The Long Exile

by Melanie McGrath

  Paddy Aqiatusuk bristled. He sensed Ross Gibson had been talking about him to this new fellow. Now neither could be trusted.

  “Are you the boss?” The policeman introduced himself as Corporal Glenn Sargent and the white man beside him as Constable Clay Fryer. The Inuit special constable's name was Areak. Sargent was a well-built, powerfully handsome man, the kind women pick out in a crowd. He had cut his teeth on the St. Roch. After that he had been posted to the police detachment at Herschel Island on the northern edge of the Yukon and had followed this with a stint at Spence Bay before finding himself commanding the RCMP's most northerly detachment at Craig Harbour.

  Aqiatusuk looked about him. “I think you have brought us to the wrong place,” he said.

  Glenn Sargent sensed better than anyone how tough life on Ellesmere was likely to be for the newcomers. He found it hard enough himself, and his living conditions were very different from those of the newcomers. The qalunaat policemen were barracked in solid, insulated detachment buildings warmed by coal-burning stoves. They had constant and plentiful supplies of food and ammunition and access to radio, boats and other equipment. “G” Division police enjoyed several weeks' paid leave every year along with hardship and isolation pay. They could keep in touch with colleagues and family over the radio. Each posting was for two years only, after which they had the option to transfer out to another detachment and at the end of it all, a Mountie knew he would pick up a pretty good pension.

  Sargent knew that if Paddy Aqiatusuk and his family were to survive, they would have to be successful at hunting the marine mammals living in Ellesmere's waters. This would be no simple matter. Wildlife studies have now shown that groups of walrus regularly overwinter in the polynya at the western entrance to Jones Sound and there are narwhal in the area of the North Water. In the autumn belugas swim from Lancaster Sound into Jones Sound along the coast of Ellesmere before crossing over to Greenland, but this was not known in 1953. The staple food of the new migrants, Sargent thought, would have to be the ringed seal which gathered around fast ice along the outer coast and in the sounds, bays and inlets. Sargent knew there would be no time to lose. Winter came on fast and early and the new arrivals had no store of meat to see them through. He would have to take them out hunting in the Peterhead the moment they had settled. After that, he would follow orders to move them forty miles away, to a spot on the Lindstrom Peninsula staked out by Henry Larsen, near enough for them to be able to make it back to the detachment in an emergency or to trade fox pelts but not so near that they would be able to drop in on the detachment any time they wanted something. There on Lindstrom they would have to stay and meet their fate, whatever that might be.

  Twilight hung off the cloud and the day seeped gradually into the night. The temperature fell to freezing, the winds began to fluster the tents and the cold slid under the ropes and came creeping across the mattresses lying on the shale. Everyone began to feel very hungry. Sargent had promised the campers traditional stone stoves or qulliqs but the discharged cargo still lay under tarpaulins on the beach beside the detachment. Anukudluk, from Pond Inlet, had a primus stove but no one had any matches with which to light it. For tonight they would just have to eat whatever Sargent had given them. They unpacked flour, sugar, lard and settled on hardtack biscuits and a couple of tins of sardines and ate their meagre first meal on Ellesmere Island in turns, passing Anukudluk's torch between the tents. Exhausted, Aqiatusuk and his family lay together in the fog of their exhalations and told each other stories and as the night deepened they gradually drifted into unconsciousness.

  Paddy Aqiatusuk woke the next day to the hum of the Peterhead. The mattress he had been lying on had sucked up water during the night, his back and kidneys throbbed and his gallstones were troubling him. The men pulled on their kamiks, went outside and stumbled over shale towards the boat. Greyish clouds slumped across the sound and spilled on to the beach, obscuring the view of the detachment. Sargent wanted some of the men to help unload the supplies the d'Iberville had dropped off on her first pass. The crates would need to be checked off against the bill of lading and loaded into the detachment store before the weather got to them. lames Cantley had ordered the year's supplies for the High Arctic in Ottawa in May, but until Sargent unpacked them and checked them off it would not be clear exactly what and how much had been sent. After that, they would all go out hunting.

  Having been assured that the Department would supply whatever they would need in the north, the Inuit had left most of their gear at camp in Inukjuak, for the benefit of their relatives, and Sargent was shocked to discover some serious shortages. Some had brought their kayaks, presumably because no one had told them that the ice conditions up in the High Arctic were too dangerous for kayaking, but no one had brought an umiak or a whaleboat, which would have been more useful. Many of the hunters did have their rifles with them, but for the most part these were ancient, lowcalibre .22s and their bullets would be almost useless against walrus and polar bear. Sargent hoped that Cantley had been generous with his order of supplies.

  His hopes were dashed the moment the men cracked open the crates. There appeared to be no duck for mending the tents, nor any first aid supplies, rifles, oil lamps, fish hooks, soapstone or snow-knives. The three hundred caribou skins promised on the bill of lading had been reduced to a few dozen buffalo pelts. Some of the supplies were completely inappropriate. There were dozens of men's overalls in sizes far too large for any Inuk, boys' fingerless wool mittens that were an invitation to frostbite and batteries for pieces of equipment the Inuit did not possess. Sargent radioed through to the C. D. Howe and the d'Iberville to establish that the missing cargo had not been loaded on to the wrong ship in error, but both vessels reported an empty hold. In Resolute Bay, Ross Gibson was noting down similar anomalies. Either the correct cargo had not been loaded while the C. D. Howe and the d'Iberville were in port at Quebec or it had been mistakenly offloaded somewhere else en route, or, worse than either of these, Cantley had not ordered it.

  There was nothing to be done for now. The new arrivals needed to get out and hunt. It was already well into September and the new camp had no meat and none stored for the winter cache. For the next six weeks, until the light gave out and the dark period came upon them, the men would have to go out hunting every day to stand a chance of gathering sufficient food for the winter. While they remained near the detachment Sargent would take them out in the Peterhead. Once they moved out to the Lindstrom Peninsula, they would be on their own. A party set off the next day before light with Sargent and Areak. Fryer stayed behind sorting the supplies. The women and children watched the Peterhead disappear over the horizon, then gathered their bags and began to walk towards the cliffs in search of grass, willow twigs and a source of fresh water. For several hours they scrambled over the moraine, clambered along the rocks, until they finally reached the cliffhead around midday. From there a series of tremendous, barren peaks stood together like teeth and between them were valleys filled with greenish-grey glaciers, heavy with debris. A few crows observed the group's progress, their presence indicating that somewhere, in a sheltered inlet or on a south-facing plateau, the women would find lemmings or Arctic hare or at least a few small birds, but none was visible. They pressed on along the cliff, eyes set on the boulders and gullies until they came upon a rock basin and there, at its lowest point, where water and blown soil had accumulated, were tufts of wild heather and the spore of Arctic hare. The air felt as dry as old leather and it had a peculiar empty chill. They looked out for any sign which might lead them to a water source but there were none of the patchwork stains and rock moulds which usually indicated the presence of a summer run-off. The only source of fresh water appeared to be from the green-grey glaciers or from the stone-ridden bergy bits which had collected in turquoise piles along the shore. Ungava was full of lakes and rivers, but here there were none. They returned to the camp full of foreboding.

  The men arrived later, in a more upbeat mood. Sarge
nt had taken them out beyond Jakeman Glacier to the east of the detachment and there they had shot three fat walrus and seen plenty more. The coast was very ice-bound, but there appeared to be seal about too. While the men flensed and butchered the animals, took their heads and lay them facing the sea, pulled out the stomach contents and gave the gristle to the dogs, the women cleaned the entrails to bury under rocks for winter. Tonight, they would set up their qulliqs and by the deep-orange light that walrus blubber gives they would boil up blood soup and make a stew. The next day, when the walrus spirits had left their heads, and they were safe to touch, Paddy Aqia-tusuk would pull out the tusks and begin to carve in walrus ivory.

  That night it was so cold in the tent that Aqiatusuk dreamed frozen dreams. By the morning, though, the temperature had clambered above freezing and the group was feeling more cheerful than they had been since leaving Inukjuak. Sargent decided that the best use of the camp's time would be to pass the next few days unloading and checking the stores. After that he would take the hunters out for caribou before moving them to the permanent campsite on the Lindstrom Peninsula.

  The lack of caribou skins in Cantley's supplies was particularly worrying. Buffalo hides did provide some insulation, though not as much as caribou, but they were heavy. Once the snow arrived, they would have to be removed lest they collapse the tents. Besides that, the black skins cut out the light inside the tents and the women would be forced to do their work sitting on the shale outside. This would prove particularly difficult for Anna Nungaq, stepdaughter of Paddy Aqiatusuk, who had been crippled by polio at the age of two, was largely immobile, and found it hard to keep herself warm. She would have to spend her days in the darkness inside the tents and, when winter arrived, the other women would have to join her. The cold would be too savage to remain outdoors. They would need lanterns, but there were none among the cargo. The caribou skins were also urgently required for clothing because buffalo hide was too inflexible to wear. Their supplies of winter clothing were perilously short. The previous summer the Inuit boats had all been hired out to scientists up in Inukjuak and the Inuit had not been able to find a boat to take them down to Richmond Gulf, near Kuu-jjuarapik, to hunt the caribou there. For a winter such as the one they were facing on Ellesmere, each hunter would require a new set of caribou clothes, each of which used up six caribou skins, the children would have to be kitted out in caribou undergarments and every family would need new caribou sleeping bags. In all, the camp would require at least 150 skins.

  Sargent contacted lames Cantley in Ottawa, but the reply was not encouraging. Cantley had been let down by his supplier somewhere in western Canada. He said he would endeavour to find some more skins and have them airlifted to Craig Harbour before the winter was out but he could not guarantee how many or when they would arrive. As for the rest, he did not really see there was a problem. The Inuit had been moved to Grise Fiord to enable them to lead traditional lives. So far as Cantley was concerned, lanterns, soap, washtubs and most of the other things Sargent said were missing were really just luxuries and he had judged that the Inuit could do without them.

  The issue of the skins remained urgent. The Canadian government had declared the whole of Ellesmere Island a nature preserve and the new preserve rules set seasons and quotas for big game animals and made it altogether illegal to hunt musk ox. In practice, these rules had never been enforced because there had been no permanent population on Ellesmere but the RCMP could not be seen openly to flout the law. As the caribou season had already closed on Ellesmere, Henry Larsen had given Glenn Sargent strict instructions to allow each Inuit family to take only one buck caribou.

  Sargent had himself hunted caribou in a spot beside Fram Fiord, a little to the west of Craig Harbour on the way to Grise Fiord, and this was where he decided to take them now. The fiord was only a short trip in the Peterhead and Sargent knew the route very well. He usually motored as far as the eastern headland of the fiord, then cut the Peterhead's engines and made his way to shore in the whaleboat, so the caribou would not be frightened off by noise. There was a south-facing slope, about an hour's scramble up cliffs, where the lichen grew and where a small herd of Peary's caribou, smaller, whiter and hardier than their more southerly cousins, could often be found grazing. There was an old Thule settlement en route. Sargent had found skulls and human bones there, as well as the ribs of blue and bowhead whales. Their antique presence tickled Sargent; on an island as bleak and lonely as Ellesmere, even a heap of old bones could provide companionship and a feeling of solidarity.

  Sargent allowed the hunters to take ten bucks. When they got back to camp, the women were already sharpening their ulus, knives, in anticipation of the meal ahead. The walrus and the caribou cheered the camp enormously. It was a dry land, and a mountainous one, and despite the vast space you could not see far, but it seemed then that, at the very least, no one would starve. They did not altogether understand Sargent's quotas and they did not imagine that he would stick to them in any case. The hunters laid the bodies of the caribou out on the beach with their heads facing the mountain so their spirits would find their way back to the Fram, and set about the complicated business of butchering and flensing. Out of curiosity, Aqiatusuk went among the creatures. He noticed that the pelts were free from the bites of warble flies and there were no bots in the animals' ears or noses, also that there were no flies around the carcasses, and he decided it must be too cold for insects. Their hooves were already growing and the pads of the feet shrinking in preparation for winter. In Inukjuak, that never happened before October. Clearly, the season arrived early on Ellesmere. Still, the beasts were strong and fit with stomachs full of sedge and lichen, and it cheered Aqiatusuk to see that. He reached down and took a slice of liver with his knife as he was entitled to do and ate it just as it was, fresh and clean-tasting, with an iron tang. By the time the sun set on the following day, the creatures' sinews would already be boiled and bundled up to be used as sewing thread and the sedge and lichen would be in a pot somewhere, simmering away in blood to make soup. Sooner or later, they would use the skins for clothing and sleeping and the antlers for carving. They would roast the heads and make combs from the hooves and not a single part of the catch, not one fragment of flesh or bone or ligament or blood, would be wasted.

  A week later, on a clear, sunny day in mid-September, the Inuit moved to the permanent campsite on Lindstrom Peninsula. The spot had been chosen by Henry Larsen on the basis that Otto Sver-drup's expedition had managed to overwinter there only a few years before. (The peninsula had been named after the expedition's Norwegian cook, who had kept his colleagues alive and healthy over the coldest winter they had ever known.) Sverdrup's expedition had been much better equipped and supplied than the Inuit, but Henry Larsen had an overweening confidence in Inuit resilience and stamina and he was pretty sure the natives would be able to cope. At Lindstrom Peninsula the waters are turbulent and leads open up all winter and this, Larsen figured, would make it easier to hunt seal, though it would also make it very dangerous. In any case, the Inuit were given no choice in the matter. They went in shifts in the detachment Peterhead, dragging a little skiff containing their belongings behind them. The skiff had been abandoned by the detachment decades before but Sargent thought that, with a bit of restoration, it might make a seaworthy vessel for the new camp.

  The beach at Lindstrom Peninsula was, if anything, even narrower than the one at Craig Harbour. It was certainly much steeper and Sargent had trouble finding a landing spot that would not damage the Peterhead's hull and had to make several approaches before the waves would allow the boat to get in near the shore. They did get in eventually, and dragged their possessions and finally the skiff itself up on to the slope. There Sargent left them, with the remains of the walrus and the caribou, some stone lamps and a box of rations each. The Peterhead disappeared around the headland and soon enough the new settlers could no longer feel the throb of its engine through the shale. Once again, they began to erect their tents. T
hey set up stone lamps and began to cook caribou meat on them. When the light failed they sat under their caribou skins and rubbed each other warm. There was no time, then, to think much about the place they had come to, or how they would live in it.

  The following day they woke to the sound of wind scudding over the cliffs and the sighing of the sea. They could see no signs of human life, no animals and no vegetation around them, just the green shale and the green cliffs and sharp, cold sun clinging to the horizon. They were utterly alone. Mary Aqiatusuk turned to her husband then and said, “Sailarjuarmiinginaaqitaa?" Are we still in the same world?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  IN ALMOST ALL RESPECTS, Lindstrom Peninsula was a bad choice for a camp. The beach was so small and narrow that the Inuit had to string their tents along it in single file, a formation that made communication between the tents difficult and gave the wind free rein to bluster around them. The beach itself was made of large pebbles and it was very steep, backing on to sheer cliffs. The tide appeared to be enormous. If a huge wind pushed in the waves, the settlers could easily find themselves sucked out to sea and those fierce currents which kept the water open in places even in winter would also make the ice pack unstable and dangerous. But it had not been chosen for its homely qualities. The real reason the six families had been moved from Craig Harbour to Lindstrom Peninsula was not that it was likely to offer a good living, but that it was far enough away from the police detachment to deter the Inuit from visiting.

  The immediate tasks were to hunt and collect fuel and water. The camp had enough food for three or four weeks, but once the dark period set in, their hunting would be severely restricted. But there still was not enough snow on the land to sledge and the sea was neither open nor yet fast with ice. They would have to walk or go out by boat. Samwillie and Elijah took off along the cliffs but they returned without making a kill. They reported that the land above the cliffs looked parched and mean and there were few tracks or other signs of animal occupation. They had seen two musk ox, they said, grazing on some mossy rocks to the west of the peninsula and raised their rifles but then remembered Sargent's warning that if they shot an ox they would be fined C$500 or sent to jail. If game was abundant, as Ross Gibson had promised them it would be, it must be concentrated in scattered sheltered pockets where there were grasses or lichen, but where these pockets were the hunters could not tell. They had seen inukshuks on some of the distant mountains and the man-shaped cairns had told them that Inuit had passed by at some time and marked sled routes into the interior. Of those Inuit there was no trace, the men said, and the hunters could only assume they had gone away or died. It seemed that they would have to depend on marine mammals for their cache.