Otherwise (27 page)

Today I climbed the high gravel ridge north of camp and spotted what I thought was a bunch of deer galloping toward me. I watched them lope along until it dawned on me that the creatures splashing across the tundra like water buffalos were
people
. As they got closer they began waving their arms like crazy and making a hell of a row. I was relieved to recognize Owliktuk leading a charge of seven men, who turned out to be the heads of families of the Kazan band
.

They’d been out of tobacco all winter so the first thing they did was empty my pouch into their stone pipes and light up. Then they all followed me back to the cabin gabbling like jay birds. When we poured in on Andy he looked as if he might have a fit but rose to the occasion and began making tea for all hands like a good hostess should. The cabin literally bulged with Eskimos. There was much hand-shaking (no nose rubbing, thank God), introductions, and friendly beaming but it took a while and gallons of tea before we could make much sense of things because of the language problem. We gathered that Owliktuk had told everybody we had come to
catch
caribou and wanted their help to do that, so here they were, and pretty damn anxious to go to work
.

We staked them to a bag of flour, baking powder, lard, and tea, and they happily set up camp on the ridge behind the cabin. They had a dog, one of the few survivors from the winter. We gave it the bones and scraps from a deer
Owliktuk had killed for us before his departure and it ate until literally it could hardly walk. Same with the Eskimos, who ate most of the rest of the deer then cooked the whole bag of flour into bannocks and scoffed them down. They really were starving
.

Owliktuk, by the way, has shed the skin clothing he was wearing when we first met him and in our honour is wearing a tattered old shirt Charles must have given him and something that looks vaguely like a pair of ancient breeches that are worn right through at the knees and ass. When he was dressed in clothing made of caribou hides he looked like a man to be respected. In white man’s castoffs he looked like a hopeless bum
.

Supper over, we had ourselves a party. What a blowout! Nine of us crammed into a space about as big as an average bedroom, with the stove roaring away as it boiled a river of tea. Most of us not having had a bath since God knows when, you could’ve sliced the air with a knife. Thank God for the smell of tobacco, though the smoke did make it hard to see what the gang was up to
.

Fun and games was what. Ohoto, a squat little guy with a grin like a cat, seemed to be the chief clown. He did imitations of white men (namely Andy and me) that brought the house down. Then he found a bag of our onions and started juggling them. I swear he had a dozen aloft when he lost control and they flew everywhere. I found a couple in the five-gallon pail we were using to make tea, but they only added spice to the flavour
.

A guy called Mikki produced an Eskimo drum, which is a hoop covered with caribou gut, and they took turns singing and dancing for us. Then we had to do our stuff.
Andy tried dancing a hornpipe while I did my bagpipe imitation. Our efforts were well received, perhaps because we had slipped a few slugs of caribou juice (90% proof alcohol intended for preserving specimens) into the tea
.

I woke this morning feeling really low, partly because of being somewhat worried how this separation may be affecting Fran. Partly because although I think I got an SOS out on the radio last night to Churchill about the terrible winter the Eskimos have had, I couldn’t get a clear acknowledgement. And partly because we’ve missed the spring migration of the deer
.

Without the deer we’re up shit creek without a paddle. Or – what’s more like it – with just a paddle
.

I decided to see could I do something about that. Using bits of old packing cases I spent a day and a half strengthening our folding boat and making a frame to hang the outboard on the stern of it. Andy thought I was nuts, or suicidal. But it worked!

The motor fired at the first pull. The boat stood the strain and none of its buttons popped. In a fit of bravado I ran her up the rapids at the mouth of Windy River, then back down again
. C’est bon!
We are no longer stuck in
one spot. Once the ice on Nueltin melts we’ll be able to go anywhere, perhaps even the Kazan River, though right now Windy Bay is only barely showing open water around its shores
.

I beached her on Cache Point and was waiting for Andy, who’d said he’d join me (he’d wisely decided against taking part in the initial run on the river), when I heard queer noises from away to the eastward: yaps, and yelps, and whimpers like a bunch of dogs playing. Andy failed to join me so I ran the boat across the bay and climbed a ridge on the far side to see what was up. Nothing was, but the noises continued so I climbed two more ridges and came upon a sight I’ll remember to my dying day. Poised on the crest of a yellow esker, sharply outlined by the setting sun, was a big white wolf. In that clear light it looked as big as a polar bear. My neck hairs crawled then damn near stood on end as the wolf threw back its head in a full-throated howl. This was echoed from further down the esker and when I swung my binoculars that way I could see two more big wolves, and a scurry that looked like pups at the mouth of a black hole in the side of the esker. It had to be a den!

About then it dawned on me that I didn’t even have a firecracker with me. Though I knew wolves aren’t supposed to attack human beings, did they know it? Truth to tell, I slunk back to the boat and went speedily home, where I had several shots of caribou juice before going to bed happy as hell
.

I know what
I’m
going to be doing for the next little while
.

Before dawn this morning Ohoto showed up from his little camp (a bit of canvas stretched between two spruce stubs) and he and I headed for the wolf den in Banfield’s Bathtub. Made tea when we got there, then lay on our bellies watching the wolf den, but there was damn little action. I think we got three quick glimpses of wolves for a day-long vigil. We got well chilled and well bored, and the mosquitoes have thawed out so we got well bitten too. For a break, Ohoto went off prospecting and came back with about a ton of iron pyrite, which he hoped was gold. All my fault for trying to tell him how white men get rich quick
.

Knocked off at dusk and on the way back to the boat found a lemming mooching around under a dried-up deer carcass. An incredible little guy built like a brick but cuddly as a teddy bear, very prettily coloured in reds and browns, and absolutely unafraid of us. To the contrary, Owinak (his Eskimo name) greeted us like old pals and when I picked him up spent about ten minutes licking my fingers (for the salt?). So we took him home to add to a battalion of red-backed mice who, uninvited, share the cabin with us
.

After supper Andy and I worked at learning Inuktitut with Ohoto as teacher. He’s really good.
Patient, understanding, and with a racy sense of humour. We teach him English in exchange. I wonder if we mangle his language as badly as he does ours? Together he and I composed a song in both lingoes about how we would like to screw Pommela’s two wives
.

When he figures we’re getting bored, he does tricks to amuse us. Yesterday he did back flips over a ten-inch butcher knife stuck, blade up, in the sand outside our door. Scared the bejesus out of me. He never seems to sleep. Can keep going all day and all night. These people must do all their sleeping in the winter
.

Tonight I tried to work our stupid little radio again. Could hear snatches from Churchill Radio, but they couldn’t hear us and we couldn’t make sense of their transmissions. Hope to hell my message last week to Ottawa about the terrible condition of the Kazan Eskimos got through and help is sent before it’s too late
.

I don’t know what Ohoto makes of our struggle with the radio but he seems to have figured out what the snatches of voices in the earphones are, though sometimes he may get it wrong. This night he was listening to the static when suddenly he jumped to his feet, wild-eyed and frantic, and rushed out the door. We hurried after, wondering what the hell, and caught him half way to the river. He was gibbering like a maniac and fairly bouncing up and down
.

”Ino … Ino …,” he howled, spinning around like a top and pointing all around the horizon
.

We got him back inside and sat him down. I took his pulse and his heart was going like a trip-hammer. After
a lot of confusion we discovered Ino is some kind of bad spirit who had just paid us a visit. Apparently Ohoto heard Ino voices and glanced up to see one – it looks somewhat like a man – go floating slowly by the window beckoning to him to follow. Ohoto says he
had
to follow, and if we hadn’t caught him he would have followed the Ino into the river
.

There was no doubt he was scared half to death. He wouldn’t go out again on his own so we let him spend the rest of the night in the cabin. When, at about 0100, the place suddenly shook as if a dinosaur had grabbed it, Andy and I damn near panicked too. We sidled outside with rifles cocked, but there was nothing unusual to be seen. All was still in the half-light, and there wasn’t any wind. Earthquake? Maybe
.

When the cabin shook, Ohoto just about went bonkers. We dosed him with a heavy shot of our alky and he finally seemed to go into a coma. Then he seemed to have a fit. At one point he swallowed his tongue and his face was turning black before Andy managed to hook a finger around his tongue and free up his windpipe. After that, he finally went to sleep and so, thank God, did we
.

No deer left around here, not even a straggler now so with Ohoto’s help we set two nets at the mouth of the river, which is still in spate and running like a millrace. This morning we took out two suckers, a grayling, and two lake trout running about ten pounds each. We won’t go hungry!

The big excitement this day was when Ohoto saw a freshwater seal on the rocks off Cache Point! There was no doubt about what it was. It must have come from the group
Charles and I saw on the Thlewiaza River last summer, though it would have had to travel more than 300 miles inland by river route from salt water. Well, why not? What gives us the right to think we are the only animals interested in exploration?

The world around us has really come to life. Every pond and swamp has Old Squaw
[ducks]
, mergansers, loons, and phalaropes nesting on it. Every little bush poking its head up above the tundra seems to have a Harris, white-crowned, or song sparrow nesting in it. So far we have logged 74 species of birds and the crazy buggers sing all day
and all night
such as it is. Spring is a short season up here, but sure and hell a merry one. All this sex frenzy is driving me nuts. I can’t even get a message to or from my girl, so all I can do is dream – well, almost all I can do…
.

Ohoto left yesterday
[June 21]
, carrying a bundle of grub for his wife and kid. I baked a huge batch of bread this morning and while the stove was hot heated up six pails of water for a much-needed clean-up. Andy and I stripped to the buff then turned the cabin into a small Niagara filled with foam and fury. I found I couldn’t lie down in a ten-gallon pail so I sat in it, but when I got up, it got up with me
. Après moi le deluge!

We were splashing nakedly around when the door opened and a startled Inuk poked his head in. It was Halo. He tried to retreat but we hauled him in and sat him on a bunk while we completed our ablutions. He was dreadfully embarrassed by the sight of two naked kabloonas and kept his eyes shut and his head between his hands until we were
clothed again. The bath was not entirely a good thing. I could now distinctly smell our guest, whereas before we all stank alike so nobody smelled the others
.

Three more visitors arrived in the afternoon: Yaha; Ootek; and a young lad also named Ohoto, but no relation to our Ohoto. They were pretty hungry but we had made a good catch in our nets and so could stuff them up. They brought two young dogs to give us because they could no longer feed them, even though these were just about the last of their dogs. We took them, but only temporarily because the people will need them badly if they are going to make it through another winter
.

We are getting to understand each other a lot better. They told us a lot more about how things are at the camps. The situation at Inuit Ku, River of Men, as they call the Kazan, is truly grim. Because they had no ammo to shoot deer when the big herds went through this spring, they couldn’t get deer skins to cover their kayaks and so couldn’t spear deer crossing the rivers as they do every spring. They had eaten the old kayak coverings last winter to keep from starving. Now the deer have gone further north and since they have no useable kayaks they can’t even set nets for fish, even if they still had any good nets, which they don’t
.

We have given them most of the grub we can spare but there are 47 of them, young and old, and we can’t begin to feed that lot. The men with us now are catching enough fish so they are saving what flour we can give them to take home to their families. Truth is, they’re completely destitute. Although I radioed for help the first week in June, there’s been no reply. I’m writing a blistering report to the Minister
to go out on the first plane, and if that doesn’t get results the newspapers are going to get a story that will put him on the hot seat
.

Ohoto has had to go home to look after his family but Ootek has offered to work for us in exchange for food for his wife and child at the Kazan camps. We’re happy to have him. Though all the Ihalmiut we have met so far are friendly, personable guys, Ootek stands out. He’s maybe thirty, alert, very bright and obliging, lightly built, with a mobile, expressive play of features, very little reserve, and is somewhat puppyish in his friendliness. He is also a shaman or medicine man of considerable repute
.

Today I set off with him to look for another wolf family we’ve heard howling in the Windy Hills south of us. Charles sometimes called those the Ghost Hills. He told me they were impenetrable, so rough nobody but a ghost could get around or make a living there
.

We crossed the Windy River near camp and started climbing. Although steep, these hills don’t have peaks – just false crests that recede as you climb toward them. They are covered with an in describable confusion of frost-shattered granitic boulders, some as big as houses, and pretty well all with sharp edges that lacerate your feet. In some places we had to go two or three hundred yards at a time leaping from edge to edge like bleeding mountain goats. Though I was wearing heavy miner’s rubber boots, my feet got badly bruised. Ootek was wearing only kamikpak – thin deerskin boots. I don’t know how he stood it
.

It took us three hours to make about a mile to the top, which was so covered with rock shards you could nowhere
see the ground. To the east and west the world looked like a war-torn version of the moon – a place only a bird could navigate
.

To the south was something else! Surrounded on all sides by mountains of grey rubble was a valley maybe half a mile wide with a massive golden-yellow sand esker a hundred feet wide and fifty high winding its serpentine way between clear ponds and lakelets whose banks nurtured stands of spruce which would have been impressive five hundred miles to the south. And the whole place, except for the golden esker and the sapphire water, was green with berry bushes and low-lying plants. A gold and green heaven surrounded by what looked like the ash pit of hell itself
.

There seemed to be no exit or entrance at our end of this hidden valley, except maybe by a couple of rock-clogged gullies away off to our left. Ootek was now limping badly and I wasn’t in much better shape so, though I was dying to explore, we couldn’t face trying to make a descent into the valley. We limped back to the boat and went home, both of us beat out
.

June 25. Ootek and I tried again to get into the hidden valley in the Windy Hills. I wondered if the gullies we’d seen to the east might be reachable from South Bay so we went off in the bathtub to find out. Sure enough, we found what looked like traces of an esker there. We landed and walked a mile inland to where we could see two cols between looming rock piles. I picked one on spec, and we climbed hopefully into it over half a mile of shattered rock and then, thank heaven, found the esker itself. Following it down into the hidden valley was as easy as walking along pavement, easier on the feet because the sand was firm but soft
.

Following the esker, which runs as level as a well-engineered railway embankment, we came to a stand of spruce trees that were veritable giants for this far north. Nestled in amongst them we found the ruins of two logs cabins, one about twelve feet long and the other somewhat smaller
.

They were very old. Nothing remained of their roofs, and the walls had collapsed. The floors were buried under a rich growth of plants. Their shape was odd – instead of being roughly square they were long and narrow, like very large grave enclosures. They made Ootek nervous. He muttered something about Ino, then retreated to the ridge of the esker, leaving me to poke around on my own. I found some very old cuts in a big spruce that looked indicative of human activity, but was uncomfortably surprised to find a fresh hole in the thin soil near one of the cabins, with dirt around it and paw prints of a big bear
.

There aren’t supposed to be bears around here. Too far south for the Barren Land grizzly and too far north for black bears. So what was this? I tried to get Ootek’s opinion but when I called out the word akla – bear – he shook his head, shouted back something about paija, and withdrew even farther. When I joined him on the esker he acted as if he had ants in his pants. I gather paija is a singularly nasty kind of spirit
.

Walking on down the esker in calm sunshine we grew hot, though a cold wind was whistling through the rock hills above us. We sat in the lee side of the esker overlooking several pretty little ponds and I took my shirt off for the first time outdoors this summer. We munched bannocks and cold chunks of fried trout for lunch. Miracle of miracles, there
were no mosquitoes!

We weren’t the only folk to use the esker. Along its crest, which varied from a few feet to several yards wide, was a well-worn path. Although pretty well packed down, we could find recognizable tracks here and there. Caribou, wolf, and fox, but no bear and nothing remotely human. This seemed to reassure Ootek, though he still kept a sharp look out and insisted on carrying my rifle
.

We walked about five miles in that lovely place and couldn’t see the end of the valley. I’m going to be dreaming about it for a long time. A Barren Land Shangri-La! You could hide out there forever and chances are nobody would ever find you. Probably lots of meat and fish, plenty of berries, certainly the finest kind of trees for building and firewood, and a quiet neighbourhood. The sort of place where a biblical troglodyte might happily live out his days…
.

June is drawing to an end and Ootek and I are spending long hours at the wolf OP. We are picking up each other’s lingo and I’m learning a lot about wolves and the Ihalmiut, but there’s damn-all news from home. No incoming messages on the radio, or at least none we can understand. Curse the goddamn thing! If we didn’t have it, we’d never miss it. But having it and unable to use it is driving us nuts. I’m for trashing it or drowning it in the river, but Andy still has faith in the Machine. He spends hours glued to it with the headphones on, though all he gets is static
.