The Long Exile

by Melanie McGrath

  For the next three days they would all be treated to the bounty of the Hudson Bay Company and the government of Canada combined, which is to say that once the ship was unloaded, the bill of lading checked, the cargo neatly stacked in the Hudson Bay Company store, there would be a “mug-up” and all the sugared tea the Inuit could drink accompanied, perhaps, by some hardtack biscuits and a sardine or two. The mug-up would give way to races, a cat's cradle competition and, perhaps, a football game, the prize for which might be a can of sardines or, perhaps, a tin of hardtack. The following day there would be more tea, a solemn sermon from the visiting priest (Anglican), followed by a photography session during which various qalunaat would snap Inuit stiffly sporting their best ceremonial parkas. These same qalunaat might then buy a few souvenirs, sealskin clothing, ceremonial drums, soapstone carvings and the like, before boarding the ship once more. After that, the Inuit would be sent to the Nascopies medical rooms for a cursory checkup and a reward of a box lunch of hardtack biscuits and sardines. Finally, there would be a showing in the Hudson Bay Company store of a movie, often something with a sea or sailing theme. Though you might think it an obvious choice, so far as we know, Nanook of the North was never shown.

  The Nascopie also brought the annual mail. For the first thirty-three years of his life there was never anything for losephie, which was okay since he could not read.

  The day after the screening, at some point during the night, the Nascopie would weigh anchor and begin its four-hundred-mile journey west to Churchill, Manitoba, on the other side of Hudson Bay. Some of the Inuit would paddle with the ship for a while, others would watch from the shore, then they would change back into their workaday clothes and would begin to gather their belongings for the journey back to their camps. Those who had credit at the store would stock up on ammunition, flour, lard, tobacco and tea before they went. The remainder would have to make do until the winter trapping season began once more. Within a week, most of them would already have left the settlement. Another year would go by before they would hear again from the other world to the south.

  And so the years floated inescapably by. Josephie grew taller, angular, nervous and quick to smile. His contemporaries had him down as a watcher, one of those people who are forever to be found on the edges of things, looking in. In January 1929, when Josephie was just seven, Thomas Mayne “Pat” Reid piloted the first plane across Ungava. It was a fine, sun-dazzled winter day, the sky vivid, cloudless, the air crystalline and smelling of electricity. The first hint that this day was likely to be any different from the last was when the dogs started to become restless and shift about. A long while later, an unfamiliar whirr was carried in on the wind. People emerged from their snowhouses, tied their snowgoggles to their faces, gazed up at the sky. The noise did not go away. Instead, it devolved into a tremulous buzz. Children clamped their hands to their ears. Their mothers gathered them up, shooing them back into the snowhouses, whilst the men grabbed their guns and stared at the clouds, waiting, until the throb accreted into a whine and the whine slid into a sound something, but not quite, like the clash between two bull walruses, and a giant mechanical mosquito suddenly appeared, dipping dementedly through the sky towards the settlement. The machine continued along the shoreline, swooped down momentarily, then passed by, gradually diminishing until it disappeared in a band of coastal fog, the final remnant of its existence an almost imperceptible shivering in the air, an electric smell not unlike the Northern Lights and a distant sound like the burr of bees.

  For weeks after this event, no one could speak of anything else. Inuit families sledged between camps and into the settlement, trying to glean more information. The Inuit rapidly found in it a rich vein of humour. A giant mosquito with a man inside! The post manager's explanation seemed just as unlikely as the creature itself. Why would anyone have wanted to cross so much land when there was already so much nearby?

  As for Josephie, he just watched.

  Pat Reid's remarkable flight came to be seen as the last good thing to happen in Ungava for a very long time and it marked the end of Josephie's untroubled early life. Later that year, the price of fox fur plummeted. A creamy, unblemished pelt which, the preceding winter, would have sold for C$7 or C$8 fetched only C$1.50, not much more than whalers would have paid for it a quarter-century before. To add to the problem, the Hudson Bay Company acquired a controlling stake in Rvillon Frres and had taken out the competition. As prices slipped further, trappers were soon forced to go out to their trap lines every day, extending them beyond their usual confines into unfamiliar terrain. But foxes were scarce that year and no rise in the numbers could in any case make up for the fall in the price of a pelt. The Inuit held on, expecting things to change. Within weeks, they had eaten all their credit at the store and by 1930 the situation was becoming desperate, as the principal markets for Arctic fur sank further into the slump. For the first time in a decade, the hunger the Inukjuamiut had so happily forgotten roamed around the camps once more.

  Though Josephie was unable to comprehend the vagaries of the Montreal fur market or, on a larger scale, the fragilities of economic cycles and stock markets, he was as well able to feel his empty stomach as anyone. In Arctic conditions, a human being requires three times the number of calories that he might in temperate zones. From time to time and for short periods during Josephie's early life the Nujarluktuk family had gone hungry, but this new hunger had certain novel qualities. First, it seemed unrelated to any physical conditions. The weather had not changed, the fox cycle was unaltered. The abstract nature of this famine made it peculiarly frightening. Added to that was the fact that the concentration on trapping had left many families more dependent on store-bought food. Had the starvation hit a decade before, many families would have had dried meat and fish and meat cheese cached away, but they had grown used to buying flour and sugar, and their meat and fish caches had dwindled. Last, no one travelled as far and as often as they once had done, so the camps were closer together and the population less widely scattered. Each family's hunting grounds now overlapped more widely with those of its neighbours. Hunting and trapping trips began to take on a relentless, desperate quality.

  About that time, so the story goes, Maggie Nujarluktuk's husband's sled was found out on the sea ice and, beside it, a neat, man-shaped hole. Of the truth of this, there is still no knowing. Of the man himself, there remains no trace. An accident would have made sense but whether it was an accident or not, the timing of the death of Maggie's husband could not have been worse. For a while Maggie and Josephie got by on soup boiled from the stomach contents of seals and walrus given them by their relatives, but with no hunter in the family, it was not long before they were forced to move in with the dead husband's brother, Paddy Aqiatusuk. From then on, they were Paddy's charges, their survival in his hands.

  Luckily for Maggie and her children, Aqiatusuk was no ordinary Inuk. People went to Paddy when they had family disputes, or decisions to make. They went to him with their sick children or their hungry dogs. They sought his advice on camp politics, on alliance-making and settling scores. If they had a disagreement with the fur post manager they would ask Paddy to act as advocate. He was the nearest thing the Inukjuamiut had to a marriage broker, psychologist, politician, sage and benign patriarch.

  Paddy Aqiatusuk was also an artist. In his spare time he took pieces of green soapstone and walrus ivory and carved. And what carvings! Bears, walrus, hunters, seals, that would make you forget everything except their cool, seductive contours and graceful lines. In time, Paddy's carvings would grace museum collections across North America and Europe.

  And so it is easy to imagine losephie, shy, self-effacing and at an awkward, in-between sort of age, advancing towards his new stepfather with trepidation and a kind of puppyish awe, and his mother, amused and a little embarrassed by her son's zeal, scolding the boy, with something like, “Don't tail after the man, you'll bother him.”

  But Josephie Flaherty did not bother Paddy Aqiat
usuk. Between the growing boy and the sculptor a firm friendship began. No Inuk boy could have wanted a better teacher, no Inuk man a keener student. True, Aqiatusuk was demanding and often grumpy (too little ihuma, undoubtedly), but it was through being in his salty, bear-like presence that Josephie began to leave behind his childish sense of the world and find his way as a hunter and a man. All through the early 1930s, Josephie and Aqiatusuk were companions on the land. During the soft summers, they paddled their kayaks across the swell of Hudson Bay while the sculptor pointed out the unexpected currents, odd tides and anomalies of beach and shore and the boy noted the bays and inlets, taking in the contours of the coast. For days they paddled along the Hopewell Islands, out west to Farmer Island, as far as Kogaluc Bay in the north, to the Nastapokas, the Marcopeet Islands and the Sleepers in the south. From these expeditions, Josephie learned to predict the tides, the effect of the winds and the rain and the sun on the sea. He became familiar with the ice and the currents. He discovered where to look for bearded, harp and ringed seal, walrus and beluga whale.

  His education continued through the hard winters. From Aqiatusuk he learned how to harness dogs and ice the runners of the komatik and to pack a sled so that it did not topple when the going was rough. Together they drove out across the land-fast ice, through pressure ridges, to the pack ice beyond. They ranged way beyond the low hills, where Josephie and Maggie had stopped to pick willow, to the huge, empty spaces of the interior. Aqiatusuk showed Josephie how to lead the dogs, reading their mood, sensing when it was best to run alongside, when more prudent to ride on the komatik with the whip, when to discipline the team and when to give them their freedom, when to offer them meat and when to let them go hungry. Gradually, young Josephie distinguished the different and subtle ways in which dogs use their intelligence. By his mid-teens the son of Robert Flaherty was an expert in dogcraft.

  Those trips were Josephie's introduction to the tumultuous churn of ice. Slowly, he learned how to recognise the thin sheet ice which formed from freezing rain and could cover the lichen and starve the caribou. He learned how to spot the thick layer of frozen melted snow which could conceal deadly melt holes below. He sensed when the sikuaq or ice soup, which began to form in the sea at the end of August, had become thick enough to bear weight and, later in the year, he recognised when the ice was likely to candle, throwing up the sharp spines that sliced sled dog paws. He learned to watch for ice rising up at the hinges between the ice foot and the shore-fast ice and to predict where it would rear up to form the turbulent, slabby ice ranges the Inuit called tuniq. He observed the shadows on the sea left by black ice, and those accompanied by frost smoke which marked open water. He discovered where treacherous ice skins were most likely to be lying across leads and where tiny tremors and a blanching of the air signalled there was land ahead.

  Under Aqiatusuk's guidance, he acquainted himself with the habits of Arctic animals, where each preferred to live and how and what it ate, where it travelled, how it paired and bred, for how long the young remained close to their mothers, where they were at their most vulnerable. He learned how to stalk caribou on the flat, windblown tundra, and how to use a white fur baffle to outfox seal. He came to a precise understanding of where and when to fling the harpoon or release the bullet that would make a creature his. He discovered the arts of flensing and butchering meat and where to store it so that wolves, foxes and dogs could not take it. When Aqiatusuk had fox pelts to trade, he took his stepson with him. The boy learned how to talk to white men and how much not to say.

  Another winter approached and Maggie Nujarluktuk took sick and, within a few weeks, she died. Her body, wrapped in skins and buried beneath the rocks, joined the company of silent souls out on the tundra, their skeletons kept from the prying paws of wolves and foxes, their stories meshed into the tangle of willow. The exact cause of her death remains unknown. In the 1930s, 740 of every 100,000 deaths among Inuit were unexplained, twenty times the rate among the population of Lower Canada. The family said a prayer, burned Maggie's clothes and returned to their lives. Josephie was not encouraged to cry, nor to vent his rage. No one thought to write to Robert Flaherty with the news, nor did they look for explanations. Death was the well-worn path, too familiar to be mapped.

  Josephie found himself alone in the world. Alone, that was, but for Paddy Aqiatusuk, from whom this shy, sensitive, loyal boy began the slow process of learning, as he was never able to learn from his real father, how to become the son to a man. Maggie's death brought them closer. They would not realise quite how far each depended on the other until they were forced apart. But for now, all that lay ahead in a distant future neither could predict and to which, in the Inuit way of things, neither gave much thought.

  Josephie Flaherty's knowledge of the world beyond the limits of Ungava remained as thin as summer ice. He got a taste of it in 1934, when the governor of the Hudson Bay Company, Sir Patrick Ashley Cooper, arrived in Inukjuak on the Nascopie and was borne ashore to the accompaniment of a personal piper. An inspection of the newly painted clapboard Hudson Bay post followed, and Sir Patrick distributed a few cans of sardines, the odd tin of hardtacks and a good deal of ill-conceived advice. After his inspection, he emerged to address the assembled Inuit in English.

  “Now that we have seen you,” declaimed Sir Patrick, “we are happy and will leave you with the confidence that you will work with our post manager as one large happy family, you following his advice as if he were your father, for he does the things which I tell him and I want you to do the things which he tells you.”

  The speech was later published in a book and distributed around the Hudson Bay posts of the eastern Arctic. Josephie never saw this book. Nor did he or any of the other Inukjuamiut ever master what it was that Sir Patrick wanted or why the piper had piped him in. Around Inukjuak, the incident became an old itch or, rather, the memory of an itch. From time to time someone or other scratched it. Between times, it was forgotten along with the world below the tree line that it represented.

  From Inukjuak, the Nascopie travelled on that year to Cape Dorset, Pangnirtung and to Pond Inlet at the northern tip of Baffin Island, picking up fifty-two Inuit, one Hudson Bay Company post manager, 109 dogs and various possessions and transferring them all to new fox-trapping grounds at Dundas Harbour. When hunting was hampered by rough ice, the manager sent half the party to Crocker Bay, thirty miles west, where they proceeded to starve. The whole party was then transferred back on to the Nascopie, the Cape Dorset and Pangnirtung Inuit were returned home while the Pond Inlet Inuit were taken to Arctic Bay. When Arctic Bay proved uninhabitable the Nascopie transferred the Inuit once more, to Fort Ross near the entrance to Bellot Strait, where they passed the next ten years scraping out a meagre living from a landscape of rock and gravel. When the Hudson Bay Company post at Fort Ross was closed in the summer of 1947, the survivors from this company experiment were again moved, west this time, to Spence Bay. They were never returned to their homeland.

  In 1939, five years after the visit of Sir Patrick Ashley Cooper, an ex-Hudson Bay Company fur trader called lames Cantley arrived in Inukjuak and set up a rival trading post a little farther upriver, calling his new enterprise the Baffin Trading Company. The Inuit found him abrasive and mean. He did not rate them either. For a while, the price of fox fur rose steadily, the competition between the Baffin Trading Company and the Hudson Bay post keeping the price paid for pelts in line with the growing demand for Arctic fox in the southern fur markets. The Inuit of Inukjuak did their best to shrug off the horrors of the past years and settled back to their customary lives.

  Far away, a war began in Europe.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SUPPOSING the bad times to be over, at least for a while, Paddy Aqiatusuk married a widow. Mary brought four children with her, all a little younger than Josephie: two boys, Elijah and Samwillie, Anna, a delicate little girl left crippled at the age of two by an outbreak of polio, and a baby, Minnie. There were now five more mouths to feed in A
qiatusuk's camp and among them no adult hunters.

  During the winter of 1939 snow crept across Ungava from the east, melted in a brief, warm spell, then froze hard over the tundra. Unable to scrape through the ice to feed on lichen clinging to the rocks, what few caribou remained on the peninsula began slowly to starve, their living bodies nipped at by wolves until they were little more than walking skeletons, flesh trailing in ribbons behind them as they stumbled to their deaths. There was no point in hunting them, so little nourishment remained on their bones.

  By Christmas the meat caches in Aqiatusuk's camp were empty. There were seal, still, and some walrus, but they had to be hunted ever farther from the settlement, either at the floe edge or out on the islands. Paddy Aqiatusuk and Josephie Flaherty were often away for days at a time, moving their trap lines farther and farther out along the coast, camping at the floe edge where the seals swam.

  Whenever they were sure they would not be going too far from camp, Josephie and Paddy would take Paddy's stepson Elijah along to hold the dogs and act as lookout. The trips exhausted the boy, just as they had exhausted Josephie before him, and before Josephie, Aqiatusuk and Aqiatusuk's father, in a continuum of extreme physical endeavour stretching back into the dimmest reaches of the past. It was a brutal regime and by the time the three of them reached the home camp they were so grim from the day's exertions that it was all they could do to sit, mug of tea in hand, sucking in the smoke from their cigarettes and staring at the icy floor. Within minutes the boy would be fast asleep, in place, chin folded on to chest. The two men would sit awhile, saying nothing. Paddy Aqiatusuk suffered from back pain and odd, inexplicable twinges which kept him from sleep. He often passed the night hours carving hunters and polar bears, building living armies of greenstone and ivory, against the time when he might have to call upon them.