Journey: A Novel

  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 repugna
nt 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.