The Long Exile

by Melanie McGrath

  The return of the sun spurred the detachment into action on behalf of the Flahertys. Not long after the first sunrise, Bob Pilot appeared to ask the Flaherty family to move. Corporal Sargent had decided that losephie would take Thomasie Amagoalik's place as the detachment's storeman. The job involved stacking shelves, counting stock and keeping the store clean. In return for his labour, losephie Flaherty would receive a small wage and the right to live in the store-man's hut beside the detachment building. Thomasie Amagoalik would have to return to the camp and make his living once more on the land. Corporal Sargent was insistent. He did not want any starvation cases on his hands, and the Flahertys' situation was more desperate than the Amagoaliks'. For now, there was help at hand. The Flaherty family had won a reprieve. Later Josephie Flaherty would have to learn to grasp their new situation. He was Inuk, and to the planners in the Department this meant that sooner or later he would have to support his family by hunting and trapping.

  And so the Flahertys moved into the hut beside the detachment building and found themselves in the strange position of having gone full circle, only it was a very odd kind of circle indeed which had taken them so far from home. For the first time in months, Josephie seemed a little more like his usual self. The family relaxed. Their new situation did not put them out of danger altogether and they were still hungry, but it at least meant they were unlikely to die of starvation any time soon. Bit by bit they began gathering their strength and after a month or so had passed and they felt settled in the hut, Josephie and Rynee turned their attentions to their missing daughter, Mary. Josephie still found it too painful to speak much about the little girl, though Rynee always knew when he was thinking about her because he would pace up and down the hut with his eyes gazing at nothing, his paddle hands tied in knots behind his back. But he could never bring himself to ask Corporal Sargent or Constable Pilot for news. In all his years, he had spoken out only once, and he had lost his job as a result. He remained mute, at least in front of qalunaat, but Rynee said afterwards that there was not a day when they did not think about their daughter, miss her desperately and long for news of her return.

  At the detachment, Constable Bob Pilot readied himself for the spring patrol. The patrol carried the settlement's mail and official documents to Resolute Bay and it was also the chance for the detachment constables from Craig Harbour and Alexandra Fiord (which had been re-established after Henry Larsen had failed to reach it in the d'Iberville) to take their annual southern leave. The patrol took about ten weeks, two weeks or so to get from Craig Harbour to Resolute, six weeks while the Mounties were in the south, then a further two weeks for the return trip to Craig Harbour. Royal Canadian Mounted Police rules stated that qalunaat police must always be accompanied by at least one Inuit guide when they were out on patrol. On short trips this would be Special Constable Kayak, but Sargent did not like him to be away from the detachment for long periods and so for the spring patrol he generally hired two guides, who were also dog-team drivers, from among the Inuit living at the camp on Ellesmere Island. This year he asked losephie Flaherty. There was a small stipend attached to the work and Sargent knew losephie needed the money. The other Inuk would be Simon Akpaliapik from Pond Inlet.

  The four men, Bob Pilot, the Mountie from Alexandra Fiord, losephie Flaherty and Simon Akpaliapik, started out on a fine day at the beginning of March. They headed west to Cape Storm and crossed Iones Sound, reaching West Fiord on Devon Island at the end of the third day. The going on Devon was tough, but they got across without incident and continued on south along the west coast, stopping every night in a temporary snowhouse to rest the dogs and catch a few hours' sleep before setting off again in the early morning. It was light almost twenty-four hours a day now, and in good weather they would make the most of the sun by skipping a night or two's rest and taking it in turns to cat nap on the komatiks. So they made good progress and in ten days they had reached Beechey Island off the southwest tip of Devon Island and were navigating their way across the sea ice when a fierce wind started up and the two Mounties became disorientated in blowing snow and lost their bearings. Visibility was poor and the wind was loud enough to drown out the men's whistles and, for quite a while, losephie and Simon carried on, unaware that the two Mounties were no longer following. When they finally realised they could neither see nor hear the men, they stopped their komatik and called and whistled for them, but by now the wind was at such a pitch that it blanked out any human noise and the ashy air made it impossible to see farther than their own hands. The two Inuit had no idea when they had become separated, but they knew that in the current conditions the Mounties were in a great deal of danger. There was no horizon or coastline to be seen now and their tracks were covered by snow almost the instant they made them. The Mounties' compasses would be no good to them at this latitude and they would not be able to get a purchase on the sun. The qalunaat would quite likely get themselves tangled in the weather and perhaps forget the first rule of Arctic survival: to build a shelter in a lee and sit out the storm.

  The two Inuit decided to begin a methodical search for the missing men. Dividing the area between them, they walked in diminishing circles, looking for tracks or any other sign that the men might have passed that way. The wind was gusting so strongly now that it was often hard to stay upright and they were being pelted with snow and pieces of ice. Wet snow heaped rapidly into piles, making the going very difficult. For hours they searched, calling and whistling, until the ominous heat of frostbite began to bother their fingers and toes. The coastline of Devon Island loomed out of the fog and they realised they had gone the wrong way and there was little hope for the qalunaat. They could barely breathe now for the force of the wind. It was hopeless. The world round them had been transformed into a vast spectral city of snowy towers. No human being could live for long outside in such conditions and the two men considered that it was time to look to their own survival.

  They were about to give up the search and build a snowhouse for themselves when the dogs alerted them to two nearby mounds. They approached and, scraping at the soft snow, not knowing what they would find, the two Inuit came at last on the bodies of the two Mounties, alive but sliding in and out of consciousness. With hail and snow pounding their heads and the wind punching their faces, the two Inuit men untied two caribou skins from their komatiks, wrapped their charges in them and placed them beside the dogs for warmth, then they pulled out their snowknives and began to cut snowblocks for a snowhouse. The snow was wet and unstable but it was all they had and they worked with it as best they could, finally fashioning a small dome with a rudimentary entrance tunnel. The two Inuit dragged the policemen inside and brewed up some hot tea. The Mounties were shaken and a little frostbitten but the tea seemed to revive them very quickly and it did not look as though they had suffered any permanent injury.

  For three days the storm continued to blow and the four men holed up inside the dome, surviving on tea and pemmican and sleeping sitting up because there was no space for them all to lie down. To occupy themselves the two Inuit sang songs and told stories, and although each had only a rudimentary grasp of the other's dialect, the stories and the songs helped muffle the tormented screams of the wind and the terrified whimpering of the dogs.

  When the travellers failed to arrive at Resolute Bay on the appointed day, Ross Gibson of the Resolute detachment sent out a couple of Inuit men to look for tracks. When the scouts returned, saying the wind had blown so much snow across the sea ice that there would be no prospect of picking up any tracks, he radioed headquarters to ask for advice and was told to hold fast for a couple of days and see if the expedition turned up. Until the weather conditions improved it would be pointless sending out a rescue team by land and too dangerous to scramble a plane.

  It was Ross Gibson's final year in the Resolute detachment. He had asked for a transfer and was due to be posted back to Inukjuak in 1957. The years since his first arrival in 1953 had been the most formative ones not only of his c
areer, but, in all probability, of his life. Under the most difficult conditions and with virtually no backup or support from the RCMP in Ottawa, Gibson had helped construct in Resolute a community from what was initially a holding camp. And while it was true that his idea of what the “natives” needed or wanted was primitive and arrogant, no one could have accused him of being cynical or lazy. It was he who had come up with the idea of clearing out an old toilet block and using it as a community room and rudimentary school. It was he, too, who had written to the Coca-Cola company and persuaded them to send pencils and he who had suggested that Leah Idlout from Pond Inlet be allowed to teach Resolute's Inuit children. He had encouraged the migrants to make a camp of scrap-lumber huts and advised the Department not to waste money on sending prefabs when the Inuit were so resourceful with what discarded planks and packing crates were already at the air-force dump. Once the huts were up, he had even had each fitted with its own single light bulb and connected up the ionosphere station's electricity supply (Gibson felt one light bulb per household was plenty for the native home).

  Never a man to take much account of the bigger picture, Ross Gibson was supremely proud of his achievements. In his view, he had had to pay a high price for them. His knees were acting up from having to scramble in and out of snowhouses to check on whether or not things had been taken from the air-force dumps and his skin, which had always been delicate, was now so roughened and sore from the dry, High Arctic winds that it regularly broke out into bloody rashes. He had lost the one great battle Henry Larsen had laid at his door: to protect the innocence of the Inuit and keep them away from the air base. Worse still, the many hours and days and years of intense scrutiny the endeavour had taken had left him worn and anxious. His superiors had admonished him for poor record-keeping and blocked his promotion but he remained resolutely unrepentant about his actions. He sensed, in the way that only someone who has been pushed to the edge of his limits can sense, that he had done his best. He did not regret his time in Resolute Bay, not yet anyway, and the Arctic was still the place he most wanted to be, but it was time to return to Inukjuak where conditions were easier. Until then he intended to keep things ticking over for the next man. He was keen not to leave behind a legacy of incompetence or recklessness, but that would be what would happen if the spring patrol failed to show.

  On the fourth day, the four travellers woke to a changed world. The storm had abated and everything was silent and swollen where the snow clung to it. It was time to move on. The men brewed some tea and got their bearings, then broke camp, harnessed the dogs and began to move slowly out across the wet snow. The animals struggled through the deeps and the men had to whip them on, but they soon sensed they were nearing their destination and began to pull with the great, life-affirming enthusiasm only Arctic dogs know. The men, exhausted, could do nothing but cling to the komatiks and hope.

  At Resolute Bay the detachment had begun to consider the real possibility that the men were dead. Then someone at camp spotted something moving at a distance on the ice. The movement resolved into what looked like two tiny specks. A couple of scouts went out on a komatik and returned, saying the specks were definitely dog teams, but it was hard to know how many men were with them. Ross Gibson fetched his binoculars and trained them on the horizon, but it was the Inuit who first identified the party as the missing patrol. They loaded their guns, put bannock bread in their parkas and went out to meet it.

  Later, in the safety of the Resolute Bay detachment, the two Mounties related the tale of the storm. Even now, Bob Pilot underplays the danger he was in, but he felt sufficiently grateful to Simon Akpaliapik and Josephie Flaherty at the time to give them a knife and a watch as thanks and it seems clear that the two Inuit saved the Mounties' lives. The policemen flew south shortly after and for the next six weeks, Simon and losephie stayed at Resolute Bay, hunting for their own food and for the dogs and waiting for the return of the constables from the south.

  The journey back to Grise Fiord was uneventful enough, though it was so cold that the men coughed blood. Sometime in late April they saw the cliffs of Ellesmere Island come into view and a tremendous sense of relief fell across the party that the journey was finally over. Rynee Flaherty later said her husband was so cold from the trip that his muscles convulsed for two or three days. Not long after their arrival Josephie Flaherty and Simon Akpaliapik went to collect their money from Corporal Sargent. They had agreed a fee of C$5 a day while out on patrol and though they were not to be paid for their six-week stay at Resolute Bay, their families were given rations while they were gone. Energised by the rescue, the two men asked if Sargent might consider giving them another C$10, in recognition of their endeavours. Simon Akpaliapik recalled later that Sargent stared at them for a while, then he turned and went back into his warm, heated quarters and very firmly closed the door. It was dishonourable, Sargent thought, to expect payment in such circumstances. The two Inuit never received any extra money for their efforts and from then on, when it came to dealing with qalunaat, Josephie Flaherty most often kept his mouth shut.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  BY 1958, what had begun five years before as a makeshift camp on a lonely outcrop on Ellesmere Island had grown into a more permanent-looking settlement of wooden-framed huts neatly positioned along the beach beside Grise Fiord. The settlement could almost have been any one of the many remote hamlets dotted about Arctic Canada, though no other hamlet in Canada had a backdrop as fearsome as this, no other was more isolated or more northerly, there was no other where survival came at such a high price. Grise Fiord was as far from anywhere as anywhere could be. No one came to the tiny settlement and no one left it. It was a staging post to nowhere, its inhabitants a group of obscure flags fluttering in a forlorn breeze.

  It was midsummer, the sun had stirred the damp inside the huts, and most families had moved into canvas tents. The Flahertys were living next door to the Aqiatusuks and losephie Flaherty was back making his living on the land. He had his own dog team now and a komatik made from scrap lumber. Otherwise, things were much the same. All the hardships of the earlier years remained: the harshness of the climate, the struggle to hunt and trap, the numbing dark and isolation and the persistent failure of supplies. What had changed was that losephie had given up on the promise of a good life and had learned to adapt to what was before him, so that the situation no longer felt like a game he was bound to lose. He could tolerate his new life only by giving up any dreams he might have had for it. He longed, now, only to be reunited with Mary, and to go home. He and Rynee rarely spoke about Inukjuak and the families they had left behind, nor about Mary or Paddy Aqiatusuk whose absences were acknowledged only in so far as they were understood to be too painful to be named. He and Rynee were talking less and less now about everything. Mostly, Rynee left Josephie alone. His moods had become frightening. Day after day he waited for news from the detachment that they would be returning to Inukjuak, but so far no such news had come. He still had not asked after Mary, too fearful of the response he might get. Instead he brooded, drifting out across the seas of his imagination, where no one else could reach him.

  Nineteen fifty-eight became a turning point for the inhabitants of Grise Fiord. On 27 luly of that year, only a few days before ship time, Thomasie Amagoalik rose early from his tent to go out hunting. His two sons, Allie, aged twelve, and Salluviniq, aged nine, were keen to accompany their father but Thomasie did not want his sons holding him up and told the boys to stay in camp. Sometime later that morning, after their father had left, Allie and Salluviniq spotted their cousins, Elisapee Novalinga and Larry Audlaluk, carrying their sculpin lines and hooks. In any ordinary situation the boys might not have bothered with sculpin fish which were as wiry as bunch grass, but luly was a thin month for hunting on Ellesmere and the Amagoaliks were hungry and the children reasoned that if their father returned from his hunt empty-handed, they might at least have some fish soup to eat and so they begged their mother to let them go along with Elisapee and
Larry to try their luck.

  The Amagoalik boys were not dressed for a day out so Elisapee and Larry agreed to wait while they put on their outdoor clothes. It was a long wait. The boys' mother, Mary Amagoalik, had made her children a new set of caribou trousers and parkas but, at the request of the detachment who liked their “natives” to look their best for the benefit of the visiting Department officials and police officers, she was saving these for ship time. Until the arrival of the C. D. Howe, the two boys would have to manage with their rags, arranging the torn layers in such a way that the holes did not leave parts of their bodies exposed because, even in July, the weather at Grise Fiord was unpredictable. Before they left, their mother reminded them to stay close to the others and come home the moment they felt cold.

  The four children made their way across the plateau and along the folds of the cliffs into the fiord. As a precaution, they kept to the ice foot under the rocks, where the ice was ancient and never melted. The plan was to walk to the spot where a little stream emptied out on to the scree. It would lead them to a brackish inlet where sculpin sometimes gathered and where they could cut a hole through the ice and sink their lines. Elisapee and Larry had been to the place many times and knew it well. The weather on this day was fair and the way was unobstructed by meltwater or rockfall, and by mid-morning the children had reached the inlet. There they stayed for a few hours, playing games with bones they found and waiting for the fish to appear, but by the afternoon when they had caught very little and were all beginning to feel hungry and cold, Elisapee suggested they go home. The two Amagoalik boys were not content to return without bringing some fish, however, and made up their minds to go looking elsewhere, so Larry and Elisapee turned back to camp, leaving Allie and Salluviniq to work their way deeper into the fiord.