Winter returned and Qillaq's group set up camp. This third winter was hard and there was not enough game on Talluritut. Dogs got eaten and a few families starved. When spring came, most of Qillaq's followers left and returned home, disenchanted. But Qillaq pressed on with a few of the most loyal, and the diminished group set off across Jones Sound and on to Ellesmere Island. There they passed another winter and in spring of the fourth year they found themselves near the Bache Peninsula where they saw the first signs of human life. The group set off to find the strangers, stopping only to hunt. For a number of months game had been difficult to come by, and Qillaq appealed to the spirits to tell him why all the animals had become invisible. The spirits answered that Qillaq's daughter-in-law, Ivaloq, had given birth to a stillborn baby but had kept it secret and this, said Qillaq, was the reason for the poor hunt. He ordered his son Itsukusuk to shut Ivaloq up in a snowhouse without furs so that she would either freeze to death or die of hunger and the animals would once again allow themselves to be hunted. This the son did. Immediately afterwards they came across a large herd of caribou near what is now Etah on the northwest coast of Greenland and shortly after that there was a cry of “Sleds sleds!” from a lookout in the group and they saw two komatiks approaching and men running beside them. The men were Arrutsak and Agina and they were living at Pitoravik, near Etah. These Inuit and their band had lived alone for many generations. They had no idea that other Inuit lived to the south of them. They were amazed and pleased to see Qillaq and his group and made them very welcome, so much so that Itsukusuk was able to sneak off in the midst of the celebrations unseen by Qillaq, and rescue Ivaloq from her snowhouse. The Greenlanders' lives were very different from that of the Baffin Islanders. They had no kayaks or bows and arrows, and they spoke an unfamiliar dialect. For many generations they had been so cut off that they had gradually forgotten that other, real people existed. There were about forty of them and they had always assumed they were the only human beings.
For several years, Qillaq and his family and followers tried to live among these polar Inuit. Qillaq showed them how to make kayaks from sealskin and bone and how to shoot caribou with bows and arrows. They swapped wives and had each other s babies, but eventually the Baffin Islanders became homesick and, after years away, they packed their things and began the long journey south.
The Ingluligmiut were imagining their own trip north would follow in similar fashion. They were looking forward to leaving Baffin Island, mostly because it gave them a reason to come back home again. They had no idea, as they boarded the C. D. Howe, that most were leaving their homeland for ever.
The flaw in Henry Larsen's plan to unite the two groups became immediately apparent. The Ingluligmiut and the Inukjuamiut spoke wildly different Inuktitut dialects and their communications were no better than the crude, fragmented sign language which served for dialogue between most qalunaat and most Inuit. For Paddy Aqia-tusuk this revelation was very unsettling. All his life, he had been led to believe that Inuit were one. The idea was embedded in the word Inuit, which means “true people.” Almost everyone he had ever met was related in some way to everyone else he knew. For the first time in his life, he now found himself confronting Inuit as strangers. The situation impressed on him just how far he had come but it also made him feel like going home. He had imagined life on Ellesmere would be not so different to living out at one of the more remote camps along the Ungava coast. There the camp dwellers were isolated, but they knew the land and every so often they would get visits from people they knew from other camps, or they would go out on visits themselves. It had somehow never occurred to Paddy that, not only would he be wholly unfamiliar with the land, but he would not know all the people in it either and it dawned on him just how isolated, lonely and vulnerable that would make him and his family feel.
Ross Gibson watched the Pond Inlet families board. The farther north they travelled and the tougher conditions became, the more respect he felt for the Inuit living in the settlements and camps. This was a common view among the whites stationed in the Arctic. Like them, Gibson had been raised with a pioneer's view of the land. He still thought of it as something to be ventured across and mastered. The harder you had to fight for this mastery, the more it made a man of you. The Inuit had always measured a man's worth another way, by how well he provided for his family. For the Inuit, living in the Barrenlands was less a matter of mastery than it was a question of avoiding unnecessary risk. This they did by a careful observation of nature, an acquisition of knowledge and a willingness to wait patiently until nature provided an opportunity to act. Survival had nothing to do with battling against the natural world and everything to do with understanding and respecting it.
As the C. D. Howe weighed anchor, the new families settled on to mattresses at one end of the Inuit quarters and warily eyed the Inukjuamiut. Aqiatusuk made some attempts to draw Akpaliapik into conversation but the differences in their language made the exchange awkward. Both groups put their efforts into preparing for their arrival. After more than a month at sea the Inukjuamiut were desperate to reach their destination and were very glad when the C. D. Howe finally crept through Lady Ann Strait in early September and began steaming into Iones Sound. Ahead, waiting at anchor, the d'Iberville sat against a backdrop of terrific, toothy mountains and raw crumbling cliffs.
The late change of plan meant that the decision to split the families into three groups had not been relayed to the families themselves. Alex Stevenson convened a meeting of the whites involved in the move and informed them of the arrangements. He read out the list of which families were to go where, intending to send Paddy and Mary Aqiatusuk to one location and Mary's seventeen-year-old son Samwillie to another, also to separate brothers Simeonie and Thomasie Amagoalik. Even to Ross Gibson, who was still so new to the Arctic, this sounded preposterous and cruel. To separate an Inuk from his family was like cutting off his leg. You could hand him a pair of crutches or fashion him a wooden substitute, but he would still wake in the night clinging to the space where the real leg had once been. Samwillie had no wife and was dependent on his mother and half-sisters to ensure he stayed warm and well fed. Without his family, he would have no one to sew his clothes or cook his food, which, in Arctic conditions, would quickly make his life unliveable. And Thomasie Amagoalik was widely known to be psychologically fragile. Without his brother, he too would struggle to survive.
When Alex Stevenson broke the news to the Inuit, Paddy Aqia-tusuk went quite wild. Stevenson tried to reason with him, arguing that splitting the group would exert less pressure on the stocks of game, but nothing seemed to wash with Aqiatusuk. Had not the Inuit been promised they were going to a place where there were no limits to the game? And how were they supposed to catch it if hunters were separated from their families? He was particularly agitated about Samwillie. The possibility of a mutiny seemed likely. To avert it Samwillie's name was quietly shifted to the same list as his stepfather and the discussion was brought to a close. The families would be divided and Simeonie and Thomasie would be separated. Discussing the matter further was just putting off the inevitable. The sea was growing icier by the day and the d'Iberville and the C. D. Howe both had long voyages ahead. The logistics of the move had already been decided. It would all work out fine, Stevenson insisted. He was confident that he knew best.
A short while later, the belongings of the families of Paddy and loadamie Aqiatusuk, Phillipoosie Novalinga and Simon Akpaliapik were lowered into the Howes cargo barge along with their sled dogs. The barge moved towards the detachment and turned westwards up the coast away from Craig Harbour police detachment where the shore-bound ice was less dense. Up on deck, the women began to cry and their children followed. Their distress set the dogs howling and, for what seemed like an eternity, the sobs of women and animals echoed across the waters of the sound until they finally found dry land and melted into the rock. The barge came back for Paddy Aqiatusuk, his wife Mary and their children Minnie, Samwillie, Anna, Elijah
and Larry, along with loadamie Aqiatusuk, his wife, Ekoomak and daughter Lizzie, Paddy's brother Phillipoosie Novalinga, his wife Annie, son Pauloosie, and daughter Elisapee, and took them ashore at a stretch of shale beach just west of the police department. Simon Akpaliapik from Pond Inlet, his wife Tatigak, daughters Ruth and Tookahsee and baby son Inutsiak were also landed on the beach. Then the cargo barge made its way back to the C. D. Howe.
CHAPTER NINE
THE REMAINING two groups of Inuit were bundled into a tiny, red-lit room in the d'lberville's cargo hold, after which the icebreaker weighed anchor and turned east.
The d'Iberville ground on through the pack ice and turned north along the east coast of Ellesmere. At Smith Sound, she encountered unexpected ice conditions. An iceberg forest had blown down from the north and was sliding along with the pack ice in the currents. The floe was so tightly squeezed that no water was visible between the plates of ice and the d'Iberville was quickly locked in to the pack, leaving her with no choice but to go with the floe. In the cargo hold, the Inuit lay on their mattresses in the red light, listening to the dreadful squealing and booming of the ice as the icebreaker split the pack. The ship made progress in inches, pushing and grinding against the floe. Squally sleet began rapping against the d'Ibervilles sides. To the Inuit, it sounded like the knocking hands of desperate spirits.
Henry Larsen gave instructions for the ship's helicopter to go on ahead to scout out a possible route through the pack to Alexandra Fiord, forty miles to the north. He was particularly keen to position Inuit at Alexandra or at least on the Bache Peninsula which had long been of considerable strategic importance to Canada. From the tip of the peninsula to the northwest coast of Greenland was a journey of only thirty miles. For most of the year the channel between the two countries was frozen and it acted as an ice bridge for Green-landic Inuit wanting to hunt polar bear and musk ox on northern Ellesmere in the region of Hazen Lake. The weather conditions at Bache were so severe that a formal border post would never be established there, but Larsen felt that the presence of Canadian Inuit in the area would at least discourage the Greenlanders. Their presence would also serve as an effective rebuttal if ever Denmark, Greenland or the United States made a claim for Ellesmere. In any case, in Larsen's mind, Bache was not such a bad spot to leave a few souls. The Meares expedition of 1870 had discovered a valley between two glaciers at Bache and had reported seeing Arctic poppies and even moths there, and during the short life of the police detachment there, twenty years before, the detachment constable had once or twice reported the presence of game.
But Alexandra Fiord was completely inaccessible and the helicopter pilot returned to ship without finding any clear channel through the ice. They drifted for five hours in the driving sleet and blanket fog waiting for a lead to open up but none did. Finally, Larsen was forced to give the order to turn the d'Iberville south before she became dangerously iced in. The ship steamed south at three knots in visibility of less than half a mile. Larsen ordered the helicopter out again and the pilot reported that the pack looked solid all the way through Smith Sound as far as Naires Strait. There was absolutely no way they would be able to land at Alexandra Fiord, or anywhere near it. The plan to establish an Inuit camp there would have to be abandoned. Larsen radioed Glenn Sargent at the Craig Harbour police detachment and told him to expect some extra Inuit families. Later that day, the d'Iberville reached Iones Sound and put off Thomasie Amagoalik and his family along with the Anukudluk family from Pond Inlet. Now only one group of Inuit were left on board. By evening, the icebreaker had turned and begun to edge back out of Iones Sound, bound for Resolute Bay. The Alexandra Fiord experiment was over before it had even begun.
A few years later, a memo passed from one office to another in the Department in Ottawa, observing that the game, reported to be in the area around Alexandra Fiord by the policemen stationed at the detachment in the 1930s, had disappeared, either wiped out in a bad spell of weather or gone north to Hazen Lake. The area was completely devoid of animal life. If the ice conditions had been different on that day in September 1953, and the d'Iberville had been able to drop off her human cargo at Alexandra Fiord, the families of Thomasie Amagoalik and Samuel Anukudluk would almost certainly have starved to death.
The journey to Resolute Bay was less eventful. By the following morning, 5 September 1953, the d'Iberville had already passed Co-burg Island and she was steaming towards Lancaster Sound when Ross Gibson went up on deck to admire the cone of rock marked Princess Charlotte Monument on his map. Up ahead, the sun caught the glacier-capped mountains of east Devon Island and crimped their edges with rosy morning light. The clean air coming off the mountains made Ross feel loose and exhilarated. A pod of beluga appeared alongside the ship and there were still a few gulls overhead, even at this latitude. He waited until the d'Iberville turned across Cape Warrender and left the hilly terrain of Devon Island behind before going back down below to check the list of supplies the d'Iberville had dropped off on her pass through Resolute Bay a few weeks earlier. He noticed, among other things, that a new police launch had been ordered and was waiting for them at the campsite. As soon as they had set up camp, Gibson intended to take a party of hunters out walrus hunting. Henry Larsen had pointed out on a map a small inlet on the southern coast of Cornwallis Island to the west of Resolute Bay, where, he said, there were walrus to be found in their dozens, dozing on the beach. He had seen them there during the supply visit. Personally, Ross Gibson hated walrus meatit was strong and fishy-tastingand he knew that even the Inuit preferred to feed it to their dogs whenever they had the choice, but it would help their morale to begin to build their winter cache. Gibson meant to run a tight ship on shore. He knew that Henry Larsen would have an eye on the new detachment and he also knew that Corporal Sargent and Constable Fryer at Craig Harbour had all the advantages; they had been around Ellesmere Island for a number of months and had an established detachment with a special constable. And there were two of them. All the same, Gibson intended to make Resolute the more successful camp. He planned to be fair and helpful to his “natives,” but he would never cease to remind them of the single most important fact of their existence at Resolute Bay, which was that they were in the High Arctic to live off the land, and live off the land they must.
At seven o'clock on the evening of Sunday, 6 September, the d'Iberville dropped anchor three miles off Resolute Bay. It was a very bright, calm end to a long late summer day. A few large floes were making their way southwards in the current, accompanied by a group of ravens which spiralled up and down on the air currents around them. At the sea's edge, an arc of shale clutched the bay and rose slowly to meet the tuff. At one end of this arc lay a building marked on maps as the meteorological and radio station. Farther along the shoreline stood the ionosphere building, and in the distance, about four miles inland, there was a faint disturbance in the air marking the site of the RCAF base. The landscape was quite unlike the spectacular, feral cliffs of Ellesmere. It seemed gentler and more quiescent.
Cornwallis is a tiny, wind-torn island at the southwestern corner of the Queen Elizabeth Islands which stretch from Baffin almost to the North Pole. No one, including Henry Larsen, had ever had much good to say about the place, which was little more than a heap of flattened gravel from which the blasting Arctic wind had scooped a single, southern bay. Its weather was unpredictable, even by the chaotic climatic standards of the High Arctic. Winter blizzards brought frequent whiteouts and in the summer, storms threw fists of hail across the land and stirred up deep and instant fogs which could last for days. The coastline was a series of poor harbours and treacherous beachings. The coastal waters were often ice-bound and choppy and the shore was often obscured by bruise-coloured cloud. Its exposure to the polar winds meant that little grew on Cornwallis. You might find a clump of rock tripe or lousewort clinging to some sheltered southern slope but nothing of any size was able to find a purchase or protect itself from the parched bluster from the north and, as a conse
quence of this, caribou and musk ox were rare visitors. There were ptarmigan and Arctic hare and in spring and winter polar bears sometimes arrived from the south, but that was about it.
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