Otherwise (35 page)

”After about an hour of this babble he called a halt and told me there didn’t seem to be any evidence of starvation and our Huskies – that’s what he called them – seemed like a pretty shiftless lot, probably just looking for handouts. He said it was second nature for natives to cry poor and we shouldn’t be taken in by it. Anyway, it was no concern of ours, he said, and we should leave that sort of thing to the proper authorities.

”He hadn’t brought in any relief supplies. After a couple of hours he and his pilot took off again. Not for the Kazan to look at the camps there but back to base. Mission accomplished.”

Fran and I found ourselves stranded at Churchill. There seemed to be no way we could get to Windy River short of chartering an airplane – something I could not possibly afford and something I could hardly ask the Department to do on my behalf.

I delivered a message to the Churchill radio station for transmission to Andy, telling him I would be back as soon as I could find transport, and that I was bringing Fran with me.

Then I took my wife to the snug home of the Ingebritson family, where Gunnar’s parents greeted her like one of their own, and Gunnar assured me he would somehow find a way to fly us to Windy without bankrupting us.

Gunnar also told me the
RCMP
patrol had not delivered any supplies to the Ihalmiut. When I visited police headquarters to find out what had happened, the sergeant in command of the detachment tried to mollify me by explaining that he had now assembled a load of relief supplies but had been unable to deliver it because the Force’s Norseman was somewhere in the western Arctic. However, assuming I would be flying to Windy on a government charter, he offered to entrust the shipment to me. Then he fired a thunderbolt.

”One thing…. These are
relief
goods only. Mostly flour, beans, baking powder, and the like. There’s no ammunition and no rifles. The territorial government won’t spring for anything like that.”

There now remained only one possible card for me to play – the army – an organization I had assured myself I would never again have anything to do with. That afternoon I borrowed Gunnar’s old truck and drove across the tundra to the sprawling U.S./Canadian military base known as Fort Churchill.

I went there emboldened by a report that the Canadian base commander had served in my old outfit – the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment. Fortunately the report was accurate. Colonel Donald Cameron listened intently while I described the plight of the Ihalmiut and emphasized the grim prediction that without an adequate supply of ammunition for their decrepit old rifles, many of the people would probably not survive the coming winter.

Cameron never hesitated.

”I’ll do what I can,” he said crisply. ”You can depend on it.”

Within the hour he had arranged for Gunnar’s Norseman to be fuelled with enough
RCAF
avgas for a return flight to Windy River, at no cost either to Gunnar or to me.

And he did more – much more.

Risking severe consequences for misusing government and military property, he arranged the immediate delivery to the Ingebritsons’ home of twelve .303 service rifles together with an entire case of ammunition. And, in the event these might not reach the Inuit in time to ensure an adequate supply of deer skins, he added forty brand-new woollen battledress trousers and jackets.

”Won’t keep them as warm as caribou skin,” he apologized, ”but better than a kick in the arse from those buffoons in Ottawa.”

It may well be that the Ihalmiut survived the winter that lay ahead of them that year because of Donald Cameron.

Frances had very little opportunity to acclimatize herself to Churchill. On September 9 Gunnar roused us early and we hastened out to Landing Lake, where the Norseman waited, fully fuelled and loaded. We lifted off in fair visibility but within twenty minutes clouds had forced us down to less than a thousand feet. A cautious pilot would probably have turned back. Not Gunnar. We pressed on, catching only blurred glimpses of a world of rock and water close below us. Nervous enough on my own account, I was apprehensive about how Fran would react. To my relief and admiration, she took it in stride. Holding my hand tightly and
leaning close she yelled into my ear: ”If Gunnar goes any closer I’ll pick a flower!”

For the first time since suggesting that she come north with me, I could believe it had been the right decision.

Three hours after takeoff, the Norseman slid over the crest of the Caribou Hills to splash down in the cove at the mouth of Windy River. Fran never afterwards revealed what her feelings were as I popped open the cabin door and she peered out at the rain-swept vista of rock, water, and tundra surrounding us.

Not having received my radio message, Andy had no forewarning of our arrival. He and Alekahaw, one of the younger Ihalmiut, had been upriver fishing when the distinctive snarl of the Norseman’s engine brought their canoe belting downstream so recklessly they barely avoided colliding with the plane.

Draped in soaking-wet, patched, and filthy
attigi
(summer parkas), they were a hard-looking pair, wild-eyed and long-haired. Fran eyed them tentatively while we hurriedly ferried gear, freight, and ourselves ashore.

The exterior of Fran’s new home was unprepossessing enough, but the inside must have truly appalled her. At the best of times Andy was not much of a housekeeper, and during the past two weeks he had been entertaining a throng of hungry Inuit visitors. The dark and dank interior looked and smelled almost as much like a bear’s den as a human habitation.

Tegpa did his best to brighten the moment by deciding he had been born to be Fran’s dog. He set out to prove it by furiously licking her face, which I think may have been as wet with tears as with rain and dog spittle.

Alekahaw also accepted Fran unreservedly. In fact, he was so smitten by the first white woman he had ever seen that within twenty-four hours he had intimated a willingness to exchange wives with me. At least that is what I, with my imperfect knowledge of his language, thought he had in mind. Fran’s response when I told her about the offer was that perhaps we ought to get to know each other a little better first. I concluded she was making a good adjustment to local mores.

Andy’s reception of her was polite but reserved. Her unexpected and uninvited arrival posed all sorts of problems for him, but these he decided to set aside for the moment.

There was work to be done.

We had first to ready the relief supplies for distribution to the Ihalmiut. The supplies consisted principally of a fifty-pound drum of powdered milk, two hundred pounds of flour, some lard, and two bundles of clothing. To our distress the milk powder proved to be so old and rancid as to be inedible. Much of the flour had been water damaged and had set as hard as stone. The two bundles of ”clothing” contained tattered underwear apparently salvaged from some government institution – possibly a prison – before being consigned to the
RCMP
for distribution to needy natives.

We destroyed the milk and made a pile of legless, armless, torn-and-worn underwear from which the Inuit could help themselves if they so chose. Few did.

These disappointments were offset by Colonel Cameron’s magnificent gift of twelve gleaming, well-oiled army rifles and the supply of ammunition that came with them. Alekahaw was rendered speechless by such largesse.

Watching his face, I concluded that whatever might befall the Ihalmiut in the future, this coming winter was
not
destined to be their last.

Next morning Alekahaw hurried off to the Inuit camps to spread the news that I had returned with rifles and shells enough to ensure the success of the autumnal deer hunt. He assured us he would be back at Windy in a few days accompanied by all the men.

We put that interval to good use making our home habitable. Andy and I laboured long and hard cutting wood and getting water then, with the old stove heated almost red hot, we turned the cabin into a kind of northern steam laundry. While I scrubbed a lifetime’s accumulation of dirt and grease off the split-log floor, Fran scraped and washed our sparse collection of battered cooking utensils, tin cups, plates, and cutlery. Then she boiled the towels, socks, and anything else that still looked strong enough to survive immersion in hot water.

Once a degree of cleanliness had been achieved, Fran spread some caribou hides on the floor and on the benches that served as beds and seats, organized the ”kitchen corner” to her liking, and hung up a few flowered dishtowels she had brought from Toronto, to serve as window curtains.

I spent most of one day constructing a seat for the backhouse (a simple two-by-four no longer seemed adequate) and in contriving a sort of door for this well-ventilated structure. Then Andy and I devoted a day in a freezing drizzle to waterproofing the cabin roof with tarpaper I had brought in from Churchill. This was especially needful over the cabin’s back room (which was to be Fran’s and my bedroom) because, although it had originally been roofed
with caribou hides, these had become so porous that rain and snow easily found a way through them.

This windowless back room, originally the Schweders’ storeroom, was ankle deep in decaying pieces of hides, mildewed scraps of clothing, rotting fragments of cardboard cartons, and unidentifiable muck and mush. The stink was almost palpable. I forbade Fran even to enter until I had cleaned it out, rigged up a double bed of sorts, and attempted – none too successfully – to mask the stench with a sprinkling of carbolic acid. If Fran had rejected this nuptial chamber out of hand, I would not have been at all surprised. I
was
surprised, and happily so, when she mustered a somewhat wan smile and pronounced it to be ”quite cozy.”

Having surmounted the first hurdles facing her, she now faced the challenge of coming to terms with the land. This was made easier by the onset of a spell of good weather following a sharp frost. Overnight the shrubbery on the Barrens flamed with autumnal colours almost as spectacular as those of the hardwoods of Ontario. Moreover, the frost seemed to have triggered the southern migration of the caribou, and forerunners of the great herds soon appeared at Windy River.

One fine day Fran and I took the canoe to visit the wolf den at Smith House Bay. She proved adept with the paddle and was curious about everything around her. Although nobody was home at the wolf den, the vast sweep of plains to the northward was crawling with serpentine lines of caribou. Fran was spellbound by them.

”The
ground
seems to be moving,” she said in a hushed voice. ”Almost as if it’s alive. It’s really worth coming all this way to see it.”

This appreciation of a world so foreign to her seemed con firmation of my hopes that our future together might not be as uncertain as it had seemed only a few days earlier. My optimism grew during succeeding days as we explored the edge of Hidden Valley, fished for grayling in Windy River, spied on a dun-coloured arctic fox not yet in his white winter coat, captured live lemmings, stalked ptarmigan, and made love on the soft lichens in a hidden cleft in the Caribou Hills.

Fran was interested in the work Andy and I were doing though repelled by the killing it entailed. She could not accept that so many deer had to be butchered for, as Andy put it, ”the good of the species.”

”Can’t you find out what you need to know by
watching
them?” Fran asked. ”We don’t kill people to find out what makes
them
tick, do we?”

I avoided a direct reply but Andy accepted the challenge.

”Suppose science did limit itself to studying living animals in their natural state, we would need hundreds more scientists to dig out all the data we need to set up effective management programs and protect the caribou herds. We don’t have that many trained zoologists so if we have to kill some deer in order to get the data … well, Fran, that’s just the way it has to be.”

Although she may not have been fully convinced, Frances showed no compunction about cooking or eating caribou meat. In fact, she took over the cook’s job so effectively that within a week she was even baking bread, something she had never done before.

I had feared Andy might resent her arrival but he showed no sign of doing so. To the contrary, he was exceptionally sympathetic to her problems.

I was less sympathetic to his, wilfully so. I did not let myself consider what his inner feelings might be at finding himself, a sexually vigorous young male, the odd man out in a potential but unrealized
ménage à trois
.

Fran’s problems were of a different kind. During the early hours before one bitterly cold dawn, I was awakened by what I thought were raindrops penetrating the roof to patter onto our shared sleeping bag. I reached for a flashlight and by its pale shimmer discovered we were being subjected to a living rain of small white worms – maggots no less. It took me only moments to realize they were blowfly larvae that had been prospering in the rotting deer hides on the roof until an especially cold night had driven them to seek a warmer haven down below.

I did not find the sight of them particularly repulsive, and might even have felt sorry for them had not Frances chosen that moment to awaken. Although she neither screamed nor panicked, she was not well pleased. I shepherded her into the main cabin, where she spent the rest of the night in the bunk there that had formerly been mine. Andy, bless him, got up, lit the stove, and made her a soothing cup of cocoa.

While we had been settling in, Alekahaw had carried the word to the Ihalmiut that I was back, with a white wife and a planeload of treasures. Every able male in the camps immediately set off for Windy Cabin. Ohoto was the first to arrive. He brought gifts: two wolf skins for me and a precious deer tongue for Fran, which would have been the Inuit equivalent of a box of Swiss chocolates.

Ohoto and Fran established an instant rapport. That very evening he began teaching her how to make pornographic
string figures, while she responded by brewing gallons of tea for him.

Next day Fran and I trekked far out into the Barrens to watch herds of buck deer go drifting by. Their enormous racks of antlers – now free of velvet – gleamed as if polished and clicked and clacked against one another with a sound like castanets. The rut was about to begin, and soon the plains would echo to the sound and fury of a spectacularly horny multitude.