by Farley Mowat
The assumption was not far from the reality. During the autumn and winter of 1943, forty-four Ihalmiut starved to death. During the summer of 1946, the survivors were smitten by what may have been diphtheria and fourteen children and young adults died. That winter, twelve more perished of starvation.
By the time Andy and I came to Kinetua Bay, only forty-seven Ihalmiut still survived in all the wide reaches of a land that had once been vividly alive with men and deer.
* Many of these population figures are derived from old records kept by Hudson’s Bay Company post managers (some of which I myself found at an abandoned post); from diaries and other documents kept by the Schweders; and from interviews with surviving Ihalmiut in 1947 and 1948 and during subsequent visits to the region.
– 21 –
THE WESTERN WATER WAY
The continuing absence of caribou had made us very restive. Ohoto had taken to spending most of the daylight hours roaming the tundra far to the northwest, from which direction, so he doggedly continued to assert, tuktu would soon come. Although Andy and I certainly hoped he was right, all we really knew was that great herds had come this way in times past. While descending the Dubawnt River in 1893, Joseph and James Tyrrell had met no caribou until July 30 when, about seventy miles east of where we now were, they had been engulfed by multitudes of southbound deer.
James later wrote:
”There were so many great bands, literally covering the country over wide areas, that the valleys and the hillsides for miles appeared to be moving masses of caribou … whose numbers could only be reckoned in square miles.”
Joseph, leader of the expedition, conservatively estimated the numbers seen that day at between one and two hundred thousand.
On returning from one of his fruitless overland quests, Ohoto suggested we break camp and travel west, where we would surely meet great herds streaming south past Tulemaliguak (Dubawnt Lake).
Andy and I were easily persuaded. We had kept company with the dead at Kinetua Bay long enough and, caribou aside, I very much wanted to explore the unknown and unmapped country lying between Angikuni and Dubawnt. Furthermore, we were all four of us ravenously meat-hungry.
We set off on July 26 hoping to find a water route to the westward but with no real idea where to look. All we could do was hold as close as possible to the island-shrouded shore of Angikuni in hopes of coming upon a river flowing in from the west.
The morning of our departure was calm, hot, and seething with flies as anxious for the return of the deer as we were. They had been making life hell for us, especially for Tegpa, whose almost-naked little belly was so badly bitten that I sometimes carried him under my summer parka when we went walking. This amused Ohoto, who claimed it confirmed the Inuit belief that white men and dogs had the same mother.
We left the big tent and much of our gear behind, taking with us the small tent; one gun; a few pots and pans; a trolling line; and a grub box containing ten pounds of canned bacon (our ”fat” supply), a bag of flour, some baking powder, tea, and sugar.
With everything aboard, we pushed off and I tried to start our shiny new outboard motor. It at first refused to go, and when it finally did kick over, pissed a stream of gas into the canoe through a hole in the fuel tank.
While Andy and Ohoto paddled manfully to distance us from the pursuing cloud of flies, I dismantled the tank, found the leak, and plugged it with a wad of chewing gum. Then, under a blazing sun, we fled the flies until we found ourselves entering another of Angikuni’s great bays.
This one was so obscured by points, islands, and shimmering mirages it was impossible to make sense out of it. Like rats in a maze we poked around, never knowing whether distant shores were the mainland or more islands, or whether the next opening was a strait or the mouth of the river we hoped to find.
During my long canoe journeys with Charles Schweder the previous year, he had taught me how to ”read water.” Now as we threaded our way through the tangle of islands I kept watching for any indication of current. In mid-afternoon I found what I was looking for: a barely discernible slick in a channel between two of the innumerable islands. We followed this slick into a masked narrows where an actual current became visible, leading us toward a barren island upon whose crest squatted a stone beacon – an inuksuak – semblance of a man.
Passing close below this evidence that other human beings had passed this way, we spotted a strange anomaly on the shore of an island to the northward. It turned out to be an enormous cast-iron cook stove complete with floral castings and nickel-plated ornaments. The presence of such a fuel-guzzling monster here in the heart of the treeless barrens seemed an absolute absurdity. Andy and I were baffled but Ohoto thought he knew the answer.
He deduced that this rusting giant had been the property of a legendary and long-since-dead Kinetuamiut shaman named Kakumee who, many decades earlier, had made a famous winter journey out to the coast of Hudson Bay, where he had met and traded fox pelts with white men. These men may have been traders, but were as likely to have been Yankee whalers wintering aboard their ships. Whoever they were, their affluence so impressed Kakumee that he decided to become an equally Big Man in his own country.
Either through trade or as salvage from a wrecked whaler, he acquired this massive symbol of kablunait wealth and set out to cart it home on his dog sled until, caught by the spring thaw, he had been forced to cache the stove where we had found it. As to why he had never returned for it, Ohoto offered no explanation.
It was a momentous find for us since it indicated the existence of a travel route to the westward. When we climbed to the peak of the island and looked west, we saw the glitter of rapids marking the mouth of a river which Ohoto thought might be one he had heard about in his childhood but had never seen – one that could be followed to Dubawnt Lake.
We headed for the river mouth with high expectations and found it clogged with boulders. Indeed, its lower reaches seemed to consist of an almost continuous shallow rapid, impassable to a canoe the size of ours.
When I asked Ohoto the name of this aquatic obstacle course, he told me Kuwee – Little River. At which I said to Andy:
”Little? It’s no bigger than a goddamn sewer. We haven’t a hope in hell of getting up it to Dubawnt!”
I was wrong. We managed to scrabble up its formidable lower reaches in ice-cold water, towing the canoe as we waded hip-deep, slipping and falling on mossy rocks and batting hopelessly at clouds of mosquitoes and blackflies.
After hours of this torment, we thankfully emerged into a stretch deep enough to float the canoe. This eventually brought us to the shore of a vast watery maze which stretched thirty or more miles to the northward, cradling an indescribable confusion of islands, points, channels and bays and sprawled across an area that, on our map, showed only blank white space.
What I wrote about it in my journal that night may have been somewhat overblown:
To be off-the-map is as thrilling though as disconcerting as peering into the core of some primeval world through a hole in the veil of time and place. I feel irresistibly drawn but scared silly. Like a dumb little dickey bird facing a hungry snake.
Because Ohoto had no personal knowledge of this new water-world and we had no map to guide us, we could only guess which way to go. Where, along hundreds of miles of convoluted shores masked by unnumbered islands, twists, and turns were we to rediscover Kuwee?
The day was almost over and sensibly we should have camped for the night and made our decision in the morning. However, even my usually cautious partner seemed to have been infected by the explorer’s itch.
”Hell’s bells,” said Andy cheerfully. ”There’s open water stretching west from right where we’re at. Let’s just go see what’s on the other side.”
We were in the middle of a broad opening in this unknown lake when a vicious nor’wester struck us. Within minutes the canoe was shipping so much water that even with Andy and Ohoto bailing furiously we could barely keep afloat. I was kept busy
trying to protect the engine from flying spray for, had it stalled, we could easily have broached into waves breaking four or five feet high.
Somehow we managed to claw up upon a gravel reef partway across the big opening. But the waves pounded the canoe ferociously upon the reef and we were forced to drag her over, launch her on the other side, and again take our chances in open water.
We were near to sinking by the time we clawed our way into a cove on the western shore. There, finally, was a deep, vigorous rapid. Surmounting it, we looked around and saw not one but three inuksuak ranged along the ice-scoured bank above us.
Tegpa scrambled ashore desperate to relieve himself. Ohoto followed, waving his paddle at the inuksuak in greeting, or perhaps in gratitude. We had found Kuwee again. Or Kuwee had found us.
We camped below the inuksuak that night and they were very much on my mind as I went to sleep. Those little piles of stones (no more than slight realignments of the bones of the land itself) reassured us that other men had passed this way. Where they had gone, we too would go.
Next morning we ascended Kuwee under power. Using a kicker for upstream canoe work can be exciting. The motor has to be run at full throttle to keep the canoe fishtailing up an unseen incline into a surging torrent. Should the engine fail or the propeller strike a rock and shear a pin, the canoe is likely to be swept broadside and capsized among the river rocks.
We made painfully slow progress. When we halted for the night, cold and soaking from struggling with the river, Andy and I warmed up by climbing a hill to see what we could see.
We were awed to behold, some miles to the west, a mighty expanse of open water stretching to the horizon.
Could this be Tulemaliguak?
We hurried back to camp to ask Ohoto. He could not identify our discovery for he had never seen Tulemaliguak himself. ”Imaha” – perhaps – was the best he could offer.
It rained that night and next morning, and the chill air carried a warning that frost would soon be whitening the tundra. A peculiar inertia seemed to settle over us. Tegpa kept his nose under his curled tail, refusing even to open an eye to greet me as I crawled out of my sleeping bag. Andy and Ohoto were taciturn and seemed depressed. As for me, I had slipped into a mire of black thoughts about my marriage. Perhaps we were all in the grip of the oppressive realization of just how alone we were.
The desire to reach the big lake and our hopes of finding the vanguard of the great herds put us back on the river. Rapids followed rapids. Most were too shallow and shoal-filled to allow us to use the kicker, so we turned to lining – breasting the current while hauling on a tow rope – to drag the canoe inch by inch up interminable runs and chutes against an implacable torrent. Andy and I were wearing rubber-soled boots, which gave us traction and some protection for our feet so we did most of the river work. Ohoto, who had only moccasin-like deerskin kamikpak – thin as chamois – kept pace along the shore, holding a line made fast to the bow with which to take the strain in case we slipped and the river began to sweep the canoe away. To Andy’s and my own amusement, Tegpa elected to ride in the canoe.
”Inuit dogs pull man,” Ohoto remarked a trifle grimly. ”Kablunait men pull dog.”
Progress was painfully slow as we battled a series of heavy rapids. One of these included a chute through which the constricted river flowed too furiously to permit lining up it. We hauled the canoe ashore, and while I went off to look for a portage Andy and Ohoto fished the pool below the rapid, using hooks baited with bits of shiny tin cut from an empty can. Up to this point we had seen no sign of fish in Kuwee and had no idea what we might catch, but we were not about to be choosy. We were tired of flour-and-water bannocks and ready to eat anything with flesh on it.
My search for a portage route took me across a vast bog sloping almost imperceptibly upward. Squelching along, I eventually reached the shore of a lake whose size unnerved me, as did its emptiness. I saw no evidence of life – not even a high-flying gull. The only sound was the threatening mutter of Kuwee’s rapids far behind me.
Looking back, I could see we had been crossing an enormous basin extending out of sight to the north, east, and west, but bounded on the south by high land resembling a distant shore. We did not know it then but we had been travelling across the remnants of an inland sea that a mere ten thousand years earlier had been filled to overflowing by glacial meltwater.
Intimidated by the magnitude of this world of rock and water, I slogged back to the canoe, to find my companions had caught no fish. According to Ohoto, the river spirits were not pleased with us. He seemed so sure of this that Andy and I accepted his demand that we pitch camp for the night. It was the right decision. Early next morning Ohoto gladdened our hearts and stomachs by hauling a ten-pound lake trout out of the pool below the rapid. Roasted over a small fire of moss and willow twigs, it made a splendid breakfast.
With full bellies and restored optimism we returned to the river which now became a veritable chevaux de frise, not of iron spikes but of frost-riven boulders through which even a seal would have had trouble finding a passage. Resignedly we hauled the canoe ashore and began a long portage across the saturated tundra. Eventually we reached the shore of the great lake we had earlier seen, to find it surrounded by a palisade of boulders ten to twenty feet high bulldozed from the bottom by massive ice floes driven ashore by spring storms.
We got the canoe and gear over this barrier and set off under power to coast the northern shore, staying in the lee of the rock dyke for we had not forgotten the malignant wind that had struck us a few days earlier. The height of the dyke almost completely concealed the land to the north, giving me a disquieting sensation of being at the edge of the world, though far to the south we could see smudges on the horizon which could have been either islands or mainland.
During the next two days we found only five breaks in the rocky barrier where we could safely beach the canoe. When we did get ashore, we were dismayed by the bleak aspect of the wastes beyond. All the Others seemed to have abandoned this part of the world. Most ominously, the tundra was unmarred by the intricate network of deer trails imprinted almost everywhere else across the Barren Lands.
Andy and I both became so oppressed by the feeling of being sucked into a lifeless void that we were indepen dently contemplating a retreat to Angikuni, though neither of us was willing to voice his fears aloud. As for Ohoto, he had almost ceased to talk. As time drew on, he withdrew so far into himself as to be virtually unreachable. Our sojourn in a land that even the deer seemed to avoid was plunging him into deep depression.
One day we were hit by a fearsome squall that almost instantly whipped the lake to white fury and might have smashed the canoe had we not been lucky enough to find a break in the boulder dyke through which we could haul her up to safety. Leaving Ohoto to pitch camp, Andy and I set off on foot seeking a vantage point from which to get our bearings. No prominent hills were within reach but the ground sloped slightly upward away from our camp. After squelching across it for several miles, we finally opened a view to the north and west.
We could see now that the shore of the lake we had been travelling upon curved away to a range of shadowy highlands far to the south, and that only a narrow isthmus separated our lake from what seemed to be its twin to the west. Both lakes were big, but not big enough to be the one we sought. However, in the far distant northwest we could just discern what appeared to be a watery expanse so vast it had to be Dubawnt – the Inuit’s Tulemaliguak.
Hurrying back to camp we found Ohoto had killed a sic-sic – a ground squirrel – and was boiling it up with rice for dinner. Although the little creature weighed no more than a pound or two, it was the first fresh meat we had had for many days and it raised our spirits.
We were elated, too, when Ohoto concluded that the enormous body of water to the northwest had to be Tulemaliguak. Furthermore, he also concluded that the lake we were on must be the one known as Nowleye, and its close companion was Kamilikuak which drained into Tulemal
iguak.
Coasting Nowleye’s northwestern shore we happily watched the rock dykes fade away revealing the nature of the land beyond. We were delighted to find it reticulated and patterned by a multitude of caribou trails, both old and new, and to see real trees at both ends of the narrow isthmus separating the twin lakes. There were not many trees, nor were they large, but they tempted us to go ashore where we soon had a big and wasteful fire crackling and the tea pail boiling.
The strip of land separating Nowleye from Kamilikuak extended from north to south for six or seven miles and at its narrowest point was about a mile wide. It was the only dry land between the Kazan and Dubawnt river systems.
This low and boggy isthmus was a natural causeway across which migrating caribou had funnelled during their great annual treks spanning countless millennia. In many places their passing had churned the peaty soil to mire and worn ruts down to deeply scarred bedrock.
Ohoto was ecstatic at the sight of the tangle of tuktu trails.
”Kinetuamiut often talked about this place – the deer’s way. My father, Elaitutna, came here many times as his father had done, and his father, because tuktu never failed to come here too, travelling between the salt water in the north and the forests in the south.
”Soon, they will come again….”
– 22 –
MASTER OF THE BARREN LANDS
We pitched our tent on a slight rise in the middle of the isthmus – a vantage point from which Kamilikuak stretched westward to the horizon, bounded by high hills to the south and rock-strewn plains to the north. The southern portion looked less forbidding so we launched the canoe on it and set off to explore.