Eastern Passage, Page 3

During the long winter evenings Fran and I were often visited by neighbours, both white and native, or went visiting them. Few owned radios so conversation was the entertainment. They were exceptional storytellers, and even most of the youngsters had good tales to tell. After these visits, I would sometimes stay up past midnight, scribbling notes about travellers, hunters, missionaries, trappers, lovers, and losers; about Cree, Idthen Eldeli, Metis and whites, and the lives they led.

  A bent toward writing was increasingly preoccupying me, and Fran’s suggestion that I might have it in me to become a full-time writer seemed almost credible. I began spending a lot more time at my portable typewriter than in filling notebooks with scientific data as a dedicated biologist would have done. Of particular moment, I started expanding an account I had sketched earlier about the terrible events the year before that had decimated the Barren Land Inuit – especially the Ihalmiut of the Kazan River country.

  By mid-November I had what I thought might be a publishable account of this disaster so, with Fran’s encouragement and acting on the assumption that I might as well start at the top, I titled it Eskimo Spring, addressed it to the editor of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly magazine in Boston, USA, and sent it off with the next mail plane.

  Then, feeling cocky at having perhaps loosened the fetters binding me to Ottawa, I decided to take a week off and travel by dog team to South End, a hundred and fifty miles away to see how the caribou, wolves, and people to the south were making out.

  I borrowed a dog team and carriole from Shorty Laird, a white trapper temporarily laid up with a bad leg, and made ready to depart one crystalline morning with the mercury registering thirty below and just a breath of wind.

  Shorty’s eight dogs had been tied up for three weeks and were wild to run. It took me and two teenaged helpers half an hour to manhandle them into the harness, attaching them to the fifteen-foot-long carriole, which held my grub box, fifty pounds of frozen fish for dog feed, my sleeping bag and rifle, and a small packsack of odds and ends. I had tied the carriole to a stump while we harnessed the dogs, but somebody prematurely slipped the securing knot and, before I could jump aboard, the dogs were off like cannonballs. A fifty-foot brake rope was always towed behind the carriole in case of such emergencies, and I just managed to grab the free end as it whipped by and wrap it around one wrist, after which I was dragged through the settlement on my back at about thirty miles an hour.

  Somehow I managed to swing myself around so I could use my feet as a brake. This got me nowhere and, once the dogs had dragged me onto the slick lake ice, there remained no further possibility of stopping or even slowing them. Nevertheless, I hung on for perhaps a quarter of a mile, while my arms felt as if they were being wrenched from their sockets; then I let go.

  I got shakily to my feet as carriole and dogs grew small in the distance. Looking back, I could see a small troop of neighbours ranged along the shore, motionless as gargoyles but undoubtedly enjoying to the full the spectacular discomfiture of the tenderfoot.

  As I limped grimly back to make arrangements for a search team to pursue the runaways, I knew I had secured a permanent place in Brochet’s panoply of stories.

  The cold intensified as December settled in, and the mud chinking of our cabin could not keep it out. Although the indoor temperature at waist level remained tolerable, water spilled on the floor froze almost immediately.

  Slipping on a patch of this instant ice brought me inspiration. I began saving our waste water, which I then heated in galvanized pails on the back of the stove. When I had a couple of full pails ready, I would carry them outside, add as much snow as possible, then slather this slush on the outer walls of the house, where it froze instantly. When our cabin was ice-sheathed up to the level of the ceiling, it became much more liveable. Soon almost every cabin in Brochet acquired similar igloo-like armour and my stock went up a little.

  In mid-December a small bush plane belonging to one of Isaac Schieff’s many interlocking little companies slithered to a halt on the ice of Brochet Bay to unload freight for his trading post, together with some mail.

  There were letters for both Fran and me – not all bearing good news. A stiffly worded epistle from the University of Toronto informed me that my college had decided not to let me complete my current year extramurally – an arrangement that had been agreed upon before I went north in the spring of 1947. I was on notice that if I wanted a degree I would have to resume classes in Toronto by mid-January of the coming year.

  Fran was outraged by what we both felt was a low blow, but I had mixed feelings. I had always known that a career in science would require me to obtain a bachelor’s degree, then a master’s, and finally a doctorate, but this academic climb to success had never had any attraction for me. Now I was tempted to use this setback as an excuse for abandoning academe altogether and becoming an unfettered “naturalist” able – perhaps – to make a living studying the wild ones alive and in the wild. I might have done it then and there had not Frances been dubious.

  Schieff’s plane’s principal cargo was liquor, and most of the customers celebrated fiercely over the next several days and nights, turning Brochet into Bedlam. Guns blasted salutes at all hours – and not all were aimed at nothing. To Father Egenolf’s helpless fury, several bullet holes appeared in the steeple of his new church.

  Fights erupted between employees and adherents of the Bay and of Schieff’s company. Combatants included white and Metis trappers, together with drifters from a commercial fishing venture Schieff had started. The hullabaloo was enough to put the caribou and wolf populations to flight and even to persuade many of the resident ravens to seek safety in the woods.

  One night, when the temperature had sunk to forty-five below zero, two Metis men failed to find their way home after a bash at Schieff’s and froze to death. I thought it a wonder more did not meet a similar fate. Indeed, Fran and I thawed out and resuscitated one unfortunate who, wearing little more than a flannel shirt and torn trousers, passed out in a snowdrift near our cabin. Had Tegpa not drawn our attention to him, he might never have awakened.

  Our concern about what was going on was not shared by others. When I spoke about it to Jim Cummins, the game warden, who was also the magistrate, he offered this nonchalant advice.

  “Don’t let it bother you. If people gets enough liquor into them they’ll stay warm even if hell freezes over. Anyhow, this lot of booze’ll run out soon enough, then they’ll quiet down.”

  Binge drinking and wild parties were not the worst of it. Fran was unnerved and I was infuriated by the hostility unleashed by some “under-the-influence” white residents. One evening Schieff’s manager (whom I will call Belson) barged into our home to announce belligerently that he had come for Tegpa, whom he fancied as a new leader of his dog team and had already several times tried to buy. I had always refused, so now he tried a different tack.

  “Your goddamn husky’s been into my fish shed stuffing his gut. Either you pay me twenty-five bucks for the fish he stole and turn him over to me for my team … or I’ll shoot the fucker dead first chance I get.”

  He then stamped out of the cabin, sweeping Fran’s china teapot (a precious loan from Renée Garbut) off the kitchen counter, shattering it into tiny fragments. When I told the usually affable Bill Garbut about this incident, his benevolent expression hardened into a scowl.

  “That son of a bitch would shoot his own mother for the fun of it. The way he screws the natives – and it’s more ways than one – makes me puke.… Let me tell you a little story about him.

  “There used to be a Chip kid here with a wizened-up arm from polio he got when he was a baby. He had epilepsy too – took fits. He wasn’t too smart but he always tried to do his best. His family was part of the Hatchet Lake band but Nazee – that was his name – couldn’t make it out on the land with the rest of them so the mission was supposed to be looking after him.

  “He got by, running errands and doing odd jobs nobody else would do. A lot of them
for Belson, who paid the kid with spoiled stuff from his store nobody would buy.

  “Winter evenings, Belson and his cronies – white trappers and the like – would amuse themselves giving Nazee lemon extract and when he was tipsy – the stuff’s three-quarters alcohol – make him strip to the buff and dance round a red-hot pot-belly stove. Crippled like he was, he would sometimes fall against the stove.

  “Then they’d give him some more extract, and get out the marking hammer.

  “You know what that is, don’t you? Hammer with sharp little nails set into its head, used to bash a fox skin or any fur to make a pattern into it. Kind of a trademark that shows the skin belongs to your outfit.

  “Those bastards would pay Nazee with shots of extract, or sometimes a nickel or even a dime, to let them bash him with Schieff’s hammer. Mostly they’d do it on his backside, but sometimes on his crippled arm or his legs, under his clothes where it wouldn’t show.

  “When I got wind of that, I sent for the boy and when Renée and I saw the brand hammered into that wizened arm I sent a message down to Belson offering to shoot him if he done it again. When I told Egenolf about it, he just shrugged and said it was in God’s hands. The sanctimonious old bugger! I sure and hell knew whose hands that kid was in, and it wasn’t God’s!

  “Renée wanted us to keep the kid around but I couldn’t do that because Company policy don’t run to charity. Anyhow, the kid went someplace else. Don’t know where. But that bastard Belson’s still around! I keep hoping somebody’ll fill him full of lead.”

  During this drunken period, the native people kept a low profile and some withdrew to their bush camps. They even stayed clear of Fran and me. I wondered why, but concluded they probably thought we whites were all alike. Perhaps we gave them occasion to think so. After the Garbuts threw a party to celebrate the first anniversary of our marriage, I wrote in my journal:

  The main refreshment was punch made of about a quart of grain alcohol from my scientific supplies, a couple of bottles of Vat 69 out of Bill’s private stock, a lot of Renée’s homemade beer, some cans of grapefruit segments, a bottle of maple syrup, some mouldy lemons, and a good big dollop of cayenne pepper. After a few mugs of this Bill was reborn as an Apache and danced wildly about to music he made himself – the mating call of a bull moose.

  Some Crees just in from South End with fur to trade found the post door locked and our lot whooping it up inside. They stood outside the frosted windows peering in at the antics of the “master race.” Wonder what they thought of it all. Don’t think I’ll ask.

  Jim Cummins had been right about one thing: when the planeload of liquor was gone, Brochet quieted down. Hardly a soul was to be seen outdoors during the brief daylight hours and at night even the occupied cabins seemed to belong to an abandoned settlement. Almost the only sign of life was underfed dogs drifting about like disembodied spirits.

  The next plane to arrive was a Norseman chartered by the federal Department of Indian Affairs. It brought in a Dr. Robert Yule on the last of four visits scheduled for 1948 to provide for the medical requirements of the natives who lived at or traded to Brochet. Amiable, middle-aged Dr. Yule might have chosen a better time to perform his duties. On the day he arrived, there were fewer than twenty natives in the settlement – the rest being far away at winter camps or on their traplines. Had the good doctor chosen to delay his visit until the Christmas season, the entire population of the region would have been gathered here. He and his plane stayed with us exactly twenty-five minutes – Bill Garbut timed it – while the doctor saw (but did not treat) a Dene youth with a broken leg that had already begun to set crookedly, and several elderly people to whom he handed out large white pills he carried loose in his pocket. They looked like afterdinner mints but Bill claimed they were laxatives. Then he gave us all a smiling farewell and flew back to his home in The Pas.

  His departure left me seething, for he had been responsible for the health of the natives of the region during the fearful epidemic in the spring of 1947 when at least two hundred men, women, and children – an accurate count was never made – perished of a disease that was never diagnosed because no doctor visited any of the afflicted camps. But I had visited several of them while making the canoe journey between Reindeer and Nueltin Lakes four months after the dying and had seen many of the hurriedly made graves which now housed the inhabitants of those otherwise-deserted sites.

  The memory of those graves and the mass grave Father Darveaux had told me about impelled me to write a report about the abominable way the natives of this region were being treated. I detailed the government’s failure to provide medical aid or help of any sort during the 1947 epidemic and concluded my tirade with a bald account of the treatment the crippled boy, Nazee, had received.

  Before sending my outburst to my superiors in Ottawa, I showed it to Bill Garbut. He said little, other than to ask my permission to make a copy of the Nazee story. I was not surprised when, a few days later, he told me he had arranged to have the copy mailed anonymously from Winnipeg to Isaac Schieff.

  “That money-grubbing old bugger hired Belson after the Bay fired him for frigging with the mail. Schieff knew he was no damn good. Maybe this’ll give him some second thoughts. He’s scared shitless of the press.”

  Within a week, the moccasin telegraph was spreading the news that Belson was being replaced by Schieff’s son as manager at Brochet.

  By mid-December, with Christmas fast approaching, Brochet was filling up.

  One by one the empty cabins are sprouting smoke from their tin chimneys as the human and dog population swells. It’s a rather mysterious phenomenon because they all seem to arrive in the middle of the night. You wake up in the morning and there they are! Tents are going up too, which means the Barren Land Chips have begun to arrive all the way from Nueltin Lake. The traders are busier than beavers. Lots of activity and lots of chicanery as furs are swapped for gewgaws, gadgets, and sometimes even useful stuff like food and ammunition.

  A week later I wrote:

  The settlement is overflowing with a couple of hundred adults and at least sixty children. The trading posts are jam-packed from morning until night. Brochet Bay looks like a dog rodeo, with teams racing over it every direction and sled tracks as thick as threads in a white handkerchief. The mission is doing a roaring business too, collecting furs for tithes, hearing confessions, selling pardons, and, I wouldn’t doubt, indulgences.

  Although it’s running mostly on tea now instead of booze, which has pretty well run out, the social life never seems to stop. Candles and oil lanterns burn all night in every cabin and the natives, most of whom haven’t seen each other for a couple of months, just never seem to get enough visiting. Dog teams are as thick as taxis in New York and cries of “Hew” and “Haw” (left and right) sound like a hassle of mad ravens. The teams compete for right of way and there are glorious free-for-all dogfights with lots of cursing in Cree, Chip, English, and canine. When we go walkabout we carry good thick sticks to keep the dog mob at bay. At night there is a deafening cacophony from two or three hundred hungry dogs each wanting another chunk of whitefish or caribou. Little mountains of crushed bones, fish scales, deer hair, and dog shit grow like mushrooms around every dog tethering post. Things were actually quieter around here when the booze was on the go.

  Christmas is the main celebration of the year because winter dog travel makes it possible for almost everyone – men, women, youngsters, and old folks – to come to Brochet even from the most distant camps. But though most of the natives are nominally Christians – Catholics – neither religion nor trade is the principal draw. The big attraction is human companionship: the need and opportunity to renew the sense of belonging to a family, clan, or tribe.

  Christmas becomes the time, and Brochet the place for far-flung and wandering people to see and touch one another; a time for young guys and gals to make out, with marriage often the outcome; a time and place for old folk to circulate and pass on the knowledge they’ve
acquired; a time for storytelling, dances, “socials.” A time and place for the renewal and repair of the human fabric.

  There is something else as well.

  This annual get-together is almost certainly fuelled by an ancient, maybe instinctive, need to renew the allegiance that not only binds human beings to one another, but cements all living things into the single, super-entity that constitutes life on earth.

  These people are doing what their pagan ancestors (and ours too) used to do every year at the time of the winter solstice: they are refurbishing and strengthening their essential connections to the mother-with-a-thousand-names who is the mother of us all.

  For nearly two thousand years Christianity has been trying to make over this celebration, and refashion it into a weapon we can use in our ongoing war to subjugate all the world and (madmen’s dream!) even the universe, to serve our boundless ambitions and insatiable desires.

  This isn’t the kind of dream my native neighbours seem to have. I believe they’d be content with what they had, with their old ways and old beliefs – if only we’d let them.

  Nineteen forty-nine was almost upon us, but Frances and I had not yet decided what course to steer.

  One morning while I was out on the bay chipping at nearly a foot of new ice that had formed in our well overnight, I saw the corporal from the weather station knocking on the door of our cabin. He had brought us a radiogram. By the time I got back with the water, he was gone but Fran wordlessly handed me the flimsy. Unlike most government communications, this one was concise and to the point.

  AS OF DECEMBER THIRTY ONE YOUR SERVICES HAVE BEEN DEEMED REDUNDANT

  R A GIBSON

  DEPUTY COMMISSIONER NORTHWEST TERRITORIES OF CANADA AND DEPUTY MINISTER DEPARTMENT OF MINES AND RESOURCES CANADA

  “Looks like they got my report,” I said a little ruefully.

  Fran was half smiling, half crying. “Well, what now?”