At the End of the World

by Lawrence Millman

  Now Jimmy pointed to a badly rusted winch a few feet away from the giant hogweed and directly above the Moose River. The tall one was always working with it, he said. Always, he repeated.

  Might Peter have thought of this sort of continuous work as an antidote to grief?

  Jimmy’s family name used to be Wabajun, which means “Whitewater,” since one of his ancestors delighted in paddling his canoe in frothy, roaring rivers. A perfectly sensible name …

  … but the newly arrived Anglican missionaries in the nineteenth century did not have an easy time pronouncing Cree names, so they renamed Jimmy’s grandfather—along with many of the other local Cree—Wesley, after the Anglican divine John Wesley.

  Since it was lunch time, we sat down beside the Moose River, and Jimmy brought out a tin of Klik and some bannock to go with the apples and oranges I had bought at Moose Factory’s Northern Store.

  I was familiar with bannock, a type of unleavened bread quite common in Canadian outposts like Moose Factory.

  Bannock is the substrate (so to speak) for this oft-told Cree joke: What did the trapper who’d spent his whole life in the bush say when he saw his first pizza? Answer: Who barfed on the bannock?

  But I had never heard of Klik. Later I googled it, and rather than tell me that it was the Canadian version of Spam, Wikipedia provided me with this tidbit of information: “In computer programming, Klik or Click is a game development RAD tool using visual programming.”

  Question: Can you spread a RAD tool on bannock?

  A Canadian version of Spam doesn’t sound very tasty, but I’ve often thought that the flavor of food depends on the physical setting where it’s eaten, and so it was that with the gray-blue Moose River eagerly rushing past us, and Canada jays and ravens perched in the nearby trees, my Klik tasted just fine.…

  45

  “Take the Indian out of the child” was a quote commonly used in Canada by proponents of residential schools.

  From the 1880s until the mid-1980s, Native children in Canada were snatched from their families and forced to attend schools usually presided over by gentlemen of the cloth who were often anything but gentle.

  Like John Trapper, Jimmy Wesley attended the Bishop Horden Residential School. One morning he stopped and tried to talk with Akeenik (“new girl in town,” he said), but they could only manage a series of gestures, since Cree and Inuktitut are quite different languages.

  “I tried speaking to her in English, but that didn’t work, either,” Jimmy said.

  Jimmy was so late to school that his teacher, an Anglican minister, clubbed one of his hands … clubbed the hand repeatedly and so hard that, he said, “I still have almost no feeling in it seventy years later.”

  Jimmy’s prominent cheekbones and wide nostrils made him seem perpetually alarmed, as if he could not get the minister’s violent act out of his head.

  Concerning Bishop Horden, the school’s namesake: In 1855, two years after he arrived in these parts, Horden, then only a missionary, delighted in the fact that he had already baptized eighty-two of the local Cree.

  Along with performing baptisms, Horden and the other missionaries informed the Cree that eating food with cutlery—likewise using a napkin at mealtimes—was essential for their salvation.

  In the old days, Jimmy said, many Cree were baptized by Anglican ministers, then rebaptised by Catholic priests, and then baptized all over again by the Anglicans. “We must have gotten very wet,” he added.

  Jimmy also told me this: upon noting that the Cree fought off disease by wearing moose tooth charms, Anglican missionaries gave the Cree seemingly less primitive charms to fight off disease—Holy Bibles and crucifixes.

  I asked Jimmy what he remembered about Akeenik. “She always had a cut lip,” he said, by which he probably meant she had the congenital fissure known as a harelip.

  Also: “She sewed clothes for our people out of coats and trousers the Mounties had thrown away. My father owned a parka she made for many years. It was a very nice parka, too.”

  We were now joined by Jimmy’s wife, Anna. “That woman, we called her Agnes, she had tuberculosis,” Anna said. “I worked in the hospital’s TB ward, Ward 3, where she was a patient for many years. I remember that she liked to sing ‘Jesus Loves Me.’”

  I wondered: Did Akeenik/Agnes think of what she had done to Sara Apawkok while she was singing this hymn?

  Tuberculosis, caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, was once so rampant in the Canadian North that missionaries distributed samplers with “Don’t Spit” written in large letters to Native people, although most of the recipients of these samplers couldn’t read.

  The missionaries could also have distributed samplers with “Don’t Talk” written on them, since talking is just as likely to spread the bacterium as spitting.

  How had the bacterium arrived in the North? Most likely, it was brought there by early white visitors like those missionaries themselves.

  Ouyerack spent most of his time coughing, wheezing, and gasping for breath in his tent. “We almost never saw him,” John Trapper told me, “but we always heard him.”

  A local doctor visited Ouyerack and determined that he was suffering from tuberculosis. In his case, pulmonary tuberculosis.

  Akeenik seems to have had the extrapulmonary variety, because Anna told me that she sang “Jesus Loves Me” without punctuating the words with coughs.

  In January, 1942, a perpetually coughing Ouyerack was admitted to Moose Factory’s new thirty-two-room hospital. The first night he slept in the hospital was probably the first night he ever slept in a structure made from anything other than snow, sod, or animal skins.

  Ouyerack died on May 27, 1942. Postmortem tests for tuberculosis turned out to be negative. In permanent exile from the Belchers, could he have willed himself to die?

  “Our native soil draws all of us, by I know not what sweetness, and never allows us to forget,” wrote the Roman poet Ovid, himself an exile.

  46

  In Moose Factory, I visited the St. Thomas Anglican Church’s cemetery with John Trapper. We were accompanied by a number of exuberant misasaks, an insect that breeds promiscuously in the Hudson Bay lowlands.

  I had written the first few drafts of these notes by hand, but I’m now using my computer to write this final draft as a Word file, and the spellcheck keeps changing misasak to “missal.”

  Little does a computer know that missal (there it goes again!) is the Cree word for a large northern horsefly, which, in the words of an early visitor to the Canadian North, “lands on you with a thump, takes a bite out of your flesh, and then retreats to a nearby tree, where you can hear it masticating.”

  Slapping at the misasaks, John and I wandered around the cemetery. Most of the grave markers were wooden crosses with no names on them. Several of those crosses were also broken. One of the broken crosses had only a single legible word on it: “Beloved.”

  Names on the gravestones: several Highboys, a few Smallboys, a number of Wesleys, and a single Butterfly.

  The Smallboys, John told me, were almost all over six feet tall.

  John showed me a large concrete cenotaph that listed the names of the Inuit from the east coast of Hudson Bay who’d been shipped to the Moose Factory hospital and died without being cured of whatever ailed them, which was usually tuberculosis.

  Ouyerack’s name was on the list, with the designation E9-541 next to it.

  Why such a designation? Because white outsiders had an even more difficult time with Inuit names than they had with Cree names, so the Inuit received numbers, and by those numbers they were subsequently known.

  Inuit dog tag

  For many years, every Canadian Inuk was obliged to wear his or her identity number engraved on a dog tag and worn around the neck. Dog tags worn in the western Arctic began with a “W,” while those worn in the eastern Arctic, like Ouyerack’s, began with an “E.”

  Not only Inuit names, but Inuktitut itself perplexed most qallunaat.
When they did try to speak it, the results were often mixed, as when a clergyman in Igloolik in the 1950s confused ijjujut (Bible) with igujut (testicles) and told his congregation that they should be paying more attention to their testicles.

  John and I gazed at one cross after another, but we couldn’t find a cross that marked Ouyerack’s final resting place.

  If Ouyerack had actually been Jesus, he would have risen shortly after he died, but—like Peter Sala—he went down rather than up, thus becoming a part of the local ecosystem.

  Roseroot (Rhodiola integrifolia) is a cold climate plant that usually doesn’t survive in more temperate zones. In the unmowed cemetery, I noticed a bountiful patch of it.

  If Ouyerack had been buried near this patch, perhaps it was his latter-day descendent …

  … or perhaps the roseroot was the descendant of a Cree man named Sinclair Whitefish whose grave was very close to it.

  All at once John was reminded of something else about the Belcher Inuit: “They were afraid of trees.”

  Unlike the Belcher Islands, Moose Factory is situated below the tree line, so if you visit the village and its environs, you’ll see black and white spruce, balsam fir, poplar, tamarack, and several different types of birch—hardly frightening at all.

  But here’s something that is frightening: many deciduous trees in different parts of the world are developing fissures on their bark and even shedding that bark as a result of, it’s assumed, Wi-Fi radiation.

  “We travel the Milky Way together, trees and men,” wrote John Muir.

  47

  At the Cree Interpretation Center in Moose Factory, I met a middle-aged man everyone called Upsagan. This nickname refers to a bracket fungus, Fomes fomentarius, that Mark Wesley (his actual name) frequently uses as a fire starter in the bush.

  “I like getting down and dirty with nature, and I can’t do that with a lighter or matches,” Upsagan told me.

  I asked him what inspired his delight in dirt. He told me: “My grandmother was dying. She said, ‘Don’t look at me. Get out of the house and look at the world.’ And so I did…”

  Another specialty of Upsagan’s: drying the membrane that cloaks a moose’s capacious heart and making tote bags out of it.

  Eager to have the membrane around a moose’s heart as a carrying conveyance, I bought one of his bags, and as of this writing, it has done splendidly in all kinds of weather.

  “If it’s obsolete, it works,” wrote mountaineer-explorer H. W. Tilman.

  Upsagan told me of an incident he’d heard about from his father: One day Peter Sala escaped from the Mountie compound, stole a canoe, and began paddling. The Mounties apprehended him at Charles Island … and put him back behind the winch.

  In a motorized canoe, I set off for Charles Island with Upsagan and his eleven-year-old son. The son played Nintendo for the entire trip.

  Pointing to a small cove with a campground and a purple port-a-loo directly above it, Upsagan said, “I think the Mounties must have captured your friend [Peter Sala] right over there.”

  I’d told Upsagan about the Belcher murders. Now he told me about an incident that occurred fifty miles east of Moose Factory, at a place called Hannah Bay. In 1832, a group of starving Cree asked the local Hudson’s Bay Company man for food. The HBC man refused to give them food unless they gave him furs.

  “Not unusual behavior for a Company man,” I remarked. To which Upsagan replied: “But it gets ugly … like your story.”

  “Yes!!!” Upsagan’s son shouted not in agreement, but at his Nintendo handheld video system.

  “The Cree shaman contacted the Great Spirit, and he said, ‘Kill the bastards!’ Upsagan continued. “So they killed nine people at the post, even some half-Cree servants.”

  “Sounds like he contacted the Christian God,” I remarked, swatting at a mosquito.

  “Probably true,” said Upsagan, “because I don’t think we had a Great Spirit in those days, only lots of nature spirits, and they never would have told us to kill our fellow human beings.”

  One of the elders at Moose Factory told me this story: Shortly after the arrival of the first missionaries, some Cree killed a whiskey jack (Canada jay) and decided that if the bird’s gizzard caught a fish, they would become Christian.

  The gizzard caught one fish, then another, and then another, so they said good-bye to the animistic past and converted to Christianity.

  “Some people say they’ve heard the cries of the dead at Hannah Bay,” Upsagan added, echoing what Markassie had told me about the dead children on Camsell Island.

  We hauled the canoe ashore in the cove where Peter was captured. It was only a short distance from Moose Factory, so Peter probably would have been captured before he could manage a smile.

  But I managed a smile, albeit an ethnographic one, when Upsagan pointed to an Usnea lichen (Old Man’s Beard) dangling from a black spruce and told me that Cree women once used it as a feminine hygiene absorbent.

  While the St. Thomas Anglican Church’s cemetery in Moose Factory bred giant horseflies, Charles Island bred mosquitoes and did so in such quantities that it made most other places seem mosquito-bereft.

  I’ve noticed that mosquitoes in different places have different-pitched whines. Here, for instance, the whine had a relatively low pitch that sounded a lot like the sacred Hindu syllable om.

  In the Canadian North, a case can be made for the mosquito as a true conservationist, determined at all costs—often sacrificing its very life—to preserve wild lands from invasions by resource sniffers and developers.

  Another point in favor of these miniature conservationists: As soon as baby birds break free from their eggs, usually in the late spring, they begin snapping up mosquitoes, an extremely important source of nutrition for them.

  Upsagan wanted to burn an upsagan to keep away the whizzing, stinging hordes of mosquitoes, but we couldn’t find his namesake fungus on any of the islands’ trees, so we coated our exposed body parts with DEET (N, N diethyl-meta-toluamide), a much less healthy alternative.

  Seated at a picnic table, the two of us were talking (his son, seemingly impervious to the bloodsuckers, continued to play Nintendo) when all of a sudden there was a very strong gust of wind.

  Without looking up, Upsagan said, “Balsam poplar…”

  … and then he added: “Not so long ago, our people could identify a tree by the sound the wind made in its branches. Now there are only a few of us who can do it. So much is being lost.…”

  So much is being lost. The balsam poplar above us seemed to whip its branches up and down in agreement.

  48

  Whether Ouyerack died of tuberculosis will probably never be known, but one person who did die of TB was a nineteenth-century Concord, Massachusetts, resident named Henry David Thoreau.

  Quite a few Concordians did not appreciate Thoreau. There was once an old lady who often put flowers on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grave in the town’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, but who muttered as she passed Thoreau’s, “And none for you, you dirty little atheist.”

  Back from Moose Factory, I was foraging for mushrooms very close to the dirty little atheist’s grave, and I found several Suillus species, symbiotic partners with the nearby white pines. Yet another example of how, in Nature, everything is hitched to everything else.

  Like Peter Sala, Thoreau was hitched to the local ecosystem. In his case, he was well aware of the fact. He wrote: “Pines and birches or, perchance, weeds and brambles, will constitute my second growth.”

  I was collecting the Suillus mushrooms for later consumption (not surprisingly, graveyard mushrooms taste very good) when a voice called out to me from a SUV on one of the cemetery’s roads: “Hey, buddy. My GPS crapped on me. You know the way to Route 2?”

  I gave the voice directions without consulting a GPS.

  A short while later, I heard the word “Hello?” spoken loudly over and over again, like a broken record at full volume. A man’s cell phone seemed to have crapped on him,
and he was wandering among the gravestones, even occasionally wandering into them.

  Hello, hello, hello, says a person on his/her cell phone. Tap, tap, tap, goes another person on his/her computer keyboard. Meanwhile, a supermall rises up on the last bit of wild land in the vicinity …

  … or another Burger King/McDonald’s/Kentucky Fried Chicken/Subway is squatting obscenely on a recently drained wetland.

  Mr. Hello now walked over to me. “Hey, you got a cell phone I can borrow?” he asked. I told him I didn’t own a cell phone.

  The stressed expression on Mr. Hello’s face indicated that not only had his god failed him, but he couldn’t find a replacement god and thus had become the technological equivalent of an atheist.

  “It’s so open here, I was trying to get a satellite connection,” he said when I asked him why he was in the cemetery.

  Opinion: It’s much better to get a connection with the ground on which you’re standing than with an artificial object thrust high into the sky.

  Earlier in the afternoon, I’d visited Walden Pond because a friend had told me about a great horned owl perched in a tree there, and I hoped to find an Onygena fungus growing on one of its pellets.

  You might recall the species in question, Onygena corvina, from my visit to Peter Sala. It doesn’t grow directly on the pellet, but on the bones of the small mammalians gulped down by the owl and then vomited up in the pellet.

  Onygena corvina on owl pellet

  Personal admission: I would rather find an Onygena Corvina on an owl pellet than a bag of gold pieces.

  I didn’t locate the owl, but I did see a large milk snake with alternating bands of red, black, and yellow slithering across the trail directly in front of two kids who were so affixed to their iDevices that they didn’t notice it.

  Contrary to popular belief, our grandchildren won’t condemn us for what we’ve done to the planet because they’ll be so lost in the solipsism of the tech-dependent world that they won’t notice it (i.e., the planet).