The Long Exile

by Melanie McGrath

  From the camp, losephie set off directly to Paddy Aqiatusuk's grave, a rubble of stones piled up on a nearby slope where some loose rock formed a gentle, upward curve and losephie had to scramble to reach the spot, which was marked by a red stone inuk-shuk. It looked unbearably lonely. There were a few patches of vegetation growing there but nothing else and everything living seemed to point southwards.

  He returned from his first sortie subdued. He missed his stepfather greatly. To him, the land was nangijuanngittuq, empty, not in any literal way, but in the more profound sense of having no meaning. Paddy Aqiatusuk was, or, rather, would have been, the meaning whose presence would have filled the land. Now he was gone, buried not among his ancestors, but here, surrounded by emptiness. The qalunaat place namesGrise Fiord, Craig Harbour, Lindstrom said nothing to losephie about the land. In the absence of Aqiatusuk's tales of hunting routes and traplines, Ellesmere Island felt like a place that did not really exist.

  There was only one way to make it exist and that was to experience it. losephie knew the task ahead would be enormous. Learning the land here would be as much a lifetime's work as it had been in Ungava. He already sensed there were conditions here that he had never before had to confront. Elijah, Samwillie, loadamie and the other men at camp later told him that he would have to get used to very dynamic ice and moving floes, to whirling winds and rip tides. He had already seen how the movement of light through the thin air baffled distance and produced strange mirages out at sea. He would have to learn how the currents moved and where there were safe beachings. When winter came, he would need to familiarise himself with the way the ice heaved up into pressure ridges and the places where the tides broke through. The hunting conditions on Elles-mere were very different from anything he had ever known. The game was so scattered that he would find himself having to be away from the settlement for days, sometimes weeks, at a time, leaving Rynee and the children to manage with whatever cache of meat remained. He would have to learn how to hunt narwhal, creatures with which he was completely unfamiliar. Occasionally, the men advised him, he would run into musk ox, which would think nothing of charging the sled if they felt cornered. If he shot one, he would risk being sent to prison. Before long, he would come face to face with a hungry polar bear. He would be afraid. Trapping would be no easier. The foxes often followed bears way out on to the sea ice to scavenge from their leavings and Josephie would have to follow them. Food was so scarce that crows and wolves would often get to the bodies of trapped foxes before he would be able to retrieve them. The men had discovered that the only way to work was to go out hunting in pairs during the summer months and split up during the winter to work their separate trap lines. For months at a time, the only animals they would get, aside from the foxes, would be seal.

  Rynee and the children would have to adapt themselves to their new conditions too. In Inukjuak, Rynee and Martha had only to venture out so far as the river to find sweet water or freshwater ice, but on Ellesmere Island, the women of the camp warned them, it could take hours to gather enough ice for a couple of days. Heather and grass were hard to come by and there were no berries to be found, no insect grubs and very few ptarmigan or hare. It was rare to find gull eggs or sculpin. For protein, they would be dependent on whatever Josephie could bring back from his hunting trips and they would have to get used to Josephie's being away for days, sometimes weeks, not knowing where he was, or even if he was still alive.

  Josephie would need harpoons with avataqs, or floats, for spearing seal, traps, seal nets and ammunition, harpoon heads, fishing line and hooks, holland twine for mending nets, a lamp, a flashlight, a hare-skin baffle, fox-fur kamik soles to soften the sound of his step across the shale, a seal breath detector for hunting the animals at their breathing holes, a spare snowknife, a new flensing knife, a komatik and dog team with the attendant harnesses and equipment, and access to a boat. Rynee would need a couple of dozen stretched sealskins with which to make kamiks, hare skins for baffles and underwear, caribou skins for parkas and other winter clothes and sinews for sewing, blubber for the qulliq and, eventually, a primus stove. They could only hope the detachment would supply them.

  A few days after the Flahertys arrived, Bob Pilot and Special Constable Kayak, who had replaced Areak, turned up in the detachment Peterhead, bringing tea and sugar and hardtack biscuits and offering to take the men hunting. Just as they had done in the previous two years, they would cache walrus for winter dog food and any seal they caught they would use immediately. The men climbed on board the boat. If Josephie hoped to see his new equipment there, he was disappointed. There was nothing resembling traps or a lamp or a snowknife.

  The few weeks between summer and winter streaked by in a fury of activity. There was much to do to patch up the tents, prepare the winter caches, repair the qarnaqs, spruce up the komatiks, feed the dogs, look after the pups, haul water, make walrus-meat cheese, and sew new sets of clothes to prepare the camp for the onset of the dark period. When freeze-up came, Josephie and Joadamie went out along the coast, setting traps and going after seal where the shore-fast ice gave out to the pack. While he was away, Rynee moved part time into Mary Aqiatusuk's tent and the two women shared the burden of searching for grass and heather for the qulliq and ice for water. When twilight fell, as it did earlier and earlier, they sat inside scraping skins and sewing sealskin clothes. Neither woman mentioned her troubles, though each sensed the wound in the heart of the other. Work activity took their minds off the sudden fall-off in temperatures and the spiralling winds which came with the start of the autumn and it shielded them a little from the painful memories of people lost to them.

  One day in mid-October the sun did not rise and an inky gloam took the place of dawn. Moonlight reflected in the frozen sea and picked out the silhouette of the tied-up sled dogs. Above the sea the sky was dark grey and powdery, but on land every living and dead thing melted into the same impenetrable black swell. The absence of light seemed to slow down everything. All the ordinary markers of the passing of time disappeared. Nothing moved, nothing changed, but everything sounded oddly unfamiliar. Strange barks ricocheted off the rock, rattled across the shale and bounced along the shoreline before disappearing somewhere inside the folds of the pressure ice out at sea. Primus stoves hissed and qulliqs stuttered and the guy ropes of the Flahertys' tent clinked in the wind. The shale under foot cracked, the piss pots echoed. The sled dogs scraped and pawed and howled as the ice drummed and thumped. The tides wheezed and guttered, snowflakes hummed. Human breath made crisp little gasps as it turned to ice crystals.

  After a few days, the Flahertys discovered that their internal clocks had broken, waking them at all hours and disturbing their sleep. In the dark, everything seemed at the same time simpler and more complex. Objects became silhouettes whose sharp outlines obscured detail. Their own fingers dissolved into tentacles floating in a sea of contradictory impressions. Adults felt shorter, children taller, eyelashes felt thicker, noses more fleshy. The others, who had gone through it all before, attempted to reassure them, but there were so many bewildering new sensations that it was impossible to feel comforted.

  At the end of October, temperatures began to plunge. Bob Pilot left Simon Akpaliapik's qarnaq and returned to the detachment. Thomasie and Mary Amagoalik and their sons Allie, Salluviniq and Charlie moved into the choreboy's hut nearby. Samwillie and Elijah Aqiatusuk moved into their qarnaq with Mary, Minnie and Larry Audlaluk. Phillipoosie and Annie Novalinga and their family followed suit. Last into their own qarnaq were Joadamie and Ekoomak Aqiatusuk, and their daughter Lizzie. In the frenzy of activity during the summer and autumn, no one had got round to showing Josephie how to build his own hut but there was an old one left over from a previous year so the Flahertys moved into that. The place took some getting used to. Unlike a snowhouse, which had windows and a spacious aspect, the sod hut was windowless and claustrophobic. The constant burning of the qulliq filled the space with blubber fumes which seared the eyes and the back of
the throat. The whole structure proved unstable. Rynee Flaherty returned one day from a trip out collecting heather to discover that the sod bricks had caved in. It was far too cold to live in the tent, so the Flahertys were obliged to move in with loadamie. There were now two families, seven people, living in a single earth room twelve feet by ten feet, and with nowhere to escape one another even for a moment because it was too cold to stand outside. The adults had to take turns sleeping. There were no complaints, though, losephie and Rynee both knew that without loadamie and Ekoo-mak's generosity they would freeze. For Rynee, the move was particularly hard. losephie's relatives were kind to her, but these were not her people and this was not her home and she was already lonely.

  The cold made everyone much hungrier. Each hunter was having to go out hunting alone, now, or with his own family. The scarcity of the game did not justify hunting in pairs. loadamie loaned losephie some of his dogs, his komatik and harnesses. The detachment advanced him some traps and ammunition but he soon discovered that it was almost impossible to control the dogs. The animals had to be kept very hungry to make them move and, even when they were starved, they considered Joadamie their master and would not obey Josephie's instructions. Often he would have to trudge ahead and, crouching low, imitate the movements of a seal to get them going. They remained uneasy in their new fan harnesses, which were more suited to High Arctic conditions than the longer harnesses of Ungava, as a result of which the komatik was always overturning and Josephie would have to stop to repack it in the dark. The dry air made the dogs' lungs bleed and the dry ice ground against their paws, even, sometimes, after Josephie tied sealskin booties over them. On several occasions he took them out along the coast with the intention of setting his trap lines and from there sledging out to the edge of the shore-fast ice where the dogs could scent out seals' breathing holes, but each time the team lost control and bolted or refused to move and he had to return home empty-handed.

  In the dark he felt completely bewildered. He could not see the end of his own outstretched hand. Walking out on the ice blind was terrifying. At any moment, he expected to fall through some thin patch or opening lead. For mile after mile he had to trust the dogs, beasts who, it seemed, were as disoriented and as demoralised as himself. It were as if he suddenly had no body, but existed only as a shadow, unable to get any purchase on the world around him, aware that at any time the world could swallow him up. When it was clear and the moon gave off a strong light, he felt his chances rising, an intimation, a possibility that he might get out of it all alive, but the cloud had only to come over and a baleful gloom would settle back in and despair would sneak into his heart. What had he brought himself and his family to? It was too dark to see his way to an answer.

  As the days and weeks wore on, the cold deepened into a hard, inescapable crust which seemed to work its way into his vital organs. Sometimes Josephie would return from a trip struggling for breath which had frozen his lungs. The dark, the dogs and his own lack of experience after twelve years as a choreboy seemed constantly to doom his efforts. He had to fight the temptation to give in to brooding or despondency but this new life was a terrible shock to him. One of his hopes in travelling north had been to be able to make himself useful to his stepfather's family. Now, after only a few weeks on Ellesmere, he began to sense that there was very little he could do to make any difference. On the contrary, unless he could change his situation, he would be forced to accept the humiliating truth that the Flaherty family's survival would for some time depend on help from the Aqiatusuk family. The conditions stretched him beyond his limits. As they edged further into the dark period, he grew more anxious. Without help he would not be able to keep his family fed through the winter. He needed a hunting partner, but there was no one he could turn to. Rynee had to remain at home to feed the children, clean skins and patch their clothes and it was as much as the other men could do to keep their own families alive. The detachment appeared to have no interest in his plight. There was only one person left. His daughter Martha.

  And so, at the age of six or so, the granddaughter of Robert Flaherty and Maggie Nujarluktuk began her hunting career, in temperatures cold enough to freeze the breath, to curdle the blood and murder the bones.

  Father and daughter made an odd couple. Forced together by circumstances, they rose together in the black dawn, pulled on their outdoor caribou underclothes with the fur on the inside and rolled on another pair of hare-skin stockings, while Rynee lit the qulliq to melt water and chewed their kamiks to make them supple. Once they were dressed, they ate a piece of seal meat or a little slice of blubber and took a piece of bannock bread to pocket for the journey. When breakfast was over, Josephie went out to fetch the dogs and ice the runners of the komatik while Martha pulled on her caribou overclothesstill frozen so they would resist condensation and dampand yanked up her kamiks and waited for her mother to check that there were no holes and no little pieces of skin exposed. Once that was done, Rynee would help her daughter put on her sealskin mitts and her dog-fur mitts and she would go out to meet her father on the ice.

  If the cold was terrorising for Josephie, how much more so was it for his little daughter. Frost cramped the muscles in Martha's throat and froze her eyelashes, her brows and the hairs inside her ears. Out there on the High Arctic ice, her breath scoured her lungs like gravel and her brain rattled hard and frosty in its little box. This fierce, black world made no sense to her. As she bumped along on the sled across Jones Sound in pewter light, with Josephie up ahead encouraging on the reluctant dogs, almost invisible in the gloom, she would feel as though she had somehow died and entered a limbo world and tears of horror would fall down her cheeks, freeze and form forests of ice crystals on her face. When that happened, her father would grab her arms and say, “What do you want? Do you want us to starve?”

  Then Martha would wipe her cheeks and focus on the way ahead because she was strong, stronger than Josephie would ever know, and because she had no choice.

  All through that early winter they sledged, past Christmas and on into the New Year. They went east to Smith Sound and south to Devon Island, then north as far as Norwegian Bay and west to Hell Gate, till there was no patch of ice, no glacier or fiord or shale beach around southern Ellesmere that was not tattooed with their tracks. On and on father and daughter moved, endlessly in motion, bound by fear, hunger and the incalculable ties of family.

  What Martha Flaherty would have given for it all to stop! At times all she wanted was not to have to face another day out on the frozen land. But, tiny child though she was, she knew already that to give in to this impulse would mean her death and those of her mother and brother, and so she would muster the resilience which was both her genetic legacy and her cultural heritage, gather herself and set her sights ahead.

  From time to time, Bob Pilot would turn up at camp, bringing little offerings of flour, tobacco or lard. Sargent came too, though less frequently. They had not, as Josephie had supposed, washed their hands of the Flahertys. In fact they were anxious about the family. But their hands were tied by their orders, which were to keep the Inuit out on the land. Besides, they never saw the whole truth of the situation. The Inuit were too wary of the policemen to tell them everything. If they were asked, they would say only that conditions were hard but they were managing. Neither Sargent nor Pilot could understand what they were asking of a gentle man with only a few years' experience of hunting was impossible. All the same, the two policemen knew that the family were hungry and vulnerable, and that winter was not over yet. If the Flahertys were to last it out, Sargent and Pilot decided, then, orders or no, something more would have to be done.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  SNOW ARRIVED and the families deserted their sod huts for snow-houses. All through the early weeks of the winter they hunted and trapped, their days reduced, as they had been during every winter on Ellesmere Island, to a stark and brutal regimen of survival. At Christmas the detachment threw them a party. They swallowed tinned sardi
nes and chocolate, watched a film and danced a few lacklustre reels. Corporal Sargent and Constable Pilot took pictures. No one smiled much. Afterwards, they returned to camp and resumed hunting and trapping and by January the sardines and the chocolate were already distant memories.

  Josephie and Martha were now able more often than not to bring back a ringed seal, but there were four human mouths and several dogs to feed and blubber to be kept aside for the qulliq and still barely a day passed when the family's stomachs did not ache and their minds grow dizzy with hunger. All the talk was of food and how to get it. The dark days tumbled relentlessly one upon the other and discovered the Flahertys, huddled in the cold, picking at the bones of seal flippers. Technically, they were not starving, but their faces had taken on the soft, bloodless look of malnutrition and their eyes were matt and empty. Sleep provided them no relief. Under frozen sleeping skins they dreamed of duck and eggs and cloudberries and of all the luscious bounty of a life now gone.

  If Josephie regretted making the journey up to Ellesmere Island he never said so. On the few occasions Rynee brought the topic up, he merely observed that they had to make the most of their situation. All the same, he was preoccupied. As winter wore on he seemed to lose interest in the world beyond what might be extracted from it to feed his family. He took no pleasure in stories or songs, things he had always loved. The beauty of the land escaped him and his manner became sharp and unpredictable, particularly round Martha. Gradually, over the months, Josephie Flaherty, the hard-working, cheerful, somewhat introspective man who loved his homeland and his stepfather, began to dwindle and in his place a bitter, vindictive and moody creature took shape.

  In February the sun arrived again, revealing devastation in the Inukjuamiut camp. Old bones, antlers and pieces of flensed seal and bearskin were scattered between the sod huts and snowhouses, there were broken piss pails and harpoon handles, bits of tattered sealskin harness and walrus skulls strewn about. Bits and pieces of butchered animal were stuck on ledges and rock outcrops out of range of the dogs. Over to the side where the Ingluligmiut had built their qar-naqs, the beach was cleaner and more ordered. The mess seemed to echo the peculiar desperation of the Inukjuamiut, who had been brought to a land in comparison to which Ungava, which had in turn seemed so relentless and raw to Robert Flaherty, appeared infinitely forgiving. In their camp's dishevelment could be discovered the great shake-up which the move north had wrought not only in their everyday lives but also in their hearts. As they went about restoring the camp to something like order, it was clear that the order was as fragile as the new roots they were trying to lay down. They had survived another winter, but they were in a mess.