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 seve
ral 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.
Coming home tonight I stopped the kicker in the middle of the bay and without preamble told Ootek to take over. He’s never touched a motor before. His eyes bugged, but he wiggled aft, sat himself down and, repeating every movement I had made, started the kicker and we were off. I pretended unconcern as he ran us about at top speed like a teenager in a souped-up car, but he did everything just right. I’m convinced he understands that engine as well as he understands one of his sled dogs, though he’s never touched a kicker before we came along. Wonder what he’d do with a Sherman tank?
It had been our original intention to establish a base at Windy River from which to study the caribou herds as they emerged from the taiga forests on their northward migration into the tundra plains. After they had passed by, and after the spring thaw had opened the lakes and rivers to canoe travel, we had planned to follow the deer north to the Ihalmiut camps, there to study the interactions between deer and people. Later, when the herds moved on to their summering grounds we had hoped to be airlifted still farther north to rejoin la foule.
Our late arrival at Windy, together with the lack of a suitable canoe had made nonsense of these plans. In mid-June, taking advantage of a rare opportunity when the radio seemed to be functional, I sent another SOS message on behalf of the Inuit, to which I added a request that the relief plane also bring us in a proper canoe and enough extra gas to fly us and our gear from Windy direct to Angikuni Lake.
We had heard nothing in reply but, on July 1, a strangely misshapen Norseman came thundering over Windy Bay to splash down off Cache Point. It was Gunnar’s, with a seventeen-foot freighter canoe lashed to one of his plane’s floats. We were in no way ready for it but we jumped into the Bathtub and hurried out to query Gunnar, who greeted us with his usual mocking grin.
”Surprise … surprise. You guys sure musta stirred up the shit in Ottawa. They’ve sent me in on special charter with a load of crap for them Huskies up on the Kazan. Huskies’ll have to come down here to get it though ’cause I can’t fly it on up to ’em. The drag of that fucking canoe made me burn more gas on the way in here than a hundred-mile-an-hour headwind. I’ll be lucky to make it home.”
”What about our trip to Angikuni?” I asked anxiously.
”Not to worry. That’s laid on. Be back in a couple weeks. Right now, get your Husky pet to help unload this junk.”
While Ootek put the freight ashore, Andy and I hastened back to the cabin to fetch our outbound mail. Included was a long letter I had written to the minister detailing the perilous condition of the Ihalmiut. Before sealing it, I scrawled a postscript pointing out that the relief supplies we had just received – white beans, flour, five sheet-metal stoves, a dozen galvanized iron pails, six shovels, twelve lumberjack axes, and two dozen fox and wolf traps, but no ammunition and no fishnets – were unlikely to solve either the immediate or the long-term problems of the Ihalmiut.
Gunnar had also brought us a bundle of personal mail which we had had no time to read before he took off on his return flight to Churchill. My share included several letters from Fran. I opened and read these as soon as I could – and felt as if I had been kicked in the stomach.
She was seriously unhappy, envisaging a future of perennial choices between accompanying me on long and arduous expeditions to the back-of-beyond or of remaining in Toronto and seeing me only in passing.
Although her letters filled me with distress and apprehension, there was nothing I could do for the moment except get myself into a state. Andy admonished me:
”You can’t do damn-all to straighten things out ’til Gunnar comes back, maybe in a couple of weeks, so hustle back to your wolves and do some work.”
I took this advice and immersed myself in the comings and goings of the four adult and four juvenile wolves who constituted the family at Wolf Knoll. Their world at least seemed to be unfolding as it should.
Soon after Gunnar’s brief visit, Ootek returned to his family, to be replaced by Ohoto, who arrived at our cabin a few days later in poor shape, having eaten nothing for three days except one small, rotten sucker he had found dead beside a stream.
He brought bleak news. The migrating caribou, which by now were well north of the Kazan camps, could provide no more meat. The spawning run of fish in the rivers was coming to an end and, without kayaks, the people could not fish the lakes.
Andy and I tried our best to transmit another SOS to Churchill. When there was no indication our signals had been received, we sent Ohoto back to the Kazan camps with orders to bring the people to Windy Cabin, where we would give them all the grub we could spare and provide a canoe and nets with which they could fish Nueltin’s deep waters, where lake trout and fat whitefish abounded.
On July 10 all but one of the able-bodied Ihalmiut men and youths arrived on our doorstep. They told us most of the old folk and children were now too weak to make the journey so the women had stayed behind to care for them.
We also learned that Ootek’s wife, Howmik, was too ill to look after the couple’s sole surviving child so Ootek had chosen to remain with them.
He had, however, sent us a present – a black-and-white male puppy. Yaha delivered the scrawny little creature, explaining that, having failed to keep the rest of the litter alive on a diet of fish scales and bones, Ootek hoped we would be able to save this last pup’s life. We named him Tegpa and fed him so much canned milk that for the first few days he threw up as much as he was able to keep down.
After a day at Windy Cabin, mostly spent eating and sleeping, all the men except Ohoto headed for home again, laden with as much of our food and fish as they could carry. As I watched them go, I was filled with fury on their behalf – and with shame, for was I not a kablunait, one of the invaders of their land?
In the cabin that evening I tried to explain to Ohoto how I felt. He listened in silence then, as he went off to his own small tent, touched me lightly on the arm and softly spoke a single word:
”Ayorama” … it cannot be helped.
– 20 –
PEOPLE OF THE DEER
As I awaited Gunnar’s return I had to decide whether or not to go out with him to Churchill, and perhaps on to Toronto, to deal with my personal problems and to raise what hell I could about the Ihalmiut situation.
In the end I decided not to go. As far as Frances was concerned, I hardened my heart. Surely, I thought, she could possess her soul in patience until October when we would be reunited at Brochet. To help her accept the situation, I prepar
ed a packet of encouraging letters, journal notes, funny poems, and sketches that Gunnar could mail to her.
I also wrote a long and scathing report on the Ihalmiut situation to be forwarded by registered mail to the commissioner of the Northwest Territories.
Gunnar finally appeared (more than a week overdue) and landed with his usual panache. Although we were greatly cheered to see him, we were angry to find he had nothing for the Ihalmiut. According to his account, the Churchill RCMP detachment (which was responsible for ”native administration”) had received no authorization to release relief supplies.
I scribbled an angry telegram about this for Gunnar to dispatch to Ottawa. There was no time to do more since Gunnar was anxious to get us to our destination and return to his base before daylight ended.
Hastily we loaded our gear and ourselves (including an apprehensive Tegpa) aboard the Norseman. Without the least hesitation, Ohoto, whom we had persuaded to accompany us, climbed into the co-pilot’s seat nodding his understanding of Gunnar’s pantomimed warning not to touch any of the controls.
Overloaded with supplies for six weeks, an extra forty-five gallons of avgas for Gunnar’s return to Churchill, and the new canoe lashed to the starboard float, the Norseman at first refused to fly. Roaring down the bay at full throttle, we were perilously close to the Duck Islets before Gunnar was able to rock it free of the water. I thought we were goners as we passed over the islets with only inches to spare, but Ohoto, leaning as far forward as his seatbelt would allow, was ecstatic.
”Dwoeee! Dwoeee!” Faster! Faster! he shrieked with delight.
Gunnar flew at about five hundred feet, a height from which Ohoto could see for several miles horizontally while still being able to recognize familiar detail directly below us. Under his guidance we rumbled north into a world that seemed more aquatic than terrestrial – an amoeboid water-world gleaming with uncounted lakes, streams, and rivers and pocked by varicoloured ponds, bogs, and muskegs.