The Long Exile (21 page)

The issue of the skins remained urgent. The Canadian government had declared the whole of Ellesmere Island a nature preserve and the new preserve rules set seasons and quotas for big game animals and made it altogether illegal to hunt musk ox. In practice, these rules had never been enforced because there had been no permanent population on Ellesmere but the RCMP could not be seen openly to flout the law. As the caribou season had already closed on Ellesmere, Henry Larsen had given Glenn Sargent strict instructions to allow each Inuit family to take only one buck caribou.

Sargent had himself hunted caribou in a spot beside Fram Fiord, a little to the west of Craig Harbour on the way to Grise Fiord, and this was where he decided to take them now. The fiord was only a short trip in the Peterhead and Sargent knew the route very well. He usually motored as far as the eastern headland of the fiord, then cut the Peterhead's engines and made his way to shore in the whaleboat, so the caribou would not be frightened off by noise. There was a south-facing slope, about an hour's scramble up cliffs, where the lichen grew and where a small herd of Peary's caribou, smaller, whiter and hardier than their more southerly cousins, could often be found grazing. There was an old Thule settlement en route. Sargent had found skulls and human bones there, as well as the ribs of blue and bowhead whales. Their antique presence tickled Sargent; on an island as bleak and lonely as Ellesmere, even a heap of old bones could provide companionship and a feeling of solidarity.

Sargent allowed the hunters to take ten bucks. When they got back to camp, the women were already sharpening their
ulus
, knives, in anticipation of the meal ahead. The walrus and the caribou cheered the camp enormously. It was a dry land, and a mountainous
one, and despite the vast space you could not see far, but it seemed then that, at the very least, no one would starve. They did not altogether understand Sargent's quotas and they did not imagine that he would stick to them in any case. The hunters laid the bodies of the caribou out on the beach with their heads facing the mountain so their spirits would find their way back to the Fram, and set about the complicated business of butchering and flensing. Out of curiosity, Aqiatusuk went among the creatures. He noticed that the pelts were free from the bites of warble flies and there were no bots in the animals' ears or noses, also that there were no flies around the carcasses, and he decided it must be too cold for insects. Their hooves were already growing and the pads of the feet shrinking in preparation for winter. In Inukjuak, that never happened before October. Clearly, the season arrived early on Ellesmere. Still, the beasts were strong and fit with stomachs full of sedge and lichen, and it cheered Aqiatusuk to see that. He reached down and took a slice of liver with his knife as he was entitled to do and ate it just as it was, fresh and clean-tasting, with an iron tang. By the time the sun set on the following day, the creatures' sinews would already be boiled and bundled up to be used as sewing thread and the sedge and lichen would be in a pot somewhere, simmering away in blood to make soup. Sooner or later, they would use the skins for clothing and sleeping and the antlers for carving. They would roast the heads and make combs from the hooves and not a single part of the catch, not one fragment of flesh or bone or ligament or blood, would be wasted.

A week later, on a clear, sunny day in mid-September, the Inuit moved to the permanent campsite on Lindstrom Peninsula. The spot had been chosen by Henry Larsen on the basis that Otto Sver-drup's expedition had managed to overwinter there only a few years before. (The peninsula had been named after the expedition's Norwegian cook, who had kept his colleagues alive and healthy over the coldest winter they had ever known.) Sverdrup's expedition had been much better equipped and supplied than the Inuit, but Henry
Larsen had an overweening confidence in Inuit resilience and stamina and he was pretty sure the natives would be able to cope. At Lindstrom Peninsula the waters are turbulent and leads open up all winter and this, Larsen figured, would make it easier to hunt seal, though it would also make it very dangerous. In any case, the Inuit were given no choice in the matter. They went in shifts in the detachment Peterhead, dragging a little skiff containing their belongings behind them. The skiff had been abandoned by the detachment decades before but Sargent thought that, with a bit of restoration, it might make a seaworthy vessel for the new camp.

The beach at Lindstrom Peninsula was, if anything, even narrower than the one at Craig Harbour. It was certainly much steeper and Sargent had trouble finding a landing spot that would not damage the Peterhead's hull and had to make several approaches before the waves would allow the boat to get in near the shore. They did get in eventually, and dragged their possessions and finally the skiff itself up on to the slope. There Sargent left them, with the remains of the walrus and the caribou, some stone lamps and a box of rations each. The Peterhead disappeared around the headland and soon enough the new settlers could no longer feel the throb of its engine through the shale. Once again, they began to erect their tents. They set up stone lamps and began to cook caribou meat on them. When the light failed they sat under their caribou skins and rubbed each other warm. There was no time, then, to think much about the place they had come to, or how they would live in it.

The following day they woke to the sound of wind scudding over the cliffs and the sighing of the sea. They could see no signs of human life, no animals and no vegetation around them, just the green shale and the green cliffs and sharp, cold sun clinging to the horizon. They were utterly alone. Mary Aqiatusuk turned to her husband then and said,
“Sailarjuarmiinginaaqitaa?"
Are we still in the same world?

I
N ALMOST ALL RESPECTS
, Lindstrom Peninsula was a bad choice for a camp. The beach was so small and narrow that the Inuit had to string their tents along it in single file, a formation that made communication between the tents difficult and gave the wind free rein to bluster around them. The beach itself was made of large pebbles and it was very steep, backing on to sheer cliffs. The tide appeared to be enormous. If a huge wind pushed in the waves, the settlers could easily find themselves sucked out to sea and those fierce currents which kept the water open in places even in winter would also make the ice pack unstable and dangerous. But it had not been chosen for its homely qualities. The real reason the six families had been moved from Craig Harbour to Lindstrom Peninsula was not that it was likely to offer a good living, but that it was far enough away from the police detachment to deter the Inuit from visiting.

The immediate tasks were to hunt and collect fuel and water. The camp had enough food for three or four weeks, but once the dark period set in, their hunting would be severely restricted. But there still was not enough snow on the land to sledge and the sea was neither open nor yet fast with ice. They would have to walk or go out by boat. Samwillie and Elijah took off along the cliffs but they returned without making a kill. They reported that the land above the cliffs looked parched and mean and there were few tracks or other signs of animal occupation. They had seen two musk ox, they
said, grazing on some mossy rocks to the west of the peninsula and raised their rifles but then remembered Sargent's warning that if they shot an ox they would be fined C$500 or sent to jail. If game was abundant, as Ross Gibson had promised them it would be, it must be concentrated in scattered sheltered pockets where there were grasses or lichen, but where these pockets were the hunters could not tell. They had seen
inukshuks
on some of the distant mountains and the man-shaped cairns had told them that Inuit had passed by at some time and marked sled routes into the interior. Of those Inuit there was no trace, the men said, and the hunters could only assume they had gone away or died. It seemed that they would have to depend on marine mammals for their cache.

They figured they could use the old police skiff to return to the spot where they had seen seal and, perhaps, if they could find a way of bringing the massive carcass home, they might even bag a walrus. Once they had collected enough meat for a winter cache, they would begin setting their trap lines and establishing sledging paths with route-side caches. By then, they would know the coastline rather better. But it was a formidable job. Survival on the land was so dependent on their being familiar with it, and here they knew nothing.

On a clear morning soon after they arrived, a party of hunters set off into Iones Sound. Despite the clement weather, the swell was exceptionally rough and awash with floating ice. Making very slow progress they headed towards the area where they had found seals when they had first arrived, but the animals had moved on and no amount of searching revealed their new location. After a few hours and soaked in freezing water, the group returned to camp empty-handed.

While they were out, the women set themselves to the task of finding water and fuel. It seemed that any chunks of freshwater ice from bergs broke up before they reached the shore or got crushed by the pebbles at the shoreline. In any case, there were no bergy bits on
the beach they could profitably melt down for sweet water and nowhere within sight to collect heather for fuel, so the women decided to clamber up the cliffs and go looking in the mountains in the hope of finding a stream and a sheltered spot where grasses or willow might grow. Leaving their children in the care of Anna, the crippled woman, they slung flour sacks over their shoulders and began the long climb upwards. At the top of the cliffs they paused a while to catch breath. Up here the air trembled and quivered with almost spectral energy. It was as if they had inadvertently stepped into a dead world restless with old and sleepless souls. Between the peaks were the greyish glaciers they had first spotted at Craig Harbour, which would at least provide some sweet-water ice, so they moved further inland, stumbling across the shale and scree until they arrived at an overhang. There, on the other side, they saw a deep hollow whose sides were ragged with dry moss. At the base of the hollow, sheltered from the whipping wind, there were humps of stunted willow the size of a newborn baby's thumb. They lowered themselves inside and began to pick. For several hours they gathered the moss and willow nubs until, eventually, their sacks began to bulge, then they scrambled back up the ridge, pulling the sacks behind them on sealskin ropes. It was a hard climb, the rock was ice-worn and slippery and along the way the scree bit into the soles of their
kamiks.
They knew they would not be able to carry ice in addition to the willow in the sacks, so they retraced their steps and reached the top of the cliff above the camp, intending to drop off their burdens and start out afresh. It was only then, looking down on the camp, that it really hit them how vulnerable they now were. In Inukjuak they were used to being able to spot a distant camp or a hunting path or sled track from any high vantage point, and the coast was specked with the remains of old
kayaks
and
umiaks
which the weak Arctic sun had been unable to rot. Out on the Ungava tundra, there were the leavings of generations of hunting trips: skulls and leg bones picked clean by the wind and bleached by the sun.
There were piles of rocks under which lay the remains of the hunters and their families and every hill and inlet told a story. Here on Ellesmere, the land had no voice and spoke of nothing.

They rolled the bags of moss and willow down the cliff and followed after. On reaching the camp, some of the younger women went off once more to find water, taking their sealskin carriers with them. They returned late with a few pieces of old glacier ice, so ancient and wind-compacted that the women had been forced to prise them out with ice picks. The ice took a long time to melt over their blubber
qulliqs
and the resulting water tasted as old as time, but the air was so arid that, in spite of the taste, they drank until their stomachs bulged.

And so the days passed and after the second or third week of patchy hunting and endless trips into the mountains for ice and heather, Paddy Aqiatusuk, as camp leader, came to the conclusion that the Lindstrom Peninsula was unsurvivable. He had serious misgivings about the camp's ability to last out the winter unless they were moved. The shale beach was too narrow and steep and the sheer cliffs behind made it impossible to watch for caribou or polar bears. There was no proper water source and insufficient heather or plant material for fuel. Sooner or later the moon would pull the waves up the beach and when that happened there would be no escaping the tide. And while there were signs of seal and beluga and even narwhal in the sea, the waters were so turbulent that hunting from the boat had proven too dangerous. True, the sea would ice up quickly but the pack would always be prone to movement and pressure cracks. The only large land mammals the hunters had found evidence of were musk ox and these they were forbidden to shoot. They had not seen any lemmings and only a few spoor of Arctic hare which meant there was unlikely to be a large fox population. Even ptarmigan, the little Arctic grouse, which sprang from the tundra around Inukjuak in great sprays, were a rare sight here.