There was no particular reason to worry. The weather was clear, the children knew the path and polar bears kept away from the fiord during the summer. They often went out for a day at a time collecting heather or hunting for eggs or ptarmigan, so no one in camp thought anything much of it when the two Amagoalik boys failed to return home at the end of the afternoon. It was only as evening set in, with the sun still ablaze, that the children's mother began to get worried and went down to the beach with a telescope to scan the area round the fiord and see if she could see the boys or their tracks. Sometime later a handful of the men in the camp set out to look for the boys while someone else went to alert the police detachment. The women stayed behind to look after the boys' mother. For what seemed an eternity, they sat and waited. Every so often they thought they heard the yap of a dog coming from inside the fiord, but the sounds became muddled with their thoughts. Time slid by. Suddenly, a lone figure appeared from the direction of the fiord and began trudging along the shale towards them and they hurried out to meet him, their feet bringing up little fountains of stones behind. The news was as bad as they had feared. The body of one of the boys had been found in the water and it looked as though he had fallen through a soft patch in the ice and drowned. He had been dead a while. His brother was still missing.
By the next morning there was still no sign of the missing boy and the men were forced to give up their search so they could hunt for food for their families. In keeping with Inuit custom, Mary Aqia-tusuk burned the clothes which the boys' mother had been saving for the arrival of the C. D. Howe. The women cried at the waste of new clothes. It was easier than crying for the boys when the tears shed might never have ended. There it was: Allie and Salluviniq Amagoalik would never see another ship time.
The report of the Grise Fiord police detachment to Henry Larsen in Ottawa in September of that year noted, with regret, that the Amagoalik boys had died “while out playing.” But, like Aqia-tusuk's obituary in Time magazine, this was not true. The boys had died while out looking for fish to feed their family.
The deaths of the two boys brought to mind a story the camp had been told by a party of Greenlandic hunters and their families who had passed by Grise Fiord the year before. One of them was an old woman called Padloo. Padloo's father had been among the travellers who had made their way from Baffin Island to Etah in northern Greenland under the leadership of Qillaq. It was a story familiar to most Baffin Islanders but to the Inukjuamiut it was new. After several years' travelling, and just before the party reached Greenland, Qillaq's friend Oqe became disillusioned with the search and decided to return to Baffin, taking twenty-four of his supporters with him. It was summer, but there was enough ice to sledge and the group turned back at Makinson Inlet on the east coast of Ellesmere Island and began heading south, stopping at Goose and Fram fiords on the southern coast to set up hunting camps to gather a cache for the winter. But high winds followed by bad autumn weather made hunting hard and the people began to go hungry. When the dark period and the cold set in, their meat stores were empty and by the end of the year they had eaten their dogs and their surplus skins and were starving. One by one they began to die.
Of all the travellers, a man called Qimmingajak was the most determined to save himself. Under cover of the perpetual dark he went out collecting the corpses of those who had died. When he and his family had eaten all the dead, Qimmingajak looked about to see whom he could eat next. His first victim was his young brother-in-law, Qallutsiaq. The boy had already eaten all his clothes with the exception of the sealskin boots and trousers his grandmother had given him, and he was in a pitiful state. After Qallutsiaq, killing came easier to Qimmingajak, and before too long, he had murdered everyone in the camp except his wife, Angiliq, and their two sons.
For a while the family lived off the frozen corpses of Qimmin-gajak's victims, but hunger eventually returned. Stringing a cord through the roof of his qarnaq and fashioning the loose end into a noose, one day Qimmingajak instructed Angiliq to fix the noose round their elder son's neck. The boy and his mother both protested, but Qimmingajak threatened to kill Angiliq if she refused to do as he commanded and so, after a great deal of crying and shaking Angiliq pushed the rope over her son's head and Qimmingajak tightened it. Then he cut up the body of his son and gave the hands to his wife just as, in happier days, he had presented her with the flippers of a seal.
Now only Angiliq and Qimmingajak and their younger son were left alive. In the hope of saving her remaining child, Angiliq took off hunting. Till then she had never hunted anything much except sea birds, hares and lemmings and there seemed very few of any of these on Ellesmere Island, but she took off across the sea ice in Jones Sound, checking the agluit and begging Sedna, the sea spirit, to send her a fat harp seal. All night she walked and waited and towards dawn she put her testing feather in one last aglu. Within minutes, the feather moved with the breath of the creature beneath it, and Angiliq raised her harpoon and brought up a small struggling seal. Angiliq whooped for joy and, half running, half stumbling, dragged the animal behind her to camp. When she reached the qarnaq she crushed a little of the seal's fat to light a fire and in the low flame of the qulliq she suddenly saw Qimmingajak sitting in a corner watching her. It was then she knew it was too late. Her younger boy was dead and his father had already begun to eat his body.
Spring came and the sea melted into blue, Padloo said, but a tuurngaaluk, an evil spirit, had taken over Qimmingajak and he no longer even tried to hunt. Knowing who her husband's next victim would be, Angiliq went out to sea in Qimmingajak's kayak looking for walrus. She knew what she was doing was dangerous but she had nothing to lose, so she paddled round the sound, searching for signs of life. After many hours, she saw a ship in the distance, and, racing back to camp, she began to pile the clothing of the dead into a huge mound before setting it on fire to make a beacon. Spotting the smoke, the captain of the whaler sent his ship's skiff to investigate. He picked up the survivors and dropped the pair at Pond Inlet on Baffin Island from where they wandered into a nearby camp at Igar-juaq. The people there offered them muktuk and polar bear meat. Angiliq ate the meat but Qimmingajak refused and was later seen inspecting an area of graves. He did not live long in Igarjuaq. Some said Angiliq killed him, others said it was a relative of one of the bodies he had scavenged. No one knew what had become of the tuurngaaluk which had occupied Qimmingajak and given him his terrible taste for human blood, but it was possible, Padloo said, that the tuurngaaluk of Fram Fiord remained there, waiting for its next victim.
A rumour began that the spirits did not want the Inuit on Ellesmere Island. Something bad had happened to every group of Inuit who had ever camped there. The deaths of the Amagoalik boys were just two in a series which stretched back past Paddy Aqiatusuk and Special Constable Kakto and his wife, Ooarloo's two children, to Oqe's followers and the Thule themselves. The Inuit did not want to be in a place which so manifestly did not welcome them. They needed to get back home. But how?
Lust over a month after the boys' death, a faint pucker appeared on the horizon, as if someone had pinched two clouds together. The lookout let off two rifle shots to warn the camp that the C. D. Howe was on her way towards them and the camp Inuit changed into their best clothes and came down on to the beach to wait, speaking excitedly, as they always did, about who and what the ship might bring, and for a moment they forgot their sadness.
The detachment store had run out of most of the things they needed. For a few heady weeks after the ship's departure those who had the credits would be able to get their hands on all the staples plus such wonderful luxuries as currants, tobacco, sugar and even cookies. After months of living on nothing but polar bear and seal meat, and little enough of that, families looked foward to enjoying some currant bannock and sweet tea. The ship was also bringing the previous year's special orders for those families who had had particular luck in trapping and had managed to tuck away enough credits for a sewing machine, a gramophone or a set of new need
les. There were not many special orders at Grise Fiord but the few there were had been eagerly anticipated and when they finally arrived it felt like a sudden fall of rain in the midst of drought.
This year, as usual, there was also the hope that the C. D. Howe would be returning relatives from southern sanatoria, newly cured and brimful of tales about the crowds and mayhem south of the tree line. The families were not told whether or not their relatives were on board ship, so the first they would know about it would be when their missing son or mother appeared on deck. By 1958, the Flaher-tys were not the only family who had lost a relative to the south and for all those who had, the interval between the ship's announcement and the opening of the passenger quarters seemed interminable, as full of anxiety as anticipation. For three long years the Flahertys had clung to the hope that Mary would be on the next supply ship. But she never had been and they had had no word from her.
As the C. D. Howe sat in Jones Sound, the Flahertys tried to prepare themselves for every eventuality. They heard the sound of an engine starting up and saw the detachment Peterhead begin motoring towards the ship. Moments later a handful of crew members came up on the C. D. Howe's deck and began untying ropes. The Peterhead disappeared round the far side of the ship and the two detachment Mounties reappeared on the deck of the C. D. Howe accompanied by some other qalunaat. The men appeared to be in conversation for a while before disappearing back down below. Sometime later, the Flahertys saw figures moving beside the ship's hull and caught the cough of the Peterhead's engine. A puff of blue exhaust fumes made its way into the sky as the boat began to swing round towards the shore. She dropped anchor shy of the beach and Constable Bob Pilot transferred to the skiff and took hold of a bundle passed over the side, then the boat began to edge towards the beach. At the shoreline, Pilot got out and lifted the bundle, which, it was now clear, was a girl of about five or six, on to the shale. No one dared approach. Pilot stood there for a moment, then, taking his charge's hand, he began to move towards them.
Josephie and Rynee Flaherty exchanged a worried glance. The girl was swinging her head about, trying to take in the mountains, the red cliffs and the row of little huts. She seemed distressed. Could it be?
“Mary?” said Josephie.
In all the flurry it was hard to recall exactly what happened next. At some point the girl tried to loose herself from Pilot's grasp and began to call out for Jackoosie Iqaluk.
Josephie and Rynee stood on the beach and said nothing. Was this their daughter after all? They were not the people she was crying out for. The little girl looked terrified. There was no glint of recognition in her eyes. Again, she called for Jackoosie, and began to scream and kick out.
Josephie and Rynee looked at one another. Rynee nodded. The wind brought a cold blast down from the mountains. They took Mary back to their tent. When the girl had run dry of tears, she fell into a fitful sleep broken by gasps and sobs. She refused to eat or drink or even to catch anyone else's eye. Eventually she stopped protesting and sank into a profound gloom, as if she hoped they would forget about her.
It would be difficult to believe what had happened to Mary during her time away, were it not the incontestable truth. She had been transferred from Churchill, Manitoba, with Dora and Mary Iqaluk to the tuberculosis sanatorium. The three girls were quickly separated, stripped, bathed, deloused and put into different wards. None of the nurses in the sanatorium spoke Inuktitut and the girls spoke no English, so they had no idea what was happening to them. At one point, Dora found Mary Flaherty strapped to a bed and sobbing. She was two years old. Luckily for Mary, her illness had been caught early. After some months at the sanatorium, she had made a swift recovery and had been transferred in due course to Montreal. In luly 1956 she was placed on board the C. D. Howe for the trip north and was put ashore at Inukjuak. According to the records, the Flahertys were still living in the settlement and Mary was then three years old and not in a position to argue with anyone about it. By the time the mistake was spotted the C. D. Howe was already making her way across Hudson Bay and it was too late to call her back.
For a year, Mary lived with relatives. In 1957, when the C. D. Howe returned to Inukjuak on the annual supply, the little girl was put back on board the ship and sent north. For forty days she sailed without parents or guardians until the C. D. Howe finally put in at Resolute Bay. The C. D. Howe's own records seemed to suggest that losephie and Rynee Flaherty had been landed at Resolute Bay and they were now living at the Inuit camp there. A quick check would have established that this was not the case, but no one made it. Four-year-old Mary was left with the cargo on the beach. Mary was taken in by Dora's family, the Iqaluks. For a year, she lived with the Iqaluks in Resolute Bay. No one bothered to contact her real parents. Confused and full of contradictory impressions, she took the Iqaluk family to be her own. She was now five and had been in transit from Manitoba to Grise Fiord for more than half her life. When she finally arrived in Grise Fiord she had no idea who her parents were. No one apologised to Mary or to her parents for her treatment and there was no investigation of the incident.
As the fifties ground into the sixties, obscure and lonely though it was, the settlement at Grise Fiord began to transform itself into a remote but respectable little community. On her 1959 visit, the C. D. Howe dropped off a pallet of 12-foot-by-6-foot prefabricated houses, which the Inuit modified for the extreme conditions by reangling the slope of the roofs and altering the guttering, then reconstructed them along the beach facing the sea. A year or two later, a few more of the prefabs arrived and, pretty soon, Grise Fiord boasted eight houses arranged in two parallel streets and the scrap-timber huts that had formerly been their homes were converted into stores or torn down. In 1962, a day school opened and a welfare teacher endeavoured to instruct children who had had no schooling at all for nine years, using the only two books the Department sent him, How to Run a Successful Bank and The Roads of Texas. While he struggled with his lessons, the teacher's wife organised adult classes in sewing, cooking, art and music and was surprised when women turned up at some of them. In the spirit of community, the police detachment set up a branch of the Wolf Clubs where young Inuit boys learned how to skin seals and put up summer tents. Twice a month they screened a film at the detachment and when CBC Radio began broadcasting Anne Pedlo's weekly show in Inuktitut, they invited everyone along to the detachment to listen.
Grise Fiord developed politics. Agendas emerged and competed. Men and women took positions and argued them out among themselves. Disputes were resolved, reparations made and alliances forged. Leaders sprang up and followers followed them. Hunters accustomed themselves to the terrain and began to be more successful at their hunting. More fox were trapped. The settlement remained poor, people continued to die in accidents and of the cold and disease but, for most, everyday existence no longer teetered on the edge of survival. But Grise Fiord was never able to escape the fact that it was a made-up world, a terra nullius whose population had been tricked into living there. It remained somewhere with no history, no context, no soul and nobody really wanted to stay there.
Ever since the deaths of the Amagoalik boys, people had been asking the detachment when they could go back. Some wanted to return to Inukjuak to look after elderly relatives or to be reunited with their families or they needed wives or were homesick or feared that the fate of the Amagoalik boys would fall on their children, or they simply found the life on Ellesmere Island too lonely and difficult and remembered that they had been promised they could go back. Bob Pilot, who took over the post of head of detachment after Glenn Sargent left, had no doubt that such a promise had been made, but his hands were tied. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Department refused to do anything.
There were only two ways out of Ellesmere Island, by ship or dog sled. The only ship that ever called into Ellesmere, the C. D. Howe, would not have time in the navigation season to call into Inukjuak on its way back to Montreal. If it took the Inuit all the way down south, they w
ould have to support themselves until the following year, when the C. D. Howe set off for the north once more. To leave the settlement by dog team, each family would have to carry themselves and all their equipment to Resolute Bay. losephie Flaherty knew first hand how perilous that journey was. With children, it might well be impossible. Supposing the families made it to Resolute Bay, they would have to wait for the RCAF plane which left Resolute air base four times a year for the air base in Kuujuak in northeast Ungava. The plane always carried a lot of air-force cargo, so there would not be room to take Inuit equipment. Once they were landed at Kuujuak, any Inuit family wanting to get to Inukjuak would have to travel by dog sled inland across Ungava, a trip which had nearly ended the lives of both A. P. Low and Robert Flaherty and had killed Alakariallak forty years before. The Inuit would have to pay their own passage. And if all that were not sufficient, the Department inserted a new condition. Every family who left Ellesmere Island would have to recruit another family to take their place. It was important to Canada that the settlement remain populated.
The Long Exile Page 24
