At the End of the World

by Lawrence Millman

  Neither the judge or the chief prosecutor asked Ouyerack, one of the two new religious bosses, if he had ever been nailed to a cross. If they had, he probably wouldn’t have understood the reference. For his only knowledge of wood would have been the drift logs that frequently wash up on the Belchers.

  Nor did the end of the world, so often referred to by Ouyerack, Peter Sala, and Mina, come up during the trial.

  But the end of the world—again, the natural world—did come up recently in a bar in Hingham, Massachusetts, one of whose numerous TVs displayed the perpetually burning fire on the so-called Fireplace Channel.

  The virtue of this sort of fire, the bartender told me, pointing to the large plasma TV, is that you don’t need to worry about a real fire, and there’s no need to chop wood.

  If artificial fires end up replacing genuine ones, it will no longer be possible to roast chestnuts, barbecue ribs, or burn evil politicians at the stake.

  In the same bar, I overheard one Cyberian say to another: “Yeah, I’ve got a 2015 Corvette Stingray with a carbon fiber body and a 40 LTE connection to GM’s OnStar driver service network. It’s a gigantic rolling smartphone!”

  Recommendation: Any person found to be in possession of a gigantic rolling smartphone should be charged with obscenity.

  “I am not Jesus anymore,” Ouyerack told the court. “I am only a poor Inuk whose name is Ouyerack.”

  39

  Markassie’s uncle attended the trial, and when one of the journalists raised his camera and began taking photos of the “man-birds,” his uncle became scared.

  “He thought the man was shooting at us with some sort of strange qallunaat rifle,” Markassie told me.

  Judge Plaxton cited a recent incident where a Cree man had shot another Cree man because he mistook his victim for a cannibalistic wendigo. The tip-off—wendigos smell very bad, and his victim also smelled very bad.

  Like tupilaks, wendigos can assume a variety of shapes and forms, but they almost always seem to have a skeletal appearance and possess antlers.

  The Cree man received a verdict of manslaughter rather than murder, since—according to the judge—this was a case of mistaken identity. The analogy was obvious: killing a wendigo and killing Satan were not dissimilar …

  Wendigo

  … even though the former was a native species and the latter a noxious invasive.

  The last wendigo died in 1962, or so the story goes. Reputedly, he (it?) stood in front of the train to Churchill, Manitoba, believing that the train would stop for him, a supernatural being, and then he would be able to eat the passengers. The train ran him over. Sic transit gloria mundi!

  The jury in Ouyerack’s trial retired and came back a short time later with this verdict: the accused would be sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labor in Moose Factory, Ontario, and would not be allowed to return to the Belchers.

  “Moose Factory?” asked a Cyberian acquaintance to whom I mentioned the Belcher murders. “Do they manufacture moose there?”

  Before I could say that “factory” refers to the jurisdiction of a factor (trader), especially a factor with the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Cyberian had hauled out his iDevice and disappeared down the Internet rabbit hole.

  40

  Since 9/11, Americans had been waiting diligently for another terrorist attack. At last, on April 15, 2013, two bombs fabricated from pressure cookers exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring at least 260.

  I was camping in northern New Hampshire at the time, and I didn’t learn about the bombings until I returned. “You mean you didn’t have any contact with the outside world?” a neighbor asked incredulously.

  But I’d had plenty of contact with the outside world. My feet had touched numerous granitic outcroppings, and I had seen moose footprints in the snow, tiny yellow cup fungi in balsam fir resin, and mourning cloak butterflies, not to mention the constellation Ursa Major resting contentedly in the sky.

  I returned the day after the so-called lockdown, when Boston area residents were obliged to stay indoors, or they might be attacked by the still rampant bombers.

  It’s an exaggeration, but not much of one, to say that most of those residents would have remained indoors anyway.

  “The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial,” observed Edward Abbey.

  I asked one of my neighbors how she occupied herself during the lockdown. “I updated my Facebook profile and shared some of my photos on Flickr,” she told me.

  A paradox: Social media are no more social than Narcissus gazing at his own image in a pool of water.

  Another neighbor said she played monster-featured video games with her kids the entire day? The entire day? I asked in disbelief. Yes, she said, they really love monsters.…

  In spite of purveying a rich variety of monsters, screens domesticate our species no less than our species turned a once fearsome canid into a creature that fetches tennis balls, sits placidly in laps, rolls over, and plays dead.

  Given our lives of continuous connection, members of our species now have the ability to be everywhere at once, which makes us similar to St. Augustine’s God—a being so all-encompassing that he, too, is everywhere at once.

  If you’re everywhere at once, you’re also nowhere at once and, as a result, have no contact with (there’s that crucial phrase again) the outside world.

  Silicon Valley legend Kevin Kelly once referred to the Internet as “a magic window” that provides “a spookily godlike” perspective on existence, adding: “We can see more of God in a cell phone than in a tree frog.”

  Given how they are worshipped, digital devices like cell phones ought to be called iGods.

  Wait! Kevin Kelly is not a legend. Here’s an actual legend, from Greenland: the Moon disguised himself as a handsome seal so he could sleep with his sister, the Sun. When the Sun realized that she had slept with her own brother, she began running, and the Moon began running after her …

  … and that’s why night follows day.

  Just as—according to the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Buchanan—God was responsible for 9/11, a surprising number of people thought the Supreme Being was behind the Marathon bombings.

  A tweet from a church outside Boston: “God sent the Marathon bombs for the sin of Massachusetts passing same-sex marriage.”

  Prejudice: Only birds should be allowed to tweet.

  The two Marathon bombers learned to build explosive devices from the online magazine of the al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen.

  A digitally-savvy twelve-year old with a laptop and a hormonally derived grudge probably could have worked out a far more destructive urban Armageddon than the Marathon bombings.

  Passionately in love with digital technology, our species has become its own predator.

  41

  Peter Sala’s trial took place the following day, on August 20, 1941.

  “Will God Be Hung?” asked a headline in a Canadian newspaper at the time of the trials.

  Several anthropologists have referred to the Belcher murders as a prophet movement, with a prophet/visionary, Peter, proclaiming the imminent transformation of the world.

  But Peter was trying to transform the world only insofar as he thought the killing of a certain evil spirit in a tiny portion of that world, the Belcher Islands, might improve it.

  “Is Satan present in this courtroom?” the crown’s prosecutor inquired. Peter did not open his eyes. “Nakka,” he said. Which means no, emphatically.

  If the Belcher murders were made into a movie, Peter’s behavior during the trial would have to be changed, since no actor can win an Oscar or even an Oscar nomination by being silent or by keeping his/her eyes closed during the entire movie.

  The Cyberian who thought the Belcher murders would make a terrific movie later changed her mind and told me that “I don’t think children freezing to death would attract much of an audience.”

  British documentary film-maker John
Grierson—a good friend of Robert Flaherty’s—had gotten permission to film the murder trials, but the remoteness of the Belchers as well as persistent bad weather made it impossible for him to travel there.

  It was Grierson who, in writing about Flaherty’s second film, a South Seas drama titled Moana, coined the word “documentary.”

  Speaking of films: Cyberians have developed the habit of watching them on their Android devices. Perhaps they get a sense of superiority by observing minuscule members of their own species?

  “I’m really worried that my son will turn into the Android he’s always using,” a woman told me. “He thinks of life as just a giant cradle-to-grave app.”

  The son in question had a real-life model. “I’m so attached to my computer that I’m really upset when I see that reality doesn’t display the time in its upper right hand corner,” his father told me … only half in jest.

  But here’s piece of information that’s not amusing: Unaware of the outside world while they’re gazing at their iDevices, Cyberians are becoming unaware of the world around them even when they’re not gazing at those devices. They still blindly walk into each other, lampposts, garbage cans, and even traffic.

  Citing an earlier murder case by a Native person, Judge Plaxton told the jury that Peter “was not in a responsible condition of mind” at the time of the killings, and thus he recommended a verdict of manslaughter rather than murder.

  The jury retired again. This time there was a somewhat longer wait, perhaps because Peter—being God—was regarded as a primary force behind the Belcher murders.

  By now the Qiqiqtarmiut would have realized that juries don’t interrupt a trial to go goose hunting, so they remained seated while the jury deliberated.

  Peter nodded slightly after the jury foreman returned and announced the following verdict: “Peter Sala, charged with inflicting grievous bodily harm on Keytowieack, sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labor.”

  Like Ouyerack, Peter would be exiled from the Belchers for the remainder of his days.

  This relatively mild verdict, the same as Ouyerack’s, indicates that Canadian jurisprudence had a rather liberal attitude toward Native wrongdoers at the time … especially if those wrongdoers did wrong to each other rather than to white people.

  Peter, Ouyerack, Adlaytok, Aleck, and Akeenik, were escorted by the Mounties to their boat, the Fort Charles, and placed in the boat’s hold.

  As for Mina, she struggled against the Mounties so violently that she was placed in an improvised strait jacket and hoisted onto the boat in a sling hung from the boat’s derrick.

  On the morning of August 21, 1941, Judge Plaxton and the judicial party left the Belcher Islands on a police plane, and that same afternoon the Fort Charles steamed south to Moose Factory, which would be the new home of the exiled Qiqiqtarmiut. For a while.

  Shortly after the trial, the Toronto Star journalist wrote: “To judge from the actions of the five Eskimoes, no one would have thought they had deliberately and in cold blood disposed of eight [actually nine] other Eskimoes.”

  The Cyberian who’d disappeared down the Internet rabbit hole when I mentioned “Moose Factory” informed me: “My first hit was ‘Find Moose Factory Singles!’ But there don’t seem to be any Moose Factory singles.…”

  42

  A new record—sixteen people belonging to various races and nationalities (Cyberia’s human diversity is unequalled!) seated in a row and gazing into or thumbing their digital devices.

  Occasionally, evolution tends to move backward rather than forward. For example, opposable thumbs gave our species the ability to manipulate a wide variety of objects, but those thumbs now seem to be manipulating only mobile technology.…

  In disbelief, I counted again, but this time there were only fifteen in a row … since one of the Cyberians had just gotten off the train.

  Recent studies indicate that the brains of Internet addicts contain almost the same amounts of abnormal white matter as the brains of alcohol and drug addicts.

  And like addictive drugs, digital-type devices create their own demand. That’s because the buyer is already hooked on the product …

  … like a birder friend of mine. Using an app on his iDevice, he succeeded in identifying a semipalmated plover on Cape Cod’s Sandy Neck beach in six minutes, while it took me less than a minute to identify the same bird using my app-free guidebook.

  Undaunted, my friend told me that he would soon be getting an app for flowering plants, too.

  Another example: So riddled with anxiety was the teenage Cyberian when she lost her cellphone that she scratched her face and arms until they bled and, unaware she was bleeding, continued to scratch herself even more.

  The girl happened to be the daughter of another friend. “It’s not the end of the world,” my friend said to her, referring to the lost phone. “Yes, it is!” the girl cried.

  Many Cyberians can no longer function without their devices. An example: An e-businessman’s smartphone had all his travel information on it, including the name of his hotel, so when he left that smartphone in his hotel, he had no idea where he was staying, and he wandered the streets of Philadelphia, lost.

  Remember the genetic modification of arctic char isolated on Tukarak Island? Sitting continuously behind desktop computers could eventually give our own species a zigzag morphology, while the constant use of iDevices could make us resemble chickens pecking at their feed … or slouched-over corpses.

  Corpses, by definition, are dead to the world.

  43

  Mina’s own posture remained supine while she was flown from Moose Factory to Toronto, and then taken to a psychiatric hospital for examination.

  While she was sedated, Mina was baptized by an Anglican priest. Sedated? Perhaps the priest was taking no chances with a person who had been responsible for the deaths of six people.

  Anglican missionaries specialized in baptizing Inuit who suffered from tuberculosis or some other disease. Such sufferers were usually not inclined to reject Christianity … especially if the missionaries accompanied the baptism with medication.

  The Rev. E. J. Peck frequently referred to Christ as “The Great Physician” while administering to the Inuit. I can imagine him telling a would-be acolyte something like, “The Anglican faith will cure that hacking cough in no time.”

  There were exceptions, of course. Like Canon Webster of Coppermine, in the Northwest Territories. In the 1950s and 1960s, he pulled hundreds of Inuit teeth without ever referring to Christ as “The Great Dentist.”

  The priest who baptized Mina later claimed that she was “undoubtedly of superior intelligence compared to many of the natives we have contacted in the past.”

  “Superior intelligence”: could this mean a willingness to adopt white man’s habits, particularly his religion?

  While she was in the hospital, Mina was learning English. One of her first sentences in the new language was: “I want to help you.” She was probably repeating a statement she heard from the priest who baptized her.

  Help! exclaims our species … and iDevices come to the rescue. There’s now a wearable computer-type item called a Pavlok. You strap it to your wrist, and it delivers a mild electric shock that says, hey, it’s time to hit the gym or pick up the kids at day care.

  As it happens, Apple’s helpmate Siri didn’t die in a car crash. Rather, she’s become a genie who, with the help of a so-called HomeKit-connected device, turns off or on lights, opens doors, checks thermostats, etc.

  By the time you read these words, the Pavlok and HomeKit devices will have become outmoded, perhaps replaced by—what? An iPhone app that will tell you right away if you have bad breath? Maybe IBM’s ongoing attempt to make a smartphone that will approximate all five human senses?

  Rhetorical question: How many other similarly gratuitous electronic beasts are currently slouching toward Silicon Valley to be born?

  When such runaway growth occurs in an organism, it’s called cancer.r />
  After she became a new person, Mina was put in a plane and flown back to Moose Factory, where she joined the other Belcher exiles in attending Anglican church services every evening and three times on Sunday.

  Peter Sala refused to speak with Mina before her conversion, but he began speaking with her again once both of them became enthusiastic churchgoers.

  Mina would soon turn her statement of “I want to help you” into something akin to an assault.

  44

  In 2014, I flew to Timmins in northern Ontario, then took a bus to the town of Cochrane, then a rickety train through boreal forest and muskeg to Moosonee, and then a boat to Moose Factory, a Cree village resting so low in the lowlands of Hudson Bay that parts of it are periodically flooded.

  A spring flood once carried away the St. Thomas Anglican Church—where the Belcher Inuit prayed—and it had to be towed back. Due to ongoing water-damage, the church is now condemned.

  “At first we were afraid of them,” a Cree elder named John Trapper told me, referring to the Belcher Inuit. “We walked past their tents [at the RCMP compound] each morning on the way to school, and we thought, Will they kill us? Soon we realized they were just the same as us.”

  Another elder, a man named Jimmy Wesley, remembered the Belcher Inuit. “They were always smiling,” he told me, “except the tall one.”

  “The tall one” would have been Peter Sala.

  Peter was immediately put to work chopping wood for the Mounties, carrying stones for the roads, and winching the Fort Charles and other ships in and out of the Moose River.

  “I want to show you something,” Jimmy said. Whereupon we walked over to the Moose River, then bushwhacked through ferns, horsetails, purple vetch, and especially giant hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum).

  Originally from the Caucasus Mountains, giant hogweed is an alien plant that has outcompeted local plants in many parts of Canada … just as the Christian God, an alien deity in the Canadian North, has outcompeted local deities.