‘I’m bloody well not going to do it!’
‘Just think of your public,’ said Tom. ‘Seven million viewers are waiting for you. You can’t let them down – anyway, think of the immortality you’ll win.’
‘Not much good to me if it’s posthumous,’ I replied.
‘Only ten minutes to go,’ said practical Joe. ‘I know what, we’ll lower you down a rope that’s been secured at the bottom. That’ll stop you spinning and it might even look better, because they can put it at an angle and you’ll be silhouetted against the sky.’
And that was how it was done. I was lowered from the summit by the others, rather like an Admiral in a bo’suns chair, slightly apprehensive at first, and then, when it worked, I felt superbly, wonderfully elated, drifting down, talking away into the microphone of my radio, in spectacular circumstances but at no risk to myself.
Two days later, the camera platforms had been stripped down and the Old Man of Hoy was left to its regular inhabitants – the fulmars, puffins and cormorants who lived on its flanks. Climbers have often criticised these live climbing broadcasts on the grounds of the simplification, the popularisation and some of the cheating which must inevitably accompany them to make them technically possible. Whatever the rights and wrongs, these broadcasts are tremendously exciting for those who take part, and they do give the non-climber the best opportunity of seeing and feeling through the eyes and experience of others. The challenge of communication is very much in the hands of each climber taking part, for while the cameras are on him, not only can he show how to climb a stretch of rock, he can also impart his own particular feelings and even his own peculiar philosophy. A problem the BBC have is trying to find new climbs and new ways of presenting them; spurred on, perhaps, by a need for each broadcast to outdo the last, making each one much bigger, different or more exciting.
I suspect that the Old Man of Hoy broadcast will never be superseded as the perfect live broadcast. It had every ingredient – a perfect, very obvious summit, a scale which was also perfect, since the climbers clinging to the tower were dwarfed by its size, yet were not totally lost in its immensity. In the group of six climbers, our personalities jelled particularly well – Joe, silent, laconic, supremely competent; Mac, extrovert, clowning happily and stepping into the breach whenever the commentary seemed to be dying; Pete and Dougal, both somewhat terse, workmanlike, practical – the modern climbers; Tom, the very antithesis, laughing quietly at the entire circus, poking gentle fun at my own earnest professionalism.
At the end of the broadcast, after a magnificent victory binge in Stromness, we all scattered our different ways: Mac back to London and his high-pressure business life; Dougal to Leysin and his climbing school; and Tom back to the mainland to search out another sea-stack. I couldn’t help envying him, for in my relative success as a photo-journalist I had lost a great deal of freedom, was getting trapped into the very rat-race from which I had wanted to escape in 1962. But it was, at least, a self-sought race — one by which I couldn’t help being enthralled, as I was sent on an ever-widening variety of assignments, learning more and more about my craft as a writer and photographer.
– CHAPTER SEVENTEEN –
ESKIMOES
I knew I should ask Joanacee to stop the dogs so that I could take some pictures, but could not bring myself to do so. I was so cold.
The sun had dropped below the low line of hills to the south-west, but the sky was still red; tattered streamers of steam, rising from an open lead in the distance, were coloured a fiery crimson; the smooth surface of the ice around us was broken by petrified eruptions of ice blocks. A low pressure-ridge, like a neglected piece of dry stone walling, stretched into the distance and the shadows beneath a sprouting tumescence of ice were deep green.
The sledge pulled round the headland and the view was gone, but for the rest of the journey I was racked with guilt that I had not recorded those few moments. I sat hunched on the back of the sledge behind Joanacee, wriggled my toes, rubbed my fingers, but could not rid them of the cold that bit into them. The cold now crept through the double thickness of my caribou-skin parka, played gently up and down my back. We had been travelling since dawn, and had had little to eat; our bodies were running out of the fuel needed to combat the intense cold of minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
In front, the eleven dogs were trotting effortlessly, each one of them hauling on its own lead, all of which were clipped into the main lead only a few feet in front of the komatic or sledge. It was about twenty feet long, and eighteen inches wide, with our equipment, fuel and food covered by the caribou skins, securely strapped to it. Joanacee crouched in front, ever watchful, with his deadly twenty-foot-long sealskin whip trailing behind. A flick of the wrist and it snaked forward, cracking at the hind legs of a dog who had lagged behind the others.
Only a week earlier I had been saying goodbye to Wendy in our Lakeland cottage, then four days ago I had been sitting in an ultra-modern office in Ottawa, discussing with an official of the Canadian Department of Northern Affairs the problem of the Eskimoes’ adjustment to modern society. Now I was sitting on the back of a komatic, near the head of Cumberland Sound in Baffin Island, just a few miles south of the Arctic Circle.
‘Plenty of people have done stories of the far north in the summer,’ John Anstey, editor of the Daily Telegraph magazine, had told me before I set off. ‘I want you to go hunting with the Eskimoes in mid-winter. See what their lives are like today and how they are adapting to change.’
This time I was to take on the job of both writer and photographer. I had flown to Canada at the beginning of February, and then on from Montreal to Frobisher Bay, the administrative capital of Baffin Island, en route for Pangnirtung. Here I was going to spend three weeks hunting with the Eskimoes, at the same time collecting my story. On getting out of the plane at Frobisher Bay the place seemed totally hostile to man – it was dominated by machines. The cold hit us as if it were a solid wall as we hurried from the plane across a few yards of iced tarmac to the entrance of a building. From the reception hangar, I was taken by car to the Federal building – a vast, barn-like edifice comprising government offices, social centre, store rooms, repair shops and accommodation for all the unmarried personnel posted to this outpost of so-called civilisation. It appeared there were some people who never left the building throughout the winter, and I could well believe it, for there was no reason for them to do so – outside was a bitterly hostile world, with an icy wind blowing clouds of snow past neat rows of prefab huts, the homes of the Eskimoes. The lucky ones were employed about the station as drivers while those less fortunate were cleaners. The vast majority, however, had no employment at all, and just lived on Welfare – an aimless existence, spiced by alcohol when they could lay their hands on it. I was glad to escape from the claustrophobic confines of Frobisher Bay.
A big single-engined Otter aircraft took me to Pangnirtung, our route leading us over a sea of low rolling hills, flecked with the black of exposed rocks. It was a bleak, empty, inhospitable place and seemed as foreign to man as the surface of the moon. Yet in these hills roamed small herds of caribou nibbling the moss and lichen hidden by the shallow covering of snow. Then we came to the sea; tentacles of ice-cold water writhed into the coastline; the sea-ice stretched white and featureless into Cumberland Sound, then darkened towards the floe edge; grey mist covered the black waters and mountains jutted above the mist on the other side of the Sound. We were approaching Pangnirtung, flying up a long fiord with hills towering on either side. On first sight from the air the settlement looked like a handful of tiny matchbox houses that a child had scattered carelessly over a white carpet. The plane landed on the ice of the fjord and taxied to the group of people waiting for us.
Jim Cummings, the manager of the Hudson Bay Company store, was amongst them. He had agreed to arrange my hunting trip and to look after me while I was in Pangnirtung. A quiet, stockily built man, he gave the impression of being quite shy, but lingering under what f
irst appeared to be an abrupt manner was an impish sense of humour and considerable kindness. He was a bachelor, as are many of the Hudson Bay Company managers, for they spend long periods in isolated communities where there are few, if any, European women. Rightly or wrongly, the Hudson Bay Company do not encourage mixed marriages with the Eskimoes, though many managers, I am sure, have taken Eskimo girls as mistresses. Jim, however, was courting one of the school teachers, an attractive, strong-minded Scots lass, whom he has since married.
He showed me to his home, a single-storeyed, double-skinned building, heated by a magnificent oil stove. It was deliciously warm inside, and had a humanity about it that the Federal building in Frobisher Bay had lacked.
‘What exactly do you want to do?’ he asked.
‘Have a good look at Pangnirtung, and then go hunting with the Eskimoes,’ I replied.
‘Well, looking at Pangnirtung won’t take long,’ said Jim. ‘It’s what you can see – a collection of prefabs, a few of the old Eskimo tents, the hospital and the school. As for hunting, there are not many Eskimoes that bother any longer. What do you want to hunt, anyway?’
‘Caribou, if possible,’ I said. ‘That’s what the editor wants.’
‘I suppose I could find a couple of lads who’d take you,’ he said. ‘Do you want to go by Skidoo, or dog-team?’
‘Dog-team, definitely; it’s more romantic – I want to make it as original as possible.’
‘Well, even that has problems; there aren’t many decent teams left. The best hunters can afford Skidoos, and the ones who aren’t so good don’t keep their dogs in good condition. It’s easier for them to hang around the settlement and live on Welfare. Still, I think I should be able to find something for you.’
Next day he introduced me to two young Eskimoes, Joanacee and Levi. They owned a dog-team each, and Jim assured me that they were reliable. Our food preparations for the ten-day trip were simple. Jim made a massive stew in a ten-gallon pan, poured it out on a plastic sheet in an unheated store-shed and, next morning, broke up the frozen mass with a hammer, packing all the lumps in a couple of sacks. These, a bagful of sugar and a bag of tea were our rations.
We left Pangnirtung that morning and all day our two komatics skirted the coast of Cumberland Sound, running over the flat sea-ice, past bare rocky islands and the occasional stranded iceberg. Every three hours or so we stopped and the dogs immediately curled up in the snow, or rolled ecstatically on their backs before settling down.
Joanacee lit the petrol stove and started to melt some snow. While it was melting, they sorted out the leads of the dogs, which had become plaited together during the run as the dogs had changed their positions. Once the snow had melted, the two Eskimoes turned over the komatics, and iced the steel runners, taking water into their mouths, and letting it run out in a steady stream over the metal. Once this was done we had some tea and hard tack biscuits to eat. Levi produced a hunk of raw, frozen meat, chopped pieces off it and popped them into his mouth. ‘Tuctu,’ he muttered. It was the meat of the caribou.
While the Eskimoes worked I felt extraordinarily helpless; they were so sure and quick in everything they did – I was so slow; the cold had a numbing effect, making even thought difficult. I quickly decided to allow myself to be mollycoddled by our two guides and to concentrate just on getting pictures. I was already having problems. The metal of the camera was so cold that if it touched my cheek as I held it to my eye, I received a cold burn. As soon as I brought the eyepiece anywhere near the warmth of my body, it misted and froze over, so that I could see nothing. Worst of all, though, the film was so brittle in the cold that it snapped at the least excuse. I tried to warm the camera inside my parka, but felt the heat drain out of my already chilled body, into this lump of metal, which had a temperature of around minus thirty.
Our first day brought us to Bon Accord, an Eskimo hunting camp near the head of Cumberland Sound. We reached it in the dark, for we had only eight hours’ daylight at this time of year. I was glad to stumble into the warm tent, leaving the Eskimoes to feed the dogs. This was Levi’s home, where he lived with his parents and four brothers and sisters. It was warmed and lighted by three seal-oil lamps, long wicks glimmering on the edge of an open dish of melted seal blubber.
We left in the dawn, the sun, a heavy red orb, hanging above the horizon. This tiny settlement felt like the furthest outpost of the world; five snow-covered tents clung to a rocky headland, surrounded by a waste of ice. The Eskimoes rounded up the dogs and packed the sledges; in a mad scamper we raced across the chaotic jumble of reef ice that bordered the land.
We picked our way through an archipelago of islands jutting through the ice. A biting wind whispered from the north, freezing my face, building long icicles on my beard and moustache, and yet I now felt I could contend with the cold, felt intoxicated by the empty desolation yet utter beauty of this world of ice and snow and granite, rich brown in the rays of the sun.
We stopped early that day on a small island. Levi and Joanacee immediately started probing the snow for a suitable site for our igloo; they were looking for a drift of hard, compact snow. Once they found one, they cut out the blocks for the snow house, and then built it up in a continuous round spiral. In just over an hour the igloo was completed, but there was still work to do. They shouldered their axes, and walked over to a pile of stones; the dogs, unleashed from the sledge, followed them, gathering around in tense expectancy, as the two Eskimoes levered off the stones to reveal a cache of frozen seal. The dogs lunged forward, but a lazy flick of the whip followed them and quickly drove them back, and they waited impatiently until the seal had been chopped into small pieces. Then they tore into the scattered meat, snapping at each other for choice bits, devouring it with the savagery of the wolves they were originally bred from. All our belongings were put either inside the snow house or on top of it, out of reach of the dogs, who would have a try at eating almost anything, including their own harnesses.
It was dark when, at last, we crawled through the low entrance and settled down for the night. In comparison with the cold outside, the igloo felt more comfortable than the most luxurious of hotels. The floor was covered with caribou skins, the cooker was roaring, making the air warm and heavy with fumes. Melt water crept down the walls; where it dripped between blocks, Joanacee made bridges of toilet paper. For supper we broke off some lumps of the stew we had pre-cooked in Pangnirtung, and as an appetiser we ate raw frozen caribou – no meal had ever tasted more delicious.
It was difficult getting to know my two companions – for the first day or two I even found it hard to link their names with their faces. The main trouble was that we could not speak a word of each other’s language. Levi and Joanacee were both in their late twenties; like most Eskimoes they smiled a great deal, never became flustered, and yet I felt they never gave much of themselves away. During the journey I came to like and respect them, but I could never discuss anything with them or learn what they really felt about me, themselves or the life they led. Even so, we established a relationship that I found pleasantly restful. They were eager to teach me their language and we spent many an hour repeating Eskimo words – a whole string of gutturals that I found almost impossible to remember, one word from the next.
It took two more days to reach the area where we could hope to find caribou, first up a long fjord that plunged into the land, low craggy hills on either side, and then into the land itself, up through a winding defile, where the dogs laboured hard under the whip, sliding on smooth ice, catching their traces on upthrust rocks. I have never been anywhere so desolate; the snow-covered land was like the swell of a frozen ocean, bare rocks replacing windswept spume. It was difficult to imagine how anything could live in such surroundings and yet we could see the tracks and droppings of caribou. Beneath the shallow covering of snow was the moss they lived on.
We built an igloo in the middle of this waste and on the following day started the hunt, travelling in a huge circle round our base. I c
ould not help wondering how my two guides would find their way back, it was all so featureless. It was bitterly cold, for we were now forty miles inland – the temperature was probably minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
The two komatics were several hundred yards apart, at times out of sight of each other. After we had been travelling a couple of hours the dogs picked up a scent and broke into a fast run, letting out excited yelps. Joanacee stood up and, balancing easily on the bucking sled, peered into the glare of the snow; but the dogs slowed down, the scent was dead.
We had another false alarm and eventually Joanacee turned to me apologetically and confessed, ‘Tuctu no more,’ and he waved at the hills to show that they had gone away. We got back to the igloo late that evening, finding it with unerring precision. The next morning we discovered that our fuel can had been leaking and that we had practically none left. We had no choice but to return to Pangnirtung.
Back in the settlement I felt I had seen only one aspect of Eskimo hunting; I wanted to go out again, to hunt seal, this time by Skidoo instead of dog team. I was recommended to approach an Eskimo called Owalook who was one of the best hunters in Pangnirtung and could therefore afford to run a Skidoo. He could also speak some English, having spent nine years in a mental hospital in South Canada. I could not help wondering about his background, but was reassured on meeting him. His manner inspired confidence; he was quite short but powerfully built with the battered features of a professional boxer, but in his case, the wind and cold had been his antagonist. There was a strength and kindness in his face that was offset by a twinkle of humour in his eyes. He was forty-seven years old, already a grandfather, with five children of his own.
Behind him he had a lifetime of narrow escapes; and in 1947 he had been caught on a small floe that broke away from the pack in a violent storm. He had no shelter or spare clothes, only a baby seal for food, yet he managed to survive for nineteen storm-racked days before the floe ran aground, fortunately only a day’s march from his home, then at Bon Accord.
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