Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  That mesmerizing moment played over and again in his mind for days, like a spell of nature. Only the distant hum of an approaching aircraft could break it. The floatplane landed on the river in the afternoon. A nurse, a teacher, an Inuktitut interpreter, and the pilot got out and walked toward the tents. Louie knew this day would come. He had been warned. He was resigned to accept whatever happened when it did. But instead of the excitement of going to school that a child should feel, he had a twinge of fear. His parents were still off hunting. He thought of his mom and dad coming back to the camp only to find he was gone. Would he ever see them or his older brother again? And how could he leave Hummahuk? She was sick and getting sicker. His parents had told him she was his responsibility. She needed him. With no way to communicate, Louie’s parents only knew what they heard on returning to the camp: Their children had flown off in the white man’s plane. They would live with the sadness, and the unanswered questions, for a few months until the sea froze again and the dog teams took them back to Gjoa Haven.

  The qalunaaq did not tolerate objections or resistance. They did not pause to explain or ask permission. The rules didn’t require that, and the schedule demanded otherwise. They took Louie and his little sister Rosie, assuming their parents would figure out that the children were taken because it was time for school. They wanted Raymond, too, but he was beyond their reach in a floatplane that couldn’t land on the tundra. His younger brother and sister were dropped off in Gjoa Haven, a community of just over a hundred people in those days. There they lived with their mother’s cousin, his wife, and their three kids. That made seven people sharing a Matchbox House just 228 feet square. They were poor and could scarcely feed their own kids properly, let alone two more dropped on their doorstep by white authorities.

  In school, Inuit children, many of them snatched from their parents just as Louie and his siblings had been, learned that the government did not err. Louie’s teacher used to bring out a record player, drop the needle in the vinyl groove, and lead him, his cousins, and their friends in dutiful song. An ear worm bored into his mind for a lifetime, a tune he can still hum, which told Inuit children the authorities were never wrong.

  For many Inuit, settling turned life upside down. Those who didn’t leave Gjoa Haven to hunt had to rely mainly on dried fish and the little they could afford to buy at the local store, which didn’t sell fresh meat. So Louie and his little sister, the children of skilled hunters who were brave and determined providers, were reduced to charity and a diet of porridge, bannock, and tea, with a smear of butter on a good day. They often went hungry and wouldn’t be reunited with their own family until long into the winter. When Raymond was old enough for high school, Gjoa Haven didn’t have one. So he had to leave for a residential school far to the west in Inuvik, near the Mackenzie River Delta and the Beaufort Sea. He might as well have been on the other side of the planet. Even when the brothers were older and saw each other again, Raymond didn’t tell Louie much about what had happened there.

  Being torn from his family by strangers ripped a hole in Louie’s heart. He dreamed of seeing his great-grandmother once more, lying under an animal-hide blanket, listening to her stories and legends in the lamplight. But he would never get to hear her voice again. Later that winter, a group of hunters came through Gjoa Haven to trade furs at the Hudson’s Bay Company post. They brought bad news of Hummahuk. She was very ill and probably wouldn’t be able to travel back to the hamlet. They had a message from her, a final wish: She desperately wanted to see her son, David Aglukkaq, before she died. He braved the December cold and managed to reach her by dogsled. When the group was spotted coming back, Louie rushed out onto the ice, excited to see his family again. In the commotion of barking and jumping sled dogs, and travelers happy to be safely home, he looked for Hummahuk. She wasn’t there. They had waited for her to die out on the land and then left her where she wanted to rest, wrapped in a caribou-hide shroud.

  The next summer, during the family’s hunting trip, Louie passed near their old camp, but taboo said he couldn’t stay. By tradition, everyone had to avoid the area where someone had died for at least a year. Permafrost is too solid year-round to dig a deep grave, so Inuit developed unique funerary rites over the centuries. The Netsilingmiut wrapped their dead in animal hides and laid them on the ground, framed by rocks, allowing wild scavengers to dispose of the body according to the cycles of nature. Keeping a respectful distance for a good length of time made gruesome discoveries less likely. All Louie could see as he and his family passed was a wooden cross that his grandfather had planted next to Hummahuk on a hill where her body lay. Years later, Louie returned to the Kaleet River with a friend. The cross had toppled, and there were only rocks placed in the outline of a body. As she had wanted, Hummahuk left this world the way Inuit had for centuries. Piling rocks over her body would have protected it from scavengers. But that would have restrained her soul from flying free, either to return to nature or to be reincarnated as another person, inhabiting the body of a namesake.

  The plane soon came again to take Kamookak to school. This time, they let his mother travel with her children to Gjoa Haven. As they settled in for another winter on King William Island, he couldn’t stop thinking about his great-grandmother. He wouldn’t hear her stories again, but the mystery of the white men that she entrusted him with wouldn’t let go. It never did. He spent decades trying to answer the questions that grew from the things she told him in her final days. No matter how frustrating that got, or how hard the work became as his own health faltered, Kamookak kept searching for clues. That was how he would play the cards life had dealt him: standing alone, showing respect for elders and their stories by making sure they were carefully recorded, studied, and never lost to time.

  Hummahuk had given him a mission and he would risk his life more than once to complete it.

  Kamookak was just entering his teens, nearing a forced end to his schooling, when he first heard the name of Sir John Franklin. He was a kid at a desk with a bench seat, listening to a teacher talk about white men who came from far across the sea. To other kids shifting in their seats, wishing they were somewhere else, it was just another story from a foreign culture that meant little to them. In Kamookak’s mind, there was a mental spark. As though live wires had met, touching off an arc of bright light, he immediately saw the connection between written qalunaaq history and the stories Hummahuk had told him years earlier in the tent. Now he understood where the strange objects his great-grandmother had described must have come from. He had to learn more.

  The school text told Kamookak little, so he went looking for better books on Franklin and his men, and those who had tried to find them. He was stuck with the schoolbook because there wasn’t much else in Gjoa Haven to read on the subject. So he went out on the land, where Inuit have always relied on the strength of traditional knowledge to find answers to big questions. He hitched a ride with his father as he worked his trap line. That ended around Cape Crozier, King William Island’s westernmost point, named after Sir John’s second-in-command. While his father caught Arctic fox, Kamookak pressed farther north on a snowmobile until he was roughly eighty miles northwest of home. There he stood on Victory Point, alone and perplexed. More than a century after Franklin’s men had made their way from stranded ships to leave a note in the stone cairn that John Ross’s nephew James had built, Kamookak was consumed by the same question: Why? Why would sailors give up the vessels that were their best shelter? Why would they go south by land when the men they counted on looking for them would likely retrace a similar route through the northern archipelago by sea? Why, with so many weapons and supplies, so much power and knowledge, was not a single man able to survive?

  Kamookak knew early that he was onto something important in his research, but it wasn’t until he hit a dead end in school that he really committed to the work of recording oral history from the many stories elders were eager to tell whenever a young visitor sat patiently, eager to listen. Just as
he was ready to leave home to continue on to the next grade, the government briefly stopped sending kids to the residential schools that were their only chance for secondary education. His teacher told him, and most of his classmates, that they were too old. The system wouldn’t allow Kamookak past ninth grade, so it was time to earn his keep at home instead. In months when his father couldn’t find construction work, the two would go out trapping, and when his father couldn’t get out on the land, the teenager worked the trap lines with his uncles instead.

  Louie Kamookak didn’t set out to solve one of naval history’s most enduring mysteries. His early work focused on tracing the family trees of four main groups that made up the Netsilingmiut. As the lines of those family trees became clearer, Kamookak also got a better understanding of contacts that Inuit had had with the foreign explorers. Qalunaaq names didn’t make any more sense to them than Inuit names registered in white men’s ears. So Inuit gave the outsiders nicknames. A common one was Aglooka, from the Inuktitut description of the long strides they saw foreigners taking. The problem is that Inuit knew several nineteenth-century visitors by that name, including James Clark Ross and Crozier. That makes it hard for someone accustomed to the conventions of European history to untangle the various strands of it in Inuit oral history. But if an Inuk tells a story of an encounter with Aglooka from an old relative, and a listener like Kamookak knows the source’s family group, he can figure out where they normally lived and hunted. That gave the Inuk historian a distinct edge over experts from the south trying to figure out the Franklin mystery. Traveling across Netsilingmiut territory, he listened and learned, deciphering elders’ stories to figure out which groups of qalunaaq various Inuit family groups likely met, and when. In time, Kamookak found that one of the most obvious mariners in the elders’ stories was Franklin’s loyal friend John Ross. Those accounts came from the years when the Ross Expedition was trapped on the Boothia Peninsula, and Netsilingmiut helped the sailors survive, sealing their place in local legend.

  Catching Arctic fox turned out to be a cinch compared to tracking Franklin leads. Over the years of crisscrossing Netsilingmiut territory, Louie Kamookak amassed an encyclopedic list of local names. From those, he meticulously drew family trees and mapped out each group’s traditional hunting grounds across vast stretches of the High Arctic. Like any detective on a very cold case, he dismisses nothing. He has scribbled notes from every elder he interviewed into several notebooks. Kamookak hauls around a small reference library of notes and old books as he works to sort out solid details from sketchy ones. During one of our chats, his knapsack sat at his feet, bulging with books. He showed me a few, including explorers’ journals and a 1971 volume: Human Osteology: A Laboratory and Field Manual of the Human Skeleton, by William M. Bass, MD. The spine was broken and pages fell out when he opened it.

  Another time, Kamookak’s portable library was crammed with stacks of old photographs and binders full of notes chronicling Inuit oral history. He riffled through the snapshots, looking for those that told important stories. He stopped to linger on ones that meant the most to him. A foggy black-and-white image shows his grandfather Paddy Gibson in a Mountie uniform on horseback. Another is a picture of a shaman’s bone amulets, strung into a belt that he found under a rock. He reached in again and slipped out a binder with a clear plastic cover and a black back. It was labeled Franklin Oral History 1998.

  Scanning the pages, Kamookak paused at an account from elders he visited on the mainland, near the mouth of the river that the Franklin Expedition survivors were trying to reach. In 1832, after some three years of silence from the Ross Expedition, the Admiralty was under pressure to launch a search mission. Commander George Back made plans to head for the Boothia Peninsula area with relief supplies, by way of what indigenous people called the Great Fish River. Before he set off, Back received a letter that Ross had already been rescued and had safely returned to England. Back’s orders were to make the voyage anyway and explore the northern coast. He took a treacherous, undiscovered route some 605 miles northeast from Great Slave Lake, in what is now Canada’s Northwest Territories, to the Arctic Ocean. That’s where Back met a group of Inuit near Franklin Lake, not far from the mouth of the river that now bears his name. The encounter turned so nasty that Inuit were still talking about it generations later when Kamookak sat down with me for interviews in Gjoa Haven.

  Back reported that some of his men, who had separated from the main group, got in a fight with Inuit and killed three of them. The Inuit threw rocks and an elderly shaman ran after the visitors. Back also recalled that the man was angry and shouting during the August 31, 1834, encounter. Then the explorer felt the need to mock what he didn’t understand: “We perceived, infinitely to our amusement, that this was the conjurer, or wise man of the tribe . . . thinking no doubt to charm us away.” Knud Rasmussen heard the Inuit side of the story almost ninety years later, when they described how one of their oldest shamans “spoke a magic verse that was intended to charm the white men away, far away. . . .”

  Kamookak sensed a link when an old Inuk woman told him a story that she heard from her elders about ancestors who kept a few white people in an area near the Back River. By the sound of it, they weren’t guests.

  “It might have been a true story,” Kamookak explained, “but it’s too short to do much with it. There’s not enough there to back it up.”

  Yet he doesn’t dismiss the possibility altogether. He has heard a lot of weird things over the years, not only from Inuit. Some details he could chase down and confirm as facts. Others remained in the ethereal dimension of legend. By figuring out the difference, he developed a gut feeling about where the last survivors of the Franklin Expedition spent their final hours. Kamookak suspects they made it to the mainland and got pretty close to escaping the Arctic by moving off the rocky tundra of King William Island, perhaps reaching the thicker grass and flowering sedge to the south. If they did, the men somehow died before they could get far enough south to reach the nearest outpost. Traces would be very difficult to find today.

  “I think some may have got further down the Back River,” Kamookak speculated. “But as you search further down, it gets harder to find evidence because there’s more growth on the mainland to hide things. Where up here, nothing much grows on the limestone.”

  On a trip to gather Inuit oral history, he also developed a theory about at least some of the King William Island spirit stories.

  “Three elders told me: If you travel on King William Island, do not ever travel alone because there’s bad spirits there,” Kamookak said. “I think they’re referring to the Franklin men starving and dying. When people saw them in their terrible condition, the cannibalism, I think they thought: ‘These guys are not human. They’re bad spirits.’”

  Reading from his binder of oral-history interviews, Kamookak filled in more details that explained how the friendly atmosphere of the Ross days had turned lethal. The trouble began as a misunderstanding over a woman’s knife. Inuit women use the broad-bladed ulu for doing a variety of things, such as scraping animal hides, butchering meat, or even cutting hair. By strict custom, an ulu shouldn’t be sharpened in the summer, when fish were running up the river to spawn. But Back, or one of his men, saw an Inuk woman struggling to cut fish with her blunt tool. So he took it from her to sharpen it. He meant to be kind, but the grab came across as a deep insult—more qalunaaq arrogance.

  Blood was spilled. Any hope of trust was destroyed. And, at least among the area’s Inuit, the reason was never forgotten.

  SHAMANS, the wise men and women of their Inuit clans, weren’t always accommodating to white visitors. They had to produce results to maintain their high status, which sometimes required at least a show of hostility. If the Netsilingmiut world seemed to go wrong when outsiders came in, it was up to the shaman to make things right. People’s lives depended on it. They turned to those with the most power whenever life was confounding, illnesses didn’t pass, or strange threats, such as
white explorers, suddenly upset their lives. A group followed the best hunter to food. But if caribou, musk ox, seals, or other prey were nowhere to be found, Inuit suspected a curse. When a hunt failed and hunger set in, the shaman danced to a drumbeat, singing mournfully into a trance, and appealed to helper spirits, called tornait, for rescue. If someone fell sick, the shaman worked to heal her with rituals and traditional medicines. A shaman wearing an animal-hide band tied across his forehead, and a belt of bone and ivory amulets, could summon his spirits and seek a cure, sometimes assisting with lichens and plants brewed into medicinal teas.

  Among the most coveted Inuit amulets were objects that shamans used to cure the sick. They usually collected these from the land. A lemming snatched from among the rocks was skinned. Its fur, pressed onto a boil, could drain the pus and, one hoped, whatever evil power was producing it. But first, the sick person had to confess all her wrongdoing. Hold anything back, and the shaman’s power was useless. If spirits refused to abide, there was no other hope in those days. Netsilingmiut hunters who reached the northwest shores of King William Island might have stumbled on the Franklin crew’s abandoned medicine chest, with its tiny frosted bottles containing various powders and elixirs. But they would have seemed useless next to the iron and wood that Inuit prized most. Those could be transformed into weapons, tools, sled parts, or other items practical in the physical world. When Inuit came across widely scattered artifacts from Erebus and Terror, a shaman would have had an eye for anything that seemed useful in summoning the power of spirits among the hollow brass curtain rods and clay pipes, soup tins and blue-tinted snow goggles. Perhaps she would have pondered the utility of a Victorian toothbrush, a beaded silk purse, a sextant and telescope, porcelain teacups or pocket chronometers. If something looked like it might transfer qalunaaq power, even if it was just a scrap of a Royal Navy officer’s cap, or brass buttons emblazoned with an insignia, scavengers picked it up.