The Farfarers

by Farley Mowat

  A week later he was dead of a massive heart attack.

  Through many centuries, Tunit families living along the coasts of the Ungava peninsula relied on the vast herds of caribou funnelling past the eastern end of Payne Lake to guarantee their winter survival. In early September the people travelled up river from the sea coasts to the narrows, there to refurbish caribou guide fences and hunting blinds before the main herds arrived from the north. The autumnal kill would have been made partially on land, using bows and arrows, but principally in the waters of the narrows where large numbers of swimming animals could be speared from boats. Once enough caribou had been slaughtered and cached to ensure a winter of plenty, the Tunit settled into their semi-subterranean houses to enjoy a prolonged social season.

  We southerners tend to envisage winter in the Arctic as a dread and miserable time of cold and famine. Those who have experienced the Inuit way of life know this to be a misconception. For the Tunit at Payne Lake, winter would normally have been a relaxed and enjoyable season largely spent visiting, feasting, singing, making tools and clothing, making love, and sleeping as long as one chose. If people felt cramped in their small houses they could go out on the lake and fish through the ice. Or, when the moon was out, range the white countryside for hares and foxes. So long as the caches had been well-filled in the autumn, there would be meat, fat, and fuel enough to keep them well and happy until the caribou herds returned in spring.

  When the ice finally roared out of the rivers, the Tunit would launch their boats and return to the coasts, there to spend the sunlit summer months living on the bounty of the sea.

  I surmise that, after establishing themselves on the Ungava coast and getting to know the native people, some venturesome valuta men took a leaf from the Tunit book and went up the Payne to winter with the natives there. This would have been a more convivial way of putting in the long months than remaining in poorly heated longhouses set far apart along the frozen coast.

  Over the course of several decades, more and more valuta seekers doubtless recognized the wisdom of wintering in the interior where there was an unlimited supply of the best possible food (caribou meat and fat, supplemented with fresh-caught fishes) together with a much better supply of fuel than could be found near the coast.

  However, perhaps not all Albans would have been content to live cheek by jowl with Tunit in their cramped winter houses. I think many may have preferred a way of life closer to their own traditions, and these would have been the people who built the village at the Cartier Site. Significantly, it was located several miles distant from the teeming Tunit settlement and on the opposite side of the lake, as if its occupants deliberately wished to maintain a degree of separation.

  Coastal valuta stations such as Pamiok were probably not totally deserted during the winter. Caretakers would have been required to protect vessels and their gear. These guardians could have been relieved at intervals, for men could travel quickly and easily along the frozen rivers between Payne Lake and the coasts.

  In its heyday the Cartier Site had five houses that, together, were capable of sheltering three or four score people. As melding between Tunit and Albans continued, many or all the “village” folk may finally have drifted across the water to winter with Tunit relatives and associates at the narrows. As these livyers increasingly adopted Tunit ways, the village may eventually have been abandoned.

  Farfarer arrived at Pamiok to find the Ungava-based clans only recently returned to the island from their winter quarters at Payne Lake. There was much news to exchange, but what most excited the residents was the imminent prospect of Saint Stephan’s arrival at Diana Bay. This brought the local people, Tunit and Alban alike, to fever pitch in their haste to load the year’s collection of valuta into boats and be away north.

  The resident clans no longer possessed large ocean-going ships such as Farfarer, relying on somewhat smaller craft with which they could navigate inland rivers, while still being able to engage in coastwise voyaging. These boats were large enough to roof the houses at Payne Lake, but too small to cover the old foundations on Pamiok Island. So, during summer occupations of that island, inlanders, livyers, and Tunit alike pitched their tents within the old foundation walls, taking advantage of previously levelled ground.

  Farfarer was soon unladen. In a normal season she would then have been hauled to her foundation and overturned to become her people’s home away from home until it was time to return to Crona. This year things would be different. While some of her folk remained at Pamiok to hunt and gather valuta in the vicinity, the ship, manned by a small working crew, was destined for a new farfaring.

  CHAPTER TWENTY - TWO

  OKAK

  THE PEREGRINATIONS OF THE WALRUS TRIBES MUST always have been of absorbing interest to valuta seekers. At an early date, hunters in the west would have noted how the approach of winter triggered an eastward exodus of tuskers out of Hudson and Ungava bays through Hudson Strait. Many then swam north towards Davis Strait to winter in company with their fellows from the high Arctic; but others turned south instead of north. Inevitably valuta hunters would have investigated this southbound movement.

  Having rounded the northern tip of Labrador, scouts coasted south under the shadow of the mighty Torngat Mountains, which rise out of the sea at Cape Chidley and gain height and majesty until, after some three hundred miles, the awesome peaks plunge back into the sea again.

  Labrador south of the Torngats subsides into a densely forested plateau. At the junction of the two regions, walrus prospectors from the north would have come upon a remarkable coastal enclave centred on Okak Basin.

  Although this basin lay within the fringes of the Torngats, it was not one with them. Its extensive lowlands nurtured grassy bogs and pastures dotted with stands of spruce, larch, and birch.

  It possessed other attractions. Thousands of caribou wintered on the extensive lowlands bordering the basin’s many long inlets. Clouds of ptarmigan gabbled in willow swales and berry bogs. Snowshoe rabbits were everywhere. Wooded valleys harboured black bear, muskrat, beaver, mink, otter, and lynx. Sheltered on three sides by a semi-circle of guardian mountains, Okak offered a cornucopia of opportunities to people who were both pastoralists and hunters.

  The first southern venturers returning from Okak undoubtedly brought back glowing accounts of the place—accounts reinforced by other visitors during ensuing decades. Descriptions of its natural pastures, groves of tall trees, wonderful fishing rivers, and exotic animals would have resonated strongly amongst crofters in Tilli made uneasy by the appearance of Norse marauders there. Indeed, when the time came to abandon Tilli, some crofters may have chosen to bypass Crona entirely and sail all the way west to Labrador, there to settle in the security and plenty offered by the Okak oasis.

  I conclude that tenth-century Albans were familiar with the Labrador coast south to Okak, and that at least a few valuta men and some crofters may have already settled alongside the Tunit there.

  All through the preceding winter, a move to the West had loomed large in the talk of Farfarer’s clan. Other clans had already shifted their homes to the western grounds where permanent residence offered a considerable advantage over migrant competitors who came and went with the seasons. Furthermore, European merchants were showing increasing interest in doing business in the new land.

  The elders at Sandhaven agreed that the time had come for their clan to shift west too. But where were they to go? Valuta folk who had made the move to Ungava had gained much thereby—but had paid a price. Domestic animals could not be husbanded, nor crops grown on the tundra of the western grounds. Immigrants to that region had therefore to forgo crofting, something which had been a cherished and intrinsic part of their lives since dim antiquity.

  Farfarer’s people did not want to follow suit. There was talk about the possibilities of Okak. However, although furs, falcons, and other valuables were to be had in the Okak region, tuskers—the sustaining core of the valuta trade—were to be found
there only during migration and even then were wary and hard to hunt. Certainly Okak offered good crofting possibilities, but the region seemed less than ideal for valuta people.

  There had, however, long been a belief that somewhere to the south of Okak was a place where tuskers might be found in numbers sufficient to gladden a valuta seeker’s heart. In fact, it was the search for this mysterious wintering ground that had led to the discovery of Okak. The search had not been pursued because Labrador south of Okak was darkly cloaked in forests which were the bailiwick of Innu, mysterious woodland dwellers whom Tunit took care to avoid.1

  Avoidance between the two peoples was mutual. Although not overtly hostile, neither felt at ease with the other. They lived in different worlds. Innu restricted themselves to forest-covered country while Tunit (and their Alban friends and associates) generally kept to open ground.

  In the middle of the summer previous to the decision of Farfarer’s clan to abandon Crona, two unknown Tunit men had come paddling into Okak Bight from the southward. Their arrival caused something of a sensation. Their double-paddled sealskin boat was of unusual design, their skin clothing of slightly unfamiliar cut, and their dialect a little different from that of the Okak Tunit. They explained that they had come from a country far to the south bordering on an inland sea. They knew from tales told by the elders of their tribe that other Tunit lived to the north. So, being young and venturesome, they had set out to find these kinsfolk.

  They had much to tell about their homeland and its denizens, human and otherwise. Of special interest to the Okak Albans was the news that walrus bred in astronomical numbers on the endless sandy beaches of the strangers’ country.

  An account of this visit had reached Crona in the autumn of that same year. It had been much discussed at Sandhaven and the clansfolk had tentatively concluded Okak might be the place for them. The decision was made that, come spring, Farfarer would sail to Pamiok as usual, but then, having left most of her people there, the skipper and a skeleton crew would undertake a reconnaissance to Okak and, if possible, beyond.

  It was mid-July before Farfarer departed from Pamiok. In addition to her working crew, she had shipped several Tunit men and women, most of them kin to the skipper’s wife. At least in its earlier stages the southern voyage promised to be something of a festive cruise offering the Tunit the opportunity to visit camps of distant compatriots and to see places known to them only through stories told during long winter nights.

  Farfarer made a fast passage across Ungava Bay to a glacier-sculpted canal on the Labrador side, between whose walls tidal currents flowed with the velocity of mountain rivers. She shot through this short cut between the bay and the Atlantic on a rising tide.

  Twin tower beacons at the canal’s eastern mouth marked a cove where valuta men camped in spring while gathering down from the plethora of eiders nesting on nearby islands. The station was empty this late in the season, so Farfarer did not pause but steered southward through a maze of coastal reefs and islands alive with porpoises and small whales. The Torngats marched to starboard, rearing their crenellated ridges ever higher.

  Crossing the mouth of Nachvak Fiord (a gigantic canyon flanked by mile-high peaks), Farfarer bore into Ramah Bay. Here she dropped anchor and her crew rowed ashore in the longboat. Tunit living in tents pitched along the beach greeted them warmly. They had recently killed a number of fat caribou so there was heavy feasting that night. But in the morning, heavy work.

  People did not come to Ramah Bay just for the caribou. They came, and had been coming for thousands of years, for a smokily translucent stone, a form of quartz called Ramah chert, which lent itself admirably to the fashioning of points, knives, scrapers, and a host of other tools. Farfarer’s people took aboard a cargo of chert “blanks” to be used in trade, as gifts, and to make tools for their own use.2

  Continuing south across the mouth of Saglek Fjord, the vessel passed close to Nuliak Island where Tunit from all along the coast gathered in spring to take migrating harp seals.

  When the ship was a few miles south of Nuliak the lookout spotted a pair of beacon towers at the tip of Cape Nuvotannak, which guards the entrance to Hebron Fiord. Within the fiord a third and singularly massive tower, over twelve feet high, looked down upon a summer settlement of valuta men from Okak.3

  After receiving a rousing welcome, Farfarer’s people were proudly shown ten newly fledged peregrines and gyrfalcons huddled on perches and squalling for strips of caribou meat. These had been taken from cliff nests in the mountains to the north and from the Kaumajet Mountains to the south. They represented a king’s ransom. The pity was that only a few would survive the long and arduous passage to distant Europe.

  Next morning Farfarer, piloted now by an Okak man, coasted beneath the mammoth wall of the Bishop’s Mitre, which plunges nearly four thousand feet into the sea at the end of the out-thrusting Kaumajet peninsula. Instead of rounding the southern tip of this towering massif, Farfarer slipped through a narrow cleft between soaring cliffs to enter the broad bay which is the outer portal of Okak Fiord. The fiord’s mouth lay concealed behind a massive island at whose northern end was Okak’s principal harbour, its entrance presided over by twin beacon towers.4

  Ghosting before an easterly zephyr, Farfarer entered the harbour to find it ringed with tents. She had arrived at an opportune time, most of the region’s inhabitants, both Alban and Tunit, being foregathered here to mingle and to trade.

  In the false dawn of July 23, 1995, the MV Alla Tarasova rounded the southern extremity of the out-thrust Kaumajets and steamed into Okak Bight. The helmsman eased the ship into Okak Island’s harbour. The sun came blasting over the peaks of the Kaumajets as the anchor chain ran out with a roar. Within an hour the passengers had boarded a fleet of Zodiac inflatables and were on their way towards the only level stretch of shore in sight.

  Claire and I were in the lead boat. We scrambled ashore behind the expedition’s archaeological mentor, a rangy Scots-Canadian who, during the preceding week, had guided us over several Tunit sites he had previously excavated along the north Labrador coast.

  Now Callum Thomson led the way up a ten-foot-high cut-bank onto an ancient raised beach thickly overgrown with dwarf birch scrub, out of which twenty or thirty decayed wooden crosses protruded at odd angles. This, we deduced, must have been the cemetery for an eighteenth-century Moravian mission to the Inuit, abandoned in 1919 after the population had all but been wiped out by influenza.

  It was clear that the Moravians had not been the first to make use of this rare stretch of level ground along the harbour shore, a stretch that included the only place for miles about with enough soil to permit the digging of a decent grave. The whole of the raised beach was pocked with tent circles, depressions betokening house pits, and symmetrical arrangements of boulders. Intermingled with the habitation sites were sturdy growths of angelica.5 Clearly, this had been a favoured place to live since ancient times.

  We had gone only a few steps when Callum stopped and beckoned me to him. He pointed to the ground at his feet.

  “Maybe this is one of those longhouse foundations you’ve been going on about.”

  It was hard to tell if he was being jocular or not. I had been holding forth for days on the subject of boat-roofed houses and at one point had brashly said it would not surprise me if traces of such were to be discovered in Okak Bay.

  Now I found myself on the verge of a depression whose size and shape were a good match for most of the boat-roofed house foundations scattered across the eastern Canadian Arctic. Roughly fifty feet long (nobody had a tape measure, so we had to pace it) it was perhaps eightteen wide. The walls, which had apparently been made of sod rather than stones and turf, had long since rotted down to mounds only a few inches high.

  Callum gave me a sardonic look as if to say, “This is your baby,” then turned and loped off to search for the ruins of the mission.

  There was nothing much I could do except look. I had no shovel, and anyway it is
against the law to dig archaeological sites without a permit. The most I could make of this enigmatic hole in the ground was that it seemed to be about what I had so off-handedly said we might expect to find.

  Though the raised beach beyond this first depression was thigh deep in an almost impenetrable tangle of dwarf birch, I searched it anyway—and stumbled into a second depression. The vegetation was so dense here that I had to investigate mostly with my feet but was able to determine that it was of similar proportions to the first.

  Clumping around for an hour in a thin, chill rain, I tried to make sense of this double discovery. I noted that the sites were no more than twelve feet above high-tide level and less than forty feet inland. It seemed to me that an approach had been cleared through the jumble of big boulders which littered the foreshore, leaving a relatively smooth place to land or to launch a good-sized boat directly below the putative longhouses.

  Search as I might, I could find nothing else which might further illuminate the discovery. Then Alla Tarasova’s siren blew the recall signal and we hastened back to the Zodiacs. Shortly thereafter the anchor came up and we sailed away.

  That evening I cornered Callum.

  “So tell me . . . who do you think could have made those depressions, and what are they?”

  He took his time replying, weighing his words carefully.

  “They don’t look like something the Moravians might have done. One would wonder why anyone would dig anything like that in a cemetery. At first glance they don’t look like Dorset, Thule, Inuit, or Maritime Archaic work either. I think, Farley, there are lots of questions, but no answers. Not until you get an excavation permit. Then I’d be happy to have a go at finding who the culprits were.”6