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The Expedition from Arctic to Tropic
, as Charley called it, was to include two of his two children – eight-year-old Inez and six-year-old Tony – together with four Eskimo sled dogs. Transport was to consist of an eighteen-foot canoe and a fifteen-foot dog sled, either of which could carry the other.

In March of 1929, the expedition left Chesterfield Inlet on the frozen shore of Hudson Bay with the canoe lashed on top of the sled to serve as a carriage for the children, luggage, and supplies. The two men took turns breaking trail for the dogs or, when the going was good, walked or ran behind the sled.

It was late June before the ice melted sufficiently to let them launch the canoe. Loading the sled and dogs aboard they paddled south and east to Lake Winnipeg and up the Red River to its headwaters where the dogs again came into
play, hauling the canoe over land on a sled temporarily fitted with old bicycle wheels, to the Mississippi, down which they paddled to New Orleans and into the Gulf of Mexico.

They followed the Gulf coast east to Florida but, concluding it would be pushing their luck to attempt a canoe crossing to Cuba, went to the Bahamas, landing at Nassau to complete an outward voyage of some eight thousand miles.

En route they had staged shows in church halls, schools, small theatres, barns, anywhere a paying audience could be assembled – shows that included performances by
Two Eskimo Children in Full Native Costume and Four Huge Arctic Wolf-Dogs
. The star was
That Renowned Northern Explorer, Baron Charles Planinshek
, whom O’Grady always introduced as ”The Master of the Barren Lands.”

However, despite their best efforts, recognition and rewards resolutely eluded them. When they reached Nassau (after a harrowing crossing from Miami), they found themselves regarded as drifters and pariahs.

The Great Expedition had failed utterly to catch the world’s eye. Now it began to dissolve. One of the dogs was traded for a keg of rum, and when Charley announced that they would now return to Canada O’Grady jumped ship and disappeared.

The Master of the Barren Lands and the two children persevered, paddling laboriously north along the Atlantic seaboard of the continent through terrible winter weather until one spring day in 1932 they came ashore in Montreal.

The great voyage was finished, and the man who had been introduced to more than 150 audiences as ”King of forty thousand Eskimos” was nearly finished too. He was admitted to a Montreal hospital as a welfare patient while his children
and two remaining dogs were adopted by local families. They were now and forever out of Eskimo Charley’s life.

When summer came and he was discharged from hospital, he drifted west to the long-abandoned cabin near Pelican Narrows. The place was in ruins; when Charley set to work to clean it up and uncovered the skeleton of its last occupant spread-eagled on a collapsed bunk bed he moved on, making his way to Reindeer Lake; along the Cochrane River; down the Kasmere to Nueltin Lake, to eventually reach his long-derelict cabin at Charley Lake.

The king had returned but the few remaining Ihalmiut would have no part of him nor would the Idthen Eldeli. The few white men in the country gave him a wide berth. His only sustaining contacts with living beings seem to have been with his dogs and occasional brief visits to the Schweders, who were then managing a small outpost of the
HBC
at Windy Lake.

Charles Schweder told me his namesake was convinced that ”all the natives was out to murder him.”

Believing himself to be in deadly peril, Eskimo Charley took protective measures. He trained his dogs to attack all strangers, but generally kept them with him inside his cabin, where they could not be poisoned by skulking enemies.

He always carried a cocked .30-30 rifle in the crook of his arm when he went outside and did not hesitate to snap off a shot in the direction of any untoward sight or sound.

”Father told me,” Charles remembered, ”never you go near to that man’s place ’less you lets him know you is comin’, from a good ways off.”

His most bizarre guardians were the dead. He systematically robbed native graves; especially Inuit graves, which
were always built above-ground and so were easily located and readily accessible. Charley took only skulls, favouring those of relatively recent dead to which scalps and hanks of long black hair still adhered.

He brought the skulls to one or other of his lairs (he maintained several widely dispersed cabins, but never stayed long in any one of them) and affixed them to the tops of stout poles so that they formed a perimeter of grisly guards around each cabin. When he moved from one cabin to another, the skulls went with him.

”They was a sure-fire
Keep Out
sign. When them skulls was up, nothin’ would go anywheres near Charley’s place … not even a wolverine!”

According to Charles Schweder: ”He’d kill anything that walked, flew or swam ’round his cabins. He had poison and traps and snares scattered every which way. Seems like he had a special hate for wolfs. Never bothered skinning them – said he hated their stink. But he sure like to kill ’em – any time, any place. He used to smash up old bottles and stuff deer guts with the pieces and scatter them any place he see wolf tracks around.

”Told my father he cut up old clock springs into pieces, sharpened the ends of the pieces, coiled them up tight and fastened them with deer sinew. Then he freeze them inside chunks of meat and leave the chunks where wolfs could find them. They melted inside the wolfs and the spring opened out and tore the hell out of the wolf’s gut. Charley claimed that trick never failed.

”He was pretty near as hard on the deer. Joe Highway from Brochet used to trap up our way sometimes. Told me he come on a deer-crossing place on the Putahow River
where Charley had shot off a case of .30-30into one of the big fall herds. Joe said you could smell rotten meat a couple miles away. Charley never had no need to do that.”

In mid-summer of 1941, Fred and Charles Schweder arrived by canoe with their winter’s fur at the
HBC
post on Reindeer Lake. They brought word that Eskimo Charley had not been seen for almost two years. This news filtered out to the
RCMP
detachment at The Pas and during the winter of 1942–43 a constable and a ”native special” went north by dog team to investigate. They were directed by an Idthen Eldeli (who refused to accompany the patrol himself) to the southernmost of Charley’s several cabins. The searchers concluded it belonged to Eskimo Charley even though the tall poles surrounding it were not crowned with skulls. They banged on the door and, when nobody answered, broke it down. According to Charles Schweder, who had the story from the native special constable:

”They got one hell of a surprise when they seen what was inside. Bones all over the place. Looked to them fellows like Charley must’ve died in there and there being nobody to feed the dogs was in there with him, I guess they ate him. Some people thought the dogs killed him … because of the kind of a man he was.”

That would have been wishful thinking. When the patrol searched the cabin they found this note:

Charles told me something more – something that does not appear in the police report.

”There was a bunch of people skulls in there. One was pretty well chewed up but most was in one piece. The Indian was there said they took all them bones, dogs and all, and buried them all together to save trying to figure out who in hell
any
of ’em
was
. Figured it would just have been a waste of time.

”I guess if anyone ever digs up old Eskimo Charley’s bones they’re going to wonder … what kind of a thing
was
he, anyhow?”

There remains a question as to why
all
the skulls were found
inside
the cabin. I think it was because Eskimo Charley had been preparing to take them with him to his ultimate refuge at the lake called Kamilikuak when Death forestalled him.

A
lthough our explorations of the twin-lakes country revealed no deer the country was by no means lifeless. Loons were abundant. Three kinds shared the lakes – red-necked, black-throated, and yellow-billed – and they were everywhere. We could hear their cries at all hours of the long days and short nights.

There were few ravens (we supposed because most would have been travelling with the deer herds) but many raptors. Rough-legged hawks circled close overhead waiting to pounce on ground squirrels whose insatiable curiosity about us had brought them out of their secure burrows. Peregrine falcons and long-tailed jaegers hunting for lemmings sometimes made use of us as involuntary ”beaters.” And we had a spectacular encounter with a pair of ghost-white gyrfalcons who had an eyrie on a shoreside cliff. Their nest held three almost full-fledged young. The adults would not allow us a close approach, diving fiercely upon us.

Although we saw no living deer, shed antlers and white
bones testified that, in due season, this was very much their country. At some time in the not-too-distant past they had shared it with even larger creatures. Twice we found muskox skulls, one with its curved horns still intact. And once we came upon the skull of a Barren Lands grizzly, the largest carnivore on the continent. The incisors were almost three inches long, curved and pointed like scimitars. I took a bear’s tooth back to camp and gave it to Ohoto, who accepted it with reverence, slipping it into a deerskin amulet bag he wore around his neck.

Andy and I were still asleep early one morning when Ohoto came bursting into the tent shouting that the deer had come. We scrambled out in time to see him with our .30-30 in hand running along the isthmus toward the northern skyline, where seven does with seven fawns stood silhouetted. We dressed and hurried in pursuit but long before we could reach him he had begun shooting. Three does and a fawn went down.

I might have called Ohoto to account for such butchery had I not been aware he could claim to have killed on our behalf – to help Andy and me in our mysterious purposes, one of which was ”to procure and dissect at least fifty caribou to provide scientific data upon which plans for the future management of the herds” could be based.

So three does and a fawn lay bleeding on the tundra while two surviving fawns stood a few yards off, grunting in their peculiarly plaintive way, not knowing whether to follow the fleeing remnant of their little herd or stay close to their slaughtered mothers.

While Andy was busy measuring the corpses and Ohoto was skinning and butchering a doe for meat, I tried to chase
the surviving fawns away. They went reluctantly, perhaps aware (as I certainly was) that their chances of survival on their own were slim indeed.

Returning to camp laden with bloody bundles, we squandered our hoarded firewood to fuel a roaring blaze, thrust enormous chunks of meat into the coals, hauled them out again when they were charred, scraped off the charcoal, and gorged ourselves on the pink and steaming flesh beneath.

Having subsisted too long on a diet of flour, tea, and lean fish, our craving for red meat was exceeded only by our craving for fat. At this season of the year, does carried very little fat but there was still marrow in their leg bones. So we roasted the long bones, cracked them open, and gulped down steaming hot strips of juicy marrow.

It was astonishing how much meat we were able to eat. During the subsequent forty-eight hours, the three of us and Tegpa consumed most of an entire doe, including the heart, liver, kidneys, and tongue.

As ”senior scientist,” Andy was responsible for dissecting the carcasses, a task that kept him busy with scalpels, knives, scissors, and forceps for two full days, looking for parasites and pathogens while turning the patch of tundra where the deer had died into an abattoir of bloody fragments.

Ohoto scavenged what meat was useable, some of which he buried in the permafrost beneath the moss, where it would remain fresh for many days. The rest he sliced into paper-thin strips and spread over the upper branches of bushes to dry in wind and sun. This was
nipku
– jerky – which, he assured us, was excellent and would keep for years.

Although I spent most of my time looking for live caribou, the great flood of southbound does and fawns Ohoto had
assured us was just beyond the horizon failed to materialize. When I asked him why, he explained reasonably enough:

”
Schweenak
[bad] to camp in the deer path. Tuktu may wait for us to go away. Or look for way around. Better we move.”

He suggested we shift camp to the southeast shore of Nowleye, but Andy and I felt it would be more convenient to stay put.

During the next few days a scattering of fawns and does drifted past us. They were wary and skittish but we were encouraged to stick to our decision by flights of ravens soaring in the pale skies and by occasional glimpses of wolves – signs we took to be indicative of the near presence of
la foule
.

Wolves being my particular scientific responsibility I busily collected wolf feces, old or new, and analyzed their contents; which proved to be mainly fragments of caribou bones embedded in a stiff matrix of caribou hair.

Ohoto watched intently as I dissected the wolf ”scats,” and I could imagine the sardonic pleasure he would get from someday telling his friends how deeply the
kablunait
were enamoured of wolf shit.

When there was nothing better to do Ohoto would make string figures for my entertainment. Using both hands, he would weave and interweave a loop of string between his fingers to create representations of plants, spirits, and animals. He made these abstract forms move in weirdly lifelike ways, each illustrating some particular aspect in the lives of the creatures represented. The figures were compelling, both in themselves and for what they had to tell me about wolves, lemmings, caribou, people, and other inhabitants of the Barren Lands.