In the Land of Feast or Famine: The Legend of John Hornby
Some time in the summer of 1918 Inspector LaNauze of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police caught in a photograph the physical image of the man in a rare instant of repose: shock-headed, bearded, hawk-nosed, moccasined, the strong lean hands holding an illustrated catalogue. He is reading with almost insolently withdrawn concentration. The picture was taken at Fort Norman near the entrance to Great Bear Lake, or it may have been higher up the Mackenzie at Fort Simpson. What it does not show is that John Hornby is a short wiry man, little more than five feet tall; that his eyes are intensely blue, memorable and disconcerting because vague and always (it seems) looking at something a long way away. It was ten years since he had first come into the North. Within the next five years he was to become a legend in his own lifetime.
In the first quarter of this century there were plenty of colourful characters in the North-West Territories: old Klondikers, beach-combers, remittance-men, frantic solitary men who got bushed and stayed behind, men of good family with a past and men of good family with no future, and men of no family with neither past nor future; braggarts, ruffians, visionaries, unscrupulous men. These provided a variegated contrast to the respectable and hard-working people who were simply and quietly committed, through choice or birth, to living in an inhospitable country: grave, self-reliant Scots and Orcadians who served the interests of the great trading companies, and sometimes their own; and morose businesslike trappers – often of Scandinavian or German stock – who wrung a living from the country dangerously, relying on skill, experience, and their dogs. Restlessness, endurance, energy, cunning are the hallmarks of the best of them. Against such a background the small lithe Chaplinesque figure – pathetic and endearing, with the laconic smile and piercing blue eyes – would seem slender material for the making of a legend.
But John Hornby eluded all the categories. He had no commercial or scientific ambitions, no will-o’-the wisp dream of gold or fur. His past was not notably disreputable. He was said to be wealthy – and that, at times, was about half-true. He was well-educated, a Harrovian, spoke in a soft scholarly voice, was not given to profane language, and was even suspected of being a learned man because he knew a few words of French, German, and Italian. Professionally he was not an explorer, a trapper, a prospector; he was something of all these, but a caricature of them all. By instinct and habit he was most like a trapper, and could have been a good trapper but for his love of animals and his hatred of steel traps. He never killed except for food and even in that matter was notoriously improvident. He was not a particularly good shot with a rifle, yet managed to keep himself alive. And his name persists on the maps. The bay where he first wintered on Great Bear Lake; the elegant canoe-passage he discovered through the confusing islands and peninsulas at the eastern end of Great Slave Lake; the double turn in the Thelon River where he built a cabin and died – all these still bear his name. And although his name is now overshadowed by the manner of his death, he lives still in the long northern memory.
The legend is mostly to do with Hornby’s feats of strength and endurance, and with behaviour which, even in the North-West Territories, was regarded as eccentric. Stories were told of him as a young man working with the railway gangs around the Yellowhead Pass, how he would go hatless in winter, and barefoot if need arose; and how, when he was at Onoway, he would frequently run the forty-odd miles to or from Edmonton, had once trotted fifty miles beside a horse, and on another occasion ran 100 miles from Edmonton to Athabaska Landing in under twenty-four hours for a wager of a bottle of whiskey (although he was not a drinking man). It was said that he could outrun an Indian, and pack more than his own weight at a portage; and his untiring crooked jog-trot was the despair of anybody who had the misfortune to travel with him. When the Hudson’s Bay Company was celebrating its 250th anniversary, an impromptu football match was mounted at Fort Smith – with other delights – to celebrate the occasion; and Hornby had injured his leg in the game but set off on the 300-mile canoe trip to Reliance alone, with his leg in splints. He had the reputation of fearing no man, of being crazily quixotic; and this was illustrated by the story of his kidnapping a woman from a brutal and dangerous common-law husband, and hiding her and her two children in a furniture warehouse in Edmonton, and setting them safely on their way to England.
On the whole he preferred the company of Indians to white men, and liked to travel light. His standard outfit even for a journey of indefinite duration – he was inclined to boast – was a rifle, a fishnet, and a bag of flour. Because he despised ‘white man’s grub,’ other men were suspicious of travelling with him; yet it was said that he had several times kept indigent Indians alive by starving himself. Altogether his reputation for starving and for being impervious to hunger and hardships was impressive. He had even wintered once in a wolf-den south of Chipewyan when the freeze-up caught him on the way to Slave Lake. And stories more genial and fanciful were also told: how he refused to travel with any brown-eyed man; how he had once turned up at Resolution with a group of Indians to collect Treaty Money, and would have got away with it but for his eyes; how he knew of fabulous deposits of gold and silver but refused to form a company for fear of spoiling the country; and how he had been the first man to bring samples of pitchblende out of Bear Lake.
Many of these legendary stories about Hornby had some root in fact; but they suffered accretion and transmutation in passing from one story-teller to another; for heroic elaboration of the truth is one of the chief forms of emotional release in the North, and a good story travels quickly. The story of the pitchblende, for example, has no reliable basis; the myth-making faculty, here as elsewhere, had fused some genuine piece of Hornby lore with detail from other men’s stories. Hornby did not deliberately manufacture or distort his own legend; but he was too human to destroy it, and intelligent enough to understand the rhetorical force of deftly managed silences. He delighted in providing his few friends with a fund of outrageous stories about himself. To gain his effect, elaboration was seldom necessary.
Consider the Arden story, for example. Not many weeks before Denny LaNauze took the photograph, Hornby had been ‘rescued’ by a young Englishman named D’Arcy Arden. Arden lives in Yellowknife now and tells the story himself. “That was in the winter of 1917-18. I was at Dease Bay and Jack had come through from Norman and went straight on to his old house on Hornby Bay. I visited him early in the winter and found him half-starving. There were moose almost within rifle-shot of his cabin; but he insisted that winter on doing all his hunting with a small-bore pistol. He said he was all right and there were Indians there, so I went back to Dease Bay. Later in the winter an Indian named Bay-u-Na brought back a dog I had given Hornby. It was a very fine dog and I told him not to give him to the Indians; now the dog was almost starved to death. So Pat Klinkenberg and I took a dog-team with food to Hornby Bay. We saw plenty of caribou on the way; but Jack had no food except some old fish-bait. He had lost most of his stove-pipe through a fish-hole in the ice earlier in the season. His cabin stove therefore was propped up several feet off the floor so that what was left of the stove-pipe would go through the roof. We had a lot of trouble persuading him to come back with us: he said he was all right and didn’t need company. But he came in the end.”
There were other reasons why Hornby did not want to go back with Arden, even if it did mean a warm house and plentiful food. For Dease Bay was the headquarters of his own earlier empire, his natural home, and Arden the usurping monarch. Hornby’s own account of that winter is less amusing than Arden’s. The Indians with him had starved, and he fed them staples until there were none left. He crippled his leg with an axe and for some time ‘could only crawl about my business.’ The Indians left him and no doubt he would have died if Arden had not intervened. We have Arden’s story of the pistol and the stove-pipe. It is some measure of Hornby’s reticence and bitterness that Arden did not know the rest of the story. For Hornby had been away from Bear Lake for three years serving in the Army in France, had been decorated, then severely wounded, and discharged ‘on account of ill-health caused by wounds.’ Like a wounded animal finding a quiet place to die, he had turned towards Great Bear Lake, setting off with practically no outfit, ‘a desperate man running away from civilisation, looking like death, making the tremendous trip in a little boat no better than a broken-down packing-case.’ Alone and ill he managed the journey of more than 1100 miles, escaped drowning more than once, and arrived at Dease Bay ‘with a much depleted outfit’ to find many changes. It was no home-coming. He felt deep affection for the Sastudene Indians that he had brought from Norman years before back to their ancestral caribou-grounds; these gentle, guileless, still unspoiled people matched his own temperament. Now D’Arcy Arden held among them the position Hornby had held before. The gear Hornby had left in his cabin was destroyed or stolen; the cabin near the Dismal Lakes had been looted and burned since the two Oblate Fathers Rouvière and Leroux had been murdered by the Eskimo; trappers had overrun the country and were working the whole area down the Coppermine to the Gulf and along the Arctic coast. His land was violated; he could no longer live there. He made his way with a few Indians, temporarily loyal, to his old base on Hornby Bay, on the edge of the Barren Ground where he had first wintered with Cosmo Melvill in 1908. Even after the Arden rescue, he spent one more desolate winter there, and nearly died of it; then left Great Bear Lake never to return.
By 1923 the legend had reached Edmonton. Whenever he came ‘outside’ he could usually be seen in the King Edward Hotel, his weather-beaten clean-shaven face and almost conventional dress an intriguing contrast to the lurid stories that were told about him. From Bear Lake he had turned to the east end of Great Slake Lake, and twice had nearly died of starvation there. He never learned to swim: yet he had nearly drowned himself in trying to explore the torrential Taltson River with an equally inexpert canoeist. Because the Barren Ground – the open shelterless tundra – is the most savage part of the North, Hornby’s name became linked with the Barrens, although he had seen little of that country. One photograph shows him in winter wearing an old jacket with tattered sleeves, the trouser-knees monstrously baggy from crouching on his heels like an Eskimo at a fish-hole, his headgear a bizarre affair with strings and ear-flaps, the fruit of a succession of inspired improvisations to meet the whim or need of the moment. Another photograph shows him sitting on a large rock blissfully cracking caribou bones with an axe to get the marrow from them. Edmonton journalists – incorrigible romantics thirsty for sticky labels – described this as ‘John Hornby, the Hermit of the Barrens, examining scientific specimens.’ Because he was reticent and enigmatic – and not least reticent when most voluble – he was called a hermit and a mystic. Because he refused to plan, and did whatever he did with bland self-confidence, he was said to be a man of diabolical skill and dare-devil courage, a man capable of surmounting any difficulty by deft improvisation. The fact that he survived year after year did nothing to undermine the legend.
But all this, like the Arden episode, had its darker side. In the Bear Lake years before the war – the six years with Melvill and the Douglas party and the Oblate Fathers – Hornby had been content, had suffered no acute hardships, had never starved, had found satisfaction in activities which, if they lacked distinguishable rational basis, were at least appropriate to the country and its people. But it was distaste for ‘civilisation’ that had brought him to Canada at twenty-three and then taken him into the North four years later. Growing up in his Nantwich home was, he said, intolerable: all the talk was of cricket, and horses, and hunting – if this was civilisation he could not regard it very seriously. The war had sharpened and deepened all his suspicions. He had had to use his hunter’s skill to murder men. The world had run wild; civilisation was in a suicidal state of decay, and all its ways were unclean. And even when he had placed the length of the Mackenzie River and the breadth of Bear Lake between himself and civilisation he had found fresh bitterness, a shattering desolation. He had been amiable, gregarious, amenable before; suddenly he becomes solitary, resentful, inscrutable. Casual observers sometimes thought him mad; perhaps he was from time to time. In the winter of 1920-1 (the first starving winter near the ruins of Back’s old Fort Reliance) he had written in his diary:
‘At times this life appears strange. I never see anyone, no longer have anything to read, and my pencil is too small to let me do much writing. It is not surprising that men go mad. I have long been mentis non compos.... Unquestionably my mind has become somewhat vacant, for there is nothing to sharpen the intellect.... It is very easy to lie down and give up, but an entirely different matter to bestir oneself and move about.’
After the war his travels had become more and more arduous: not that he went to more inaccessible places, but that he took no pains to avoid discomfort and disaster. Hardships and starvation seemed to take on a positive value, as though they were the only substantial values left for him, as though an ascetic or masochistic spirit were driving him to some impossible consummation with the country he loved. He courted death because he did not fear death. He went into the North alone and with little provision, because he loved the unfenced land to the point of obsession and felt that any other approach defied the integrity of the land. If he was deliberately seeking death he had many opportunities to gratify such a wish. But his supreme self-confidence allowed him to do impossible things as a child would do them – without bravado, absent-mindedly, without delight in skill. His exploits were feats of endurance, miracles of survival. Yet he was no daredevil: his mind did not deal in calculated risks. You either got through or you didn’t. If you ignored pain and hunger and exhaustion, the issues were horribly simple: as long as you weren’t dead you were alive, and some last tendril of the will-to-live could cling to the most improbable surfaces. What some men will suffer to make a living or a fortune or a reputation, or to extend the limits of knowledge or to alleviate the human condition, Hornby endured continuously, alone, without encouragement, for no reason that anybody could see. He got into predicaments that nobody else would have courted; but he survived them as nobody could have been expected to survive.
As long as he travelled alone – which he almost invariably did from choice – his eccentricities were harmless enough. Oldtimers and trappers who knew and liked him never mistook him for a Superman of the North. Anybody who did was in danger. Bullock’s adventure with Hornby in 1924-5 is particularly interesting: Bullock was the only man who ever acted on the assumption that the Hornby Legend was true, and survived.
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Malcolm Waldron in his book called Snow Man gives a touching account of the first meeting between Hornby and Bullock: he had the story from Bullock. Like most of Hornby’s memorable meetings, this took place in an Edmonton hotel. James Charles Critchell-Bullock, at twenty-five, had just retired from the Indian Army after five years’ service and somehow or other had wound up, with the remnant of an inherited annuity, in Edmonton in search of some new way of life. Amazed at the small commanding figure that Hornby cut, and by the precision and softness of his voice, Bullock advanced without introduction to congratulate the little stranger upon his uncorrupted English accent. Hornby, eighteen years older than Bullock, was not embarrassed by this affront, “Harrow,” he mumbled. “Sherborne,” said Bullock in reply. And that was the beginning of a lifelong friendship – or almost.
Bullock quickly found out who Hornby was; almost anybody in the lobby could tell him some part of the legend. As their acquaintance grew, he disclosed his state of mind to the famous man. He was weary of the ways of the world and wanted to do something bold and clean – anything, no matter how dangerous, so that it took him into the Far North. Hornby listened quizzically and patiently, and replied ambiguously. Did Bullock realise how hard life was in the North? Bullock, six foot two and proud of his physique, replied that he reckoned he could stand any hardships. So they made a short, inconclusive, and unnecessarily strenuous trial run into the Mount Coleman country. Hornby talked a good deal on that trip and gave Bullock the impression that he would like him to be his biographer. Thereafter Bullock collected a quantity of information about Hornby, some of it unique but much of it unverified and inaccurate. Bullock wrote elatedly to his brother: ‘Hornby is a wonder man – can go off into the blue goodness knows where with half a dog, a couple of fish, and only the clothes he stands up in.’ A trip into the North with Jack Hornby was ‘on’; and Bullock started to prepare himself for it by eating raw fish and going bare-headed in cold weather. He also began, with his own money, to make elaborate preparations under the fantastic belief that what Hornby called a ‘trip’ was what Bullock would call an ‘expedition.’
The diverting preliminaries to the Hornby-Bullock expedition are too intricate to be rehearsed here. Temperamentally two men could not have been worse assorted. Bullock’s idea was that he would be the first man to winter on the Barrens and to take meteorological observations there; he would also be the first man to take motion pictures of the rare and almost extinct musk-oxen in their natural habitat. In Hornby’s absence he laid in equipment consonant with such ambitions, had a little instruction in meteorology and geology, and worse some preposterous letters to the North-West Territories and Yukon Branch in Ottawa seeking support and encouragement. Hornby withdrew to England, cancelled the expedition by cable, then returned, looked up Bullock almost (it seems) by accident, shouted with laughter when he saw all the gear Bullock had collected, and agreed with puckish ambiguity to go with him to the east of Slave Lake – not that he approved of the scheme but because he could not bear to think of a greenhorn ‘messing about in my country.’ He promised to meet Bullock at Fort Resolution on an agreed date and turned up six weeks late; by which time Bullock was having trouble with his hired hand and wondering whether they would get to their destination before the freeze-up. When Hornby arrived, Bullock got his first severe shock. Hornby had brought four trapper friends with him and gaily introduced them. They were all coming. Wouldn’t that be fun, he said. Bullock fumed and sulked; but Hornby showed him then and later, obliquely but without qualification, that Hornby not Bullock was in charge of the party.
The legend, on very slender evidence, had linked Hornby’s name with the Barrens. It was the thought of wintering on the Barrens, and of gaining some notoriety thereby, that had seized upon Bullock’s imagination. The half-million square miles of Canadian tundra were a no-man’s-land that called out – like other desolate places – for a small devoted élite; among these Bullock longed to be numbered. The Athabaskans call that country De-chin-u-way: no trees. Samuel Hearne had given it the haunting name of The Barren Ground, a name still preferred by purists to the more colloquial term ‘Barrens.’ The northernmost limit of trees – the Timber Line – almost reaches the Arctic coast 150 miles east of the Mackenzie Delta. From there it runs south-easterly to the northern tip of Great Bear Lake and crosses the Arctic Circle about 100 miles to the eastward. Tongues of small timber run northerly up the river-valleys – the Coppermine particularly; but the line trends steadily south-east in a slight curve, crossing Artillery Lake east of Great Slave, and meeting Hudson Bay at Churchill. Beyond the Timber Line is the Barren Ground: open rolling plains eroded by wind and frost, broken by soft ridges, ground down by the ice-cap into slashes of lake and muskeg, scoured out in long striations; for the few weeks of summer, a blaze of flowers and brilliant lichens, and the haunt of drab butterflies and – the worst enemy – blackflies and mosquitoes; and a terrible desolation in winter when there is no shelter anywhere from the winds. In the stillness the temperature may drop to 60 degrees below zero. And the sky is a vast commanding presence there as it is at sea. The only features are the eskers, the long gravel ridges – sometimes looking like railway embankments – dropped by the receding ice-cap. The lifeblood of that country is the caribou migrations. Back and forth from the timber to the Barren Ground the caribou range in an unpredictable rhythmic life-flow: splay-footed, deer-legged, antlered creatures, wonderful swimmers. They are food and clothing. ‘They are like ghosts,’ runs an old Indian saying; ‘they come from nowhere, fill up all the land, then disappear.’ A season when ‘the caribou did not come’ is a black season; much misery, many deaths.
The party of eight made a quick passage of Slave Lake. There were more shocks for Bullock here too. First Hornby insisted that Bullock leave his hired man and wife behind in one of his old cabins, then he made a cache of all Bullock’s cherished gear, allowing him to keep only a couple of cameras and a typewriter. It was, he pointed out, rather a lot of gear to take over a 25-mile portage; and when Bullock protested about the waste of such expensive equipment, Hornby asked whether money was really of any ultimate importance. Bullock sulked all the way over Pike’s Portage. But the winter caught them when they had scarcely entered Artillery Lake and Bullock could no longer indulge the luxury of wounded feelings. Two of the trappers built a cabin just inside the timber; the other two built a stone dug-out nearer the head of the lake, later replacing it with a cabin a little to the southward. Hornby and Bullock went on into the Barrens, some six miles north of the head of the lake, and dug a cave in the top of an esker. The dwelling, when finished, was 7 by 10 feet, with nominal headroom of 6 feet. The whole cave had to be revetted inside with spruce-brush and ground-willow, and caulked with moss to keep the sand out. The roof was supported by thirty green poles no bigger than an inch and a half in diameter, and the whole loaded with a heavy layer of sand. ‘It is comfortable,’ Bullock wrote at first, ‘except for there being sand in everything.’ But the roof creaked dangerously and Hornby brought more wood from the south – the first instalment of a network of small crooked poles that grew in the pure fantasy of improvisation, never quite keeping the sand at bay, and in the end making movement in the cave almost impossible. A detail that Hornby had probably not overlooked was that he stood five foot two and was nimble on his feet; Bullock stood six foot two and though proud of his physique lived up to his name very well.
If one supposed that wintering in the Barren Ground in the grand manner was their objective, one would have expected them to settle down to a winter of stoical endurance, the trappers acting as a support party in case of need. Bullock hoped that that would be the case; but Horny had no such intention. Indeed the winter was devoted to trapping – the only occasion when Hornby is known to have trapped seriously – probably because fur was the only way of offsetting Bullock’s large and ill-considered outlay. After only five days in the cave, Bullock wrote: ‘Our discomforts are certainly appalling, almost squalid. Poor Hornby is becoming daily more untidy. His only care is in setting traps, cutting up meat, and chasing and talking about caribou.’ A few days later he found Hornby ‘too communistic – this rich and poor stuff gets me.’ When he tried to argue Hornby into good conservative sense, Hornby would open a book and start reading.
Bullock had hoped for something more romantic; but their longest continuous period in the cave was a month – and even then there were interruptions, usually at five-day intervals, when Hornby through restlessness or in self-defence would withdraw to the trapper’s place for a couple of days. Bullock was too inexperienced to travel far alone in winter, and at first kept to the cave as headquarters; but both spent a good deal of time with the trappers. In the cave everything offended Bullock’s fastidious nature like a cold blast on a raw nerve. They argued about the Battle of the Somme, about religion, about money, about table manners, about books, about how to write diaries. Hornby pocket-knife exasperated Bullock. Bullock remonstrated; for a day or two they were ‘not particularly communicative’; but Hornby went on using his knife exactly as before. ‘I loathe skinning foxes on my bed,’ Bullock wrote again. ‘Blood everywhere – sand everywhere –‘ and as a romantic pre-Hemmingway afterthought – ‘Blood and Sand.’ But there was nowhere else. And when Hornby would vanish for a day or two, Bullock would heave a sigh of relief, tidy up the cave, get out his typewriter, and write long self-communing letters that he never posted but once tried to publish. For a time he busied himself with trapping and hunting – and they were never short of food – but the hallucinatory solitude bothered him. One day he contemplated suicide because he could find no shadow on the snow. His humiliation was complete. From January onwards, whenever he was alone in the cave, his apathy increased, his attention relaxed, he slept for dangerously long periods.
Once in the middle of December Hornby collapsed outside the cave, either from poisoning or from a heart attack. Bullock stumbled over him in the dark, dragged him into the cave, and nursed him for two days and nights expecting him to die. Then Hornby sat up and demanded food and never referred to the incident again. Twice Hornby went out to Reliance for stores and ostentatiously neglected to bring back the meteorological instruments Bullock wanted. At Christmas, Hornby left Bullock alone in the cave. Wood ran out; Bullock wrote some long heroic passages in his diary and finally, when he found his beard freezing to his sleeping-bag, set off for the nearest trapper’s shack, in a blizzard, led by a dog with a frost-bitten and gangrenous paw. He suffered the crowning insult to his eloquence by surviving the journey. But the dangers were real enough.
The most notorious incident was the arrival of a Mounted Police patrol on All Fool’s Day 1925. On the second trip to Reliance Hornby was asked by Bullock’s hired man whether it was true, as Indian rumour had it, that Bullock was insane. Hornby loved a mystery and had plenty of reason to feel concern for Bullock’s deterioration; he replied impatiently that ‘The police had better come and see for themselves.’ By the time the patrol arrived from Resolution, the days were lengthening out again, the trappers were counting their skins and thinking of pulling out, and Bullock was delightedly busying himself with his cameras. The police were greatly impressed with the squalor of the cave, but after sizing up Bullock and hearing Hornby’s story decided that, although Bullock didn’t seem a very suitable person for Northern travel, he was not dangerously insane.
The police left and the trappers set off for Resolution, and Bullock made a journey alone with dogs – as he had longed to do all winter – to Reliance to settle with his man and say goodbye to his expensive gear now to be abandoned; and injured his back on the return journey travelling through a wet spring blizzard. When he reached the cave the spring thaw was well advanced and the squalor of the cave indescribable. Hornby was burning old clothes for lack of fuel. So they demolished the rickety structure, dumped all the loathsome garbage of the winter into the pit and set it afire. The winter was over, with no solid accomplishment, no genuine heroism. But they had taken 353 white foxes, the skins worth at least $10,000. And they had got through the winter without killing each other.
The journey out was another marvel – of confused purpose and futile hardship. If they were to take the Thelon route to the east – as Hornby was determined despite the contrary advice of the police – they could only do it safely by travelling light. If they wanted to be sure of the furs, a 600-mile journey through poorly mapped country was whimsical security. But Hornby had not yet made the observations he had promised to make for the Government, and Bullock had not yet filmed the musk-oxen – his last shred of self-respect: and these jobs could only be performed on the Thelon. So they settled for the Thelon. Through the early days of May they eyed the fickle weather, trying to keep their smouldering tempers under control, while they sorted and weeded out their accumulation of gear and skins, and threw away whatever they could – including much food – and still could not get their load much below a ton. At two-thirty on the morning of 12 May they finally set off with all this, and two canoes, precariously mounted on one toboggan, four dogs and two men hauling; and pulled their hearts out, packing and double-packing and manhauling, to shift it all two miles in that first day.
The Hanbury River – the northern branch of the Thelon – starts as an imperceptible current running northerly through a vertiginous confusion of lakes and standing water east of Artillery Lake. Hornby knew that once they were into the Hanbury they would have a straight run – except for portages – into the Thelon. Instead of taking the classic northerly route into the Hanbury, he decided to travel due east until he struck Campbell Lake (which is actually much father to the south) and pick up the Hanbury from there. He had no accurate map. One of Hornby’s most endearing qualities – and his most dangerous – was his bland disregard for brute fact. His favourite reply to an insuperable difficulty was ‘What does it matter?’ Now that the thaw had started, and the ice was not out of the lakes, he would travel by sled at night when the ground and snow would be frozen. He reckoned that they could make 200 miles in five days. There were obstacles to this spirited plan: their prodigious load, Bullock’s injured back, the lack of night-frost, then a very heavy fall of wet snow. Their progress was pitifully slow. And when they struck what they thought was Campbell Lake, having travelled fifteen miles in twelve days, they were completely lost for a fortnight; and in any case the condition of the lake and the land prevented travel of any sort. Hornby, reconnoitring far to the North, eventually found the Hanbury by the simple expedient of dropping bannock crumbs in the water. Once into the Hanbury they made better time. But when, at one o’clock on the morning of 23 July, they ran out of the Hanbury into the Thelon, they had travelled 150 miles in seventy-two days; and even this speed had been achieved by taking unnecessary risks in running rapids single-handed in laden canoes. They still had 400 miles to go.
At the junction of the Hanbury and Thelon they stopped for a few days to photograph musk-oxen and ran through a large caribou migration. Refreshed and well-fed, they made forty miles the first day under way. Then Bullock nearly amputated several toes with an axe. For a day he kept going, then collapsed. Hornby, who had borne the burden of most of the portaging, was in nearly as bad condition as Bullock. In the summer heat their stock of meat suddenly went bad. Two of their dogs had run away; one had had to be shot; now they shot the last one. Somehow they rallied and went on, sometimes living off trout and ‘poor’ caribou, but most of the time feeble and half-starved. Two or three times they narrowly escaped drowning in the rapids. But towards the end of the journey they travelled 260 miles in twenty-six days on thirteen of which bad weather prevented them from moving.
On the afternoon of 27 August they pulled out of the Thelon into Baker Lake and sighted the cluster of buildings to the north-east – the Révillon Frères post. According to Northern custom, they tidied themselves as best they could, and paddled across to the post. Somebody at the landing stage, startled by the bewhiskered filth of the two men in the canoes, asked where the hell they had come from. “Edmonton,” said Hornby.
From their winter-quarters to Baker Lake they had travelled 535 miles in 107 days: a feat of endurance perhaps, an act of folly certainly, but not a notable journey by any rudimentary standard of judgment or skill. The only remarkable thing about it is that they survived. As a final merry quip of fortune, they found that all the furs, imperfectly cleaned in the dark cave and in the rapid thaw, had spoiled on the journey and were worthless. With remarkable prescience Bullock had written his epitaph on this journey after only a few days in the cave on the Barrens: ‘With Hornby one travels by hook or crook. The greatest distance with the minimum of comfort, a maximum of energy expended with often least accomplished.’
Hornby’s parting shot – an aside written in his characteristic elliptical style in his report on the caribou written in Ottawa in November 1925 – is much more light-hearted: ‘The day of hardship and exploration in the Arctic regions is now a thing of the past. One can realise what difficulties and hardships were to be met with [in earlier days]. Now the routes are mapped, transportation is easy and instead of months it is only a question of days [to get anywhere]. Previously it was the explorer [who travelled this country], now it will be the American tourist.’ ‘I intend,’ he said, ‘to retire from active life and become only an arm-chair critic’; and because his father was mortally ill he returned to England at the turn of the year.
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Hornby still had hankerings for ‘one more trip.’ He had discussed this with Bullock; but by the time they had extricated themselves from Hudson Bay, made Newfoundland in a little trading vessel, and parted in Ottawa Bullock had had enough. Apart from anything else, Bullock had lost all his money and Hornby had scarcely reached England when the first of a series of cables from Bullock arrived demanding funds. Some authorities have said that if it had not been for these cables, Hornby would never have gone into the North again; that he went back to ‘settle’ with Bullock. But even when he went back to Canada he made no attempt to find Bullock (who was then in New York in straitened circumstances). All the evidence shows that he could never have come to rest in Nantwich – or indeed anywhere else in ‘civilisation.’
He seemed now, after so many solitary travels, to want a companion; and he found an eager and devoted hero-worshipper in his young cousin Edgar Christian, a boy of sixteen who had just finished school and was thinking of emigrating to South Africa. His father, a distinguished professional soldier, readily agreed that to make a journey into the North with Hornby would be a priceless opportunity for the boy before coming to grips with the troubled world of the middle twenties. In the winter of 1926 Hornby’s reminiscent talk – one imagines – flowed compellingly. He would sit forward, at once alert and indolent, gazing into the fire; and you would swear he was sitting by a campfire on one of the eastern islands of Great Slave Lake. He talked perhaps about the spell of the Barren Ground and of the Upper Thelon; of how few men had really penetrated beyond the timber, and how – though he had seen only threads of that country – he knew it perhaps better than any man. He talked about the fur-animals, and the lakes and rivers teeming with great salmon; and how the caribou at migration moved in solid bands of thousands – millions perhaps – their eyes glazed, their hooves grinding the ice to fine powder, the air shaking with their bemused grunting, crowding each other to death in the rapids and at shallow river-crossings. Some day he would write a book about the country and his travels and all he had learned: it was to be called In the Land of Feast or Famine. He had made several starts at it and now had much of the material collected. More interesting things kept interrupting this intention; but this winter on the Thelon he was going to take things easy, and writing his book would give him something to do in the dark hours.
What Colonel Christian could not know – and there was probably nobody in England who could have told him – was that Hornby, for all his fabulous experience and rhapsodic talk, was an extremely dangerous man to travel with. He refused to plan; he had never shown any organizing ability or forethought; the trip with Bullock shows that his humour could run to grim, even cynical, extremes; his judgment, focused continually upon the present, was seriously distorted because he rejected – as manifestations of the ‘civilisation’ he loathed – everything that thought, analysis, skill, and purpose could add to the purely animal business of Northern living. He had never yet had any clear purpose to give shape or direction to his activities. And although this may in some way be admirable, as an absent-minded return to primordial existence, it was a precious enough thread to hang anybody else’s life on. His earliest travels are the potterings of a man in love with the country; after the war an element of melodrama enters; the Bullock episode was macabre comedy. Everything shows that Hornby was a gentle-hearted man who shrank from the suffering of animals and would not willingly have harmed anybody he loved or respected. Yet he was intensely self-preoccupied, isolated in a world which was nobody else’s world. And the next and final episode was tragedy – a tragedy of which Hornby was the instrument but in which Edgar Christian was the protagonist.
In April 1926 Hornby landed in Montreal with Edgar Christian. Both were in holiday mood and Edgar wrote home to say that in Montreal they had met a man who told him he was ‘with one of Canada’s best and anybody who is with J. Hornby can never go wrong.’ What Edgar did not understand, because his admiration would not let him see it, was that Hornby’s friends were appalled at the prospect of Hornby taking the boy into the North. It was one thing for Hornby to survive incredible privations alone: the addition of one ineffective hunter to the party could destroy the infinitesimal margin that Hornby always operated on. In Ottawa, in Toronto, in Winnipeg, in Edmonton, wherever they stopped on their trip westward – different people tried to dissuade Hornby and warn Christian. But neither would listen. The record of one of these warnings is preserved. ‘In the spring of 1926 Hornby cabled me in Ottawa that he was on his way and presently arrived with Edgar Christian. He was full of plans to winter far out on the Barrens where no trapper had been before and trap white foxes. I tried to persuade him that this was a summer breeding ground but not a winter range, that there would be no fish in the Thelon and that the caribou pass through in the autumn and late spring only. He did not argue but put on his puckish grin: he knew better. Christian resented any question of Jack’s knowledge and ability. Again in Edmonton we talked about it, then I left for the North. I was at Fort Chipewyan when Hornby and the two boys arrived by canoe. I tried to persuade him to join me with Christian on my exploration of the Upper Dubawnt, but Hornby was determined to make a final journey down the Thelon and then give up northern travel.’
In Edmonton Hornby had run into Harold Adlard, a retired England Air Force man of twenty-six whom Hornby had declined to take on the Bullock trip. Adlard had never been farther north than Onoway. But now Hornby said he would redeem his promise and take him into the North. Edgar was perhaps jealous at first but also a little cheered that there should be another greenhorn in the party besides himself. From Fort Smith he wrote home final words of encouragement. ‘Don’t get worried about me because I am as safe as a house with Jack.... I have seen lots of trappers who have been on the trail with Jack and many won’t go again because he is too tough, although they like [him] more than any man. I shall be with someone whose name runs through Canada with highest praise which makes me feel absolutely satisfied about the future.’
And they disappeared into country where there were not even Indians.
* * * * *
One of the last men to see the party travelling eastward in their big square-sterned canoe was an Artillery Lake trapper named Jim Cooley. He endears himself to memory because he always travelled into his trapping country in an impeccable suit of blue serge and a dove-grey Stetson.
“Sure,” he told an Edmonton Journal reporter, “I met him myself near Reliance. It’s quite true that they didn’t have much grub, but then, Jack Hornby could go farther on a diet of snow, air and scenery than a Lizzie can go on twenty gallons of gas... While Hornby is fond of taking chances and does many things that look crazy to the ordinary individual, he has made trips which will be talked about for years around northern campfires. He has reduced the business of living off the country to a science.”
Jim Cooley did not know his man well: he was merely repeating the legend in his own vivacious style. Hornby had reduced nothing to a science. And the story of his last journey is distressingly straight-forward, as we have it in the grim ingenuous record written by Edgar Christian throughout the seven and a half months it took him and his two companions to die of starvation.
For Edgar Christian the traverse of Great Slave Lake was full of wonder. At Reliance they were held up by ice, but presently made their way over Pike’s Portage, into Artillery Lake, and by Hanbury’s route into the Thelon. Hornby knew where he was going: he had chosen the exact spot the year before and pointed it out to Bullock. It was about 300 miles from Reliance, in one of the few sizable stands of spruce timber of the Thelon. But for no intelligible reason he travelled slowly – ‘from laziness’ he said in one of the notes left in a cairn for the Artillery Lake trappers – reached his destination very late in the season and missed the southward migration of caribou that their lives would depend upon. They were late in getting a cabin started, and the temperature was ten below zero before they had finished it. By the end of December their position was becoming desperate: even Edgar Christian could see that.
Without dogs there was no hope of retreating westward or of advancing eastward. Hornby had starved before and was not unduly alarmed. But he was on the move all the time, remorselessly, in all weathers. For many hours at a time he would range the Barrens that lay just beyond the protecting screen of trees, or watch with binoculars from a ridge-top for a sight of caribou. He set traps for animals, and nets for birds; and even at night, in bitter temperatures, he would spend hours clearing and setting and hauling the fishnet through the ice on the river. There seemed no limit to his physical endurance, and he was incorrigibly cheerful. If sheer expenditure of effort, and dogged defiance, could have fed the party, they would have fared handsomely; but Hornby’s rifle seldom killed anything. The others help as best they could. Edgar Christian was no hunter, and once he started to starve could not endure the cold. For lack of caribou their clothing was inadequate. They saved for Christmas dinner a caribou head – a notable Northern delicacy. Thereafter they took little but a few small animals and some fish; never much, never enough to last. Adlard, greenhorn though he was, learned quickly, and soon proved himself a good shot and a tenacious hunter; but he got severely frostbitten bringing in the last caribou they shot early in February and had to keep to the cabin for almost a month; otherwise he might have saved the whole party.
They clawed their way through the first two months of the year. At the end of February Hornby realised that he must make a final effort for caribou before he was completely incapacitated; for his old wounds were now causing him intense pain. They hunted for ten days in the open and took nothing; and when they returned exhausted to the cabin they found the tracks of caribou that had passed near the house. They saw caribou only twice after that, and were too feeble by then to hunt them.
Ever since Christmas Hornby had been behaving as though he understood very clearly how serious their condition was. He had now driven himself beyond even the limits of his own endurance in his efforts to find food. But he continued to make light of the situation and in late March read to his companions part of the diary of the terrible winter of 1920-1 to show that conditions could be even worse and still not be fatal. Christian noted that now, ‘under similar but not severe conditions,’ he could appreciate the meaning of the diary, with its laconic understatements and bleak statements of shocking fact. And Christian’s own diary unwittingly shows that Hornby had been consistently denying himself in order to feed the others.
Killing an occasional bird or fish, and by digging up garbage and old fish-bait thrown out in the fall, they survived March and the year was beginning to turn. But now they were confronted by a new danger. Adlard, who had all along suffered from being shut out of the deepening intimacy between Hornby and Christian, became morose, then menacing, then on the verge of mental collapse. Seventeen days passed without their taking game of any sort. By that time Hornby was dying. For nearly a week Christian and Adlard did what they could for him, which wasn’t much; and Adlard was shocked back into sanity. Hornby told them what he could about how to look after themselves, and how to get out in the spring. In the morning of 16 April he lost consciousness, and died in the evening. His body, sewn in a canoe-sail, was placed outside the cabin door. For three days Adlard devoted himself to Christian’s needs, but exhausted his last reserves of strength, lingered a little, and died two weeks later.
For more than a fortnight Edgar Christian recorded, day by day, the gruesome particulars of his own solitary decline, without a flicker of emotion or self-pity. Long before Adlard died Christian had faced up to his personal predicament. There was no sign of panic. If only his crazy body could assimilate the wretched garbage he grubbed up from the snow, he could hold on indefinitely. His horizon had now shrunk to an apathetic animal search for food and his resolve ‘to pull through and go out to let the world know of the last days of the finest man I have ever known.’
The sunshine was getting warmer; he sat outside in the sun when he could, doing everything possible to regain strength. Soon the birds would be returning; he saw a raven flying north. Then cold weather came again and heavy snow; then the snow thawed. With the terrible remorselessness of a machine running down, his strength ebbed away. One day he discovered to his amazement that he was too weak to carry a rifle out of the house, and thereafter left two loaded rifles outside the door. Some days he had to den up, because of bad weather or sheer weakness; he burned floor-boards and bunk-poles. Then one day he tried to go out and found he could only crawl. For the last eleven days of May the diary was silent. On the 1st of June, five days before his nineteenth birthday, he entered his diary for the last time and ‘made preparations’ – wrote a letter to his father and a note to his mother, placed carefully in the cold ashes of the stove the diary and letters and Hornby’s will and some other letters and records, and left a note on top of the stove. He turned into his bunk and pulled a red Hudson’s Bay blanket over his head. Almost the last words he wrote were: ‘Please dont Blame dear Jack.’
* * * * *
Fourteen months after Edgar Christian died, three geologists canoeing down the Thelon noticed fresh cuttings in the wood by the riverbank. They landed and found the cabin derelict, the two bodies outside, the two loaded rifles by the door, the boy’s body inside. A year later a Mounted Police patrol recovered the letters and diary from the stove, buried the three skeletons beside the cabin and set over them three crosses with initials cut in them, tidied the cabin in case somebody else should need to shelter there, and signed death certificates in quintuplicate. Only two parties are known to have passed the cabin since then.
When the story of Hornby’s death was given to the world in 1929, Northern people, and particularly Hornby’s friends and associates, were profoundly shocked. The publication of Edgar Christian’s diary[1] some years later received, and still receives, the recognition it deserves. But about Hornby, although he is still a living legend, there has been almost a conspiracy of silence and genuine information about him is very hard to come by. One man will allow that Hornby was a lovable man of generous disposition and vivid personality; another will dismiss him as aimless, incompetent, irresponsible, a freak, a myth. Companionable as only an intensely lonely man can be, he had many warm acquaintances, but very few intimates – perhaps one. To his closest friends he could be as infuriating as he was endearing. For the rest, he was a man one met by accident; he moved like a bird of passage, arriving without warning, leaving without apology. With something of an animal’s protective instinct, he was guilelessly ambiguous, would announce a profusion of plans and then invent at the last moment a quite new one. Without deliberate duplicity he would reveal one aspect of himself to one person, to another, another; always withdrawn, devious, unpredictable. Something vivid and fantastic about him disarmed criticism, inspired hero-worship in some, and in others affection; but others, on slight acquaintance, felt only distrust and contempt. The disaster that Hornby’s death involved is a barrier almost insuperable to a sympathetic understanding. Yet the central figure in a myth of a tragedy has a stature and power that not even accurate history can confer; and he stands now with his back to a strong light.
When representations were made to the Committee on Historical Documents in 1931 that some memorial should be erected on the Thelon to commemorate John Hornby’s death there, the suggestion was rejected ‘inasmuch as it was the consensus of opinion that this was not an event of sufficient national importance to receive attention in the manner suggested.’ Which is one way of saying, of Hornby’s life and of his death, in his own most characteristic phrase: ‘What does it matter?’ And what after all would one commemorate, beyond his vivid smile, his crazy generosity, his passionate sense of the integrity of the country, his gay and birdlike inconsequence, his childlike illogical optimism, his astonishing self-confidence, his pitiless endurance, his tragic light-hearted courage in the face of a disaster that he must have known his own levity and irresponsibility had produced, the slow merciless killing of himself to save two lives he knew he could not save? To say that he longed for death and deliberately sought it is to miss the point. He once told Denny LaNauze that he wished he had been born an Indian. And if his philosophy could be crystallised, it would be very simple and straightforward, rather like an Indians – something like this:
In civilisation there is no peace. Here, in the North, in my country, there is peace. No past, no future, no regret, no anticipation; just doing. That is peace.
As long as he could live by himself and to himself it was perhaps an excellent philosophy.