The Long Exile

by Melanie McGrath

  Josephie and Rynee Flaherty reeled at the news. They were in no doubt about what it actually meant. They had heard the stories and were prepared to believe them. Their daughter would be taken to some huge building full of sickness, then she would be stripped of her caribou-skin clothes, bathed and disinfected. From there she would be placed in an isolation ward and forbidden to speak Inukti-tut. She might also be tied to the bed to prevent her from wandering off and spreading infection and to make it easier for the doctors to administer the great many very painful injections the treatment prescribed. For the duration of her stay in the south, the likelihood was that no one would tell her parents where she was or whether she was dead or alive. If they were lucky, she would be sent back to them months or years from now, dressed in a skimpy cotton outfit, bewildered and cold and unable to speak her parents' language. Otherwise, these few moments might be their last together as a family.

  There was nothing Rynee and Josephie could do to stop their daughter's being taken away. If they resisted, the police would take her anyway and so they said their goodbyes and a frightened and tearful Mary Flaherty was removed from the camp with Dora and Mary Iqaluk and taken to the tiny hospital in Churchill. From there the girls were transferred on to a noisy cargo plane and sent south. Many years later, Dora recalled the journey. In all the rush, Mary's bottle had been left behind and she became so hungry during the flight she tried to eat a doll made from rabbit fur. The three girls were taken to a sanatorium which looked like a prison. The girls found it terrifying. Soon after their arrival, Mary was separated from the two sisters and put in a ward staffed by nurses who did not speak Inuktitut. One time Dora managed to sneak away from her own ward, she found Mary tied to the bed, crying. For the next three years Mary Flaherty neither saw nor had any news from or about her parents. She became aattimajuq, one who is separated from her family, cut adrift. According to Inuit custom she would not be talked about openly. Until she came back to them she would be a living ghost, at once a presence and an absence too painful to be acknowledged.

  The C. D. Howe left Churchill and sailed on round Salisbury and Nottingham islands and out across the Hudson Strait. The strait was well known for producing rough weather, particularly during the August storm season and sure enough near Resolution Island, a fierce wind whipped up the swell and pretty soon they found themselves surrounded by huge slabs of churning pack ice. A half-dozen crew rushed down to the Inuit quarters to distribute lifejackets and, not long after, the ship began to lurch and roll alarmingly, clipping ice floes on either side. The blasting wind swept her up on to the crest of each wave of white water, then dashed her back down to the foot of the swell. Hail began drumming against the ship's hull, while up on deck the wind ripped the tie-downs from the tarpaulins, which began billowing and humming in the wind like rogue sails. The sound set off the sled dogs, who howled and scrabbled wild-eyed at the doors of their crates. Suddenly the ship seemed to come alive. Guns, fish hooks, stone lamps and sewing gear scurried across the floor. Fire extinguishers rattled in their clasps, doors swung and crashed shut. Water flowed out of some broken tank or tap and tore along the linoleum. In the Inuit quarters men, women and children threw up where they sat, unable to stand let alone make it to the washrooms. Everyone was terrified. They knew that if they were swept to sea, within two or three minutes in a high swell in Arctic waters they would all be dead. Rynee Flaherty clung to her bunk with Martha in her arms and little Peter tucked in her amiut, while Josephie tried to gather their possessions. There was no prospect of sleep. This was Torngak, the evil spirit who played havoc with those who broke taboos and he would not stop until he was done with them. They had to sit and pray and hope they would get through it.

  After what seemed like days but was probably hours, the storm fell away, leaving them flattened and edgy. No one spoke. People fell, exhausted, on to their bunks. The C. D. Howe proceeded north in still waters towards Baffin Bay. A few hours later they found themselves above the 65th parallel. An empty cold filled the air. They were moving through an ethereal blue iceberg forest. Red Northern Lights shot across the sky. Once again they crossed the Arctic Circle. For the next day or so nothing seemed to move on the horizon. At the 70th parallel, where the West Greenland Current gave out, broken floes and bergy bits appeared in open water. Five degrees farther north the High Arctic began. From here the great polar desert rolled away a thousand miles north to the tip of Ellesmere Island.

  At the beginning of September, forty days after the Flahertys left Inukjuak, the C. D. Howe finally swung into Resolute Bay and dropped anchor in the midst of a deep and sinister fog. Leo Manning, the Department interpreter, appeared in the Inuit quarters to tell the Nungaks, the Echalooks and the Iqaluks to pack their things and make ready for the cargo barge that would take them on shore. The Flahertys were to remain on ship until they reached the Craig Harbour detachment.

  The Flahertys watched the others leave, then went to their bunks. The storm had unsettled them so much that they had barely slept or eaten. Peter had begun refusing his mother's breast. The Flahertys hadn't been able to bring themselves to imagine how Mary might be by this time. They felt drained and uneasy. For a few hours they took some rest. A while later, when the fog still showed no signs of clearing, Manning came back down to the quarters to tell them that the ship could not sail in current conditions and that they would be put ashore until it was safe for the C. D. Howe to continue on.

  No one got much sleep that night but for the first time in forty days the Flahertys scarcely noticed how tired they were. There was two years' worth of news and gossip to catch up on. The Resolute Bay camp had been having a hard time of it, they said. The weather on Cornwallis was unlike anything they had ever encountered in Inukjuak. They could barely breathe the winter air, it was so cold, and in summer, dense fogs descended for days. A ceaseless wind ripped across the island and the hunting was hard. Polar bears came up from the south and crossed over on their way to Bathurst Island, but they were fearsome and the dogs were not trained to contain them. The hunters hated having to go after them, but in the winter, in particular, they had no choice. They had to grit their courage. They would much rather hunt caribou, and the meat was infinitely better, but they had to cross all the way over to Southampton Island to get any. The first winter they had gone very hungry and had been reduced to raiding the rubbish dumps at the air base and the weather station, which Ross Gibson had expressly forbidden them to do and seemed now determined to prevent.

  The policeman had begun daily inspections of the tents, pulling up the sleeping skins and poking into the pots and pans, looking for stuff that might have been taken from the dump. They wondered if the extreme cold had not affected him in some way. He seemed even more agitated up here, constantly drilling them on the need to maintain the traditional Inuit way of life, as if he knew anything about it. In any case, most of the men were hoping to find work of some description at the air force base. At least the men got fed there, though their wives and children still had to be provided for. Right now, there was only the odd day or two of casual work and it paid badly, but they were pinning their hopes on being offered some formal waged employment at the base in the future.

  They had not had much contact with the camp at Grise Fiord, they said. A few dog teams had come in during the spring, bringing the police for their annual leave. They had heard that Aqiatusuk had died. It was a different world up there. From what they had picked up there was game on Ellesmere Island but it was almost impossible to reach and the camp was completely cut off. There were no weather stations, no air bases and no prospects for employment whatsoever. The Grise Fiord camp was not really big enough to be viable but there was no other way for them to survive except to keep on hunting and trapping. The loss of just one hunter or carver like Aqiatusuk could put the whole camp in danger.

  The following morning the fog had thinned considerably, though it was still misty and there were sharp spiny ice crystals in the air. losephie Flaherty woke to the sou
nd of boots on the shale and throwing back the tent flaps he saw the old Inukjuak detachment pulisi, Constable Ross Gibson, striding towards the camp. In two years Big Red had aged to an almost shocking degree. The policeman was still huge and powerful-looking but not much else remained of the man losephie remembered. His face was livid with red blotches and darkened, leathery-looking spots and when he took off his hat to scratch his head losephie could see that his hair had receded and thinned. He moved at a strange angle, like willow twigs in fierce wind. He did not seem happy.

  Gibson had come to check on the newcomers and to make sure the Flahertys were prepared to leave whenever the fog cleared, which it did, as if on command, shortly after. It was hard saying goodbye and strange boarding the ship alone. The previous night's discussions had been rather gloomy and the Flahertys were nervously anticipating arriving at their destination unsure of what they would find. The C. D. Howe moved out of the bay, cleared Barrow Strait and began to churn steadily through the waters of Lancaster Sound. By the end of the following day, she had turned northwest and was steaming along the east coast of Devon Island, where, two years before, Ross Gibson had noted the shadows on the cliffs and glaciers. The sun came out, refracting from the ice crystals in the air and scattering millions of tiny rainbows. The ship ploughed on, sliding finally through Lady Ann Strait and into Iones Sound. It was then that the Flahertys caught their first glimpse of Ellesmere Island. For two years now, the place had lived in their imaginations as an icier version of the gentle, willow-covered hills and sand strands of Inukjuak, but with more and larger game. The Ellesmere Island of their imagination boiled with seal and beluga, the rocks were white with the guano of plump snow-geese and the cliffs were dotted with their eggs. In this imaginary Ellesmere, caribou wandered along snowy paths to their grazing grounds and walrus lay sleeping soundly at the edge of the shore-fast ice. Blooming willow, pink saxifrage, purple heather and yellow Arctic poppies were watered from a hundred little streams and the muskeg was firm and not too hummocky, with cloudberries ripening on every south-facing slope. It was not fanciful, this imaginary Ellesmere, nor was it an amalgam of their hopes. It was rather what they had been led to expect.

  The Ellesmere Island stretched out ahead confounded every expectation. Recalling the scene later, Rynee said she thought they would be crushed by rock and ice.

  A cluster of tiny people appeared on the beach beside the police detachment and began waving. From where the Flahertys were standing on the deck of the C. D. Howe it was impossible to make out individual faces but the shapes and contours of these people, the way their bodies stirred the air as they moved about among the rocks, were so familiar to the Flahertys that it was hard, in spite of their surroundings, not to imagine they were back in Inukjuak and that Aqiatusuk's departure and death and their own long, exhausting journey were just elements in a dream from which they had at last awoken. The sense of being among fellows hit them like a sudden wind and in that single, tremendous moment of recognition, all the uncertainty and confusion of the past two years melted away and they were left with the only thing that mattered or had ever mattered: to be among family.

  The ship dropped anchor and the crew came out on deck to prepare the cargo barge. Sometime later, Josephie, Rynee, Martha and Peter Flaherty were dropped on the beach. There were tears then, and wide, open grins from the men. The children ran between the newcomers' legs, laughing with excitement. Aside from a party of Greenlanders, these were the first Inuit the settlers had seen in two long years and they were bundled along to Mary Aqiatusuk's tent and offered hot sweet tea. A barrage of eager questions followed. The Inukjuamiut wanted to know everything about the camp at Resolute Bay. How was the hunting going? Where were the people camped? Was Big Red bothering them? Had they caught caribou or bear? Were there any foxes? Did they have trouble finding sweet water? Had anyone come down with illness? Was Cornwallis as empty as Ellesmere? And as cold? After a long series of investigations, they began more tentatively to enquire after Inukjuak and their relatives there, but their questions were now hesitant and oddly detached. It was as if their homeland had taken on the character of an ancestral place, revered but remote. losephie could not know then that in a few years from now he too would find himself set loose and drifting whenever the old country was mentioned, reluctant to call up the image of a place to which he longed so fiercely to return.

  While the Flahertys were enjoying their welcome, Corporal Glenn Sargent was taking note of how little equipment or food the newcomers possessed. No boat, no komatik, no dogs, no lamps, the list went on. This worried him. He ordered the special constable to fetch some destitution rations and noted the donation of flour, oats, sugar, tobacco, lard and tea in his report book. When the time came to file his usual quarterly dispatch on “Conditions in general among the Natives,” he would let HQ know, as diplomatically as he could, that he thought it had been irresponsible to allow this new family to travel to Ellesmere with so few clothes and such spartan supplies. His instructions were to interfere as little as possible but he knew the newcomers had not a hope of surviving the winter without a great deal of assistance and good will from their family already at the camp.

  A new constable had come up on the C. D. Howe at the same time as the Flahertys as a replacement for Clay Fryer. He was Bob Pilot, a tall, genial man with a rocky exterior. Pilot was very young, only twenty-one or twenty-two. He had begun his police career in Calgary but his only Arctic stint prior to the posting at Craig Harbour had been in Iqaluit for summer duties the previous year. Still, he was very obviously keen to do whatever it took to earn his “G” man stripes. Sargent thought it would be good for him to get a feel for life on the land. Once he had had a chance to unpack his things and settle in a little at the detachment, Sargent resolved to dispatch his new junior to live in Akpaliapik's sod house at the camp, where he could learn how to handle a dog team on the ice before the winter came. Once the dark period arrived, he could return to the comforts of the detachment, but while he was out with Akpaliapik, Pilot would be able to keep an eye on things in general and on the Flahertys in particular. It seemed like a good solution to their concerns.

  By evening the new Inuit arrivals had settled in their tent. The baby began to cry. Rynee cooked up some porridge, dipped an Arctic hare's foot into the mixture and held it to the lips of her son, who took it in his mouth and sucked a little. She had no milk of her own for him now. The journey north had dried her up. Twilight fell and the cliffs closed in around them, blocking their view of what lay behind. It seemed to Josephie and Rynee then that all the events of the past few months, the arrival of Aqiatusuk's letter, his death, the qalunaat uncle, the journey north and the loss of Mary had already blurred into a past that felt all the more remote in time for having happened so far away. An atmosphere of abstraction, a thin, life-denying feeling crept into their tent that night. In the half-light, only Martha still seemed full of spirit. They fell on to their few sleeping skins, exhausted, and woke the next day to a floury sky. Out in the sound, the C. D. Howe had finished unloading her cargo, and was preparing to weigh anchor and head back down south to Montreal.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE NEXT DAY the Inuit moved from the detachment to their camp. In the past year, they had shifted from the site chosen by Henry Larsen and were now established along a small beach twenty miles east of Lindstrom looking out to the southeast across Jones Sound at the folds of the Devon Island mountains, just visible nearly a hundred miles away. A fierce blue sky loomed overhead, punctured here and there by high, drifting cloud and the sun clung to the safety of the horizon line. A few crows soared by as the Flahertys began erecting their tent, the sea sighed and flopped against the beach but these small sounds were no match for the clank and groan of the loose ice pan. The Flahertys had never seen so much summer ice as there remained in the waters of Jones Sound and at the mouth of nearby Grise Fiord, nor had they ever heard ice growl and moan with more anguish than here, where it never melted.

  T
he winter before, the camp's second in the High Arctic, Simon Akpaliapik and Samuel Anukudluk had shown the Inukjuak families how to build the sod huts, qarnaq, typical of the inhabitants of the Arctic's arid zones, where there was often too little wind-packed snow to build snowhouses until late in the winter. In Pond Inlet, Akpaliapik and Anukudluk had built their qarnaqs into the rock, but here they had had to rely on scrap lumber from the supply ship and improvise roofs from pieces of old canvas. Now, as it was summer, the huts lay unused, their roofs put to use as tents. The Inukjuamiut and the Ingluligmiut were living separately, the Inuk-juamiut tents zigzagging along the shoreline at some distance from where the smaller group of Ingluligmiut was camped. The two groups had discovered they had less in common than Henry Larsen had supposed and they had gradually drifted apart. More experienced in high-latitude survival, the Ingluligmiut were the favourites of the police detachment, which showed them greater consideration and respect. The Inukjuamiut resented this. For their part, the Ingluligmiut were still waiting for the payment they had been led to believe would follow their efforts to help the Inukjuamiut settle in and could only imagine that the Inukjuamiut were in some way responsible for the fact that they had never been paid.