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of the huge concrete grain elevator that gives Churchill its sole reason for existence. For Churchill is nominally an ocean port, despite the fact that it is only for a few brief weeks each year that hardy freighters can dare the passage of Hudson Straits to enter the Bay and take on cargo. In May of 1947 that “ocean port” was the ultimate desolation of man’s contriving.
    Shouldering my kit bag, I trudged up the frozen ruts of Churchill’s only road and found my way to the beer parlor. In a few minutes I was sitting comfortably close to the stove while a morose bartender brought me a bottle of sad ale—sans glass. As I drank the thin brew I looked out the dirty window at a clay-cold array of rusted boilers, abandoned donkey engines and dead construction machinery. And I wondered just how the devil I was going to find my way out of this scrap heap of ruined ambitions and into the Barrens. I had several more beers but they seemed to grow weaker, if possible, and my spirits ebbed steadily.
    Then the door swung open with a gusty crash and a massive Scandinavian rolled into the room. His eyes lit up with a quick gleam of recognition as he saw me and in an instant the gloom of Churchill was dispelled.
    â€œSo you come back!” he boomed. “ Ja! I thought maybe you would!”
    This was John Ingerbritson, and I had last seen him when, as a boy of fourteen, I had gone to look at his ship in the harbor at Churchill. Many years earlier, when he had been living at The Pas, the call of John’s Norwegian blood became too strong to deny and so he built a sea-going vessel there in his backyard, five hundred miles from the sea. When all forty feet of the Otto Sverdrup was completed, she was loaded on a flatcar and taken north to salt water. Her full tale is a Norse saga that began when John announced that he intended to fish the treacherous Bay waters. The scientists told him bluntly that there were no food fish to be had in Hudson Bay, but John set his nets anyway, and each week he shipped a fine cargo to the markets in distant Winnipeg. For John was a fisherman, though not much of a hand at science.
    After hoisting a few for old times’ sake, John took me to his home, where Mrs. Ingerbritson welcomed me into her brilliantly clean little house and filled me with good food.
    Then, over coffee, and surrounded by the ebullient offspring of John and his wife, I explained why I had come back to Churchill and where I wanted to go. When I finished, John suggested that I should charter a plane, but I was doubtful about the idea. For one thing, the cost of flying in the arctic can be prohibitive. For another thing, a pilot needs a clear-cut objective, and I had none in mind.
    While we were talking, a lanky, dark-eyed young man had come quietly into the room and he was introduced as Johnny Bourasso, former Royal Air Force Pathfinder pilot, at present the captain and crew of an ancient twin-engined Anson aircraft that made a precarious living for her owner by flying improbable tramp-freighting runs over the top of the world. Bourasso was at once dragged into the discussion, and the three of us got out the maps.
    There was much talk and telling of tales. Without attempting to discourage me, old John was evidently determined that I should be made fully aware of what I was proposing to do, and so he told us the yarn of the Englishman, John Hornby, who set out to winter in the Barrens in the late 1920s.
    Hornby took with him two young Englishmen, fresh from the old country. The three men set out from Great Slave Lake, and then silence dropped down on their track. For a year no word was heard of their fate—and when it did come, it was a grim word.
    A party of prospectors canoeing down the Thelon River the next summer found Hornby’s shanty in a tiny wooded oasis hundreds of miles north of the timber line. The bodies of the three men who had challenged the Barrens were there. Their story was preserved in the