Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
That summer, Paul spent more than four months canoeing and traversing and mapping the rocks.
This, he felt, was the life. He'd camped before, plenty of times. He'd even been in northern Ontario
with his parents, on holiday. But this was camping for
work
. Every day there was a new site to explore,
every day a new set of rapids to run. Paul Hoffman was hooked. Geology seemed to be exactly what
he was looking for, and when the next summer came around, Paul was eager for more. But this time
he wanted to go somewhere different. Sioux Lookout was great in its way, but it wasn't the true North.
Paul was hankering after remoteness. What he really wanted was the Arctic.
Scratch a geologist and, under their skin, almost invariably, you'll find a romantic. They will often
be gruff about the landscape they work in. They are usually matter of fact about the rocks and how
they interconnect. But try asking why they've chosen to spend their lives working in this particular
place or on that particular terrain, and that's when the stories start to slip out.
When Paul was eight years old, just before he started with his mineral obsession, he heard a CBC
radio drama about the last trip of the Arctic explorer John Hornby, an eccentric Englishman who had
lived precariously in the Canadian Northwest Territories during the early 1900s. Hornby was quixotic,
even by the extraordinary standards of the place and time. His eyes were an intense, piercing blue, and
he refused—for luck—to travel with any man whose eyes were brown. Though his hair and beard were
wild, he spoke with a soft, expensively educated accent. He was barely five feet tall, but his toughness
was legendary. Once, so the stories go, he trotted for fifty miles beside a horse. Another time he ran a
hundred miles in twenty-four hours, for a bet.
Hornby used to boast that all he needed, for a trip of any length, was a rifle, a fishnet and a bag
of flour. He would take absurd risks, venturing into the barren lands again and again with scarcely
any provisions. Finally, in 1926, he pushed the odds too far. He decided to spend winter in the remote
Thelon River valley, a few hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle. With him he took his eighteen-
year-old nephew, Edgar Christian, and an Edmonton man, Harold Adlard. Sometimes rowing, some-
times portaging, the party would take their hefty, square-sterned canoe across Great Slave Lake and
eastwards to the Thelon River, where they would build themselves a log hut for the winter.
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The timing was crucial. This far north, winter would be excessively harsh. By November, thick
ice would coat the lakes and rivers, and deep snow would smother the hut and its environs. After that,
there would be little wildlife at large, and few opportunities for hunting. Yet Hornby, true to form, was
taking few provisions. His entire plan relied on gathering meat from migrating caribou as they passed
the Thelon River on their way south for the winter. If he missed the caribou, all would be lost.
Hornby, however, seemed to feel no urgency. He left several notes en route, stuffed into tins and
marked by stone cairns. “Travelling slowly,” one reported laconically. “Flies bad.” And in another, left
around 5 August: “Owing to bad weather and laziness, travelling slowly. One big migration of caribou
caribou had gone.
The party's attempts to stave off hunger grew increasingly desperate. They managed to trap a fox
here, a hare there, sometimes a few scrawny Arctic ptarmigans. By early December, Hornby was re-
duced to digging up frozen blood from the site of an old caribou kill. It made, Christian wrote in his
diary, “an excellent snack”. Every day the party set traps. Every day now the traps were empty. “Got
nothing but damned cold,” Christian wrote on 18 February. And on 23 February, “this game of going
without grub is Hell”. Soon they were pounding old bones to squeeze out any sustenance, and scraping
hides for fragments of meat.
By now all three were far too weak from hunger to attempt escape. They were hundreds of icy
miles from the nearest humans, and in their poor condition, that distance might as well have been thou-
