We had been flying over this watery confusion for about an hour when Ohoto began bouncing in his seat. Suddenly he gave a shout we could hear even above the thunder of the engine.
”Inuit Ku!”
This was the great River of Men Joseph Tyrrell had known by its Chipewyan name, Kazan. But, try as we might, we three white men could not pick it out among what looked like a million glittering shards of broken mirror blindingly reflecting the light of the westering sun.
The Norseman laboured up to 2,500 feet. Despite Ohoto’s anxious attempts to point us in an easterly direction, Gunnar now took a northwesterly course. From close behind Ohoto’s shoulder, I watched what seemed to be a distant haze gradually become a water horizon of such magnitude it seemed oceanic.
Shaking his head in exasperation, Ohoto pointed at it:
”Angikuni Nowk … No … Tulemaliguak!”
Tulemaliguak was the Inuit name for the largest body of water in the Barren Lands – the vast lake we now call Dubawnt.
Gunnar glanced at the crumpled map spread across his lap.
”Could be. Look at the size of the fucker! So where the hell’s Angikuni?”
When I shouted the question into Ohoto’s ear he replied by jabbing a finger eastward and downward. Gunnar nodded. The plane banked in that direction and began losing altitude. Twenty minutes later Ohoto turned to me, his broad face made broader still by an enormous smile.
”There! Angikuni! The Great Lake! My people’s place!”
Gunnar set the Norseman down in a little cove backed by a naked headland near which, so Ohoto proudly told us, he himself had been born.
In a tearing hurry to be rid of us, for it was growing late and he would have to find his way back to Churchill in semidarkness, Gunnar remained in the pilot’s seat, keeping the engine ticking over while the three of us launched the canoe and ferried ourselves and our gear to a tiny gravel beach.
We had not seen any Caribou during our flight and their absence had made Andy and me distinctly uneasy for, despite Ohoto’s assurances that vast herds would appear, we could not get on with our investigations of their lives while they were absent.
While Andy and Ohoto pitched our two tents, I climbed the long slope of the brooding hill behind the cove for a closer look at the country. The view from the crest was stunning. To the north, west, and east the tundra rolled into infinity like gigantic billows in a frozen sea.
Although old caribou trails were everywhere, neither the deer nor any of their normal consorts – wolves, wolverines, ravens, gulls – were to be seen. The almighty sky was empty of wings; the glittering surface of Angikuni Lake was itself unmarred by any living being. The entire enormous panorama appeared devoid of life except for two tiny human figures and a puppy down by the cove, diminished by distance to the size of insects … and, ah yes … except for insects.
When the blessed breeze eased for an instant, a roiling mass of blackflies and mosquitoes lifted from the mosses and lichens like a rising tide and enveloped me. They were understandably insatiable because, until the deer returned, there was precious little good red blood for them to eat.
Our camp was on an ancient gravel beach fifty feet above the current level of the lake and, thankfully, exposed to every wind that could blow bugs away. The site also commanded a superb view over Angikuni’s principal southwestern bay, and of a great lumpen hill called Kinetua several miles to the westward, from which the people who once lived here had taken their local name, Kinetuamiut.
We anchored our large wall tent and one-man pup tent with heavy stones for it was impossible to drive stakes into the rocky and permanently frozen ground. The big tent, which had a more-or-less bug-proof door, became a refuge for all of us and provided sleeping quarters for Andy, me, and Tegpa. By his own decision, and for reasons he did not reveal, Ohoto chose to sleep in the pup tent.
Nearby we built a stone fireplace for use when the flies permitted and when we could scrounge enough twigs, moss, and berry bushes for fuel. Otherwise we cooked inside the big tent on a stinking, roaring gasoline stove whose fumes the blackflies could not tolerate.
Because Barren Lands lakes are subject to ferocious and almost instant storms, we took particular care of our precious canoe, hauling it well above high-water mark and lashing it down to heavy boulders.
In the absence of caribou and wolves I tried to discover what I could about the Kinetuamiut. When Tyrrell arrived among them half a century earlier, they had been so numerous they had given his two canoes an escort of twenty-three kayaks. His sketch map of Kinetua Bay showed five ”camps” on its northern shore.
Rather reluctantly Ohoto accompanied me on my first exploration, which was to the nearby cove where he had been born. At first I could see nothing to indicate that the grassy bench behind the beach had ever been occupied by human beings. Then Ohoto peeled some moss away from what proved to be a ring of boulders twenty feet in diameter that had once anchored a deerskin topay – a tent.
The topay which had once stood here had belonged, Ohoto said, to his grandfather Utuwiak and both Ohoto and his father had been born in it. Poking around the rest of the site I found seven more tent circles, all apparently of about the same age. Together they may have housed fifty or sixty people.
Where had all the people gone? What had become of them?
I turned to Ohoto, but he was not his usual helpful self. He would tell me nothing except to mutter a few words about ”the great dying.” And he was very anxious to be gone from this place of his ancestors. When I started scratching around inside one of the circles, he abruptly abandoned me and trotted off toward our own camp, paying no attention to my attempts to persuade him to return.
Annoyed, I continued on alone around the shore of the bay past a series of paired stone pillars that had once supported kayaks and came upon an even more extensive settlement site of more than two dozen tent rings, some as much as twenty-four feet in diameter. The tents raised over them must have been the size of small houses.
This camp was protected on the landward northern side by massive granite outcrops frost-fractured into a chaos of angular fragments and studded with odd-looking protuberances. When I climbed up to investigate these I found they were rock-built graves. Although originally roofed with flat stones, many had been opened by wild weather and wild animals. Human skulls gaped up at me from the mossy depths of some.
Unnerved by so many dead (I counted thirty-one clearly recognizable graves among many more reduced to mere piles of rocky rubble), I returned to our outpost, but found little comfort there. Andy had just returned from a long trek across the plains to the north and gloomily reported having seen neither caribou nor recent signs of any. Ohoto was in a despondent mood from which he emerged only long enough to assure me he would not go near any more old encampments of his people. Tegpa alone seemed cheerful, and it was in his company that I continued my attempt to discover what I could about the empty camps – and the full graves.
Although examining the graves was an unsettling and unsavoury business, I hoped the tools, weapons, and ornaments placed in them for the use of their occupants in the afterlife might be revealing of how these people had lived.
One thing was evident: they had not suffered from any shortage of material goods. Many well-made hunting and household artefacts of flint, soapstone, bone, and wood, together with trade goods including guns, iron snow-knives, steel hatchets and knives, and copper cooking pots accompanied most of the dead.
The majority appeared to have perished during one relatively brief period. The first to go had been buried in well-constructed graves farthest from the camp and provided with ample grave goods. Later victims had been interred ever closer to the tent circles, in increasingly makeshift graves, and with fewer grave goods. The last burials hardly deserved the name. One that I literally stumbled across was no more than a jumble of human bones (of an adult and a child) scattered within one of the tent rings, suggesting that no one from this tent had survived to bury them.
r /> Starvation could hardly have been the killer since the many stone-built meat caches sealed with heavy rocks standing in and around the camp were full of animal bones, suggesting that the meat which had once clothed them had gone uneaten except by worms.
Neither was there any indication of assault by other human beings. The bones of the dead were not broken or cut, nor had the graves been pillaged. Furthermore, kayaks and dog sleds (among the most precious possessions of the deer people) had not been taken. I found the decayed remnants of at least seven kayaks crumpled between stone pillars that had once raised them out of harm’s way.
The evidence was unequivocal – many people had once lived around the shore of Kinetua Bay.
Now there were none.
In the mid-eighteenth century, when Europeans first began exploiting the central Canadian Arctic, the Barren Lands were home to inland-dwelling Inuit who had very little knowledge of or congress with the sea and with Inuit whose way of life was dependent on sea mammals. The inland people relied almost exclusively on caribou.
These people bore a number of tribal names but shared a common way of life vigorously and successfully maintained until 1867, when Father Gasté, a Roman Catholic priest of the Oblate order, set out by dog sled from a mission at Reindeer Lake to proselytize ”some pagan savages” whose existence in the Barren Lands to the northward he had heard about from some of his mission Indians.
Gasté persuaded some of the latter to guide him to the head waters of the Kazan River. There they encountered a group of ”Esquimaux living more than three hundred miles from the sea where is the natural home of this people.” Although the ”Esquimaux” were friendly and hospitable, Gasté was quite unable to interest them in Christianity. Defeated, he retreated back into the forests, happy to have escaped from the ”Barren Lands, that dreadful wilderness.”
Although he himself never again ventured to the Kazan, Gasté’s visit resulted in a trade link being established between the inland Inuit and the outer world. A few of the most enterprising Ihalmiut began daring the two-hundred-mile winter journey south through mostly Indian territory to trade white fox furs with the mission or at a Hudson’s Bay Company post of Reindeer Lake.
Contact had been established; nevertheless, the world of the Ihalmiut remained essentially unaltered. Only a few Ihalmiut of each generation undertook the long and arduous journey south and, until just before the turn of the nineteenth century, no white strangers followed Gasté north.
Then, in 1894, Joseph Tyrrell and his Iroquois canoe-man came paddling down the Kazan.
Tyrrell was astonished to find twenty-three populous villages (he called them ”camps”) on the river’s upper reaches. In his official reports he estimated the big, conical skin tents in these camps were then home to five or six hundred Eskimos. However, shortly before his death in 1949 he told me he believed that at the time he came among them the Eskimos of the Dubawnt and Kazan systems together may have numbered as many as two thousand men, women, and children.
Confirmation of that estimate exists in the reports of another Oblate missionary, Father Turquetil, who between 1901 and 1906 ventured into the Barren Lands from the west coast of Hudson Bay and made brief contact with the Ihalmiut. Turquetil estimated that ”850 souls” then lived along the Kazan and that the inland Eskimos of Keewatin numbered between one and two thousand.
In their heyday these people of the deer may have constituted the most numerous and cohesive Inuit group anywhere on earth. Unlike their coastal-dwelling relatives they were not nomads but a people of relatively settled residence, mostly at or near major caribou routes and crossing places where huge herds of tuktu regularly came to them.
As wealth was measured in Inuit society, the inland dwellers were rich and, for the most part, blessed with all they required in the way of food, clothing, and shelter. Fleet kayaks and sturdy dog sleds enabled them to travel swiftly almost anywhere they chose, at any season. The summers of the Long Day were times of leisure and abundance. The winters, far from being times of dread and hardship, provided opportunities for feasting, story-telling, dancing, singing, and love-making.
Above all, they possessed an abundance of that most precious of commodities – time itself. They had ample time to remember their past, to celebrate who and what they were, to dream, to work with words and thoughts, and to play.
Despite living in what we might consider extreme discomfort – even bitter adversity – they appear to have been well content.
Such was the world of the Ihalmiut in the second decade of the twentieth century, when the Great Dying came upon them.
Death burst out of an Ihalmio returning from a trading trip to Reindeer Lake and leapt from camp to camp along the Kazan with appalling swiftness, emptying the topays and filling many graves. By the time the caribou returned that spring much of the Ihalmiut country had been virtually denuded of human kind.
Word of what had happened was slow to reach the outside world. Not until two years later did Father Turquetil, in charge of a mission at Chesterfield Inlet, learn that a burning and fatal fever (which he thought might have been influenza) had decimated the inland people. He estimated that ”between five and six hundred Esquimaux of the interior perished in this great dying.”
Some of the Ihalmiut survivors sought sanctuary where the Kazan debouches out of Ennadai. But the Kazan River – Inuit Ku, the River of Men – was now a river of the dead.
The survivors of the Great Dying knew only brief respite. By the turn of the twentieth century white fox pelts had become the white gold of the north and when it was discovered that the so-called Barren Lands were inhabited by multitudes of white foxes a tide of kablunait trappers flooded in. By 1920 some had reached Ennadai and the Kazan.
These interlopers were servants of commercial behemoths that battened on fur. Now the Ihalmiut became serfs to the servants. They found themselves impelled, if not compelled, to spend the bulk of their time and energy killing inedible little animals which they then exchanged for high-powered rifles and other marvels that vastly increased their ability to kill caribou.
The white trappers penetrating the Barren Lands typically ran traplines of enormous length (a hundred miles was not exceptional), servicing them with teams of up to fifteen huskies. One such team could consume an entire caribou carcass every day or two. In addition, the bait used for trapping foxes, wolves, and other fur bearers was almost always caribou. And the trappers fed themselves and their dependants on caribou. During the peak period of the white fox bonanza many Barren Land and taiga trappers routinely slaughtered four or five hundred caribou a year: a profligate butchery of large mammals on a scale not seen upon this continent since the virtual extinction of the prairie bison.
Little wonder that the river of life which had sustained the peoples of taiga and tundra since time immemorial began drying up.
The harried deer abandoned ancestral migration routes and their behaviour became so erratic it was difficult to know where, and when, the remnant herds might be encountered. During the autumn of 1924, only a scattered few caribou came within reach of the remaining Ihalmiut. And that winter one outpost trader recorded the deaths from starvation of fifty of ”his” Inuit. As many as two hundred others are thought to have perished along the Kazan and Thelon rivers that same hungry winter.
The diminution of the caribou and the disruption of their age-old migration patterns struck a deadly blow at indigenous human life both in the northern forests and on the Barren Lands. The Inuit (and Chipewyans) became more and more dependent on the fur trade for survival. Then, in the late 1920s, the already beleaguered world of the Ihalmiut was invaded by a new and singularly rapacious wave of white trappers.
The new intruders seldom employed steel traps, which were expensive, heavy to transport, and cumbersome to use. They preferred poison. Every autumn they would slaughter caribou over as large an area as possible, and later seed the far-flung carcasses with strychnine or arsenic.
Some white trappers preyed eve
n more directly on the Inuit by engrossing native traplines, robbing native meat caches, and, in general, taking whatever they pleased, including women.
One such white trapper entered the camp of Igluardjuak (one of Ohoto’s uncles) and at gun point took a dog team, a sled, and Igluardjuak’s wife. Doubtless he believed the ”huskies” would not dare retaliate. Next day Igluardjuak borrowed a team and drove off into the winter darkness. He returned several days later with his wife, the stolen team, and the sled. He never spoke of what he had done during his absence but when spring came the bloated body of the white trapper was found bobbing among the melting ice pans on Ennadai Lake.
Roaming at will over the Barrens, white trappers took most of the available fur, leaving little to sustain the people of the deer who had now become trappers themselves. The caribou slaughter continued unabated. During the decade following the First World War the Inuit population of the entire Canadian Barren Lands fell well below four hundred, of whom perhaps a hundred and fifty were Ihalmiut.
When in 1929 the Great Depression overwhelmed most of the Western world, white fox pelts became virtually worthless. Most free traders decamped, as did the majority of white trappers. Many outposts, even of such old established trading firms as the Hudson’s Bay Company, were abandoned.
The Ihalmiut became people of the dole. And it proved woefully insufficient to hold body and soul together.
Although the remaining Ihalmiut now retained unchallenged possession of their country, its nature had been fatally changed. The seemingly infinite multitudes of caribou had been savagely diminished. The silken fur of the white fox could no longer provide a substitute. Famine and disease became almost permanent residents in the few remaining Ihalmiut camps.
At the beginning of the Second World War, the Ihalmiut numbered just 139 men, women, and children.* During the ensuing five years, even these few disappeared from the peripheral vision of the outside world. If anyone in authority gave the Ihalmiut a thought, it was to assume they had become ”non-existent.”