Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  “If there is any place in the far north that is haunted by ghosts it is certainly King William Land,” cautioned Lorenz A. Learmonth, who had managed the Hudson’s Bay Company on the island and across the Arctic.

  Local legend had it that an Inuk named Aglooka was walking one day along a beach on the southern shore of Simpson Strait, near Starvation Cove. Inuit oral history says dozens of men from the Franklin Expedition died there. The Inuk stumbled on “a large piece of much-weathered spar, which had drifted in from some shipwreck of long ago, possibly from Franklin’s Erebus or Terror,” Learmonth wrote. Aglooka turned it into a fine sled, the envy of everyone, but soon fell sick and died. In his final moments, Aglooka told his family and old hunting friend Neovitcheak that he wanted to be buried with his prized sled. They obliged, but Neovitcheak gave in to temptation, dug into the grave, and stole it. He too became ill, decided Aglooka’s spirit had hexed him, and reburied the sled with his old friend. Neovitcheak’s illness got steadily worse anyway. His family was plagued by bad luck. So he hung himself from a line of seal sinew in his igloo, hoping to free the others from the jinx.

  Learmonth duly reported the suicide to RCMP Sergeant Henry Larsen, himself a legend of the North. The Mountie defied Inuit warnings of a double curse and went by dogsled to Neovitcheak’s grave, at the bay named after US Army Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka, who led a search for the Franklin Expedition in the late 1870s. During Larsen’s investigation, the Mountie disturbed Neovitcheak’s burial site, and, when he got back to Gjoa Haven, a storm struck and buried the place in black snow. The snow may have been darkened by fine dust carried thousands of miles north from the United States, but it was such a rare event, and lingered for so long, that Inuit saw it as an evil omen. They blamed Neovitcheak’s curse. Larsen returned the following year, and after he passed by the grave again, the Mountie’s sled dogs got distemper or some other disease. Most died.

  By 1941, Larsen was commanding the St. Roch, the first ship to complete the Northwest Passage from west to east. First a gale battered her. Then she was beset by sea ice. While frozen in for nearly a year, Larsen sent Constable “Frenchy” Chartrand on patrol to the King William Island post, where he too died. Later that same winter, Larsen and acting Corporal Pat Hunt sledded to the Gjoa Haven trading post and waited with Learmonth for a mail delivery, part of the cargo Paddy Gibson had planned to bring by dogsled from the landing strip at Cambridge Bay. It was all lost with him in the crash.

  “Neovitcheak had again been at work,” Learmonth was certain, “and all Larsen’s and Hunt’s mail and the rest of the St. Roch and Western Arctic mail had been destroyed in the plane, with Paddy on board, which fell flaming from the sky between Eldorado and Coppermine.”

  LOUIE KAMOOKAK was seven years old when he heard for the first time about the qalunaaq visitors who had come in big ships long ago. Hummahuk told him the story when they were together where the boy loved to be, out on the land, living in a tent with his maternal great-grandmother. His parents and older brother had gone in pursuit of a caribou herd. Louie stayed behind with instructions to make sure the sick, frail elder was comfortable and not hungry or thirsty. He also kept her and the tent clean, doing regular chores like emptying her toilet bucket. Their hunting camp was near the Kaleet River, on the northern edge of mainland Canada. The family traveled the roughly seventy miles from Gjoa Haven by dog team before the summer melt. They wouldn’t return until the ocean froze over again and the sea ice gave them a new bridge back to King William Island. They stayed not far from the river mouth that Franklin’s dying crewmen had struggled to reach more than a century earlier. After all that had passed over the generations since, the wilderness around the Kamookak camp wasn’t much different from what the Royal Navy sailors would have found if any had lived to see it.

  Including Louie, a dozen Inuit camped by the Kaleet. At its mouth, where the river became more of a stream as silty fresh water spilled into ocean, the surrounding land was largely flat and rocky. Stone inuksuit stood like dark, silent sentries whose pointing arms helped travelers find their way to the caribou and then back home again. In those days, the caribou didn’t come all the way to Gjoa Haven. The long-haired, usually shy musk ox were also staying away from the island. There could have been reasons for that other than human activity or even shaman’s curses. Migrations of the Arctic’s largest mammals have always changed with a mysterious cycle of nature. They still do. But elders said the coming of the qalunaaq added a new twist: Caribou and musk ox stayed away from King William Island during the time when white men visited in tall ships. Years later, Kamookak found evidence that suggests the British sailors hunted eider ducks. There were wooden remnants of what appeared to be man-made duck blinds by a lake not far from Victory Point. As the sick and hungry sailors trekked farther south, it got harder to find fresh meat, just as Louie’s family was having trouble in this hard season, as they made their desperate move south.

  “Franklin’s time was a bad time,” he told me. That is what the elders’ stories taught.

  Louie and his family made up eight of the hunting party, which totaled fourteen people. His parents were there. So were their parents, and their parents too. Parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, all together on the land, with children watching, learning, and working, just the way Inuit families had fed, clothed, and cared for each other for centuries. Each night, Hummahuk lit the qulliq, which sat on the ground with smooth, curved edges—like lamps southern kids read about in exotic tales of genies—burning oil pounded from seal blubber. Lying in the dim light that cast moving shadows on the tent wall, when darkness was falling earlier each August evening, Louie couldn’t have been more content, drifting toward sleep, safe and warm on a mattress of caribou hides, stacked several thick, with his head resting on a rolled-up parka. The squawk and screech of gulls, buzzing mosquitoes, and the rising wind outside the small, square tent were nature’s lullaby. His great-grandmother knelt on the side of the small space that she shared with her husband. She spoke softly as the boy fought to keep his heavy eyelids from shutting, captivated by the elder’s voice that spoke of things, places, and beings he could only imagine. Hummahuk told of a time when she was a girl, around six or seven years old, with her father searching the shore for driftwood. They stumbled upon strange things by a big bay.

  They didn’t know what they were, she said, but the shape of some stuck in the girl’s mind. In Hummahuk’s description, one piece of metal she saw sounded like a table knife, not sharp and pointed like one a hunter would need to gut a freshly harpooned seal. More oddly rounded. The details weren’t precise, but other items sounded like forks and spoons and muskets. Hummahuk and her father filled their mitts with the lead balls of musket shot. At first glance, they appeared to be the scattered droppings of an Arctic hare. But these were made of metal, which made them useful. It seemed they had been lying anywhere from a mile to a three-mile walk inland, on a small hill or ridge, in fine gravel. But where? The question gnawed at Louie for years.

  As the boy grew and traveled, asked questions, read books, and learned more about the white man’s ways, he thought about that story many times. He wondered if the blunt knife was one that a Royal Navy officer used to butter his toast at breakfast. Louie’s great-grandmother remembered one thing for certain: She and her father didn’t try to take everything they saw. Only what was necessary. Things they were sure could be put to good use. That was the Inuit way.

  Hummahuk had already heard from her father the stories of encounters with qalunaaq men. She knew the strange things scattered about at their feet must have belonged to them. Nervous, she also knew the owners were dead and gone. That demanded extreme caution. Who could say what spirits might guard this place? Suddenly the girl saw something larger hidden in the gravel. Hummahuk described it to her great-grandson that night in their tent.

  “It was the length of a human being. And at one end, there was a stone with some strange markings on it. It was a grave. And they wouldn’t go nea
r it. They were afraid. They were pretty sure somebody was under there. So her father grabbed a few items and one of them was a butter knife, or a dinner knife, which she later on turned into an ice chisel.”

  After years of research, Kamookak concluded that Hummahuk’s encounter took place roughly two decades after the Franklin Expedition’s men made landfall on King William Island’s northern shores. Early on, the historian thought it was Collinson Inlet, which cuts deep into the island’s northwest coast, on the same route that Francis Crozier had led survivors south. After some more sleuthing, however, he realized the place in Hummahuk’s story was actually Erebus Bay, where archaeologists have found a number of Franklin artifacts, including a bone toothbrush and sailors’ buttons.

  Now there was no doubt: The items his great-grandmother had described came from Erebus or Terror. They must have come with the mariner whose body lay buried beneath rocks by the beach, where Hummahuk saw many musket balls and other items scattered near a large mound.

  10

  He Who Takes Long Strides

  Louie Kamookak’s strength as a self-trained historian comes from his innate understanding of two eras bridged by his own life. Born into the traditional Inuit world, he grew up in an era of forced modernization as part of the “Settlement Generation.” Its oldest roots run back to the late 1950s, when Canada’s government began its most determined push to change Inuit subsistence culture. That was justified as a civilizing mission, but it had political advantages for a nation worried that Soviets or Americans might encroach on Canada’s Arctic if permanent settlements weren’t set up to establish sovereignty. The strategy relied on drawing people who had always lived in concert with the rhythms of nature, and the animals they hunted and trapped on land and at sea, into a more jarring, sedentary life. Then they could be integrated into a new economy based on trade, jobs and wages for the fortunate minority who could find paid work, and social welfare for the rest. To quicken the break from the past, children would be civilized in the ways of the south.

  If the strategy succeeded, it would cleave the Inuit soul from the Arctic’s.

  They are still living, and dying, with the mistakes of that policy today. But it was a change that had been coming, with the inevitability of a round rock rolling downhill, since the arrival of the white sailors in big ships, propelled into their hidden world by the wind and currents. A century after Sir John Franklin and his men died during the most technologically advanced expedition of the day, most Inuit were still living the traditional way. Whether they sheltered in tents in the summer or igloos in the winter, their homes were designed for people constantly on the move. Structures adapted to the Arctic over the centuries had the added advantage of natural insulation, which made them relatively easy to keep warm with a mix of body heat, portable kerosene stoves, and seal-oil lamps.

  Moving nomads into fixed homes was a crucial step in building permanent hamlets. At first, Inuit built their own shacks, usually out of scrap wood and metal. They improvised insulation with cardboard, paper, and wool, filling in cracks with moss and lichen in the hope that would seal out the gale-force winds that regularly blow from the pole. The government came up with a slight improvement: It shipped prefab homes north by barge. That remains the only way to move heavy freight into the vast majority of Canada’s Far North because there are no road links to the south.

  The new homes, a uniform twelve feet by twenty-four feet, were officially called Plan 370 houses. But the tiny structures, which extended families had to squeeze into, were quickly known by a more apt name: Matchbox Houses. Inuit had to buy them for $1,000, half the government’s cost of building and transporting each unit. Families who didn’t have that much cash on hand, a fact of life for most, could pay back the government over a decade. That was hard enough, but a heavy, hidden cost made paying off that debt virtually impossible: Matchbox Houses were so poorly built for the extreme Arctic climate that it cost around $500 a year to heat each one, far more than most families earned.

  Gjoa Haven got its first Matchbox Houses in 1967. Federal authorities had conceded in the mid-1960s that selling substandard prefab housing to people who couldn’t afford it wasn’t a good idea. So bureaucrats decided to make them pay rent instead of taking out loans. The government also offered larger houses, called 512s because of their square footage. A subsidy of 20 percent of a household’s total income was capped at $100 a month, which meant the fundamental problem didn’t change: Few Inuit families could scrape together enough income to pay for housing that was a basic necessity. That made it almost impossible to turn down anything officials offered as an incentive to settle in organized hamlets. This created some hard choices for parents like Louie’s, who were torn between the old life they knew and a new one they couldn’t completely trust—or fully afford. Relief came each summer for the family when they headed back out on the land to hunt. Camping in the pure air, and hunting for what the Inuit call country food, was the way life should be. As Louie would soon discover, the government had a plan to fix that, too.

  The drone of a circling bush plane was a sound that could send shivers through Inuit children. As soon as they were old enough to go to school, they knew to fear the noise from above as much as the eerie, throaty growl of a polar bear. A good hunter, maybe even the intervention of a fine shaman, could protect them from predators on the tundra. Against the qalunaaq who came from the sky, they were powerless. As late summer days grew shorter, the wind colder, Inuit parents knew the planes could descend at any moment, without warning. Like some strange winged beast, come to life from an elders’ myth, they landed and disgorged white people who searched hunting camps, looking for kids to snatch. The first day of school was approaching, which meant Louie’s life on the land with his family was about to come to an abrupt end—at least for now. It didn’t matter how far into the wilderness a family moved. If a plane could land, the qalunaaq would come, take school-age kids, and fly off. Some ended up in residential schools run by the Catholic Church, others boarded with relatives who had enough trouble feeding their own families. No one asked permission. No one signed, or applied thumbprints, to any official documents. In many cases, Inuit parents didn’t understand what the people effectively stealing their offspring were saying. All their protests, the crying, and shouts of “Leave my children alone!” fell on deaf ears. Frightened kids were strapped into plane seats. Engines revved. And they were gone.

  It was a relentless system, built on the premise that indigenous people had to be civilized by assimilating their inferior culture into the Euro-Christian traditions of white Canada. By force if necessary. When the last residential school was closed in 1996, an estimated 150,000 First Nation, Inuit, and Métis kids had been taken from their families and forced to live in conditions that still plague their communities. Many suffered physical and sexual abuse. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission that probed the secret history of the system found that 4,100 aboriginal children died in 130 schools across the country. Most lost their lives to tuberculosis and other diseases that spread easily in overcrowded residential schools. Others killed themselves or died in accidents, including fires and drowning.

  The dreaded day of the plane dawned for Louie in late August 1969, at the same Kaleet River hunting camp where he was caring for his sick great-grandmother, Hummahuk. Louie’s younger sister, Rosie, was with grandparents in another tent. His parents and older brother, Raymond, were maybe two days away on foot, hunting for the larger caribou herd. Minding Hummahuk kept Louie busy, but some days he went out with his grandfather to hunt one of the small number of caribou that had come to graze that far north. One morning, the boy’s grandmother woke him up, all excited, telling him to hurry and look. Staring hard across the river, Louie wasn’t really sure what it was he was trying to make out. At first, he could only see four small black blobs. His grandmother, who had been south as far as Edmonton, figured they might be train cars. His grandfather peered through his binoculars.

  Musk ox. Just hearing
the word got the pulse going.

  One of nature’s most intriguing, and enduring, mammals, musk ox shared the grassy northern steppes at the end of the last Ice Age with mammoth, woolly rhino, and mastodon. The others fell to extinction as the climate warmed, and migrating hunters helped decimate their populations. Yet thousands of years later, musk ox are still struggling to survive against all sorts of modern threats. Much like Inuit themselves, who hold musk ox in very high regard. Netsilingmiut legend even told of musk ox that could speak to humans. But it had been so long since King William Island elders had seen any of the animals that spotting a herd so close was like an encounter with the wandering spectres of a lost species.

  For a boy who knew these animals only through elders’ stories, their arrival was riveting. Telltale details quickly came into focus: the freakishly long shag rug of a fur coat, covering a layer of down called qiviut, some of the warmest fiber growing on any animal anywhere; the sharp horns, curved like a sixties flip; on the bulls, a thick, heavy crown called a boss. Their behavior was even more fascinating. Powerful, yet mostly docile, a frightened herd usually runs first and then forms a circle, with their heads and horns lowered. At times, they are willing to die trying to protect any young hiding behind them from wolves or other predators. Or they may break and run again, leaving the weakest exposed and easily picked off in the stampede. These four musk ox were adults, but still easy prey for Louie’s grandfather and great-grandfather, who brought down the small herd with sharply aimed rifle shots. The kill provided hundreds of pounds of good meat, and warm bedding, for the coming winter.