The Snow Walker (14 page)

All day we sat in the low tent around a small, smoky fire of wet willow and caribou fat, and we were not frightened. It is not the way of the people to worry when trouble comes. We laughed at our plight, and told stories. Haluk was wild with excitement for he was hardly more than a boy and this was an adventure he would remember through the long years ahead.

It was Haluk who brought the bad news. During a lull in the rain he had gone to the head of the island to watch the floes spinning past. In a little while he was back, running as hard as he could and shouting, “Come quick! Come quick! The island is sinking!”

When we hurried down to the shore we found the lake waters rising so fast they had already covered the slope where the dogs were tethered, and the beasts were up to their bellies, frantically pulling against their leads. We waded in and freed them, but the water continued to rise so swiftly that we were bewildered, not understanding why the water was rising so fast. It was my cousin who guessed the answer.

“It must be the rapids at the foot of the lake,” he said. “They have held the pack ice. The gorge must be plugged and now the River has nowhere to go!”

Then we knew we had little time. If the gorge stayed blocked the lake would rise until the island vanished beneath those cold waters.

The women made haste to pack all our important possessions into small bundles after which they placed the heavy things, traps, cooking pots and such, in a hole over which they rolled big rocks. As for my cousin and me, our thoughts were racing, but we could think of no way to flee from the island. Our people do not swim, and in any case no swimmer could have escaped being crushed by the pounding fragments of ice. Nor could we ride the ice pans as one would a raft, for the turmoil was so great and the wind so strong that not even the largest floes were safe from upsetting or being overswept by other floes. I wondered if we might build an
umiak
,
a woman’s boat of the kind sometimes used by the coastal people, out of willow branches and caribou skins, but I knew there was no time for that.

It seemed we could do nothing but hope that the dam in the gorge would soon burst. I stood on the highest place and saw that the waters had already swallowed more than half the island.

Then it was as if I became two persons. I was a man of my people, but standing beside me was another self. It was a very strange thing that happened. One of my beings was calm, feeling no fear, and this was one who had come back to his own place. The other was panic-stricken, mouthing the prayers he had been taught by the priest.

I was two beings who struggled against each other; and it was the man of the people who won. He felt such a contempt for that other that he flung him away, and he vanished into the cold ice-mist that swirled over the lake. Then I was alone and I looked about me at the world that had harboured my people since time before memory, and I was content to be there even though I believed the waters must soon make an end of us all. I thought of Kakut, and inside myself I asked him to take me back.

These are true things I am speaking; and it is a true thing that when I lifted my eyes to look westward toward the place where my father lay, I saw his canoe.

I saw that great canoe, whiter than the ice around it, breasting the heaving waters and driving down upon the island’s head.

I was still watching as if it was something seen in a dream when Haluk ran up the slope and seized my arm. His young voice was shrill and it pierced into the quiet places in my mind. He yelled at me and pulled hard on my arm, and my vision cleared and I went with him.

My cousin and the rest of the people were also running toward the head of the island, everyone burdened with bundles and surrounded by the half crazy dogs. We were ready when the great canoe grounded. Everything was swiftly loaded. Everyone climbed aboard and there was still room to spare, for Kakut’s canoe was a mighty one.

The crossing to the mainland was not easily made and there were times when it seemed certain the canoe would be crushed and all of us drowned. But it was not crushed and we escaped from the island.

the old man
ceased telling his story. Haluk’s wife, Petuk, went outside, blew up the embers of the fire, and began to boil another pail of tea. After awhile I went down to where my canoe lay. I took from it the rifle, the remaining shells, the net and the tea and tobacco and brought them back to the tent. Katalak looked up as I lifted the flap… he looked up and after a moment he smiled so broadly it seemed all the years had lifted from his face. Then they were all laughing. Katalak reached over and poked me in the ribs.

“One time I saw a wolf that looked as hungry as you, all bones and a bit of dry skin. He lost his teeth somehow.
Eh!
I think you lost your teeth on the River. Well, Kakut gave them back and you had better keep them until you get to the coast. Leave them there with Anyala, my daughter, if you wish. We will return them to Kakut when the winter snows come.”

The amusement faded from his voice.

“Eeee.
We will take them back, as we took back the great canoe and placed it where it belongs… where it will always remain, so long as the people remain by the River and live in this land.”

Dark Odyssey of Soosie
_______

The federal day school at
Spence Bay is an excrescence upon an alien face. Awkward and obtrusive, it clings to the perpetually frozen rock of the arctic coast some two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle in a world belonging to another time.

On Friday night, April 15, 1966, the fluorescent lights of its largest classroom glared down upon a strange assembly. A gentle-faced and weary old man clad in the dark majesty of a judge’s gown sat at the teacher’s desk under a portable enamelled plaque which bore the colourful insignia of law and government. Facing him with an earnestness that was a grim parody on the daytime earnestness of the children whose places had been usurped, sixty or seventy men and women crowded into school desks, overflowed folding chairs, lined the walls, leaned on window sills or squatted on the floor.

Prominent in the foreground were several R.C.M.P. officers in crimson ceremonial rig, four black-gowned lawyers, three or four immaculately dressed psychiatrists and physicians, several reporters and a clutch of employees of that burgeoning colonial empire, the federal Department of Northern Affairs. We were the intruders who had been flown to Spence Bay from as far afield as Newfoundland and Edmonton in order to ensure that justice was done, and was seen to be done, in this remote corner of the nation.

Massed solidly toward the rear of the room, unsmiling and unspeaking, were the others… the people whose land this was. They were colourfully clad in embroidered parkas, bright woollen sweaters and gaily coloured dresses, yet their mood was sombre. They did not even look at the intruders in their midst. They did not even look at one another. They had been told to be here so they might witness what would be done with two young men of their own race who had transgressed against
our
law.

The Court of the Northwest Territories came to order.

Shooyuk E5-883 and Aiyaoot E5-22, both of Levesque Harbour, do jointly stand charged in that on or about the 15th day of July A.D. 1965, at or near Levesque Harbour, they did unlawfully commit capital murder of Soosie E5-20…

A reporter whispered a question to the government official sitting next to him: “What’s going on? Do you give them prison numbers before you even try them?”

“Certainly not. Every Eskimo has a number like that. It makes them easier to identify.”

Soosie E5-20 was dead. Shooyuk E5-883, who was her nephew, and Aiyaoot E5-22, who was the son of this woman none of us would ever know, stood before the judge as the court clerk read the charge against them. Their faces showed no comprehension even when the charge was translated by the court interpreter—a white man married to an Eskimo, who had lived among them for the best part of his life. It was clear to everyone present that the grave ritual in which the two accused were the central figures was incomprehensible to them. They stood before the judge, shrunken and withdrawn, two small, smooth-faced youths who did not seem much more than children; but they were men who had long since been driven from that world where children thrive.

The prosecution began its case at 9
a.m.
the following morning, and by 11
p.m.
sentence had been passed. During those hours we, the intruders, heard only the bare outline of how death came to one woman… fragments from the final chapter in a long, dark odyssey of a people’s journey to destruction.

in the late
summer of 1913 the Hudson’s Bay Company established its most northerly post at Cape Dorset on the southwest coast of Baffin Island. The Eskimos there were a confident and effective people whose ability to hunt meat for their own use had sustained them through many generations; but before the decade ended they had become hunters of fur for the use of others and their lives had undergone a transformation. Instead of travelling in kayaks, they were making their way along the coasts in big gasoline-powered boats imported from Scotland; they were using expensive repeating rifles instead of bows and spears; and their families were eating flour bannocks, lard, canned ham and peaches instead of country meat. Their summer tents, now made of canvas instead of skins, were filled with a plethora of trade goods ranging from gramophones to gaudy cotton clothes.

This is how things stood in the spring of 1926 when a daughter was born to a young man named Kitsualik. She was a fine big baby who, according to the old customs, should have been named after one of her ancestors. However, Christianity had been quick to follow the traders to Cape Dorset and the Church of England missionary christened the child Susannah. The people could not pronounce it, so they called her Soosie.

Soosie lived out her early childhood in the halcyon days of the fur trade. Trading posts were spreading like a fungoid growth across the arctic islands and along the mainland coast from Hudson Bay to the Bering Sea. It was a time when all but the most inaccessible Eskimos were being transformed from meat hunters into fox trappers, a time when the people were being weaned away from their old allegiance to the land and sea which had nurtured them since their beginnings.

Then suddenly, in 1930, with the advent of the Great Depression in the south, the cornucopia of the trading posts dried up. The price paid for a good white fox pelt plummeted from as much as a hundred dollars to five dollars or less, which in terms of what an Eskimo got for his money meant about fifty cents. Most of the smaller trading outfits packed up and abandoned the arctic and famine followed upon their abrupt departure.

During 1931 and 1932 nearly three-quarters of the children born at Cape Dorset died of malnutrition and its attendant diseases in their first year of life. Soosie herself had watched her mother wrap the emaciated corpse of a baby brother in a piece of cloth and place it in a niche in the snowhouse wall so that the dogs could not get at it. The small body shared the snowhouse with the living until spring came and it was possible to bury him.

it was at
this juncture that the Hudson’s Bay Company, with an eye to the future after the Depression, made a proposal to the government. Canadian ownership of the immense, high arctic archipelago now known as the Queen Elizabeth Islands had been disputed by the United States, Denmark and other powers. The Company suggested that Canadian sovereignty over these vast, uninhabited lands be strengthened by settling them with Eskimos who had been “made indigent by the current economic problems.” The Company volunteered to do the colonizing, and the government accepted with the proviso that the Company bear full responsibility for the wellbeing of the settlers and agree to repatriate them if they should ever become dissatisfied with their new homes.

In the autumn of 1933 the post managers at Cape Dorset, Pangnirtung on the west coast and Pond Inlet on the north coast of Baffin Island were told to begin recruiting colonists. It was no easy task, for the people were closely bound by tradition, familiarity and inclination to the places where their ancestors had lived and died. They had no wish to leave; and the Cape Dorset manager found no recruits until he sought the help of Kavavou, a sometime shaman who had become a “Company man.”

Kavavou echoed the manager in extolling the virtues of a new country where game and fur abounded. He made much of the Company’s promises of lavish new equipment to be provided free, together with an abundance of store food; and he confirmed the manager’s assurance of passage home to any who might not be satisfied. A desperately hard winter, with hunger present in every igloo, gave such added weight to Kavavou’s efforts that his cousin, Kitsualik, and a few other men reluctantly agreed to go.

When the Company’s supply ship,
Nascopie,
steamed out of Cape Dorset harbour on August 14, 1934, she carried away with her six families—twenty-two men, women and children—together with their possessions and their dogs. One of those who stood at the rail watching the low hills of Cape Dorset grey into the distance was eight-year-old Soosie. At Pangnirtung the settlers were joined by two families and at Pond Inlet by four more. Then the
Nascopie
steamed into Lancaster Sound and turned north toward the forbidding coast of Devon Island. On August 23 she dropped anchor at her destination, Dundas Harbour.

The colonists found themselves in a steep-walled fiord surrounded by an immense ice cap rising to six thousand feet, which left only a narrow fringe of ice-free rock along the base of the buried mountains. It was a land suitable for Titans but not for mortal men.

Although no Eskimo had ever chosen to live there, the place had been briefly occupied once before. In 1924 the federal government built an R.C.M.P. post at Dundas Harbour to command the entrance to Lancaster Sound as part of an early attempt to exert Canadian control over the high arctic islands. For a little while the Canadian flag whipped and frayed in the bitter winds funnelling off the ice cap, but the post soon had to be abandoned because the encroaching glaciers and the fearsome ice streams in the Sound so imprisoned the police that they could not patrol the land or travel out on the ice even to hunt seals with which to feed their dogs.

To the Cape Dorset settlers this forbidding place was utterly alien. They were used to a land of open tundra plain, not a mountainous world buried under perpetual ice. There were no caribou and few foxes or other animals on the meagre fringes of ice-free land. Because they were a people whose world was inhabited not only by the seen but by the unseen as well, the imponderable menace of this looming land shadowed them with apprehension.

Before two months had passed, the Cape Dorset people were longing to return to their own country. When the Company employee who was their guardian, and who lived in the comfortable police building, told them that nothing could be done until the ship returned the following summer, Kitsualik and three other men hitched up their dogs and set out to the west with their families, hoping to find the ice in that direction stable enough to let them escape across the Sound to northern Baffin Island.

It was a vain hope. After five days of tortuous travel on the shifting sea ice, during which they covered only forty miles, they were forced back to land at the mouth of Croker Bay. There they found westward travel along the shore barred by a succession of glacier tongues. Forced to retreat into Croker Bay (which was a slightly larger prison than Dundas Harbour), they spent the winter enduring worse privation than any they had known at Cape Dorset. They were able to survive only because Kitsualik revisited Dundas Harbour, abased himself before the angry white man and so obtained a dole of food.

Late in the summer of 1935 all the colonists gathered at Dundas Harbour determined to board the
Nascopie
and go home. But when the ship finally appeared, she anchored well offshore, unloaded some small quantity of supplies… and steamed away without them. They were told she would pick them up the following year.

The child, Soosie, remembered that second winter even more vividly than the first. While making a desperate attempt to hunt seals on the treacherous ice of the Sound during the dark days of January, Kitsualik was carried off when the shore-fast ice broke free of the land, sending him adrift in the running pack. Starving, and sheltering miserably behind upthrust slabs of ice on a piece of floe only a few yards across, he was driven eastward through nearly a week of below-zero weather before managing to scramble back to land. He had freed his dogs and abandoned his sled, so it took him the best part of another week to make his way back on foot to Croker Bay. By then his family had given him up for lost and hardly expected to be alive themselves to see the summer come.

the choice of
Dundas Harbour for an Eskimo settlement might appear to have been a blunder, but this was not so. It was intentionally chosen to provide a justification for transporting Eskimos to new locations, on the grounds of strengthening national sovereignty, and so to establish an acceptable precedent for moving Eskimos to regions where they would be useful to the fur trade.

Separated only by the narrow gut of Bellot Strait, Boothia Peninsula and Somerset Island form a gigantic finger thrusting northward from the mainland of the central arctic. In the early 1930s this region still belonged to the Netchilingmiut—the Seal People—for no trader had succeeded in planting a permanent post among them. The Company had tried to do so from the westward as early as 1926 but had been rebuffed by shallow, ice-filled seas and by the Netchilingmiut themselves. They were a tough and touchy people whose preference for the old way of life was so strong that intruders bringing winds of change were made to feel unwelcome and even threatened.

In 1932 the Company had decided on a new assault on this last Eskimo redoubt, from the eastward through Lancaster Sound and Prince Regent Inlet, and at the same time had concluded that the best way to deal with the intransigence of the Seal People was to plant “domesticated” Eskimos in their midst. The Eskimos chosen for this role were the twelve Baffin Island families who had been set ashore at Dundas Harbour. In the autumn of 1935 the Company reported to the government authorities the surprising fact that Dundas Harbour had proved unsuitable and requested permission to move the people to a better site. Permission was quickly granted.

on a late
August morning in 1936 the sonorous blast of the
Nascopie
’s whistle again echoed from the cliffs surrounding Dundas Harbour. By the time she dropped anchor the entire population was ready to embark, and this time they were permitted to do so. One of Soosie’s sisters recalled their feelings on that day.

“Everyone think now they going home. The bad times, they over now. Pretty soon we see all the people we leave behind. My father say he never go from Cape Dorset anymore.”

When the
Nascopie
cleared the harbour she headed westward, bound not for Cape Dorset but for uninhabited Elizabeth Harbour on the south coast of Boothia. In her holds she carried prefabricated buildings and the supplies to establish a new trading post; but if the Baffin Island Eskimos aboard knew anything of this, they did not know they had been chosen to help make that post a successful venture.