The Snow Walker (16 page)

Doyle accompanied Josee back to the camps where he found that “all the people were very hungry.” He gave them what food he could spare but his own rations were running low so three days later, with Josee as his guide, he drove on to Fort Ross.

Josee’s story had been under discussion there for several weeks and had become the subject of deepening suspicion. The white people believed Josee had at least been negligent and there were those who bluntly charged that he had abandoned his mother, aunt and four of the five children to free himself so he could marry Soosie.

“Eskimos don’t have enough sense of responsibility,” one of the white men who was present at Fort Ross remarked. “If things become too difficult, a man may just walk away and leave, and those remaining have to look after themselves. Even if Josee’s story
was
more-or-less true, he should have stayed in the igloo with his family. It was despicable of him to run away.”

With Lyall acting as interpreter, Josee was searchingly interrogated and in such a way as to make him understand what he was suspected of. Bewildered and deeply perturbed, he strove to placate his questioners by replying as he thought they wished him to reply, and in so doing succeeded only in reinforcing their belief that he was guilty.

It seems not to have occurred to his inquisitors that his visible distress could stem from the shame and horror of being thought capable of such crimes; but at least some of the white men must have known that to question an Eskimo even twice was to tell him that he was not believed
…
and an Eskimo accused of lying thinks of himself as an unworthy human being.

When, on May 18, Constable Doyle returned to Creswell Bay accompanied by Lyall, Kavavou, Takolik and the post manager, Josee went with them, not yet officially under arrest but, as his own people could see, an object of suspicion and distaste to the white men.

If there was to be a trial, Doyle needed the bodies of the missing people as evidence, so the five surviving men in the Dorset camp were dragooned into a work party together with Takolik, Kavavou and Josee, and set to digging for the buried igloo. For a few hours each day Josee was allowed to return to Kitsualik’s camp… and to his young wife, Soosie. There are no records of what passed between them, but Josee became more and more withdrawn and silent as the days passed. Still, he did all he could to help the policeman and it was his persistence that finally led them to the place beneath which the igloo lay.

The searchers dug a shaft
thirty-four feet deep
before striking frozen ground. The snow was packed so hard it could only be cut with axes and it took eight men three days to sink the shaft. Then they drove a lateral tunnel in the direction Josee suggested and found the igloo.

It was empty, but Kitsualik soon found the place where the imprisoned people had tunnelled their way out. They had only been able to progress by filling in the tunnel behind them as they dug it out in front. The searchers tried to follow the same procedure but the work was so laborious and dangerous that Doyle decided to give it up and wait until summer suns melted the great drift.

He spent the next few months enjoyably as a guest of the Company at Fort Ross. Josee spent them at Creswell Bay in deepening darkness of the spirit. Except for Kitsualik and Soosie, people avoided him when they could. It was not that they believed him guilty of any crime, but he was under the shadow of a sword… the white man’s sword of justice.

On August 4 Constable Doyle returned to Creswell Bay by boat. This time he found the bodies without which there could have been no legal case. The corpses told a ghastly story. Buried in utter darkness with little food or air, unable to judge or keep direction, they had burrowed blindly, not to the south where they might have found escape but westward along the foot of the cliffs under the deepest section of the drift. The women had led the way and at intervals behind them in the winding, twisting tunnel were the bodies of the children.

Josee was present when the bodies were removed from their snow crypts. That night when he did not return to Kitsualik’s tent, Soosie went looking for him. She found him on the edge of the high cliff, a small, dark figure standing as immobile as the
inukok
—the stone semblances of men that some long forgotten people had erected to give an effect of life to an otherwise empty land. Not life but death was in Josee’s face, but if he had it in mind then to make an end, Soosie’s arrival forestalled him. Soosie was life… doubly was she so, for she was carrying his child.

Josee was taken back to Fort Ross by Doyle, this time under arrest. The
Nascopie
arrived on September 14 carrying the usual police detachment headed by a senior officer who was also a magistrate. Next morning Josee was arraigned before Inspector D. J. Martin and charged with criminal negligence resulting in the death of two women and four children. However, the
Nascopie
’s master was anxious to depart so instead of being tried at once, Josee was remanded until the return of the
Nascopie
a full year hence.

Since there was no place to hold him at Fort Ross, he was released as a prisoner in his own custody and told to go back to Creswell Bay… and wait. Alone, he set out to walk seventy miles across the empty sweep of rock and tundra oppressed by memories of the winter’s tragedy, fearful of the incalculable vengeance of the white men, diminished and dishonoured in his own eyes and in the eyes of his people. It was more than could be borne. When he had approached to within only a mile of the skin tent wherein his young wife waited, Josee halted. He was near enough to see the beckoning glow of light through the translucent side of the tent, but the black pall that loomed behind him darkened his mind. Placing the muzzle of his rifle in his mouth, he leaned down and pulled the trigger.

most of those
at Creswell Bay accepted this new tragedy with resignation. Soosie alone dared to rage against those who had destroyed her husband. And when her child was stillborn that winter because another famine had weakened even her powerful body, her furious resentment against those who had brought her people to such a state of misery hardened into hatred.

Kitsualik tried to soothe her but she would pay no attention to him. The experiences of the past few years had aged him far beyond his forty-two years and he was no longer the man who had earned the respect of the Cape Dorset people. He no longer believed they could do anything for themselves except endure. If there was any leadership left it rested with Kavavou, but he had abandoned his fellow exiles to reestablish himself as a creature of the Company, living close to the post and setting an example to the Netchilingmiut of how a man could expect to be rewarded if he changed from a seal hunter to a trapper of foxes.

That same year Kitsualik’s son, Gideon, also abandoned his people to accompany a missionary to Arctic Bay and begin training as a priest of the white men’s God. His departure filled Soosie with bitterness, and it took the last of the heart out of Kitsualik.

One savagely cold February night in 1942, when the people were enduring yet another epidemic, Kitsualik crawled out from under the robes where he had lain for several days in the grip of a raging fever. Dressing himself only in his sealskin trousers, he left the igloo so quietly that the others, sleeping fitfully, did not hear or see him go. Kitsualik had gone “walking on the land,” having chosen to make an end to his long exile.

Soosie and her mother were left alone. But in the early spring of 1942 she married Napachee-Kadlak, Kavavou’s youngest son, a gentle and ineffective man who was given to dreaming of other days and other places. He tried to persuade Soosie to abandon Creswell Bay to go and live with his father’s group at Levesque Harbour eight miles south of Fort Ross. Angrily she refused. Never again, she told him, would she place her trust in the
kablunait.
She saw only one hope for continuing survival, and it lay in the independent, self-sufficient way of life.

“She tell us,” Napachee-Kadlak remembered, “we got to be
Innuit
again. We got to do like the old people used to do.”

Napachee-Kadlak bent to her impassioned arguments, thereby hallowing the fact that the Cape Dorset exiles had found a leader in Kitsualik’s daughter.

During the summer and autumn of 1942 Soosie goaded and guided her people through a frenzy of activity. Never before had they caught and dried so many fish. Never before had the men made such prolonged and successful journeys into the interior to hunt caribou. Never had they killed more white whales and bearded seals. By late September the Creswell Bay camp was adequately provisioned against the long night of winter for the first time since its occupancy.

to the south
disaster loomed. Bad ice conditions had prevented the
Nascopie
from reaching Fort Ross with her cargo of supplies for the year ahead. Consequently, Kavavou’s people at Levesque Harbour, who were almost totally dependent on the post, were soon in desperate need. When the R.C.M.P. sent a sled patrol to Fort Ross from Arctic Bay in March 1943 to bring in the mail the
Nascopie
had been unable to deliver, Constable DeLisle found fourteen destitute Eskimos at the post itself. He recorded that most of the Levesque Harbour people were sick, some with tuberculosis and many more because of another “flu epidemic” which had already killed several of them. One of the victims was Kavavou, whose reliance on the Company served him no better in the end than it had served Kitsualik.

Soosie’s people had no contact with Fort Ross that winter and so were spared a new outbreak of disease. They hunted vigorously on the sea ice for seals and bears and, when their ammunition ran out, reverted to the use of spears. For the first time in many years the returning sun of spring was not obscured in mists of agony and sorrow.

During the summer of 1943 the Creswell Bay people continued to do well. Four children were born and one of them was Soosie’s, a son whom she named Aiyaoot, in the old fashion.

It was a different matter at Levesque Harbour.

That summer the
Nascopie
again failed to reach Fort Ross and that remote little trading post suddenly became newsworthy. Headlines announced that two white men and the wife of one of them were marooned in the arctic with not enough food and fuel to last them through the winter. As soon as the autumnal ice was firm enough, Major Stanwell-Fletcher was parachuted down to direct the Eskimos in preparing an ice landing strip. When it was completed, a huge C-47 transport plane flew in and picked up the white people, taking them safely back to their own land. It did not carry away any of the Cape Dorset people who ten years earlier had been transported to Fort Ross from
their
own land.

Fortunately for the Levesque Harbour group, Ernie Lyall did not abandon them. Years later when he was asked why he had not taken the opportunity to escape in the plane, he found it hard to answer.

“Don’t know why I stuck it out there. Things didn’t look good at all, you know. Nothing left at the post and nothing to get from the country. Sure was hard to see that plane take off and head south, but my wife and kids, it was their people here, and I guess you’d say they’d sort of become my people too.”

The white men had rescued their own, and the world applauded. It was left to Ernie Lyall to rescue the people the white men had abandoned, and the world knew nothing of it.

Accompanied by Takolik, who had succeeded his father Kavavou as nominal leader of the Levesque Harbour people, Lyall set out by dog team in the savage weather of early December to make his way to the nearest place from which help might be obtained. This was Arctic Bay, three hundred miles distant by the route the two men would have to follow—and which neither of them had travelled before. They took no food for their already starving dogs because there was none to take. They had no food for themselves either, except a little tea and three pounds of sugar. They had only about twenty rounds of ammunition—upon which their survival depended.

It took them a week to cross the treacherous expanse of broken pack in Prince Regent Inlet, but the ice was also their salvation for it brought them a polar bear. After landing on Baffin Island they became lost in the mountains, but they finally staggered into Arctic Bay. Although they made the return journey in better order, reaching Levesque Harbour in mid-January, their dog teams were able to haul so few supplies that these were exhausted by the end of February. Undaunted, Lyall set out to make another trip to Arctic Bay, returning in early April. Without his valiant help, most of the people at Levesque Harbour would undoubtedly have perished.

The people at Creswell Bay wintered well without any outside help. Jamesee and Napachee-Kadlak made a long trip into Prince Regent Inlet where they killed two bears and a huge square-flipper seal. Those who stayed at home were able to spear enough of the smaller jar seals to feed thirty-five human beings and to keep five dog teams in good condition. It no longer mattered very much to them that the Company had closed its trading post.

in early September
1944 an Eskimo from Levesque Harbour, who had gone to the Company’s empty post to look for scrap metal for sled runners, hastened back wild with excitement. The ship had come! The
Nascopie
was anchored in the harbour! Within a few weeks the post was open again, but many of its customers had vanished.

Before his death in the winter of 1943, the most respected shaman of the Netchilingmiut had a vision in which he saw the whole of the northern region swept clean of mankind by some mysterious visitation. The old man warned his people to leave the north. They abandoned the upper portion of Boothia Peninsula and shifted far to the south and west.

If the Dorsets heard of the shaman’s prophecy, they disregarded it. When the post reopened, the five families at Levesque Harbour returned to fox trapping with enthusiasm, for at the end of the war the price of white fox began to climb again. Soon the shelves of the trading post were loaded with such things as portable radios, sets of aluminum kitchenware, 20-horsepower outboard motors and gaudy articles of clothing made of new synthetic fibres. The Company had astutely concluded that Eskimos could best be encouraged to trap if they were offered a wide range of the elaborate and expensive consumer goods which were beginning to appear in southern stores.