At the End of the World

by Lawrence Millman

  Markassie had agreed to take me to Camsell Island. But I didn’t tell any of my e-correspondents that I would soon be visiting this obscure chunk of granite south of Tukarak Island. I would tell them in person when I got home.

  23

  From my notebook: Fog-ridden day. Both land and sea appear swathed in moist cotton. Markassie navigates by studying qimugjuit—snow formations sculpted by the prevailing wind. Also by using his time-honored sense of direction. And, occasionally, by tasting the seawater.

  “I don’t need a GPS,” Markassie informed me shortly after we set off. “That’s because I already know where I am.”

  The Inuit have (had?) enlarged hippocampuses because they need (needed?) complex mental maps of their surroundings. This loss of such maps is starting to have dire consequences.…

  In 2013, I heard about a seal hunter in East Greenland whose boat was found miles from his intended destination. The dead man was still holding his GPS. Apparently, its receiver had failed.

  I also heard about an Inuk with a GPS-equipped snowmobile who smashed into a large boulder on Baffin Island. The boulder wrecked his snowmobile, along with his GPS. He was only a few miles from his village, but he began walking in the wrong direction and nearly froze to death.

  In case of a polar bear attack, Markassie had brought along a high-powered rifle, although he hadn’t seen many polar bears the last few years. “The earth is getting too warm for them,” he said.

  The word in Inuktitut for climate change is uggianaqtuq, which means “a friend acting strangely.”

  Even without climate change, the cold calculus of lower Hudson Bay leaves very little margin for error by polar bears, an animal much more adapted to higher latitudes.

  Another strike against polar bears: with climate change, they’ve recently been mating with grizzlies. The hybridized offspring (pizzly bears?) will have much greater difficulty surviving the rigors of the North than they would if their parents shared the same genes.

  In the boat, I studied Markassie’s face. It resembled the contour lines on a topographic map, and when he grinned, impressive new lines would appear. He grinned when he pointed to something too far away for me to see.

  Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was astonished that Indian tribes in the Amazon could see the planet Venus in broad daylight. They were astonished that he couldn’t.

  Whether in the Amazon or in the Arctic, those who have good observational skills are more likely to survive than those who don’t.

  Camsell Island, a low flat rock a mile or so in diameter, was named for Canadian geologist Charles Camsell, who never visited it.

  After we landed on the island, I could now see the object Markassie had pointed to—a lone pampers stuck (or frozen?) to the rocks several feet above the high tide mark.

  A pampers—from where might Hudson Bay’s notoriously whimsical currents have brought it?

  Except for the marooned pampers, the island did not seem to have any evidence of visits by human beings—not even the fifty-five-gallon oil drums, shotgun shells, candy bar wrappers, or empty potato chip bags that litter most parts of the Arctic.

  We were in a harbor surrounded by snow-draped, fog-encompassed geology. “Here,” Markassie said. “It happened here.…”

  24

  Mina, Peter Sala’s twenty-five-year-old sister, must have liked the idea of having Jesus Christ as her boyfriend, because she left her husband, a man named Mosee, and went to live in Ouyerack’s snowhouse after she learned he was Jesus.

  “First Mina was normal, then she was crazy,” the old woman told me.

  On March 29, 1941 the harbor was covered with thick ice. The outside temperature would have been quite a few degrees below zero. Not a temperature that even an Inuk would want to experience without the proper garments.

  All at once Mina began running from snowhouse to snowhouse, shouting that the world was coming to an end, and that Jesus would soon be arriving to take the Qiqiqtarmiut to a better place than the Belcher Islands.

  “We must go out on the ice to meet our Saviour,” Mina proclaimed. “Why can’t Jesus meet us in our snowhouses?” someone asked. “Because that is not his way,” she replied.

  I recently googled “Mina Sala,” and my first hit took me to a grand boutique hotel called Mina A’Salaam in Dubai.

  A stout, powerful woman, Mina started pushing people onto the ice and then lashing at them with a dog whip. Especially, she lashed at other women and small children. All the while she was dancing like a dervish and shouting, “Come, Jesus, come!”

  An Inuit dog whip has a sealskin lash that’s flung forward and back with a quick turn of the wrist. When it strikes, it has a report like a pistol. Lashed dogs often can be seen missing an eye or an ear.

  Farther and farther onto the ice Mina whipped her victims, telling them that Jesus would soon be kayaking down from the sky.

  Jesus paddling a kayak—no one seemed to question this. Or to question the notion of Jesus paddling it vertically.

  According to one of my informants, Mina’s sister Kumudluk helped her force people onto the ice, but then she (the sister) realized that this was not a good thing to do and went back to the shore … by herself.

  All of a sudden Mina shouted, “Naked we must meet our Saviour!” Then she rushed toward the other Qiqiqtarmiut and began ripping off their clothes and pulling off their kamiks (boots).

  She even tore the clothes off her own elderly mother.

  Perhaps because Jesus would soon be kayaking down from the sky, no one offered Mina any resistance.

  Ouyerack was hunting on the other side of the island. If he had been in the camp, would he have stopped Mina? Maybe, but maybe not. For he might have been Jesus, but he was also waiting for Jesus himself.

  “Wow! This would make a terrific movie!” a Cyberian friend said when I told her about Mina forcing people onto the ice. “Of course, the ending would have to be changed.…”

  Question: Why a movie? Why not, for instance, a book? Or even a lecture?

  Answer: Because it usually requires less thought to watch a movie than to read a book or listen to a lecture, and facility has become the ultimate goal of our species.

  When facility is the highest of all values, sitting and watching a screen becomes the defining activity. Or lack of activity.

  “Virtue rejects facility to be her companion,” wrote French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, adding: “She requires a craggy, rough, and thorny way.”

  Fat flakes of snow were now fluttering down from the sky like the slow emptying of a celestial bin.

  In the distance, I heard a high-pitched keening that sounded like a musical rendition of the island’s history. The wind was picking up. Markassie shot me a glance whose message was clear: Let’s leave soon, or we might be stuck here for a long time.…

  I quickly envisioned the scene: Mina struggling to get the clothes off first one, then another person. Parkas, sealskin trousers, and kamiks scattered about the ice. The dog whip snapping. Children crying. Breaths forming large balloons in the cold air.

  And everyone naked except Mina, who had decided to greet her Savior fully clothed.

  “Some people say they’ve heard the ghosts of children here,” Markassie shouted into the wind.

  It was probably the cold that brought several of the adults back to their senses. Mina’s husband Mosee and Peter Sala’s wife, Anowtelik, each grabbed a child and headed back to the shore, then grabbed another child, and another.

  “Help me with the children,” Anowtelik yelled at Mina, “or they will freeze.” “It doesn’t matter if they freeze,” Mina replied. “The world will soon be coming to an end, and then they will be fine.”

  Each of the six people who froze to death was related to Peter Sala: his son, his adopted son, his widowed sister, two of his nephews, and his mother.

  However terrible the circumstance, Inuit men almost never cry, but when Peter heard about the deaths of his family members on the ice of Camsell Island, h
e began sobbing.

  Needless to say, Jesus did not show up on Camsell Island on that cold March day in 1941.

  25

  As Markassie and I were pushing his boat into the water, I noticed (unbelievable!) a battered-looking laptop perched on the rocks directly above me.

  A marooned pampers is one thing, but a marooned laptop is another: How could it have ended up at such a seemingly improbable place as this?

  Optimistic thought: Some Inuit kid must have thrown away the laptop when he/she realized how it was affecting his/her life.

  Instead of giving kids computers and conditioning them to be little robots, parents should give their kids hand lenses and tell them to dig up the playground, proclaimed Canadian environmental activist David Suzuki.

  Evolutionary theory explains that every species is related to every other species, which is doubtless the reason children connect so readily with other organisms. Look, Mommy! A cute little earthworm!

  Or once connected with other organisms. Most organisms kids tend to observe nowadays are virtual, offered to them by screens. Look, Mommy! A cute little stegosaurus-E.T. hybrid!

  On the virtual versus the actual: I recently told a friend’s seven-year-old daughter that Siri, Apple’s beloved voice-activated digital assistant, had died in a car crash (“She was texting while driving,” I said), and the girl burst into tears. “She didn’t cry this hard when her grandmother died,” her mother told me.

  As we were heading back to Sanikiluaq, Markassie raised his voice above the wind: “A few years ago, a German went to Camsell to study the rocks, and I think he threw away that pinnguaq [plaything] because it stopped working.…”

  By pinnguaq, he meant the marooned laptop.

  Later I heard that the German geologist didn’t leave his malfunctioning laptop on the island, but brought it back to Sanikiluaq and tried to get it fixed there. Not surprisingly, there were no computer repair shops in the village.

  So how did the laptop reach Camsell Island? Left by a non-German scientist? Dropped out of a plane? Somehow washed ashore? Or perhaps deposited there by Amaguq, the Inuit trickster god? I never found out.…

  On the trip back to Sanikiluaq, a sudden gust of wind blew off my woolen toque. In one deft movement, Markassie reached out and grabbed it before it could touch the sea. “I’ve done that many times before,” he grinned.

  Once again Markassie saw something that I didn’t—not a pampers this time, but Sanikiluaq’s igloo-shaped church. The wind had blown away every last shred of fog, and in the distance, the church looked like a white marble.

  26

  Ernie Riddell and Peter Sala returned to the Belchers on April 2, 1941. When Ernie learned about the deaths on Camsell Island, he quickly sent the following telegram message to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police:

  THERE HAVE BEEN FURTHER MURDERS COME IMMEDIATELY.

  Near his post on Tukarak Island, Ernie marked out a landing strip with coal sacks, then started waiting for a police plane to show up.

  “I don’t think we’re safe,” Ernie’s clerk Lou Bradbury said.

  After a google of “Lou Bradbury + Hudson’s Bay Company” produced no useful results, Google had a question for me: might I be interested in “Mary Lou Bradbury?”

  Ernie took a .22 rifle with him wherever he went. One day he went fishing and returned to his post with a bucket of arctic char. The Inuit who saw him must have thought: What a strange man—he hunts fish with a rifle.

  Stuck for millennia in Tukarak Island’s landlocked ponds, the arctic char have developed giant heads, tumorlike humps on their snouts, and prognathous lower jaws. Even so, they’re still good to eat.

  Stay tuned for some thoughts on the no less peculiar morphologies of future Homo sapiens.…

  The Anglican minister in Great Whale River, the Rev. George Neilsen, had accompanied Ernie and Peter on their dogsled trip back to the Belchers. For the Rev. Neilsen wanted to “help the Eskimoes with their spiritual difficulties.”

  On helping “Eskimoes” with their spiritual difficulties: In the Central Canadian Arctic, an Anglican missionary had been repeatedly telling the local Inuit that Man was the most beautiful thing God ever created. So what’s the most beautiful thing God created? he asked an Inuk. Caribou! the elder exclaimed.

  Upon hearing the word “caribou” rather than “Man,” the irate missionary smacked the elder with a Bible, which proves that the Good Book, so-called, has a certain clout.…

  On the Bible’s clout: More than a quarter of all Americans think the Bible predicted 9/11.

  The Reverend Jerry Falwell and Pat Buchanan regarded 9/11 as a divine judgment on a society that tolerates homosexuality and abortion. Would they have called the Belcher killings a divine judgement on a society that believes plants, driftwood, rocks, and even shit have souls?

  Question: Why are there plenty of televangelists in America, but not a single tele-ecologist?

  On a nature walk I once led outside Boston, I turned over a log and pointed to a red-backed salamander. “What kind of worm is that?” asked a high school science teacher.

  During the same walk, we found a small plant called a sundew, or Drosera. A man suddenly backed away with a fearful look on his face when I mentioned that the plant was carnivorous. I soon realized that he wasn’t trying to be funny.

  Note: The trichomes on a sundew secrete enzymes that trap insects rather than human beings, for our size makes us culinarily uninteresting.

  Once the Greek hero Antaeus lost physical contact with the earth, he was lifted into the air and crushed to death by the he-man (some would say moron) Hercules.

  “God will protect us,” the Rev. Neilsen told Ernie and Lou Bradbury, then gave them some of his oatmeal molasses cookies, which, along with the Anglican faith, he dispensed wherever he went.

  27

  The killings in the Belchers happened at a time when the word “remote” meant something other than a car starter, computer mouse, channel changer, or desktop manager, so the RCMP couldn’t investigate those killings then as quickly as they could today.

  Another reason for the Mounties’ slow response: the killings occurred at the beginning of World War II, and every available plane had been requisitioned by the Royal Canadian Air Force for use in Europe.

  Next to the carnage in Europe, nine deaths on some remote islands in Hudson Bay might seem like a very small number, but “the apothecium [the place where the spores are made] of a lichen [can seem] disproportionately large compared with the universe,” wrote Thoreau.

  Many Inuit knew so little about the world of the qallunaat that they believed the War was a battle between the Hudson’s Bay Company and a rival company.

  “Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed,” wrote Wendell Berry.

  Back to Ernie Riddell. He paced back and forth on his makeshift runway, constantly scanning the sky for a plane. Having notified the police about the murders, he probably wondered if he would become the next Satan?

  Ernie especially dreaded trips to the outhouse. The path was exposed, and the outhouse was quite a distance from the trading post.

  One evening there was a tapping at the door of the Hudson’s Bay Company store on Tukurak Island. Rifle in hand, Ernie opened the door, and a smiling Inuk greeted him, saying, “I have some seal meat for you, Mr. Riddell.”

  The smiling Inuk was Simeonie’s father. Simeonie said Ernie was so relieved by this visit that he stopped carrying around his rifle.

  At last the Mounties found a decrepit single-engine Norseman resting on mothballs in Ottawa, repaired it, equipped it with skis, and flew it to Great Whale River, then on to the Belchers.

  As the plane was landing, the Qiqiqtarmiut gazed up at it in amazement: most of them had never seen an airplane before. A few thought it might be an unusually large bird, but what kind of bird?

  From this presumed bird emerged men dressed in scarlet tunics—Mounties.

  “I don’t like flying in an airplane,�
�� Simeonie told me. “You can’t see the world around you like you can in a kayak.”

  In 1961, every hunter in the Belchers paddled a kayak, according to ethnographer Milton Freeman. Forty years later, Simeonie was probably the last of the Qiqiqtarmiut to travel in a kayak.

  Simeonie’s grandfather once paddled his kayak several hundred miles south, to James Bay. The reason? “Just to see,” Simeonie told me.

  The Qiqiqtarmiut helped the Mounties locate the bodies of the murdered Inuit, “A ghastly sight,” wrote one of the Mounties, “with frozen blood painting their flesh.”

  On April 15, RCMP Inspector D. J. Martin—one of the tunic-clad visitors—dispatched a telegraph message from the Belchers to Ottawa in which he stated that nine Inuit had been killed “in the islands,” and that the presumed murderers had been taken into custody.

  The murderers in question cooperated with the police. Why wouldn’t they? The Mounties were feeding them so heartily that they probably associated white man’s justice with hearty meals.…

  Probably none of the islands’ new visitors had ever listened to their own borborygmus. This word refers to the gurgling sound made by the layers of muscle in one’s intestines squeezing the food that isn’t there. A rare sound among white people, but a common one among the Qiqiqtarmiut.…

  28

  From my notebook: I have a roommate, a Canadian government official. In three days, I haven’t exchanged more than a few sentences with him because of his devotion to his PalmPilot. If I want to communicate with him, should I walk over to the school and email him?

  On the virtues of conversation: you don’t have to purchase any sort of device, so you don’t need to turn yourself into a consumer, and then—with rapid upgrades in technology—a frenzied consumer.

  “One hair of my beard is more dear to me than all the money that can be extracted from me,” wrote English naturalist Llewellyn Powys.

  On the defects of digital consumption: A person buys data owned by a megacorporation, which then can poke its mega-snout into that person’s life.