“There’s human remains up there”

“There’s human remains up there,” says Patrick.

I saw him up on the hill that morning, and assumed he was on the lookout for caribou and muskox. We’d met him the day before. He was stormbound like us and camped close by. With his rifle slung across his back he walked into our camp, seriousness etched on his face.

“I was just walking and I saw it. A skull. Up there, between the two rocks. Never noticed it before.”

He pointed up the slope, back the way he’d come, then turned and headed off towards his own camp.

We didn’t say much. Our curiosity was spiked. We started walking up the hill to where Patrick just came from. We scanned the tundra. Ken saw it first. “It’s here.”

We all closed in around him in a loose half-circle. A human skull, lying on its side, facing west. It is half sunk into the tundra just like the stones around it. It’s old. You could tell that much just by looking at it. It’s been part of this landscape for a long time.

Nobody spoke for a while. We just stood there, looking down at it. Silence felt like the appropriate response. Out there, in a landscape so raw and indifferent, a skull lying quietly has a way of punctuating a profound feeling of solitude and loneliness.

Franklin’s crew struggled and died on these shores. Remains have surfaced a short distance from here. Maybe this is one of the crew, one more name lost to time and now found. Or maybe this is someone who belongs to a much older story, one of the people who have called this place home for centuries, long before Franklin’s ships ever left England.

We don’t know. In the end, it doesn’t really matter which story it belongs to. What matters is that we stand here and bear witness to someone whose life ended in this place.

We touch nothing. We take photographs and geolocate the find. We have reported the find through the proper channels, as one must.

The whole experience makes us pause and think about why we’ve come here in the first place. We came to immerse ourselves in the history of this region, and if we were lucky, to find something. The Franklin expedition is a huge part of that story and is the reason so many people have been drawn here, us included.

But standing over those remains, in a landscape that been home to people for countless centuries, it’s obvious that Franklin’s story is only one in a much longer narrative.

There’s a real irony in how we got here and it’s one that’s been with me ever since. We made the call to turn around at Washington Bay. The long-range forecast was for high winds and unpaddleable conditions defining much of the foreseeable future. That forecast made it clear that a full circumnavigation of KWI was not in the cards. And honestly, that’s fine, because those same storms, the ones that pinned us on shore for days, are the reason we found the skull in the first place. If the weather had cooperated and we’d pushed straight through, we’d have paddled right past it and found nothing at all. Instead we may have stumbled onto something important be it a Franklin-related discovery or not.

That’s the thing about the Arctic in summer, even in August. It never lets you forget what it’s capable of. It challenges you constantly and it doesn’t let you keep score the way you want to. We realized quickly that our journey would not be a physical test where the clock and the mileage are the measure of success. We’re all athletes who are wired for faster, farther and that was a bit of an adjustment for us. But this is exploration, and exploration means staying open to what the land and the weather hand you, even when it upends the plan. You have to expect the unexpected, and be flexible enough to let the unexpected become the point.

We come away with a lighter kilometre count than we’d hoped for, and a discovery we couldn’t have planned for. We’ll take that trade every time.