sacrificial fire and salutary ice: exposure, starvation, and the onset of word in canada’s arctic

Sacrificial Fire and Salutary Ice: Exposure, Starvation, and the Onset of Word in Canada’s Arctic

Despite its peculiar beauty and apparent innocence, the Arctic landscape is obdurate,

unforgiving, and otherworldly; its terrain and waterways pose various and considerable dangers,

particularly when the frosts set in. Temperatures plummet to between -28 and -50 degrees

centigrade throughout the long winter season, even in the sub-Arctic regions of Northern

Canada. Distance is difficult to judge given the thinness of the air and the resultant quality of

light, and ready food and fuel sources are scarce. The most thorough preparation and planning

for Arctic travel will fail to account for all meteorological and navigational contingencies.

Compound the hopeless isolation of Arctic landscape with lack of shelter, potential loss of food

and stores, and the immanent risk of exposure and hypothermia that explorers and aboriginal

populations faced, and the experience of arctic exploration is beyond the imaginative ken even of

the peoples who have lived in Northern Canada at length under the security and comfort of

modern civilization. Even after European explorers had learned to listen to the Inuit, and even

now that technology promises to allay the most common threats to survival, the enigmatic

dangers of Northern landscape and meteorology are considerable and immanent.

Because of its dangers and mysteries, the Arctic holds as important a place in the

Canadian imagination as it has historically for western imperialism. It is generally represented as

a place of austere and eerie beauty. Its landscape lies well outside the grasp of European history,

culture, and language, and it threatens an alien and isolated kind of suffering that resist

articulation and meaning. Yet westerners who have experienced the Arctic, in health or in the

throes of an awful death, have attempted precisely that. They have commonly reached out

“Fire and Ice” 2

through word and text—in the form of memoirs, essays, journals, and fiction—to describe the

ineffable Arctic light and landscape, and to render, if not the meaning of the North itself, or of

their suffering, then the awful, aporetic nearness of meaning—and of God—in both.

Writing and Reflecting on Suffering

In the closing essay of Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic, Rudy

Wiebe seeks to convey the meaning and importance of the north in and for his own experience

and imagination, and discovers that it resists ready articulation. He recounts that Aritha Van

Herk, another Canadian scholar and novelist, counselled him to “find the north in [his] own

head” in order to overcome this impasse between the language of description and the supra-

textual nature of his experience. In addition to supplying Wiebe with the title for his essay (“In

Your Own Head” 113), Van Herk’s suggestion seems also to have informed A Discovery of

Strangers: Wiebe’s fictional account of the experiences of Robert Hood and the first Franklin

expedition overland to the Arctic coast (1819-1822) which occupies the latter part of this article.

Like the blinded Robert Hood on the morning of his death (Discovery 249), Wiebe—ascetic,

contemplative, and alone somewhere on the Arctic landscape—writes of being “all eyes and no

sight” (Playing Dead 113). But where Hood, starving, is saturated with texts “in his own head”

(Discovery 244), the robust Wiebe claims to be “steadily rendered more and more word-less”

(Playing Dead 113).

John Moss, moving along the Mackenize River in the Deh Cho region of Canada’s

northwest, has also “reached beyond words; through the rhythm of exhausted muscles,” and has

“become part of northern landscape in ways no text, apparently, can apprehend” (41-42). Such

paucity and poverty of attempts to “write the Arctic [landscape] down” are consequences of an


imaginative stupor generated by the place itself. Says Moss, “The more time I spend in the

Arctic, the less sure I am about what I imagine it to be” (41). Of course, Moss’ and Wiebe’s

claims that language fails to figure in their experiences of the Arctic contradict in kind the

“word-less” experiences and states they seek to describe. Doubtless they cannot help themselves

in their attempts at description, being men of letters: articulation, even the articulation of silence,

is a vocational imperative. Indeed, it seems that when Moss and Wiebe write of being “beyond

words” at times in the arctic, both must identify the state of wordlessness as the core of their

experience in the north, as the only thing they can put into words, since its latitude and landscape

evade apprehension in language.

Take them at their words, and we must still make a distinction between the reasons for

Robert Hood’s textual saturation, as Wiebe imagines it, and this shared wordlessness or textual

transcendence. The journals of arctic explorers differ from literary encounters with Arctic

landscape because of the acute suffering and correlative immanence of death endemic to the

former, and the relative safety and tranquillity of the latter. Wiebe’s contemplation is a peaceful

one, gathered in a ruminatory and meditative space unhindered by suffering. Moss, too, is

“beyond words” only in the vital, delicious exhaustion of the endurance athlete, for this is what

he has come to find:

You do these things, extend yourself to the limits of what the mind and muscle will

endure, because there, while there, boundaries bend, borders blur. This is not a question

of transcendence through mortification of the flesh. It is an honouring of the body as

landscape, for the endurance athlete becomes the thing being done, becomes the

landscape of its doing. It is not denial but affirmation. Transcendence, yes, but through


the extension of personality, not its abnegation. (64-65)

In this account, Moss experiences his own body in a positive, life-affirming way. Northern

landscape is almost incidental once he enters the “landscape” of his body. In the moment of

agony, he is satiated and not terrified because he knows he is safe, well-equipped against the

perils of the moment, and not alone.

Compare that moment with another, far from the Arctic tundra, where the possibility of

death is real. Moss, drowning in the first leg of the Ironman triathlon off Kailua, Hawaii, begins

“to compose a letter to [his] high school gym teachers” (81). The act of composition forces him

back up to the surface for another two kilometres, and continues to serve and feed him as he

cycles and runs until he moves beyond its reach, his body psychologist and pharmacologist both,

his mind “[h]overing between focussed concentration and manic contemplation.” But even then

he continues “[r]unning on [clichés,]” still needing words to stave off the danger of collapse and

of the water still in his lungs (82). Here Moss becomes, not part of a landscape, but the writer of

a text resistant to the exhaustion that would otherwise claim him. And in this experience, Moss

has more in common with the dying explorer than he ever could in the relative safety of mere

exertion. The immanence of death, it seems, breeds a textual solemnity, a yearning for speech or

writing that will make spiritual and moral sense of the conclusion of a life when all physical

sense is compromised by suffering, when the mind “hover[s] between focussed concentration”

on the body’s survival, and “manic contemplation” of its death.

Articulate Death: The Journal of Edgar Christian, Adventurer


Starving on the Upper Thelon River1 in the summer of 1927, Christian favours

concentration over contemplation. By his own account, his first task is to survive, even though

dreadfully alone, for he is “determined to pull through and go out to let the world know of the

last days” of his cousin Jack Hornby, “the finest man I have ever known and one who has made a

foundation for me to build my life upon” (Christian 107). Such a telling—such a text—would

contradict the apparent meaninglessness of their tragedy. Indeed, long before Hornby’s death,

Christian and Harold Adlard had listened to Hornby read from an old diary in which he

recounted an old hardship under circumstances similar to their own. The diary made them “fully

appreciate the meaning of it all” (90).

Sensing the nearness of his death, Hornby had “talked to [Christian and Adlard] as to

what should be done” in a tender and stoic execution of stewardship (101, 103; my emphasis).

That instruction confirms the principle of articulate suffering, becoming now a kind of articulate

death, for it is the discharge, not only of a responsibility or accountability, but also of the

accumulated wisdom and knowledge of a life, an explanation of self. Hornby leaves words to

speak and act for him. A few days later, Christian adopts that same stoic impulse and desire for

coherence by recounting the progress of his own starvation. On May 7th, having already survived

his companions by at least three days, Christian writes,

I write my thoughts down just now while I think about it all, and explain my day’s actions

and reasons for such . . . I awoke at 8 a.m. having slept well. I felt much better, but to my

surprise I was as thin as a rake about my rump, and my joints seemed to jerk in and out of

position instead of smoothly. This I believe to be exactly the same thing as happened to poor

1 The Thelon River runs west and east to Hudson Bay, and straddles the boundary between the Northwest


Jack and Harold. (117)

With disturbing clarity and intimacy, Christian chronicles the emaciation of his body and finds

hope in doing so: “I write all this down as I think it is of importance seeing how suddenly Harold

and Jack went ill, but I must stick to my guns and endeavour to cure myself now” (118).

However optimistic and stoic his tone, he discovers that packed away in the sequence of his

observations is an awareness of the encroachment of death. He concludes that the degeneration

of his bones is the problem of most serious consequence. This attentive and pragmatic curiosity

helps him manage the psychological effects of the reality and immanence of death, a death to

which he gives meaning by making a study and a text of its impact on his body.

The language of that text is increasingly spare and pointed, and suggests that neither

Christian nor his companions ever gave way to madness, or even despair. On at least two

occasions, Christian reminds himself to “make preparations” for coming death in as matter-of-

fact a way as we might scratch a list of our daily tasks (my emphasis):

May 17th

Another bad day, no fine weather, could not move out to get wood so eventually cut bed-

pole to burn. If I cannot get grub tomorrow must make preparations.

9 a.m. [June 1st?] Weaker than ever. Have eaten all I can. Have food on hand but

heart peatering ? [sic] Sunshine is bright now. See if that does any good to me if I get out

and bring in wood to make fire tonight.

Make preparations now.

Territories and Nunavut a mere 200 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle.


Got out, too weak and all in now. Left things late. (127, 129)

Recognizing that he will not make it out after all, and still desiring to absolve Hornby by his own

witness, Christian writes a letter to his father, dated May 31st, in which he downplays Hornby’s

responsibility (139). To his mother, Christian writes, “Feeling weak now can only write a little

sorry left it so late. . . . Please don’t Blame [sic] dear Jack” (139).2 Then, likely within the next

few hours, Christian crawls to the stove, places his diary, letters, and some of his friends’

documents in the stove to keep them safe until discovered, and indicates their presence there by

leaving an almost illegible note on the stove:

Who . . .

Look in

Stove. (4)

Christian’s remains were discovered in his bunk; he had pulled both blankets over his head in a

final, doubtless exhausting, act of dignity. Indeed, each of his final acts, written or performed, is

excruciatingly dignified and thus excruciatingly “textual,” pointing to a desire to win through his

suffering with humanity, even if his body failed, thus to give serenity and meaning to his death

and the deaths of his friends. His final acts write him for us just as painstakingly and movingly as

the journal and letters to which they pointed.

Edgar Christian’s is a unique case, his journal a unique text because it allows us access to

a strategy of focus in the midst of incredible suffering and encroaching death unchanged by

edition or later reflection. The journal and Christian’s moving letters home stand for that life he

2. This letter may have been written on June 1st as part of his “preparations.” Note the correspondence between his final “Left things late” and the apology to his mother: “sorry left it so late” (139).


hoped to build. Their preservation was for him an objective which in turn seems to have

preserved him from annihilation of self under the incredible physical and psychological duress of

his starvation and agonizing death. He wrote through fever, delirium, and the anguish of

suffering and loneliness in an obstinacy of Being, facing and describing bravely the physical and

mental exhaustion in order to “pull through” them. The text he left behind is what it is without

apology, hypothesis, or recursive synthesis, and is all the more haunting because it is undeniably

his, and is undeniably true. When articulated, the experience of suffering, and even of death,

becomes its own sense.

Sense and Revision: John Richardson and Official Reason

The first Franklin Expedition moved north by river and portage from Fort Chipewyan to

the “Everlasting Ice” (Coronation Gulf of the Polar Sea) through what is now known as Canada’s

Northwest Territories, tribal lands of the Dene First Nation named “Deh Cho” by them for its

“many waters.” In addition to his English crew of surveyors, Franklin took with him a team of

Acadian voyageurs, a Mohawk porter named Michel Terohaute, and for part of the journey, a

group of Tetsot’ine (Yellowknife) men and women to provide the explorers with food and

clothing. In the summer of 1821, after a long winter encamped below Dogrib Rock along the

Yellowknife River, Franklin insisted—against the better judgement of the Tetsot’ine—that if

they travelled fast and light, his crew could complete the final leg of the expedition and return to

their winter camp before the first snows arrived. Underestimating both the distance and the

weather, they were caught in early September by the onset of winter, and soon found themselves

exhausted, starving, and without hope of rescue. Midshipman George Back, the fittest of the


men, was ordered on ahead with their interpreter to the Dogrib encampment for food and

supplies while Franklin and a few others struggled on. Some of the voyageurs had already died,

and the three remaining English crew members waited near the shores of Starvation Lake, too

weak to continue. Midshipman Robert Hood died or was killed at this camp, as was the Mohawk

porter Michel, this last at the hand of John Richardson, the expedition’s surgeon.

John Richardson’s account of the expedition, a journal turned official report that helped

provide the detail and framework for Wiebe’s novel, A Discovery of Strangers, is generically

quite different from Edgar Christian’s journal (see Houston, Arctic Ordeal).3 Richardson sought

to place a politically responsible meaning on the losses sustained by the Franklin Expedition, one

that would justify the expedition itself, and absolve its English members of either shame or poor

judgement. Presented as a journal and a narrative intermittently, and doubtless consisting in the

main of entries written and dated on the terrible trail, Richardson’s account of the Franklin

Expedition shows clear signs of systematic revision. Take the entry of September 29th, for

example. Richardson writes a lengthy account of his attempt to erect a safety line for the canoes

3. Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s memoir of the failed Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole is also an interesting contra-text. Like young Christian, Robert Falcon Scott, the leader of the expedition, died of starvation and hypothermia. Like Christian, he wrote his final words homeward. Both men reached out, “across the ineluctable divide, to connect the places of their heart, the times of their life, with the moment of their suffering and death” (Moss 78). Scott’s expedition was organized in order to demonstrate English mettle, part of a race to the South Pole, and undue pressure was put on him and his men to reach that goal and return under any conditions. They reached the Pole only to discover that the Norwegian Roald Amundsen had been there a month before, and, late as it was in the polar season, the Scott party met with death on the return trip. They were praised at home for their “unflinching” courage and grace in the face of a prolonged and inglorious suffering and death. Cherry-Garrard, the survivor of an earlier expedition across Ross Island (1911) which also faced exposure and starvation, was the member of Scott’s base team who led the search for the bodies. His account of both expeditions repudiated that praise, calling the journey “superfluous,” regarding the loss of the expedition’s “best men” shameful and meaningless (543). In the final chapter of his memoir, Cherry-Garrard begs better sense and preparation for other such endeavours: “I do not suppose I shall ever go south again before I go west;” he writes, “but if I do it will be under proper and reasonable conditions. I may not come back a hero; but I shall come back none the worse” (549). The only meaning Cherry-Garrard found in the sacrifice was the meaning he gave it himself, in the form of criticism and warning against putting anything above the value of human lives.


by swimming across the icy Obstruction rapid, noting only that after his near drowning and

intense exposure he had recovered “tolerably in the course of the evening,” except that he lost

feeling in the left side of his body by virtue of the fire’s heat, and would not recover his strength

on that side “for five months afterwards” (142-43). The stoicism of his language is almost

Gilbert and Sullivanesque in moments like this: He is an Englishman! It belies the heroism and

the horror of the experience, and says nothing about the already emaciated condition of his body.

His is a very tidy and very tasteful version of events.

In addition to these moments of suppression and nearly inhuman composure, which may

or may not have been written on site, it is clear that Richardson revised certain entries and parts

of entries after the ordeal and offered additional commentary by way of explanation and acute

eloquence, conscious of his readership, and overwriting in part his actual mental condition

during those days. On October 7th, a date which marks the beginning of the most desperate

period of the expedition’s return to camp, Richardson interrupts his journal by indicating that the

next few entries have been consolidated into an official report, projecting the inclusion of the 9th

through the 29th. Here are a few passages indicative of later revision (my emphasis):

[Michel4 reported] that he found a wolf which had been killed by the stroke of a deer’s

horn, and had brought a part of it. We implicitly believed this story then, but afterwards

became convinced from circumstances, the detail of which may be spared, that it must

have been a portion of the body of (J.B.) Belanger or Perrault. (October 11th; 150-51)

4. Michel Terohaute. His relationship with the explorers was tentative at best, and Richardson casts suspicion of murder and cannibalism on him in this passage. In Discovery, Wiebe suggests that Hood and Michel were particularly antipathetic, perhaps because of a rivalry for Greenstockings, and that Michel might have figured prominently as a physical and psychological threat to Hood in his last hours.


At this period we avoided as much as possible conversing upon the hopelessness of our

situation, and generally endeavoured to lead the conversation towards our future

prospects in life. The fact is, that with the decay of our strength, our minds decayed, and

we were no longer able to bear the contemplation of the horrors that surrounded us.

Each of us, if I may be allowed to judge from my own case, excused himself from so doing

by a desire of not shocking the feelings of others, for we were sensible of one another’s

weakness of intellect though blind to our own. (October 18th; 153)

[I]mmediately upon Michel’s coming up, I put an end to his life by shooting him through

the head with a pistol. Had my own life been threatened, I would not have purchased it by

such a measure; but I considered myself as intrusted [sic] also with the protection of

Hepburn . . . . I have dwelt in the preceding part of the narrative upon many

circumstances of Michel’s conduct, not for the purpose of aggravating his crime, but to

put the reader in possession of the reasons that influenced me in depriving a fellow-

creature of life. (October 23rd; 156-57)

The evidence of Richardson’s editorializing in these selections is three-fold. First, he

implies that his perspective in time of the events his diary narrated had changed, assigning the

event and the adjustment of his view of the reality of that event, which occurred “afterwards,” to

the same date (October 11th). While it is possible that Richardson and his fellows learned the

truth about Michel’s meat offering that same day, it is unlikely given their condition and

movements as Richardson recorded them. They would not find Belanger’s and Perrault’s bodies,

nor evidence of foul play, for some days. Second, the entry dated October 18th refers to the


“decay of mind” which accompanied starvation and exposure, and yet Richardson’s prose

exhibits the opposite of decay: a real profundity of insight and analysis, and a careful, reason-

making eloquence. Even those passages I have attributed to the unrevised portions of the journal

exhibit this degree of composure, and suggest what must have been a heroic effort at self-control

and on-going self-revision. Third, Richardson refers to his reader as a rhetorical reality, and to

the diary itself as a “narrative,” in the language of a reasoned justification—hardly the tone and

control of a man whose mind had “decayed,” whose intellect had “weakened,” and who fully

expected to die on the tundra.

The sense and apparent control of Richardson’s “narrative” seems artificial in contrast to

the awful presence achieved by Edgar Christian’s journal. Christian’s account, while clear, is

punctuated somewhat erratically, and marked by grammatical lapses indicative of exhaustion and

the need for a heroic focus to write at all. Richardson’s is a much easier and more studied prose,

his occasional lapses a kind of shorthand typical only of the relation of more mundane facts or

information. But these differences are easily understood. Richardson survived with his account,

and was bound by duty and manners to ensure its coherence and appropriateness (see also

Discovery 247). His is a different kind of accounting—not as harrowingly intimate as

Christian’s, but certainly more shocking, for it speaks of cannibalism and murder as surely as it

does camaraderie and tenderness. Unlike Christian’s journal, then, Richardson’s text becomes a

kind of defence against possible public criticism of acts otherwise unspeakable, and Richardson

must reckon for them in print with both God and man.

Robert Hood: A Discovery of Strangeness in Sacrifice

Rudy Wiebe discovers in the story of the expedition important political, cultural, and


metaphysical themes. The opening chapter of A Discovery of Strangers provides a quasi-

allegorical narrative framework of the natural conflict between a silver wolf and a caribou

female, the same wolf Richardson mentions in his journal (see above). The chapter is rich with

significance both in symbolizing the persons and action of the novel itself, and in situating the

history of the expedition within the political purview of the novel itself. The narrative voice,

invented by a white writer known for his sensitivity to aboriginal culture, resonates with colonial

shame and prefers to describe the expedition from a native perspective, male and female, both to

give voice to the lands and peoples swallowed up in the morass of English namings, and to signal

its preference among the English for Robert Hood, who, if he still labored under the myth of

racial superiority, seemed to have read the faces and feelings of the Tetsot’ine with some degree

of wisdom and affection.

As important as this political re-vision may be, Wiebe is able to deal with the very

personal aspects of the expedition as well, in ways that both complicate and redeem the action

and themes of the story. Discovery concerns itself in particular with the relationship between

Hood, son of an English clergyman, and two Tetsot’ine persons: Keskarrah, an elder to his

people, and Greenstockings, his fifteen-year-old daughter. That relationship develops across

cultural, linguistic, and theological boundaries, resulting in the impregnation of Greenstockings

and the harrowing of Hood, who must navigate perils and crises of body and spirit as he moves

inexorably to his death. Indeed, the critical action of the novel is internal, though it plays out

against physical extremes of cold and hunger and distress, with Hood and his companions

struggling to maintain control, not only of their bodies, but of their minds as they experience

exhaustion, exposure, betrayal, and eventual starvation on the arctic tundra north of the Tree-


line.

Wiebe’s sources include the journals of the principal members of the expedition: John

Franklin, John Richardson, George Back, and Robert Hood himself (see Discovery,

“Acknowledgements”). Given his especial interest in Hood’s mental and emotional responses to

people and experiences, Wiebe relied on the journals for dates and locations, and for general

information pertinent to the state of the expedition, including the implication that Hood and

Greenstockings were involved sexually, and that Hood was the probable father of

Greenstocking’s child, a probability he leaves somewhat open. He used the journals to get some

sense of the personality of each character, of the complexities of their relationships to each other,

and of their perceptions of the people whose lands they had claimed for their own purposes. He

also made an extensive scholarly and personal study of Dene history and culture so that he could

imagine and render the expedition and its effects in a fuller and more personal way than a strictly

historical telling could.

In consequence, the novel is extraordinarily complex in its narrative structure, its cultural

perspective, its political purposes, and its mythology and theology. Each of the principal events

and characters is suggested to Wiebe by the journals and cultural histories he read, and is

traceable to them. Not only does this bolster the complexity of the story’s realism, it deepens our

responses to the action, and helps us to endure the intensely imaginative psycho-emotional nature

of the representation of the Tetsot’ine experience of incursive strangeness, and more particularly

of suffering as a textual event.

Combining scraps of Richardson’s account of Hood’s final days with his own cultural

and religious sensibilities, Wiebe writes something of a mystery into Hood’s slow death. For


instance, Richardson refers reverently to their faithful reading of the service, and reports that

“Bickersteth’s Scripture Help was lying open beside [Hood’s] body, as if it had fallen from his

hand, and it is probable that he was reading it at the instant of his death” (“October 20th” 155; see

also Preface to “The Account Drawn up and Transmitted Home” in S. Houston, Ordeal 148).

Wiebe brilliantly takes his cue from Richardson, correlating the service for the dates in

Richardson’s journal with Hood’s behaviour as Richardson observes it, but imagining or

discerning a very different spiritual disposition behind that behaviour. For instance, in a

“sepulchral” voice, Richardson reads of the destruction of Aaron’s sons for “offering strange

fire” on the altar of the Lord (Discovery 234), a passage which serves as the title for the chapter,

and which casts Hood’s final days as penitential and sacrificial alike. Wiebe has Hood think

brokenly of his starvation as a spiritually purgatory fast at odds with his corporeal English duty

to survive, a penitential peace broken by malevolence (in the person of Michel Terohaute) and

meat (225, 234), lending to his suffering a priestly shame and horror.

In keeping with Wiebe’s attempt to represent in text a textually-oriented death, the

rhythm and structures of the novel break down in this chapter. Richardson, Hepburn, and Hood

battle “gathering debilitation” and thus “lose the sequence of morning and evening to the

continual darkness coming steadily on” (234), compromising the integrity of the service they

observe. There is a correlative deconstruction in the sequence and sense of Hood’s thoughts.

Passages from the Bible, fragments from nursery rhymes, schizophrenic and maniacal voices,

and bizarre revelations of language converge in Hood’s mind seemingly at random. Hood

himself drifts in and out of ghastly and fractured consciousness, insinuating himself into the

narrative perception in stilted measure. All of this lends itself to disorder, but Wiebe manages to


infuse the narrative with an ascetic sense, a Northern precision of sight in chaotic blindness,

imagining an awakening of mystical truth in a razed mind so crowded with thought that the

collusion of horror and remorse, of hope and despair, coherence, argument, and finally

accountability are as inevitable as death.

Here is one example: “Prayers stagger through Robert Hood, like the footprints that

waver away from him through the riven snow of the tundra what may befall me this day O God I

know not but I know that nothing can he can no longer walk” (220). Fragmented as the prose is,

every phrase belongs to every other of its kind as indicated by the font: “Prayers stagger . . . like

the footprints,” “like the footprints [on] the tundra . . . he can no longer walk,” the narrator tells

us; and in Hood’s italicized prayer, “nothing can” redounds upon “befall me this day.” As

throughout the novel narrative perspective has refused to remain static, the distinction between

narrative voice and Hood’s own thoughts is also compromised to effect. For instance, when

Michel returns suddenly on October 9th, the narrator exclaims, encomiastic in Hood’s stead and

already affiliated with Hood’s consciousness, that “Michel Terohaute! . . . is like God indeed!”

(221). This transgressive narrative voice has moved beyond a very subtle editorial

omniscience—reflected in its flexibility of perspective, and its antipathy for anything but

intelligent cultural sensitivity—and fully into the mind of the protagonist, as if Wiebe means to

suggest that since Hood cannot write his own narrative of his last hours, his narrator has helped

with this imagined one.

Had it been attributed directly by the narrator to Hood, this praise of Michel would have

carried within it a profound contradiction. In a sense it still does. For Hood especially, Michel

Terohaute was the face of profound evil, the breaker of his peace (225), and their mutual


antipathy had grown with Hood’s affection for Greenstockings and her interest in him, an

antipathy marked by Back and Greenstockings early on (55, 73), and exploding when Michel

“steals” Greenstockings from Hood’s gentle and ultimately useless embrace (200, 208). And yet

on the verge of death, Hood can only initially see Michel as a hunter: a bearer of food, power,

and hope (221). The very strength that robbed him of Greenstockings may give him life yet. It is

Richardson the clear thinker, not Hood, who marks the absence of Michel’s voyageur

companions, and thus revives suspicion of Michel in the narrative and draws attention to the

likelihood that he plans first to use the English for their skill to return to familiar ground, and

then to kill them and secure his own freedom (222). Yet because the narrative voice praises and

celebrates Michel’s “God-like” power, as indicated by the normal font and absence of quotation

marks, the duality of Hood’s feeling is preserved along with the distinction between his awe/love

and fear/hatred for and of Terohaute. The narrator expresses the awesomeness of Michel in order

to allow his presentation of Hood’s thoughts to focus on his fear of Michel and God alike.

Hood’s consciousness is eventually troubled by Michel’s presence, but beyond rational

suspicion and observation, and principally through symbolic association with a variety of texts:

fragments of verse, Richardson’s readings from the Old Testament, and memories of wise

sayings and expressions of love—things that trigger his hatred, and that manifest the total

textuality of Hood’s illness. Hood is preoccupied, not with Michel’s threat to his safety, but with

his own superiority to Michel—of Michel’s need for him. Before death has become immanent

for Hood, when hope still writhes in the face of it, he slips into the colonizer’s madness for

control:

they should freeze [his buffalo robe] solid in water like the Esquimaux and say it is a sled


and harness Michel like any black dog and he [Hood] will write out the calculations, fill

all the pages he still has, they are all somewhere safe, pages with numbers and formulas

and the exact mathematical sequences of magnetic declension he knows better than the

beat of his blood, numbers upon and over numbers until Dogrib Rock is forced to emerge

out of those precise numbers . . . . (229)

The pen and paper which Hood has carried with him are his only instruments of meaningful,

masculine action outside of the intimacy of Keskarrah’s tent (51), and seem to him, together with

the compass that divines the all-important numbers, to make him the master of even this

unknowable and unfathomable space without names, without proportion, without apparent end.

The landscape itself, he thinks, will be tamed only as it is inscribed, as if the numbers and words

of his figuring made it not only traversable, but made it in the creative sense as well: ex nihilo,

ex mentis, ex numeris.

And yet, were he able to write it, that master-text, like the daily scriptural service

Richardson dutifully observes and desperately clings to, would be blown about in the breeze and

lay ineffectual across Hood’s eyes. The only text that is left to him in Wiebe’s narrative is the

working out in memory and soul sensations of portent, passages of chastisement, and revelations

of salvation that urge him to trace a line backward to his transgression and forward into the

ineffable landscape of death. Fear, hatred, and the impulse to subjugate the landscape and its

peoples—like love, awe, and devotion, and weakness, sin, and regret—are but constituents of an

experience written in the heart and soul, and in the ragged, wasted flesh of his starved body. The

colonial impulse washes away and is in turn washed over by other impulses, memories, and

revelations.


Searching out a place for Michel in the fever of his memory, sucking on the meat Michel

has brought miraculously to them5, Hood remembers ravens, and “still [able to] speak with some

precision,” breaks in on the silence of the lost service and recites Elijah’s salvation from hunger

(223). And here Elijah becomes an explicit and studied symbol of starvation and sacrifice alike

as one delivered of the Lord from the first, and empowered to call down the fire of heaven in the

administration of the second (see 1 Kings 17-2 Kings 2). The association is both ironizing and

sanctifying. Hood recognizes his close temporal tie to Elijah, right down to the raven Michel

claims to have discovered, and yet is incredulous of his own merit, and of the merits of sacrifice

and deliverance. From Elijah, Hood moves to Daniel’s companions in the fire—three of them

plus one, as are Richardson, Hepburn, Hood, and Terohaute—and to himself and his companions

in a fire of Hepburn’s making (224; see Daniel 3). Here Terohaute stands for Elijah (ravens) and

for the Lord (How like a god!”), and thus Hood and the other English for the pagan priests

burned in Elijah’s miraculous offering, and for Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego saved in and

by a very different fire. Wiebe’s text, then, evokes both sacrifice and delivery, and links them as

the textual grammar of Hood’s experience.

In the narrative proper, these associations and allusions are “scraps of memory,” linked

by their usefulness as scriptural symbols of Hood’s temporal and spiritual condition, and made

profane by their corruption in playfulness and contextual deconstruction. A day later, Hood still

cannot remember except with great labour who Michel is, which indicates that the association of

Michel with Elijah and the ravens is not rooted in the real past, but rather in the location of

Hood’s mind in the textual past. Hood seeks to place Michel in that past amid scraps of prayer—

5 Meat from a raven, Michel protests in the novel, not from “brother wolf,” as Richardson recorded.


which feel at times like habitual interjections more than invocations of God’s power—and fails

to do so (224). He remembers Michel’s hate for him, but not its reason, and deduces that Michel

is once more, by a feint of mercy, seeking to “destroy his peace,” to recall by the “renewed

sacrilege of EAT” (later his English duty; see 234) some other broken feast—namely the

sacrament of the Lord’s supper, of which Hood is unworthy by his own tortured and distracted

reckoning (225, 227).

In a sudden collision of texts, Michel becomes Michael, Robert becomes Robin from a

scrap of childhood verse (little Robin Redbreast), but as distracted as the memory is, it slips an

awareness of danger into Hood’s mind under cover of nonsense—“we will go to the woods says

Michael to Robin” carries menace. In the fever, that sense of danger gives way to joy under

cover of prayer as Hood’s memory turns to Greenstockings, and as he turns her and himself over

to God (227). Wiebe connects the two emotions by finishing an earlier fragment: “nothing can”

no longer turns on “befall me this day” as a fractured and cyclical thought (222). Rather, the

whole is modified to “nothing can happen to me which thou hast not foreseen ruled willed

ordained” (227), which recalls and sublimates the danger to Hood in a statement of faith, and

becomes a prayer for Greenstockings’ safety instead. It is reminiscent, too, of Shadrach,

Meshach, and Abed-nego’s refusal to worship Nebuchadnezzar’s idol: “If it be so, our God

whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, . . . But if not, be it known . .

. that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up” (Daniel

3: 17-18). In Hood’s case, however, the force of the proclamation is tenuous, shrouded in the

memory of prayer and the fever of starvation, and thus subject to corruption. Once this

recollection of texts, persons, and affections is in full swing, Hood is helpless to an absurd


extremity of association, each name a memory, each memory a surprise which “he remembers

and forgets again,” followed closely by the collusion of theology (in the form of hymnal praise

of Christ) and regressive memory of his sin with Greenstockings—an idolatry of his own

making:

The old man blazes in Hood’s memory, branches piled in warm green bedding over his

lodge and under the hides, where smoke drifts up and arms fold him into the warmth of

breasts the apple taste of her nipples, o sweetest sweetest

How sweet the name of Jesus feels

In a believer’s ear

the huge green trees flaming with heat, the great numbering trees! (229)

This string of associations, hinging on visual and gustatory images of “green” and “sweetness,”

moves from the memory of Keskarrah to Greenstockings to Jesus to George Back’s bush fire

along the river (69), perpetuating the symbolic significance of fire as destructive agent, but also

associating Greenstockings with Christ in a profanation of the greater spiritual joy trying to break

in on Hood’s mind.

Here Greenstockings replaces Michel as Hood’s associate divinity, a kind of sainted

Madonna, and the object of his love and concern which concern, removed from sexual intimacy

and the possibility of marriage, removed even from the reality of his own body, carries with it a

certain altruism. As Hawthorne did with Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne, Wiebe makes it

impossible to completely condemn Hood for his feelings and actions, even though his experience

is squarely if fluidly caught up in Christian texts and law. Hood’s tender sensitivity, useless as it


is in a culture of violence, contrasts heroically with that same culture in the sensibilities of

Wiebe’s readers, and allows them to see in Hood’s mental anguish a repudiation of sexual sin.

Wiebe is wise enough to understand that, as for Dimmesdale, sin-consciousness would be a

fundamental and primary aspect of Hood’s experience of memory and Word, so that while

Hood’s obsession with Greenstockings continues to undermine his memory of the Word,

remembering Greenstockings in turn brings him back to prayer and God, and to his awareness of

both the physical and spiritual danger he faces.

Longing to embrace Michel’s back for its warmth—despite the menace and violence the

longing produces—Hood contemplates the flatness of his own form beneath the blanket, the

useless enormity of his feet, and again thinks of Greenstockings body as a “haven,” this time

associated with the heaven of the soul (231). It seems that the conflation of these two

sensibilities—one the hard, lifesaving warmth of Michel’s actual presence, and the other the

memory of Greenstocking’s tender difference and softness, and of her wisdom—draw him back

from the physical danger of real proximity to Michel, and into the tortured truth she represents as

something as distant and real for him as God. And it suggests, too, that Hood’s identity itself is

fractured. The body seeks for warmth and kindness and food, and the mind and soul for a

different kind of peace, a peace threatened by Michel’s presence, and only partially conceived in

memory. Hood’s mind, the wellspring of these textual memories and associations, returns him

over and over to the excruciating attitude of contrition, even as it cannot extricate him from the

beauty of his memories of Greenstockings and their long winter together.

And yet, the memory of Greenstockings’ warmth and beauty takes on a metaphysical

dimension and a quasi-theological function at this point in the chapter. The chaos of association


and reason gives way a little as Wiebe seems to suggest the sanctification of those memories,

despite their profane “strangeness” in relation to Hood’s moral and ethical sensibilities as a

Christian, because they remind Hood of obliquely of a diviner warmth and lead him to a better,

eschatological refuge. The longing to embrace Michel is replaced by means of a revelation—

Greenstockings’ warning about self-mastication—and with the thought of her a hymn breaks

through, and then a prayer: “O God her father our father which art in heaven” (231-33). The

danger of “swallowing himself from that dangerous place in the mouth he has heard of” against

which she had warned him is both literal, with respect to starvation, and symbolic with respect to

the danger Michel poses, and the malevolence of this will, which is hard and natural and godless.

Profane as Hood’s association of Greenstockings with Christ as Word may be, her

“sayings,” told to him “first and indelibly” in a strange tongue, are salutary precisely because

they act as revelations of the natural and unnatural dangers he faces both physically and

spiritually. In this strange landscape, her warnings and instructions carry for Hood the weight of

scriptural authority, and with scripture they serve as an anchor against the dual corruption of his

remorse and peace. For example, in the moment Hood contemplates rejecting Michel’s “meat

offering”—in part because “[g]nawing is impossible,” and in part because he must “‘[f]ast

before, the Lord’”—he recalls a promise that “[t]he ravens and the wolves shall feed thee” (236).

We recognize this as a composite of the Lord’s promise to Elijah (1 Kings 17:4), and the

Tetsot’ine prohibition on eating wolves and ravens as brother creatures, and as creatures that lead

to food. In Hood’s culture, the wolf is a predator, the raven a scavenger, neither animal clean or

noble, and both connected at once to death and the promise of life. The “promise” alludes to

Noah’s prodigal raven, Elijah’s saving ministers, and the “wolves among the sheep” as both a


threat to the Church and as a symbol of millennial peace (Genesis 8:7, Matthew 10:16, Acts

20:29, Isaiah 11:6, 65:25). The two creatures are also linked in the Testaments by the subtly

deconstructive phrases “ravin as a wolf,” and “ravening wolves” (Genesis 49:27, Matthew 7:15).

The “promise,” then, works severally as an expression of Hood’s desire for food, to stave off

“the pain in his head that [has] grown into his stomach, an unfathomable and unuttered

loneliness,” as a reminder of their brotherhood and instrumentality, and as a reminder of

Michel’s predatory and utilitarian menace. It is also followed by a question: Hood “has always

known” that promise, but cannot remember who first made it to him (236). Greenstockings’

teaching has taken on the brightness and salutary intention of prophecy.

Of course, that quasi-sanctification cannot win out against the shame and harrowing of

Hood’s consciousness of having sinned. The fire along the river, the fire in Keskarrah’s tent, are

political and metaphysical symbols for Hood of the fire of his passion and his dim awareness that

the world, too, is on fire: that the English have brought destruction, and more than this that he

has brought destruction and pain on himself and his lover. He burned in passion throughout the

long, cold winter of waiting; he burns now in fever; and doubtless fears that he will burn in

eternal flames, though he resists absolute remorse in the confusion of his associations. Thoughts

of Greenstockings and the child she carries blend with thoughts of her father, their heavenly

father, and even his own cleric father in his theological concept (232-3). He fancies that he shall

return with her and the child he is convinced is his own to England, and show how clean she is in

keeping with his father’s reading of Mosaic laws of postnatal purification (Leviticus 12:2, 5;

Discovery 245). This fantasy is as hollow and impracticable as it is false in its assumptions—the

marriage was forbidden by Franklin and by English law alike (204), and we know that


Greenstockings is hardly a “maid” by Judaeo-Christian standards of chastity, if only by reason of

birth and culture. Yet the fantasy shows how nearly Hood manages to marry his sin with his

religious sense—and how, in the ragged textuality of his starvation and death, Hood confounds

memory, law, and Word. Close on the end of his recitation of those verses from Leviticus, Hood

shouts raggedly to Greenstocking’s absence an injunction that she, too, read of post-natal

purification, and then he faints (246). In Wiebe’s sense of Hood’s debilitated consciousness,

texts of sacrifice, of purgation, and of purification would have figured centrally and, as

Richardson senses, in horribly personal ways (247).

Richardson serves the reader as an anchor to order in the midst of Hood’s madness of

words. Taking his cue from the composure Richardson demonstrated in his journal, Wiebe

represents Richardson as methodically reflective even where deeply sensitive and

compassionate. It is Richardson, for instance, who draws the reader into an awareness of Hood’s

past as Wiebe imagines it in his attempts to understand Hood as a personality so different from

the other Englishmen. Richardson has been reading Leviticus 18, a prohibitive catalogue of

varying kinds of sexual perversion, including incest. His “cathedral solemnity begins to falter” as

he realizes Hood is laughing in macabre and ghastly fashion. “My f-f-father,” gasps Hood by

way of explanation, “never read . . . that . . . vespers!” (243). What the reader notices is the

“cavernous” and “staggered” laughter that threaten to shake Hood apart. But Richardson files

this detail, like so many others, away, and when Hood asks about a Levitical injunction against

uncovering a “daughter’s . . . nakedness, or a son’s?”, Richardson wonders, “what childhood

abomination has Leviticus led this poor boy’s dying memory back into?” (245). This crush of

reason is for Wiebe a complex and admirable quality in Richardson, and so Wiebe extends the


principle of sacrifice even to Richardson’s revisionist consciousness:

In his report he will arrange and edit them properly, as always, so they will make proper

and decent, acceptable sense. . . . Or should he burn his notes? Sacrifice must be made.

Not necessarily blood, but burnt sacrifice most surely. . . . When he is about to die, that

must also be done. Things have taken place that would not be understood properly, . . .

and whoever survives, whoever, must write the acceptable account of what can be

properly reported; and crush, burn his memory. (247-48)

All of Hood’s “heavy, heavy memories that have always pulled him . . . down” (251), all of the

texts with which his “mind is sodden” (244), and all of Richardson’s precious reasons are of a

piece, for they combine as reason, a parade of evidence and impulses that narrow lethargically

down toward a hypothesis, a claim, and a final comprehension of self mustered up into a final

textual act. Hood is bearing down on a sacrificial act—the sacrifice of himself, that unutterable

and “impossible word” (239)—and he must prepare himself for that end by a textual cleansing,

by a washing clean and an anointing of his mind (see Exodus 28:41).

Somewhere in this stream of death Hood awakens, “one unawareness breaking the other[,

h]is mind teem[ing] with inchoate phrases” and his will focuses tenuously on a desire to “find the

exact places, the exact words and every detail of punctuation as they go on and on beyond what

he has or ever will read” (Discovery 248). He is helpless to the flood, groping to find

Richardson’s Bible lain over his face, “blinded by starvation,” and with the “icy paper against his

nose[, he] sees nothing” (237, 249). The expedition’s, the Arctic’s blind prophet, Hood loses all

sense of his body, of where his limbs may lay loose in their joints, of where he ends and begins,

himself a “pencilled calculation so thin it cannot be seen.” But the calculation, however thin, is


still his own. He has something to explain to Michel, and while there is that, there is will and

there is self and there is reason, fragmented as they may be. Words collide again with memories,

and struggling to rise, Hood discovers that the text now in his hands is secondary, that “the small

light rising towards noon” which signals his death, and symbolizes the Resurrection of light and

spiritual Being, “reveals words he does not really need to see, dragging through his mind”: the

promise of death at Michel’s hand, and the greater promise of Christ’s coming as the rising sun

(249).

These texts are motley combinations of Old Testament severity and an almost

inarticulable and inexplicably obstinate hate blown free from several days of curious and

troubling observation of Michel: “what he must explain to the Mohawk very carefully is that he

will not show him how to use the compass!” (249). “Kill” and “will” push themselves forward,

without subject or object, as a final mystery, a kind of cumulative implication that, by refusing to

show Michel how to navigate, Hood is provoking his own death, securing the lives of his

companions, and perhaps seeking to ensure Michel’s death in order to spare Greenstockings of

his violence. He argues with Michel, aggravates him until the Mohawk reminds him of the nine-

month old threat—I will kill you, before you die—and then reaches homeward, half in regret, half

in comfort, inviting his own death as a final act of will: we will go to the woods, says Robin to

Michael. And the anointing he sought comes in the form of the “reassuring solidity of English

steel against his hair,” Michel’s threat losing its menace as Robert embraces it, becoming “as

comforting as a child’s prayer of forgiveness.” Hood “leans back hard into” the threat and the

knifepoint alike, a broken Isaac-Christ on a rude altar of passion and hatred, of fire and ice (251-

52).


Sacrificial Fire and Salutary Ice

Not everyone finds God in pain. Such a discovery requires in part a personal history of or

disposition to religious thinking or practise, a kind of readerly intention to search God out in all

conditions. But the principle is sound; there are certain conditions of suffering, literal “sicknesses

unto death”6 that may require by their extremity and ponderousness a kind of reckoning with

whatever friends, gods, ghosts, or monsters we look for in the dark. Moss argues (in strangely

humanist and Wordsworthian terms) that in the Arctic, outsiders achieve a peculiar kind of

comprehension:

In a secular age, in which it seems imagination is our only access to immortality, sometimes

in the landscape as an emanation of our desire is the absolute stillness of time, which is all

we really wanted after all. Not heaven in a grain of sand, but intimations of our continuity

with lichen crumbling underfoot, the air breaking in thunder, hunger satisfied; not cosmology

but the possibilities of being. For some this is the closest we come to reconciliation with our

understanding of the universe. (125)

He continues:

At night, above the whirling flood, you can see the refusal of God to exist. When you see

nothing between the stars, you see nothing—for a God who created everything ex nihilo, you

would have to see the absolute as an unconditioned absence, everywhere. It is comforting in

time to know there is no God; God’s only hope is human consciousness. (126)

And yet Moss proposes that comprehension in vitality, with a mind bound by its own system of

6. In Kierkegaardian terms, a spiritual sickness and death. In Wiebe’s novel, especially in the chapter “Offering Strange Fire,” the spiritual and the temporal run shockingly together.


reason, as disposed by habit, culture, or force of will to look between the stars just as readily as

another might look to the stars themselves, and see the hand of a Creator who hopes that human

consciousness will seek and find him even closer than the stars. It is when we find ourselves on

the brink of annihilation, pushed well beyond exhaustion into pain, that we might move beyond

culture in a search for truth. Consider Rasmussen on shamanism: “True wisdom is only found far

away from people [and] only through suffering. Solitude and suffering open the human mind”

(Moss 77; my emphasis). It may only be when our “hunger” is not satisfied, our Being

impossibly tenuous, in a moment of reckoning, that truth can break in on us with clarity.

For John Richardson and Edgar Christian, that reckoning takes the form of texts—

reports, letters, journals—arguments and intimacies that afforded them some peace and

sensibility of focus in the moment of death or in the wake of its near-passing. For Wiebe’s Hood,

reckoning is internal and metaphysical at once. His yearning for text is incited by a wordless

acknowledgment that “starvation . . . is eating [him]” (Discovery 238). His fevered mind turns

texts over and over almost at random and yet with a fragmented, brilliant coherence possible

only in fiction. Hood’s is a fantastic death. It is a heroically textual and philosophical event,

necessarily metaphysical since most of his body and mind have degenerated, have become

“ghastly” and “sepulchral” like the others’ (Richardson 161). In this condition he is “sodden”

with biblical and juvenile texts, with memories of things forgotten or never considered,

memories “rooted and growing in him all his life” that “have always pulled him . . . down” to

this final moment (Discovery 251).

In the light of that past, and those scraps of text, he sees himself as he has always been: weak

in spirit and in body, as Greenstockings saw him last. That weakness allows him a kind of final,


sanctifying humility. His earlier prayer—“dear God my God nothing can happen to me which Thou hast not

foreseen ruled willed ordained from all eternity bless her bless her that woman more gentle and tender”—is present in

his resignation to death and the anointing of “English steel” pressed to the back of his head by

Michel’s hand (227, 251). And then, embracing death, not as a release, but as a sacrifice, a purchase

of manhood and strength no longer borrowed, as a final reconciliation with his understanding of the

universe, and an accounting for all else, Hood moves out to meet God: “For Hood, in wilderness

and sacrifice the Lord has truly appeared” (Wiebe, Playing Dead, 28). Text and Death are close

because—and only when—they return Hood to God, to love, to tenderness, to anything but the

confusion of his own self. Text remembered enables the final Christology, the decision to move out

of a world of pain and text and into something unforeseen, leaving Hood’s life hanging like a

question mark in a syllable as immanent as was his death. Wiebe’s Hood, like Edgar Christian, has

made his preparations, has yearned back through text homeward, to a comprehension of life,

however truncated, and entered, speaking, into the final rest of a growing light.

Works Cited and Consulted

Cherry-Garrard, Apsley. The Worst Journey in the World. London: Chatto & Windus, 1965.

Christian, Edgar. Unflinching: A Diary of Tragic Adventure. London: John Murray, 1937.

Franklin, John. Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea in the Years 1819, 20, 21, and 22. London: John Murray, 1823.

Houston, C. Stuart, ed. Arctic Ordeal: The Journal of John Richardson. Kingston, ON: McGill- Queen’s UP, 1984.

- - - , ed. To the Arctic by Canoe 1819-1821: The Journal and Paintings of Robert Hood. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1974.


Houston, James. Spirit Wrestler. Toronto: McLelland & Stewart, 1997.

Ingstad, Helge. The Land of Feast and Famine. Trans. Eugene Gay-Tifft. Montreal: McGill- Queen’s UP, 1993.

Moss, John. Enduring Dreams: An Exploration of Arctic Landscape. Concord, ON: Anansi, 1994.

Pitseolak, Peter and Dorothy Harley Eber. People from Our Side. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1993.

Wiebe, Rudy. A Discovery of Strangers. Toronto: Knopf, 1994. - - - . Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic. Edmonton: New West, 1989.

sacrificial fire and salutary ice: exposure, starvation, and the onset of word in canada’s arctic

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