Snow Walker

by Mowat, Farley;

  “I am a man whose liver is eaten by shame,” I told him. “Through all the years since Kakut died I believed the people had taken for themselves the things which were my father’s. Now I know they only kept those things against the day of my return. Shame has eaten my liver, yet there is one thing I would like to know. Where is Kakut’s great canoe? When the ice goes from the River I will have need of a canoe of my own.”

  My cousin looked at me strangely.

  “Eeee, Katalak, the blindness has not yet left your inner eye; otherwise you would have seen that of all the things that you have in your snowhouse, none is familiar from your father’s time. You have forgotten, perhaps, that what one of us has belongs to all of us in time of need. These things are true gifts made to you in your time of need. As for the white canoe, it lies where it has lain since Kakut’s death—over his bones and over all the things he had in life and which he may have need of in the place beyond.”

  When I heard this I was more ashamed than ever, yet I felt better inside myself too, for now there was no one else to blame for the mistake I had made when I abandoned my people. There was only myself left to be angry with. And why should a man be angry with himself?

  Throughout that winter I slowly learned to live without anger, and it was the best winter of my life. All the people in that camp were as one, and I was again part of that one. Sometimes people from other camps came to visit with us, and sometimes we drove down the River to visit them. There were song-feasts and there was story telling and much eating of good meat. Then in the middle of the winter Salak began to grow big with child. It seemed to me that at last I had everything a man could want, and the memory of the years when I had wished to be one of the Kablunait began to grow dim, like the spirit lights in the northern sky fading into the brightness as the spring returns to the land.

  When the sun began to climb high over the horizon and the snows started to soften, we finished with our trapping and made ready to receive the returning deer herds.

  This island where we sit is a fine place for deer hunting because it is like a stepping stone in the middle of the long lake. In the autumn the deer herds heading south swim to it and rest before continuing on their way. Heading north in the spring, they cross over to it on the ice, for they remember it and take the same path they used in the autumn. Also the island has stands of willows to provide us with fuel, so it is a good place to camp. But in the spring when the ice grows black and rotten and the River begins to break up, we must leave it for then sometimes the island is flooded. It is our custom to camp on the mainland shore at that time of the year until we can begin our voyage down to the coast by canoe.

  In the spring that I speak of, the winter snows lay very thick on the land; and when the thaws started, the water flowed everywhere across the rocks and swamps as if the land itself was melting. My cousin and I saw it would be a year of big floods so one day we sledded his canoe over to the mainland shore and cached it at a safe height above the still-frozen surface of the river. Then we returned to the island intending to take all the people and goods ashore on the sleds the following day.

  That was our plan, but during the night the spirits sent us such a storm as I do not ever remember seeing. It began with a fall of wet snow, then the wind rose and the snow turned to rain that poured out of the night as if Sredna, Mistress of the Waters, had turned her world upside down. Our snowhouse crumbled and when I tried to stretch caribou hides over the holes the wind was so strong it brought me to my knees. Then the howl of the wind was lost in a shuddering thunder that shook the roots of the island. We knew what it was. Swollen with the flood from the land, the River had risen and burst free of the ice. Swirling floes, thicker than the height of a man, were being flung out over the rotten surface ice of the lake, crushing our road to the shore.

  I shouted for my cousin but my voice was snatched away by the wind and lost in the roaring as the islands of ice beat each other to pieces. Salak and Haluk and I fought our way toward a high drift in whose lee my cousin’s snowhouse had stood. We met him and his family crawling toward us. His house had collapsed. We all managed to burrow into the back of the soaking-wet drift, and there we stayed until dawn.

  It came grey and ugly, whipped by a rain that seemed to grow steadily worse. We knew the rain on the half-melted snows would make the River swell even faster. Yet with the return of the daylight, our courage came back. We gathered most of our things on the highest part of the island and set up a tent. We had plenty of food, and we believed the lake could hardly rise high enough to submerge the whole island. We believed we had only to wait four or five days for the flooding to end, then we would find some way to escape.

  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 watchi
ng 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 e
conomic 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.