by Farley Mowat
”I’ll do what I can,” he said crisply. ”You can depend on it.”
Within the hour he had arranged for Gunnar’s Norseman to be fuelled with enough RCAF avgas for a return flight to Windy River, at no cost either to Gunnar or to me.
And he did more – much more.
Risking severe consequences for misusing government and military property, he arranged the immediate delivery to the Ingebritsons’ home of twelve .303 service rifles together with an entire case of ammunition. And, in the event these might not reach the Inuit in time to ensure an adequate supply of deer skins, he added forty brand-new woollen battledress trousers and jackets.
”Won’t keep them as warm as caribou skin,” he apologized, ”but better than a kick in the arse from those buffoons in Ottawa.”
It may well be that the Ihalmiut survived the winter that lay ahead of them that year because of Donald Cameron.
Frances had very little opportunity to acclimatize herself to Churchill. On September 9 Gunnar roused us early and we hastened out to Landing Lake, where the Norseman waited, fully fuelled and loaded. We lifted off in fair visibility but within twenty minutes clouds had forced us down to less than a thousand feet. A cautious pilot would probably have turned back. Not Gunnar. We pressed on, catching only blurred glimpses of a world of rock and water close below us. Nervous enough on my own account, I was apprehensive about how Fran would react. To my relief and admiration, she took it in stride. Holding my hand tightly and leaning close she yelled into my ear: ”If Gunnar goes any closer I’ll pick a flower!”
For the first time since suggesting that she come north with me, I could believe it had been the right decision.
Three hours after takeoff, the Norseman slid over the crest of the Caribou Hills to splash down in the cove at the mouth of Windy River. Fran never afterwards revealed what her feelings were as I popped open the cabin door and she peered out at the rain-swept vista of rock, water, and tundra surrounding us.
Not having received my radio message, Andy had no forewarning of our arrival. He and Alekahaw, one of the younger Ihalmiut, had been upriver fishing when the distinctive snarl of the Norseman’s engine brought their canoe belting downstream so recklessly they barely avoided colliding with the plane.
Draped in soaking-wet, patched, and filthy attigi (summer parkas), they were a hard-looking pair, wild-eyed and long-haired. Fran eyed them tentatively while we hurriedly ferried gear, freight, and ourselves ashore.
The exterior of Fran’s new home was unprepossessing enough, but the inside must have truly appalled her. At the best of times Andy was not much of a housekeeper, and during the past two weeks he had been entertaining a throng of hungry Inuit visitors. The dark and dank interior looked and smelled almost as much like a bear’s den as a human habitation.
Tegpa did his best to brighten the moment by deciding he had been born to be Fran’s dog. He set out to prove it by furiously licking her face, which I think may have been as wet with tears as with rain and dog spittle.
Alekahaw also accepted Fran unreservedly. In fact, he was so smitten by the first white woman he had ever seen that within twenty-four hours he had intimated a willingness to exchange wives with me. At least that is what I, with my imperfect knowledge of his language, thought he had in mind. Fran’s response when I told her about the offer was that perhaps we ought to get to know each other a little better first. I concluded she was making a good adjustment to local mores.
Andy’s reception of her was polite but reserved. Her unexpected and uninvited arrival posed all sorts of problems for him, but these he decided to set aside for the moment.
There was work to be done.
We had first to ready the relief supplies for distribution to the Ihalmiut. The supplies consisted principally of a fifty-pound drum of powdered milk, two hundred pounds of flour, some lard, and two bundles of clothing. To our distress the milk powder proved to be so old and rancid as to be inedible. Much of the flour had been water damaged and had set as hard as stone. The two bundles of ”clothing” contained tattered underwear apparently salvaged from some government institution – possibly a prison – before being consigned to the RCMP for distribution to needy natives.
We destroyed the milk and made a pile of legless, armless, torn-and-worn underwear from which the Inuit could help themselves if they so chose. Few did.
These disappointments were offset by Colonel Cameron’s magnificent gift of twelve gleaming, well-oiled army rifles and the supply of ammunition that came with them. Alekahaw was rendered speechless by such largesse.
Watching his face, I concluded that whatever might befall the Ihalmiut in the future, this coming winter was not destined to be their last.
Next morning Alekahaw hurried off to the Inuit camps to spread the news that I had returned with rifles and shells enough to ensure the success of the autumnal deer hunt. He assured us he would be back at Windy in a few days accompanied by all the men.
We put that interval to good use making our home habitable. Andy and I laboured long and hard cutting wood and getting water then, with the old stove heated almost red hot, we turned the cabin into a kind of northern steam laundry. While I scrubbed a lifetime’s accumulation of dirt and grease off the split-log floor, Fran scraped and washed our sparse collection of battered cooking utensils, tin cups, plates, and cutlery. Then she boiled the towels, socks, and anything else that still looked strong enough to survive immersion in hot water.
Once a degree of cleanliness had been achieved, Fran spread some caribou hides on the floor and on the benches that served as beds and seats, organized the ”kitchen corner” to her liking, and hung up a few flowered dishtowels she had brought from Toronto, to serve as window curtains.
I spent most of one day constructing a seat for the backhouse (a simple two-by-four no longer seemed adequate) and in contriving a sort of door for this well-ventilated structure. Then Andy and I devoted a day in a freezing drizzle to waterproofing the cabin roof with tarpaper I had brought in from Churchill. This was especially needful over the cabin’s back room (which was to be Fran’s and my bedroom) because, although it had originally been roofed with caribou hides, these had become so porous that rain and snow easily found a way through them.
This windowless back room, originally the Schweders’ storeroom, was ankle deep in decaying pieces of hides, mildewed scraps of clothing, rotting fragments of cardboard cartons, and unidentifiable muck and mush. The stink was almost palpable. I forbade Fran even to enter until I had cleaned it out, rigged up a double bed of sorts, and attempted – none too successfully – to mask the stench with a sprinkling of carbolic acid. If Fran had rejected this nuptial chamber out of hand, I would not have been at all surprised. I was surprised, and happily so, when she mustered a somewhat wan smile and pronounced it to be ”quite cozy.”
Having surmounted the first hurdles facing her, she now faced the challenge of coming to terms with the land. This was made easier by the onset of a spell of good weather following a sharp frost. Overnight the shrubbery on the Barrens flamed with autumnal colours almost as spectacular as those of the hardwoods of Ontario. Moreover, the frost seemed to have triggered the southern migration of the caribou, and forerunners of the great herds soon appeared at Windy River.
One fine day Fran and I took the canoe to visit the wolf den at Smith House Bay. She proved adept with the paddle and was curious about everything around her. Although nobody was home at the wolf den, the vast sweep of plains to the northward was crawling with serpentine lines of caribou. Fran was spellbound by them.
”The ground seems to be moving,” she said in a hushed voice. ”Almost as if it’s alive. It’s really worth coming all this way to see it.”
This appreciation of a world so foreign to her seemed con firmation of my hopes that our future together might not be as uncertain as it had seemed only a few days earlier. My optimism grew during succeeding days as we explored the edge of Hidden Valley, fished for grayling in Windy River, spied on
a dun-coloured arctic fox not yet in his white winter coat, captured live lemmings, stalked ptarmigan, and made love on the soft lichens in a hidden cleft in the Caribou Hills.
Fran was interested in the work Andy and I were doing though repelled by the killing it entailed. She could not accept that so many deer had to be butchered for, as Andy put it, ”the good of the species.”
”Can’t you find out what you need to know by watching them?” Fran asked. ”We don’t kill people to find out what makes them tick, do we?”
I avoided a direct reply but Andy accepted the challenge.
”Suppose science did limit itself to studying living animals in their natural state, we would need hundreds more scientists to dig out all the data we need to set up effective management programs and protect the caribou herds. We don’t have that many trained zoologists so if we have to kill some deer in order to get the data … well, Fran, that’s just the way it has to be.”
Although she may not have been fully convinced, Frances showed no compunction about cooking or eating caribou meat. In fact, she took over the cook’s job so effectively that within a week she was even baking bread, something she had never done before.
I had feared Andy might resent her arrival but he showed no sign of doing so. To the contrary, he was exceptionally sympathetic to her problems.
I was less sympathetic to his, wilfully so. I did not let myself consider what his inner feelings might be at finding himself, a sexually vigorous young male, the odd man out in a potential but unrealized ménage à trois.
Fran’s problems were of a different kind. During the early hours before one bitterly cold dawn, I was awakened by what I thought were raindrops penetrating the roof to patter onto our shared sleeping bag. I reached for a flashlight and by its pale shimmer discovered we were being subjected to a living rain of small white worms – maggots no less. It took me only moments to realize they were blowfly larvae that had been prospering in the rotting deer hides on the roof until an especially cold night had driven them to seek a warmer haven down below.
I did not find the sight of them particularly repulsive, and might even have felt sorry for them had not Frances chosen that moment to awaken. Although she neither screamed nor panicked, she was not well pleased. I shepherded her into the main cabin, where she spent the rest of the night in the bunk there that had formerly been mine. Andy, bless him, got up, lit the stove, and made her a soothing cup of cocoa.
While we had been settling in, Alekahaw had carried the word to the Ihalmiut that I was back, with a white wife and a planeload of treasures. Every able male in the camps immediately set off for Windy Cabin. Ohoto was the first to arrive. He brought gifts: two wolf skins for me and a precious deer tongue for Fran, which would have been the Inuit equivalent of a box of Swiss chocolates.
Ohoto and Fran established an instant rapport. That very evening he began teaching her how to make pornographic string figures, while she responded by brewing gallons of tea for him.
Next day Fran and I trekked far out into the Barrens to watch herds of buck deer go drifting by. Their enormous racks of antlers – now free of velvet – gleamed as if polished and clicked and clacked against one another with a sound like castanets. The rut was about to begin, and soon the plains would echo to the sound and fury of a spectacularly horny multitude.
While we watched the passing parade of caribou, a human figure appeared over a distant ridge and trotted toward us. It was Ohoto’s cousin, Halo, also bearing gifts, including a tuglee, a delicately carved woman’s hair ornament of antler bone that he shyly gave Fran. He told us most of the other men were close behind.
By midnight the cabin was bulging. In addition to Ohoto and Halo, Fran found herself entertaining Alekahaw, Ootek, Onekwa, Yaha, and Yaha’s six-year-old son, Alektaiuwa. The stove glowed as Fran produced a torrent of tea, not just steeped but boiled in a five-gallon pail and served in whatever mugs, pots, and old tin cans could be found. Andy and I provided tobacco, and every Inuit, including young Alektaiuwa, lit up a stone pipe.
For a young woman from a middle-class Toronto milieu, Fran not only appeared surprisingly at ease, she seemed to be having the time of her life. Despite the fact that she spoke not a word of Inuktitut, and none of the Ihalmiut but Ohoto had a word of English, she and our guests got along so famously that the Great Inaugural Tea Party, as we later called it, lasted until dawn, when we finally packed our guests off so we could catch a few hours’ sleep.
As more Ihalmiut arrived, they also became Frances’s admirers, guests, and helpers. Ohoto and Ootek took over our fish nets and every morning brought in more trout and whitefish than all of us could use. Others roamed the plains, armed now with new rifles and ample ammunition, and saw to it that our larder was overstocked with meat. Youngsters scoured the Windy River valley for wood to keep the big cook stove glowing and so ensure there would always be tea ”on tap.”
Our social life became positively hectic. Every evening (and at frequent intervals during most days) the cabin would become crowded; tea would flow, and conversation, storytelling, Inuit drum-dancing, kablunait singing, laughter, and high spirits would erupt and continue until, having had enough, we would shepherd our ebullient guests out the door and thankfully crawl into our sleeping bags. The Ihalmiut proved themselves indefatigable party-goers.
The boy Alektaiuwa became Fran’s inseparable companion. One day he took her to nearby Soapstone Point to demonstrate his expertise as a hand-line fisher. Using a spinner I had given him, he hooked a twenty-three-pound lake trout that he did not have the strength to pull ashore. He and the fish engaged in a desperate tug-of-war. The fish fought silently but Alex shouted so loudly in his incongruously gruff voice that everyone within hearing turned out to watch the duel.
Alex eventually dragged the great fish to within a few feet of shore where, in a last act of desperation, it snatched the line right out of the boy’s hands. Without hesitation he plunged into the river to grapple with the fleeing fish. When his chilled fingers proved in capable of maintaining a grip, he sank his teeth into its tail and, sitting shoulder-deep in the fast-flowing and icy water, held on for dear life.
At this juncture Fran fearlessly waded in and stunned the fish with a rock and together, they hauled their prize ashore. Thereafter, boy and woman became such fast friends that on occasion I had to chase the lad out of our room to keep him from sharing the bed with us.
Life for Fran as the centre of attention from ten males (including Tegpa) seemed to imbue her with an energy and vivacity I had not seen before. However, as September drew on the days began to darken. All our Inuit visitors departed for their own camps, armed with new rifles and anxious to get on with the hunt upon which their survival depended. They would have no more time for visiting until late November, when their meat caches should be full and the tuktu herds would have abandoned the Barren Lands.
By then we, too, expected to be gone. The original plan had been to have Gunnar fly us south to Brochet early in October, to take up quarters in the heart of the caribou winter range. But as time passed we began to wonder if this plan could be realized. Since our little radio produced only ominous silence or bursts of crackling static, we had no way of knowing what was happening ”outside” and when, or even if, the Department intended to implement the plan.
Andy and I knew that unless we were flown out before freeze-up we would be stranded at Windy Cabin until the ice on the bay could support a ski-equipped plane.
So while trying to avoid alarming Frances, we began making surreptitious preparations for a prolonged stay. We spent weary hours in the little copses scattered along the river valley cutting and stacking wood to be hauled back to the cabin on hand sleds once sufficient snow had fallen. Closer to home we netted scores of trout and whitefish. These we gutted, split, and racked to dry or freeze in an outhouse in which we also hung haunches of deer meat and strings of ptarmigan.
Impelled by primal instinct we, like all the Others around us, were working compulsi
vely to ensure survival during the dark and hungry times that would soon be upon us.
We could not conceal what we were doing from Frances and she grew increasingly uneasy. The absence of other human beings, the disappearance of the deer (together with most other visible forms of life), and the imminence of arctic winter heightened her anxiety until she began slipping back into the quagmire of depression that had engulfed her before my visit to Toronto.
She was not the only one of us with problems.
Andy had about had his fill of ”studies in the field” and was itching to return to university to process his data and get on with acquiring his degree. Furthermore, he and I were increasingly at odds over my growing suspicion that science was not necessarily the absolute source of truth and understanding. During one of our disagreements about what I had begun to disparagingly refer to as the New Religion, I accused my friend of becoming a ”fact addict.” To which he heatedly replied that I was allowing myself to be led astray by ”sheer emotionalism and an addiction to fairy tales.”
Whatever his reasons (sexual frustration may have been one of them) the gap between us widened until a day late in September when he announced he would not go to Brochet but would return to Toronto when Gunnar came for us.
I ought to have felt bad about this, and how it might affect our friendship but I was more worried that Fran would want to return to Toronto.
As autumn slid precipitately toward winter, Fran took to spending more and more of her time in bed, seemingly immersed in one of our few books. Occasionally I was able to persuade her to go for a short trip in the canoe or a walk over the ridges behind the cabin, where hundreds of cackling ptarmigan were assembling before heading south. However, such interludes gave her no real relief. Only Tegpa seemed able to lighten my wife’s inner darkness.
Andy was now spending most of his waking hours out on the land gathering data about food available to caribou in winter. When at the cabin he isolated himself, doing analysis of tissue samples or identifying and preserving caribou parasites. I chiefly occupied myself with camp chores and with my journals, while remaining ever alert for the distant whine of an aircraft engine.