Otherwise (2 page)

At the ramshackle frontier village of The Pas, our car was shunted onto the recently completed Hudson Bay Railway to become part of a train pulled by a steam locomotive that would in its own good time haul us to Churchill. The train consisted of a long string of boxcars filled with wheat to be shipped from Churchill to Europe, with our solitary colonist car, a baggage car, and a caboose attached to the back end.

Entering the boreal forest, we bumped along at a lethargic twenty miles an hour through a seemingly endless shroud of black spruce trees and peat-filled quagmires. Frank joined me at one of the dirt-streaked windows as I peered out at a seemingly endless sweep of scraggly forest dotted with saturated ”moose meadows.”

”That’s muskeg, me boy. Goes all the way to Churchill, which is why they call this train the Muskeg Express.”

Whatever it might be called, it was vigorously alive. The stove was well fed with billets of birch, and the aroma of bannocks fried in pork fat mingled with the burnt molasses reek of the ”twist” tobacco most trappers smoked. Those who did not smoke chewed ”snouse” (snuff). There were no cuspidors, and few addicts could resist spitting on the hot flanks of the stove in passing.

Tea billies came to the boil and were passed from seat to seat so everyone could have a swig. Bert heated us up a pan of pork and beans. I watched, fascinated, as a Cree matron
across the aisle breast-fed her youngest while an older child sucked condensed milk out of a beer bottle.

The first night aboard the Express was given over to celebration. There was lively singing in Cree, French, English, and tongues unidentifiable to me. Bottles were freely passed around. Some men played poker and there was a fight during which I thought I saw the flash of a knife blade.

At this juncture, one of the trainmen came along and leaned down to yell something in Frank’s ear. My uncle nodded and pulled me to my feet, bellowing, ”Grab your bedroll and follow me!” We swayed out of our car and to the rear through the baggage car, which contained several canoes and a line of Indian dogs chained to a cable along one wall. Beyond it was the caboose, where the crew had its quarters.

”You’ll sleep here, Farley me boy. Keep you out of trouble, and it’ll be a damn sight quieter.”

The crew gave me a bunk and next morning shared breakfast with me. The brakeman allowed me up into the cupola. Reached by a short ladder, this small tower on the back of the caboose provided a stunning view of the country we were passing through. It was rather like having one’s own observation car. I was also free to step out onto a porch at the rear of the caboose and I was having a pee from this vantage point when something flipped up from the road bed and spun viciously past my head. When another followed, I jumped back inside and told one of the crew about it. He laughed.

”That’s spikes popping out. You see, kid, the roadbed over the muskeg is so spongy the tracks sink down with the weight of the train, and when they spring back up they flip the spikes out of the ties like stones out of a slingshot.”

Thereafter I used the indoor facilities, intimidating as they might be.

I spent a lot of time in the cupola watching for wolves, moose, deer, but saw disappointingly few of these others. Occasionally the Express would ooze to a stop in the midst of nowhere and a couple of people would emerge from the forest to take delivery of packages tossed out of the baggage car. Sometimes a canoe would be offloaded at a river crossing and a Cree family would go paddling away in it. Civilization was limited to the section points, spaced about fifty miles apart, where two or three men charged with track maintenance lived in tiny shanties that bore enigmatic station signs such as
WETUKSO … WABODEN … LA PEROUSE … SIPIWESK
.

During the morning of our second day out from The Pas, we crossed the mighty Nelson River flowing eastward into Hudson Bay. Then the right-of-way headed due north and the train crawled over a roadbed floating on muskeg, which in turn floated on permafrost. Even in these first days of June the land was still half-buried under snowdrifts and its major lakes and rivers were icebound. Uncle Frank worried that spring seemed to be exceptionally late this year and grew increasingly gloomy about the prospects of travel on Hudson Bay.

The trembling roadbed slowed the train to a virtual crawl. There was little to interest me in the snow-streaked country beyond, and I was reduced to entertaining myself by clocking the distance we had travelled from The Pas by counting the black-and-white mile-boards nailed to telegraph poles. I had just watched mile-board 410 slide past when the rusty whistle of our engine disturbed the quiet. At its first blast I looked forward from the cupola over the
humped backs of the grain cars and beheld what appeared to be a tawny brown river surging out of the thin forest to the eastward and pouring across the track in front of us.

The French-Canadian brakeman scrambled up into the cupola beside me.

”
C’est la foule!
” he shouted. It is the throng! This was the name early French explorers had given to one of the most spectacular displays of animate creation to be found upon our continent or, perhaps, anywhere on earth: the annual mass migration of Barren Land caribou, wild reindeer of the Canadian north.

Although the train’s whistle rasped with increasing exasperation, the caribou did not deviate and at length the engineer gave up his attempt to intimidate the multitude and the train drew to a halt with a resigned huff.

For an hour a living river flowed unhurriedly across the track. When the last stragglers had passed, the engine gathered its strength again and we continued north.

At 11 in the evening we rolled sluggishly into Churchill in broad daylight. We had arrived in the Land of the Long Day at a latitude not far short of the southern tip of Greenland. Winter still held Churchill in thrall, its unpainted clapboard shacks and shanties half-buried in dirty grey drifts. The vast sweep of Hudson Bay extending to the northern and eastern horizons was still icebound. The tidal estuary of the Churchill River was a frigid mix of open water and breakup ice. The treeless waste of frozen mosses, peat bogs, and ponds surrounding the townsite was smeared with dirty snow. It all made for a singularly desolate scene, one that was not made any more welcoming by a colossal man-made object at its centre – a gargantuan concrete grain elevator. Fifteen
storeys high, and looming monstrously over the surrounds of Churchill, this behemoth with its adjacent storage silos and docks for ocean-going vessels was the reason the Hudson Bay Railway and Churchill existed.

Discovered by a Dane, Jens Munk, in 1619, Churchill became and remained a linchpin of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s empire until the early 1930s, when it was reinvented as a subarctic port from which to ship prairie grain to Europe. When I first saw it on that grey day in 1936, its massive structures seemed to rival the pyramids. However, before I had been many days in their shadow, they lost their appeal for I became enchanted by the wonders of another world, one in which man’s works played no significant role.

Soon after our arrival we loaded all our gear aboard a little jigger – a hand-propelled rail trolley – then with Uncle Frank and Bert pumping its handles, we rattled out of Churchill on a narrow-gauge spur line to an abandoned shack some eight miles southeast of the townsite. Not much more than a shanty with tarpapered walls, it contained a barrel stove, double-tiered bunks, a broken table, and the desiccated corpse of an arctic fox that had apparently jumped in through a broken window and been unable to find a way out.

We intended to remain here only until the pack ice withdrew from the coastal waters of Hudson Bay. But the ice remained implacable so we stayed on at the Black Shack for the duration.

We may have stayed
at
the shack but were seldom in it because Frank was not one to waste time.

”Look about you,” he lectured me as I tried to linger in bed one shivering morning when our water pails were skimmed with ice. ”The birds out on the tundra haven’t
slept a wink. Too darned busy! And here it is 4:00a.m. and
you
want more sleep! Up and at ’em, sonny boy!”

I had thought we would be ”living off the land” but neither caribou nor seals were procurable so Bert, who acted as our cook, fed us oatmeal porridge, bannocks, boiled beans, and, on special occasions, cornmeal mush. What protein we got came from Uncle Frank’s double-barrelled shotgun with which he vigorously slaughtered ducks, ptarmigan, and shorebirds. Bert added some of the corpses to a thin concoction he called Mulligan stew, but many more ended up in the ditch that served as our garbage dump.

When I agonized about these wanton killings, Uncle Frank put me straight.

”Don’t be so soft, boy. There’s millions of birds out there and if we don’t get them something else will. It’s honest sport. Besides, we’re doing it for science. I measure every specimen I shoot and note the condition of its plumage. Science needs all the information it can get.”

My
duties, as specified by Frank, were to ”find every nest you can. The rarer the bird the better. If she hasn’t finished laying her full clutch of eggs, leave the nest alone until she has. If you aren’t sure what species she is, shoot her and bring her back along with the eggs.”

Mine not to question why – especially when orders came from such an Olympian as my great-uncle. I set about doing as I was told feeling no qualms of conscience.

The subarctic nesting season was short so Bert and I were out roaming the tundra almost every day, even in fog or freezing rain, relentlessly searching for nests, especially those of waterfowl and shorebirds. I was a good finder and loved the work. To flush such a rarity as a Hudsonian godwit
from her four eggs elated me as much as if I had uncovered treasure. Between us Bert and I took a heavy toll from the plover, curlews, sandpipers, ducks, geese, and loons who thronged the morass of water and mossy tussocks intent on reproducing during the all-too-brief summer season.

”The pair of you will make first-rate scientists if you keep up the good work,” Frank told us encouragingly.

We emptied the eggs of their contents by blowing air through a pipette into a small hole bored with the business end of a dentist’s drill in the side of the shell. If fresh, the contents would come bubbling out. If the egg was incubated, we would have to delicately fish the embryo out, using a needle with a bent tip. We saved the contents of fresh and slightly incubated eggs for omelettes. As the incubation season advanced, these omelettes acquired an increasingly pink tinge and meaty flavour.

Lemmings abounded. This was a peak year in their cycle and they were making the most of it. Friendly little rodents somewhat resembling hamsters, they ran around the cabin floor paying little heed to us unless we tried to sweep them out the door.

One morning we three went ”collecting” along a high granite ridge fringing the still-frozen bay. We were after the eggs of rough-legged hawks (famed lemming hunters) who occupied a chain of nests spaced at intervals of a mile or so along the seaward face of the cliffs. Bert and I were delegated to do the climbing while Frank supervised from below. Rough-legs are large soaring hawks who normally avoid humans. Bert and I had stolen the clutches from two nests and delivered the eggs to Uncle Frank, waiting below, when the owners of a third nest decided enough was enough.

As I began ascending, they both stooped upon me with talons outstretched and beaks gaping wide. Missing me by inches, the first attacker made me cower against the cliff. The second hit home.

My head was buffeted against the rock by fiercely beating wings. When I raised an arm to protect myself, it was raked from wrist to elbow by sharp talons. I thought I was going to fall, then Frank’s shotgun bellowed and my attacker soared away, still screaming defiance.

I slid down the face of the cliff to land on the beach, scared and shaken. Bert bound up my arm with his handkerchief, but Uncle Frank had scant sympathy for me.

”You must have done something to upset them,” he said crossly and completely without irony.

To do him justice, he did try to make amends. When next he went into town for supplies and to see if any possibility yet existed for the proposed voyage to Seal River, he took me along.

We went to ”Ma” Riddoch’s tavern, in whose dark depths we met the redoubtable Husky Harris, a former trapper renowned for having had numerous Inuit wives. He was equally notorious for his addiction to the use of one particular adjective. I listened in awe as he told us there was no effing hope of effingly well getting to the effing Seal River, but he would be effing happy to effing well take us hunting effing white whales in the effing estuary (where the whales were gathering to calve).

Later that day I went alone to the docks to watch several hundred beluga (another name for white whales) feeding in the estuary shallows. When a pair of motorboats put out from shore and their crews began shooting at the whales
with heavy-calibre rifles, a marine version of shooting goldfish in a bowl ensued. The whales churned the shoal water in their efforts to escape, and I could see splashes of crimson appearing on the backs and flanks of many.

When I later told my uncle about this, he was mildly dis approving. ”That’ll be some of the men employed at the grain elevator having their sport. Bit of a waste. The natives can use a couple for dog feed but most of the ones hit will roll up on the beach dead and stink the place up with no profit to anyone.”

The natives were mostly Chipewyans from the interior of northern Manitoba who made their way out to Churchill each spring to trade pelts at the Hudson’s Bay Company post. They were of interest to Frank as a possible source of specimens so we visited their tent camp on the flats by the river. While he dickered with them for some white fox pelts, I looked about with awe.

They were unlike any people I had ever seen. Small, dark, and solemn (at least around strangers), they spoke a language full of rustling sibilants. Partly dressed in caribou skins, they lived in teepees made of soot-blackened canvas full of rips and tears. When I approached one teepee too closely, an old woman shook a gnarled fist at me. But a much younger woman – hardly more than a girl – smiled and beckoned while at the same time opening the front of her shirt. Unsure whether she was being seductive or mocking, I concentrated on what my uncle was doing.