The Snow Walker (15 page)

A short distance into Prince Regent Inlet, the old ship encountered heavy ice
…
so heavy that after three days of bruising effort she was stopped. Her master decided to turn back, and two days later she anchored off the little Eskimo settlement of Arctic Bay at the northern tip of Baffin Island. A hurried decision had been made to offload the supplies for the new post, together with the settlers, and to pick them up the following summer for another attempt to reach the coast of Boothia.

The Pangnirtung men, who came of a stock wise to the ways of white men after nearly a century of contact with Baffin Bay whaling crews, seem to have suspected what was intended for them and obstinately refused to leave the ship. They would go home, they said, or they would go nowhere. The Pond Inlet people, whose home was only a hundred and fifty miles away and within reach by dog team, kept their own counsel.

Kitsualik and one or two other Cape Dorset men were for following the lead of the Pangnirtung people, but there was a strong detachment of R.C.M.P. travelling on the ship and Kavavou argued that the police would drive them ashore if they would not go voluntarily. Then a white man came among them to explain that it was too late for the
Nascopie
to return to Cape Dorset that season but, if the people were still of the same mind next summer, they would be taken home. So the Dorset group reluctantly disembarked along with the Pond Inlet families. The Pangnirtung people remained adamant; and when it became clear that force alone would move them, the Company officials reconsidered. A few days later these stubborn rebels were set ashore under the familiar mountains of their own land.

Again the Dorsets found themselves in alien country, this time surrounded by unfamiliar people speaking a different dialect. Hesitant to impinge on the hunting grounds of the Arctic Bay Eskimos, they huddled close to the settlement and, for the third successive year, they survived on the meagre dole issued by the Company. They were sustained by the enduring hope that they would be taken home when summer came again. The Pond Inlet people did not share that hope. As soon as travel conditions made it possible, they harnessed their dogs and slipped quietly away. During that long winter the Company’s plans suffered something of a sea change. Lorenzo Learmont, the post manager at Gjoa Haven on King William Island (which was as close to Boothia as the Company had been able to get from the westward), had long nursed a compulsive ambition to open the Netchilingmiut country to “the trade.” During the winter of 1936 he persuaded his employers to try a dual assault. While the Company’s small auxiliary schooner,
Aklavik
, attempted to reach Boothia from the west, the
Nascopie
would make a similar attempt from the east. If either ship succeeded, a post would be established at the mouth of Bellot Strait. If
both
made it, then the age-old dream of a commercially useful northwest passage would have been achieved. In either event, the Netchilingmiut would, to quote a Company historian, “be brought into the modem world.”

Ice conditions during the summer of 1937 were exceptionally favourable. The little
Aklavik
managed to wiggle and worm her way through the pack to Gjoa Haven, then on to Bellot Strait, and Lorenzo Learmont was on hand to greet the
Nascopie
when she arrived off the western entrance bearing the wherewithal with which to establish the new post of Fort Ross.

That wherewithal included the six Cape Dorset Eskimo families who had wintered at Arctic Bay and who, when they departed from that place aboard the
Nascopie,
still hoped they might be bound for home. But in the last days of August as they stood disconsolately on the rocky foreshore below the future site of Fort Ross and watched the smudge of the
Nascopie
’s retreating smoke vanish into an autumnal sky, hope vanished with it.

Napachee-Kadlak remembered how his people felt that day.

“Now all know never go home again. Some women they cry and don’t eat nothing. Nobody like this place. Netchilingmiut don’t like to see strange people here. We don’t know this country, don’t know what to do.”

The exiles could be of no value in advancing the Hudson’s Bay Company’s design as long as they remained in this hopeless state of mind. Somehow they had to be roused from their bewildered apathy. The solution was to send them a hundred and fifty miles to the north in a little motor boat, the
Seal,
to the uninhabited tip of Somerset Island where they would be forced by necessity to pick up the threads of life again while at the same time opening up a virgin source of furs.

The young man chosen to lead the little band of Dorsets and to manage the outpost, which was grandiloquently named Port Leopold, was Ernie Lyall, who had been a clerk in the Company’s service for ten years. His was a happy choice as far as the Dorset people were concerned. Born on the Labrador coast, Lyall had Eskimo blood in his veins and sympathy and understanding for the people in his heart. He became a friend of Kitsualik’s and eventually married Soosie’s elder sister, Nipesha.

Lyall and his charges had a desperately hard time of it. Sea-ice conditions were nearly as bad as they had been at Dundas Harbour and the country roundabout Port Leopold was as inhospitable as the Netchilingmiut—who avoided all but a small part of the west coast of Somerset—had always known it to be. In 1940 the Company permitted the outpost to be closed.

Lyall brought the wanderers south; but with the exception of Kavavou and his family, they refused to go near Fort Ross. They wanted nothing to do with the white men there or with the Netchilingmiut whom they also distrusted and disliked. Instead, they chose to camp on the north shore of Creswell Bay which faces on Prince Regent Inlet some sixty miles north of Fort Ross. It was from here that they made a final plea to the Company, through Lyall, to be sent home to Cape Dorset. It was rejected. In fact, that same summer the
Nascopie
landed two additional Cape Dorset families who had been persuaded to join those who, so they had been told, were comfortably settled on Somerset Island.

When the
Nascopie
landed the newcomers, she disembarked another unseen and deadly passenger. Before October ended, fourteen of the Fort Ross immigrants were dead of influenza, including six of those who had camped at Creswell Bay.

As winter closed in, it brought famine with it. Fox pelts had become almost valueless and the men were unable to buy enough ammunition to make a sustaining hunt, let alone purchase sufficient quantities of food to meet the people’s needs. Weak from the disease which had afflicted almost every man, woman and child, short of ammunition, and lashed by the violent blizzards which had made the east coast of Somerset infamous to the Netchilingmiut, the surviving Dorsets dubiously faced their first winter in this their sixth place of exile.

Although they were strangers to Creswell Bay, they suspected that the vicious northerly gales which had made Port Leopold untenable would strike as hard here, so they sought protection for their snowhouses close under a rampart of cliffs parallelling the north shore of the Bay half a mile inland. Kitsualik and his friend Tomasee chose to build their houses near the foot of the Bay where the cliffs dipped down and lost themselves in the inland plateau; but Jamesee, Johanee and a young man named Josee built theirs some miles to the westward where the cliffs rose nearly a hundred feet.

At fourteen years of age Soosie had now become a strikingly handsome woman who stood nearly a head taller than the rest of her people. She was sharply intelligent as well as a paragon of Eskimo domestic skills. Although she still lived with her family, she was betrothed to Josee. They had intended to marry in the autumn but because the epidemic had killed both Josee’s father and his uncle, leaving him as the sole support of two widows and five children, his marriage to Soosie had to be postponed.

During December the gales roared down on Creswell Bay from across the polar sea with such fury that most of the time it was impossible to hunt seals at the breathing holes out on the wind-burnished ice. Meat became so scarce that dogs were dying and the people were growing gaunt with hunger.

During the winter the people spent at Arctic Bay, Soosie’s elder brother, Gideon, had begun to turn to the white men’s religion seeking an eventual avenue of escape from the dismal existence of the exiles. This Christmas he held service in the chill darkness of the family snowhouse where seal oil had become too valuable to be burned in the lamps. It was a bleak and joyless parody of Christmas; nevertheless, Kitsualik’s family was better off than Josee’s, for that harassed young man had not managed to kill a seal for several weeks and the women and children in his igloo were surviving on the little that Jamesee and Johanee could spare.

During the first week in January the winds died down and it began to snow. Jamesee and Johanee moved their families into small travel igloos on the offshore ice in order to be near the sealing grounds. Josee considered doing likewise but, with eight people to house, he decided it would be best to leave the family where it was and do his sealing from Jamesee’s igloo. Luck finally came his way and one afternoon he speared a big jar seal. He hauled it happily home to his snowhouse under the lee of the cliff and that night he and the women and children feasted.

But the north wind began to blow again that night, and it blew a living gale. To Josee’s family, well fed and warm for the first time in many days, the roar of wind reverberating through the walls of the snowhouse seemed no great threat and, as the hours slipped by, the sound grew muted and they went to sleep believing the storm was dying down. They did not know that the fury of the gale was being muffled by a torrent of snow driven over the edge of the cliff and building up in hard-packed layers above the snowhouse.

The next day when Josee crawled into the entrance tunnel he found it so solidly blocked that it took him an hour to cut his way out. When he finally broke through, it was to find the world enveloped in appalling turmoil.

“Snow was coming over the cliff like a river,” he later described it. “Nothing could be seen. It was as if one’s head was under freezing water. It filled up the hole I dug in the little time I had my head out. I could tell the igloo was already buried and I thought we better get out of there while we could.”

Scrambling back into the interior of the igloo which, blanketed under the thickening drift and lit and warmed by seal-oil lamps, now seemed particularly snug, Josee urged the women to hurry and dress themselves and the children in their warmest outer garments. “We have to go!” he told them after describing the ferocity of the storm.

The women began to obey but then they paused. If the blizzard was so bad, how would they find shelter? Burdened by so many children, perhaps they would not be able to reach Jamesee’s or Johanee’s igloos even if they could find them in the blinding drift. No, they said at last, it would be better to stay where they were until the storm ended. If they could not dig their own way out, then Jamesee and Johanee would certainly come searching and would free them.

Nothing Josee could say would change their minds. He lingered in an agony of indecision for an hour or two before he made his choice. If they would not come with him, he would go alone.

The eldest child in that igloo was only ten but he considered himself a man and so was not prepared to obey the women. He struggled into his outer clothing and followed Josee into the tunnel. Several hours later man and boy crawled into Jamesee’s igloo.

For another day and night the blizzard raged. Then came a slight lull and Josee, Jamesee and Johanee fought their way to shore against a storm which was still strong enough to sometimes bring them to their knees. The ground drift was so thick they could see no marks to guide them in their search for Josee’s igloo, and snow was rolling over the cliff like an avalanche. They persevered in their search until the wind began to rise again, forcing them to retreat to the shelter of the igloos out on the bay ice.

When the blizzard finally blew itself out and the short winter day broke clear and bright, the men hastened back toward the shore
…
to find themselves in a world so changed it was unrecognizable. An immense and faceless drift now sloped up from the beach to within a few feet of the crest of the cliff and stretched as far as the eye could see to east and west. All the familiar landmarks were obliterated and the three bewildered searchers had no way of determining where, under the mass of hard-packed snow, the igloo lay. Yet somewhere far beneath them two women and four children were entombed. Desperately they probed and dug, seeking some clue
…
but the snow revealed nothing of what it hid. They stood together and shouted at the top of their voices, and there was no answer from the depths. For nearly a week they sought to pierce that anonymous white shroud before, exhausted and borne down by sorrow, they accepted their defeat.

Early in February Josee drove a borrowed dog team into Fort Ross where he carefully described to the post manager how the tragedy had taken place. The manager radioed the nearest R.C.M.P. detachment, at Pond Inlet, and the police replied that a patrol—the first ever to be sent to Somerset—would soon be starting out and would investigate. Satisfied that he had done all that the white men required of him, Josee returned to Creswell Bay where in early April he and Soosie became man and wife.

on february 27
Constable J. W. Doyle, accompanied by two Eskimos, set out from Pond Inlet. Doyle travelled south across the mountains of Baffin Island to Foxe Basin, then turned east and north up the precipitous coast of the Brodeur Peninsula until he was abreast of Creswell Bay. On May 5 the three men had just completed the dangerous crossing of the broken ice of Prince Regent Inlet when they saw a dog team approaching. Its driver was Josee who had undertaken a hundred-mile journey from the starving Dorset camps in the hope of killing a polar bear.