand winter blasts when wind pressures could be tremendous.