Born Naked (18 page)

Begun just before the Crash, the complex had been intended to make Churchill a shipping port for the hundreds of thousands of tons of prairie grain annually destined to eastern Atlantic and Indian Ocean ports. It was a visionary mega-project which, like so many such, turned out to be an economic disaster. Yet when I first saw it that grey day in June of 1936, I thought it was something to rival the pyramids—one of the man-made Wonders of the World.

Perhaps it was. But before I had been many days in its shadow, it had ceased to engage me. By then I had become enchanted by the wonders of another world—where man's works played no part.

The morning after our arrival we loaded our gear on a hand jigger—a little rail car propelled by manpower. With Uncle Frank and Bert pumping the handles we rattled out of Churchill on a narrow-gauge spur line. Our destination was an abandoned construction shack standing in lonely decrepitude on the bald tundra some eight miles south-east of Churchill. Shanty-roofed, with tar-paper walls, it contained a rusty barrel stove, two double-tiered bunks, a broken table, and not much else except the frozen corpse of a white Arctic fox that had apparently jumped in through a broken window and failed to find its way out again.

We settled in to await the withdrawal of the pack ice from the coast of Hudson Bay. As it happened, the ice never did withdraw while we remained in Churchill, so we stayed on at the Black Shack, as Bert named it, for the duration.

“At” but seldom “in.” Uncle Frank would have made (and maybe was in a previous incarnation) an effective slave driver. Since the nights never got wholly dark, he regarded sleeping as a waste of time.

“Look about you,” he lectured me as I tried to lie abed one shivering morning when our water pails had an inch of ice on them. “The birds out on the tundra haven't slept a wink. Too much to do! Too busy! And here it is 4:00 a.m. and you want more sleep! Up and at 'em, sonny!”

Bert was our cook. Burned cornmeal porridge was his specialty but we also ate canned beans; bannock spread with molasses; fat bacon and, on special occasions, cornmeal mush that had been allowed to solidify overnight before being sliced and fried in bacon fat. Frank explained that he had intended us to “live off the land” at Seal River: “Lots of seal meat; maybe a haunch or two of caribou.” But since there were neither seals nor caribou where we were, Frank spent much of his time roaming the surrounding tundra blasting ducks and ptarmigan with his double-barrelled shotgun. Bert made watery concoctions that he called Mulligan stew from some of these victims of my uncle's gun, but the corpses of many ended up in a nearby ditch which served as our garbage dump.

I agonized a little about this apparently wanton killing of breeding birds at the peak of the nesting season until Uncle Frank put me straight.

“Don't be soft, boy. There's millions more out there. We're doing this for science. I measure every specimen I shoot and note the condition of its plumage. Science needs to know these things.”

Years would pass before I would realize that collecting expeditions such as ours were little more than high-grade plundering operations conducted in the hallowed name of Science. However, for the moment my qualms were stilled and I could go about my duties with an easy conscience.

My duties were straightforward enough.

“Find every nest you can,” Frank instructed Bert and me. “The rarer the bird the better. If the nest hasn't got a full clutch, mark the spot and leave it 'til it has. If you aren't sure what species it is, shoot the parent bird and bring it back when you bring the eggs.”

With half a dozen tobacco cans filled with cotton wool in our haversacks together with our lunches, Bert and I would be out every day and all day, unless it was pouring rain or, as happened sometimes, snowing so hard that searching for nests would have been useless. I was a good nest finder and I loved the work. When I flushed a rarity, such as a Hudsonian Godwit, and found four eggs ready for the taking, I would feel as elated as if I had found four gold nuggets.

So many waterfowl and wading birds clustered on the tundra that there seemed hardly room enough for all of them to nest. As I sloshed across the still-half-frozen morass of water and mossy tussocks, curlews, several species of plovers, many varieties of sandpipers, and numerous kinds of ducks would rise before me, filling the air with their cries of alarm.

I took a heavy toll from their nests.

Having made my way back to the shack for supper, dog-tired and, like as not, soaking wet from falling through the rotting ice of a pond, I would spread my day's “take” on the table to be admired. Once I unpacked thirteen clutches from my tobacco cans, bettering anything Bert or Frank himself had so far collected in a single day. Frank rewarded me with kind words: “You'll make a good scientist, my boy.”

According to my uncle, one egg by itself had no scientific value so we always took the full clutch, thereby ensuring that, because the season was too short to allow the birds to nest again, the adult pair would raise no young that year. The real truth of the matter was that the eggs had no
commercial
value unless a whole clutch could be displayed as a unit in a collector's glass-topped case. This was something else I was still to learn.

To blow an egg we forced air through a pipette into a small hole bored in its side, whereupon, if fresh, the contents would come bubbling out. If the egg was heavily incubated, we would have to delicately draw out the embryo, piece by bloody piece, using a needle with a bent tip. We saved the contents of fresh eggs and those only slightly incubated, for omelettes which we ate as bedtime snacks. I remember one such made from Arctic loons', Old Squaw ducks', and a mixed lot of shore birds' eggs; it had a distinctly pink tinge and a meaty flavour, probably because the incubation season was by then well-advanced.

Lemmings were all around us, both inside and outside the shack. It was a peak year in their seven-year cycle of abundance and they were making the most of it. Friendly little creatures looking not unlike small hamsters, they would sometimes crawl across my lap as I sat on a tussock eating my lunch. They would also run all over the cabin floor, paying no heed to us until Bert lost patience and tried to sweep them out the door.

Egg collecting was not all beer and skittles. One morning the sun shone, the snow was melting, and it really felt like spring so the three of us set off together to explore the wall of granite which fringed the still-frozen bay like a titanic dyke. We were after the eggs of rough-legged hawks (famed lemming hunters) who occupied a chain of nests built at half-mile intervals on ledges along the seaward face of the dyke.

According to my uncle these nests were ancestral possessions used by generations of rough-legs. Not all were occupied every year. The year after the lemming population “crashed,” at the bottom of its cycle, the hawks might use only every second or third nest and, instead of laying a clutch of four or five eggs, might lay only one or two. They were able to adjust their reproductive capacity to the available food supply, something human beings seem incapable of doing.

Because 1936 was a good lemming year every nest held a full clutch. Bert and I had to gather these by scaling the face of the wall or by descending from above. Either way it was a risky business. We had each delivered two clutches to Frank waiting below on the ice-cluttered beach when the hawks decided things had gone far enough.

The ones we had already robbed had been following us, shrieking their distress as they soared overhead. Now, as I began to ascend to my third nest, they began to descend. One by one, like a squadron of attacking fighter aircraft, they stooped on me, talons outstretched and beaks gaping wide. The first one missed by no more than a foot and made me cower against the cliff wall. The second struck home.

My head was buffeted hard against the rock by fiercely beating wings. I raised an arm to protect myself and it was raked from wrist to elbow by sharp talons. For a horrible instant I thought I was going to fall; then Frank's shotgun bellowed and my attacker spun away, still screaming defiance.

I did not wait for the next attack but slid down the face of the cliff to land, scared and shaking, on the beach. Bert bound up my arm with his handkerchief but my uncle offered scant sympathy. He was eyeing the circling hawks and the nest which still contained the eggs he coveted.

“You must have done something to upset them,” he said crossly, which surely had to be the understatement of the year.

To do him justice, Frank tried to make amends. When next he pumped the jigger into town for supplies and to see if any possibility existed of making the voyage to Seal River, he declared a holiday and took me along.

We went first to “Ma” Riddoch's Hudson Hotel, a dark little cavern of a tavern to which a few rooms for guests, or girls, or both had been attached. Here I met the redoubtable “Eskimo” Charlie and listened while he and Frank had several beers. Charlie was a weather-beaten Scandinavian with beetling brows who was reputed to have had several Eskimo wives. He certainly did have an awesome store of foul language. There was no effing hope of getting to the effing Seal, he told us, but he would be happy to take us hunting effing white whales in the effing estuary—where the whales were gathering to calve. Frank could see no profit, scientific or otherwise, in such a venture and turned it down.

Later that day I went alone to the docks and watched several hundred belugas, as they are known in the North, disporting themselves in the estuary shallows… until a pair of motor boats put out from shore and their crews began to blaze away with heavy-calibre rifles. What followed was a marine version of shooting goldfish in a bowl. The whales churned the shoal water into foam in their efforts to escape but I could see splashes of crimson appearing on the backs and flanks of many of them.

When I told my uncle about it, he was disapproving. “That'll be some of the men employed at the elevator having a little sport. Foolishness! The Chips might use a couple of beluga for dog feed but most of the ones those fellows hit will roll up on the beach after they die and stink the place up come summertime.”

The “Chips” were Chipeweyan Indians from the interior of northern Manitoba who made their way out to Churchill by dog team each spring before the thaw. They came to trade pelts to the Hudson's Bay Company post and were of interest to Frank as a possible source of specimens. We visited their camp and, while he dickered for a pair of white fox pelts, I looked about with awe not untinged with apprehension.

These were the most primitive people I had ever seen. Small, dark, solemn (in our presence), they spoke a peculiar language full of rustling sibilants. They were partly dressed in caribou-skin clothing which was shedding and looked singularly ratty. About twenty of them were living in squat little teepees of soot-blackened canvas full of rips and patches. When I came too close to one of these, an old woman shook her gnarled fist at me, but a much younger woman—hardly more than a girl—smiled and beckoned to me while at the same time opening the front of her shirt. I did not know whether she was being seductive or merely mocking my youthfulness. I retreated in confusion and took shelter behind my uncle.

He had bought his fox skins and was now being offered something so exotic I could hardly contain my excitement. A live wolf pup! When he shook his head at the rather pathetic little animal straining away from us on the end of a dog chain, I couldn't contain myself.

“
I'll
buy it!” I cried urgently. “I'll take it home for Mutt! Please, Uncle Frank, tell them I'll buy it!”

He continued to shake his head. “You can't afford it. They want its bounty value and that's five dollars.”

“Lend me the money,” I pleaded. “I'll pay it back. I promise!”

“You're talking foolishness, boy. Come along. We're going back to camp.”

 

SUMMER EXPLODED DURING
the last week of June. Overnight the temperature soared into the sixties and, but for the hordes of mosquitoes emerging from the tundra ponds, we could have gone around naked. The remaining ice and snow shrank visibly before our eyes. The egg-laying season was coming to an end and soon it would be time for us to leave.

There were some chores to be attended to first. Foremost of these, as far as I was concerned, was collecting one more set of rough-legged hawk's eggs to compensate for the clutch I had failed to get. Frank had said nothing directly to me about this but I knew it was on his mind.

One warm and sunny morning I set off to the coastal ridge. I did not go back to the stretch we had already robbed but headed farther east. Nests proved few and far between in this area and it was not until afternoon that I found one, in a cleft of rock fifty feet above the beach. This time I climbed down to it from above, keeping a wary eye on the parent birds wheeling disconsolately overhead. They did not attack and I stole their eggs, wrapped them in cotton wool and packed them in my haversack. That done, I looked about from my high vantage point.

Below me the waters sucked and seethed at stranded ice floes along the shore. Open-water leads criss-crossed the decaying pack to seaward. I looked eastward along the beach and saw a large reddish object. Through my field glasses it revealed itself as the shattered remnant of a ship.

Few things will fire a boy's curiosity as hotly as a wreck, and I hurried off to examine this one. It consisted of the forward half of a small coastal freighter which must have driven ashore many years earlier. I climbed through a maze of twisted, rusty plates until I was standing high on the angled rise of the bow.

And then discovered I was not alone!

Not more than a hundred yards away, three ivory-white bears were ambling unconcernedly towards me. The leader of the trio seemed unbelievably huge, though its followers were not much bigger than a pair of spaniels. I did not need to be a naturalist to know that this was a female polar bear and her cubs.