North Pole Legacy

by S. Allen Counter

  Kali explained that he had stopped at the infirmary in Qaanaaq en route to Moriussaq to get his new dentures. That was the reason his arrival had been delayed.

  “They ship these from Denmark for the old people up here, and the nurses shape them to fit our mouths.”

  They both grinned to show each other their new chompers.

  Most members of the traveling party were now gathered in Moriussaq. The only ones missing at this point were Kali’s son, Talilanguaq, and Anaukaq’s sons Ussarkaq, Kitdlaq, and Vittus.

  “I would only hope that all five of my sons can go to America with me,” Anaukaq said. “This may be the last time we will all be together again.”

  “Eeee,” Kali agreed. “I want my son to travel with us also. Maybe he will like it over there and take my other children and grandchildren someday.”

  I had arranged for a flexible departure schedule because of the unpredictable weather and other possible unforeseen circumstances. Nevertheless, we had only a small window of opportunity for travel. We could not request the delay of a U.S. Air Force plane. If the sons did not show up in time, we would be forced to leave without them. I hoped that this would not be necessary.

  Later that evening, we discussed our American itinerary.

  “Our trip to our fathers’ homeland now looks as if it is going to be a reality,” Anaukaq said to Kali. “I don’t know if I am prepared to meet such fine people. Allen, you will have to advise me on how to act,” he said mischievously.

  “Just be yourselves,” I said. “Just be Anaukaq and Kali and everything will be fine.”

  “When we get to America and meet such fine people as our relatives, we will have to take off our hats and bow—like this,” Anaukaq chuckled, removing an imaginary hat and bowing. He fell back on the bed, laughing. We all laughed. I had never seen Anaukaq in such a jocular mood.

  “What about you, Kali?” I asked. “How will you act at our big family reunion banquet?”

  Kali thought for a moment. “Oh, I get very emotional at gatherings, especially when there are speeches being made. I can’t help that. I think when I meet my relatives and see my father’s grave, I will get very emotional.

  Kali showed us a small wreath of dried flowers he and his family had made for his father’s grave. He was quite proud of the wreath. Only a few species of tiny flowers grow in northwest Greenland, but he and his children had collected many of them, along with shrubs, and tied them together to form a lovely oval.

  While we waited for the rest of our traveling party, Anaukaq entertained Kali by showing him some of his prized possessions. One was a massive polar bear skin, which looked as if it had been pulled off the bear in one piece. Avataq had killed the bear not far from the settlement earlier that winter. But he said that his favorite new possession was a banner I had given him as a gift on an earlier visit. It was an Afro-American flag that I had designed some years earlier in the interest of instilling cultural and historical pride in young black Americans. I had used the flag on lecture tours and in classrooms to teach Americans of all races about the origins, history, and present-day makeup of Americans of black African ancestry. Anaukaq had put the flag up on the wall of his igloo so that his family and visitors could view it.

  Like a teacher, he walked Kali through the symbols of the flag. “The dark brown represents the color of Mahri-Pahluk’s people,” he told Kali. “The red borders represent the blood of their ancestors who died to build their country; the green tree speaks of their ancestry from a place called Africa.” And so on through each symbol, just as I had explained to him almost a year earlier. I was touched that this gift had meant so much to him and amazed that he had actually memorized everything I had told him.

  Kali showed his interest in the flag by asking Anaukaq questions about each symbol.

  “What does the star stand for?” he asked.

  “That is the star the kulnocktooko people used to find their way to freedom,” replied Anaukaq.

  “And what is this?”

  “That is herrkahnook [the sun],” Anaukaq answered. “It gave life and skin color to the first kulnocktooko.”

  Whether they fully understood what they were discussing, I shall never know.

  The police inspector had received all the visas and passports from Denmark but one. Malina’s passport had been lost. She was shaken by the news, which dampened everyone’s spirits. Malina had been looking forward to this trip, especially since she was her grandfather’s caretaker and personally very close to him. She did not want him to be far from her care.

  Using the lone battery-operated telephone in the settlement, I reached the police inspector at Thule. He had no idea where Malina’s passport was or whether it could be found in time for her to make the trip. The next flight from Copenhagen was over two weeks away. I asked him to wire Lynn Schiveley of the American embassy in Copenhagen and request a special visa for Malina in lieu of a passport.

  A few days later, Schiveley sent word that the embassy would wire ahead to our U.S. point of entry to explain that if Malina had proper, official identification, she could enter the country on a shortterm visitor’s visa for the two-week visit.

  The police inspector informed me that the only person in the area authorized to draw up identification papers for Greenlandic citizens was the Danish military commander at Thule. We made arrangements for me to meet with the commander as soon as we reached the air base.

  Four days before we were to depart from Thule, we still had not heard from Talilanguaq or Anaukaq’s other sons. We were all getting worried. Anaukaq went outside and walked through the village. A short time later he returned and told Kali and me, “We’re in for some bad weather. It looks to me like a big storm is coming. It could last for several days.”

  We just looked at each other, knowing that we were powerless to do anything about it. We could only wait—wait out the storm, wait for the others to reach Moriussaq.

  Everyone was packed and ready to go. The men busied themselves with chores, one of which was feeding the dogs. Both Avataq and Ajako were out stuffing their dogs with seal innards and blubber. When the dogteams were fully fed, the residual food was then taken to some of the female dogs with puppies. The nursing females were kept in small shelters built to protect the puppies from the extreme cold. It is not uncommon to find the carcasses of small pups that have wandered off from their mother frozen solid in the snow. With most of the chores completed, we were ready to travel to Thule.

  The storm rolled in later that day, with heavy, wet snow and howling winds. It rapidly became a blizzard. We were trapped. Only Magssanguaq seemed oblivious to the storm and its implications for our trip, as he played with his puppy and ran around in the igloo. Outside, even the short distances between the little houses were difficult to negotiate in the blinding, wind-driven snow. The dogs, curled up into balls and totally covered by snow, posed another danger. If you accidentally stepped on a snow-covered dog, it was likely to tear off a piece of your ankle.

  As the blizzard roared on into its second day, our hopes sank in the deepening snow. We wondered whether the storm had trapped the hunters out on the ice. The Polar Eskimos are accustomed to unpredictable snowstorms and generally seem undisturbed by weather-induced delays. This time, though, everyone was hoping for a rapid improvement in the weather.

  It was three days before our scheduled departure from the air base, and the storm was still raging. The helicopter would certainly not come for us in this weather. Wearing my heaviest clothes, I stumbled through the blizzard to the government-run shop near the edge of the settlement. I wanted to call the police inspector to get a weather forecast and some word on the helicopter schedule. But the telephone—the only one in the village—was out of order. The batteries were dead. We now had no way of communicating with the outside world. Tornarsuk, it seemed, had put another hurdle in our way.

  The telephone batteries were three massive, 10-volt units, like those used in large trucks. They were encased in a huge wooden bo
x. New batteries would have to be brought in by helicopter; there were no replacements in the village. If the storm continued another day and the helicopter couldn’t come to get us, dogsleds were our only hope for reaching the base.

  I broached the idea of traveling by dogsled with the group, and they all agreed that this might be our only means. Dogsled travel, however, was not easy. It would require a mobilization of the entire Moriussaq community.

  Then we discovered that Ajako had a large box of new 1.5-volt flashlight batteries. We tried connecting twenty of these standard D batteries in a series to get the equivalent of thirty volts and attached them to the telephone wires. It worked!

  When I reached the helicopter control office, I was told that the storm was expected to leave the area in the next twenty-four hours, but the winds were forecast to be too strong for the helicopter to go aloft. Dogsleds it would be, then.

  I also reached Qaanaaq by phone and learned that the other members of the traveling party had returned safely from the hunting grounds but could not leave the village because of the storm. I urged them to travel to Moriussaq by dogsled, but they pointed out that it would be difficult to bring their dogs there and leave them in the care of the others. Dogs are a very private and personal possession among Polar Eskimos.

  The next day the storm finally blew over, and a period of calm descended. We were now only two days from our scheduled flight from Thule. I made a quick decision to transport the group already at Moriussaq to the air base a day before our scheduled helicopter flight, to avoid the possibility of being trapped there by another storm.

  All day, we waited near our bags, ready to go. But the helicopter never came. When I telephoned the helicopter flight director at Thule, he said that the winds were still too strong for the helicopter to fly to Moriussaq, but that the moment the winds died down, they would come in for us. We waited for several more hours, and I called the helicopter pad again, only to be told the same thing. It was now four o’clock in the afternoon. I knew that the helicopter pad would close at five. Yet by this point, I had become concerned about the judgment of the helicopter control post. It appeared to us that the weather had calmed down enough to fly the helicopter in. I shared the helicopter people’s concern for safety, but the Eskimos and I felt there was no reason why the helicopter couldn’t fly in to get us while the weather was calm, even after regular work hours. After all, there were twenty-four hours of daylight this time of year.

  Five o’clock. No word from the helicopter base. I tried to reach helicopter control, but no one answered. The managers had left the post for the day and would not be reachable until the next day. By now, everyone worried that we would not make our plane. It seemed that old Tornarsuk had done his worst.

  Nukka, Jens, and a neighbor offered to take the ten of us to the air base on three large dogsleds, but we decided that this would be risky. We were contemplating their offer, however, when I remembered that I had met the helicopter pilot on an earlier trip and he had given me his telephone number at the pilot’s barracks. The pilot was Swedish and used to enjoy my surprising facility with the Swedish language, something he seldom heard in Danish Greenland.

  It’s worth a try, I thought, as I dialed the number. To my surprise, the Swedish pilot answered the phone.

  “Hej! Jag heterer, Allen. Hur star det till? [Hello, this is Allen. How are you?]”

  He too was surprised to hear from me.

  “Jag mar bra, tack [I am fine, thank you].”

  I described our desperate situation and explained the special nature of our project, mixing in a little Swedish wherever I could.

  The winds had been too strong to permit the helicopter to fly over the mountains into our area earlier that day, he said. But it was now after work hours, he reminded me, and the pilots were not expected to fly into areas such as ours unless there was an emergency.

  He paused. “I will come to fetch you.”

  “Great! Tack sa mycket! [Thank you very much],” I said.

  “I will call back in an hour or so to let you know when I am leaving Thule, so that you can be ready at the landing area. I must get in and out quickly while the weather is good.”

  I was ecstatic. I had taken a chance and something positive had happened. This was typical of Greenland. It seemed that nothing happened unless someone made it happen, and everything required a bit of luck. Clearly, had I not made the effort to reach the pilot that afternoon, we would have been stranded in Moriussaq for another day or two and would probably have missed our jet to America.

  The phone rang. “We are on our way to Moriussaq,” the pilot said.

  I ran about the village and notified everyone that the helicopter was on its way. The news created quite a stir. We all grabbed our bags and put them on the sled for transport to the landing site. Everyone, including Anaukaq, said their good-byes and made last minute bag checks.

  About forty-five minutes later, we heard the roar of the helicopter off in the distance. As always, the children of the village heard it first and started running about, yelling that the helicopter was coming.

  Anaukaq and Kali led the crowd as we walked toward the landing area. Anaukaq, with his cane, moved through the snow as quickly as everyone else. Our bags and camping gear were being pushed to the landing site on a large sled.

  As the helicopter landed, we had to turn our head to protect our faces from the heavy snow blown up by the blades. The Swedish pilot got off the helicopter and headed straight for me. “Hej, Allen. Der ar kallt [It is cold],” he said in the accent of northern Sweden.

  “Ja, mycket kallt [Yes, very cold],” I replied.

  “It looks like the weather has cooperated with us,” he added.

  “Yes! But I want to thank you for your special efforts in coming out to pick us up. You have contributed greatly to the success of this project.”

  “Don’t mention it. I am glad to help you,” he said. “I think you are doing a good thing. But we must hurry and board the helicopter,” he added. “With the amount of luggage you have and the number of passengers, we will have to make two trips.”

  He had been in the area for a number of years but he had never heard of the Henson-Peary story or of the sons of Henson and Peary. But once he heard the story, he said, he was touched by my efforts to help Anaukaq and Kali, and he offered what help he could.

  Unfortunately, the weather north of Moriussaq was still too inclement for him to fly up to Qaanaaq to pick up the other three members of our traveling party. He would fly our Moriussaq group on to Thule and wait for a chance to pick up the rest of the group the next day.

  After we packed the luggage securely in the helicopter, Anaukaq and Kali were the first to board. They were grinning like two young boys. Seven of us, including Aviaq and Malina, left on the first shuttle. When the pilot lifted the helicopter above the ground, everyone looked at one another and smiled.

  In the noisy chopper, everyone sat silently, staring out the window. I wondered what each person was thinking about. The silence was occasionally broken by the excitement of spotting a dogsled down on the ice, traveling at what appeared to be, in relation to a helicopter, an incredibly high speed. As we neared our destination, Kali pointed with excitement to the unusual mountain called Umanak, saying it looked to him like a teacup turned upside-down. This mountain had special significance to the older men. It had been the traditional home of many of their people before the air base was built at Thule, and the two old hunters had spent many of their eighty years in its shadows. Some of the young Polar Eskimos had begun to talk about reclaiming the area around the base. This, of course, did not sit very well with the military establishment.

  Once we passed over Umanak, the military base came into view. The sight of the sprawling air base caused quite a stir among the passengers. As they marveled at its enormous size, I thought about how very different much of the outside world still must appear to the Polar Eskimos. They, more than any other Eskimo group, had adhered to the old cultural ways
of hunting, preparing food, and making clothing. They still spoke their special Polar Eskimo language, and they think of themselves as true Eskimos. While nothing about the outside world seemed to overwhelm them, they were still awed by many things they saw. I could only wonder how they would react to New York City, Boston, and Washington, D.C.

  “You are clear to land,” we heard the military air-traffic controller tell our pilot. Very soon he was hovering just above the landing pad and slowly putting the helicopter down in its center. Everyone smiled as the rotary blades wound to a halt.

  Anaukaq seemed especially cheerful. He looked happy and as healthy and strong as ever. We all helped each other down from the helicopter pad and headed off for our quarters. The pilot lost no time in unpacking baggage and heading back to pick up the others left behind in Moriussaq.

  The huge dining hall was a novel sight for the Eskimos, and our group was something of a strange sight for the military staff too. Many wanted to know who we were and what we were doing there. When I explained who Anaukaq and Kali were and the purpose of our trip, everyone wanted to meet the “celebrities.”

  To my chagrin, the helicopter pilot told me that evening that the winds were still too strong up in Qaanaaq to pick up Talilanguaq, Ussarkaq, and Kitdlaq. I reached Kitdlaq by phone and told him that it looked as though the only way for his group to reach the air base was to travel by dogsled. Kitdlaq said this would be impossible, since they could find no one who could take time off to bring their dogs back. Moreover, they could not be assured of having enough food for the dogs’ round trip, since their latest hunt had not been so successful as they had hoped. It now looked as if I would have to put them on a later U.S.-bound military jet or have them wait for another trip in the distant future.

  The pilot said that regulations required him to get a certain number of hours of sleep before flying, but he would make another attempt at 4 or 5 A.M., weather permitting. I told him that I would go to my quarters and pray for good weather. And I did.