C Ihe Ladies c cu. V'VVAN - History and Classics, Department of

XLIVTHE LADIES, THE GWICH'IN, AND THE RATaway trapping with no woman at hand. Every soul you meet full of tales of theNorth." In Burgland and his family, Vyvyan finds adventure incarnate, and thatadventure is linked to tales of people encountered on the way. Like most giftedtravel writers, Vyvyan sees published pages in every uncommon event and person.And perhaps a touch of jealousy surrounds this particular description of awoman who, although she has risked her own mortality in bearing children unassisted,has managed to substitute the constricted life of civilized womanhood andall its "social ties" for "sport and adventure"; even the domestic chore of mealpreparation for a large family has grown "so easy" for Mrs Burgland,Robert Service wrote an account of his trip up the Rat River in August 19II,after he had travelled north from Alberta with George Douglas (Douglas 13;Mallory 10). Given her quotation of his work at the start of her book and herreading of his Ballads of a Bohemian while at Aklavik (field note for 29 June), Vyvyanwould no doubt have been interested to read Service's account, but, except as anewspaper article published immediately after the trip ("In"), nothing appeareduntil 1945, when "Book Ten-The Spell of the Yukon" formed part of Service'sautobiography, Ploughman of the Moon. As might be expected, he provided the mostliterary of all early accounts. He exploited his talents as a character sketcher andused arctic disasters to cast the prospect of the Rat River trip in ominous shades.Vyvyan would have appreciated his account if she did not know it when she cameto write her own book. Service tells his reader about John Hornby, EdgarChristian, and Harold Adlard perishing on the Barrens in 1927 (422), and,closer in time and space to his own Rat River trip, the tragedy of FrancisFitzgerald's Royal North-West Mounted Police (RNWMP) party perishing on theDawson-Fort McPherson patrol in February 19II (426). This prepares the wayfor the Herculean ascent of the Rat in a scow named OPhelia. The allusion to aliterary character who met her demise by a watery suicide hardly emboldens thecharacters sketched colourfully by the Yukoner, but the lone "Lady" of the groupof six, the skipper's wife, "was made of rare stuff' (429). The mosquitoes are theworst Service has ever seen, the labour demanded to haul upstream a scowweighing half a ton is monumental ("even the Lady lashed herself to the strainingrope, pulling like a little man" [434]), and Service has as close a call with death ashe would ever wish:Four of us were on the track-line, bent low, our chests breasting the current.It was the toughest pull we had ever had. With muscles taut we inched the scow