Otherwise (26 page)
Although I had been a ”writer” since childhood, I had never thought about it as anything more than a pleasurable avocation. Now I was beginning to wonder if I might be able to earn a livelihood at it.
Frances encouraged me, suggesting that I might someday write a book about our travels. The idea took hold and as I prepared to go north again I began keeping an extensive journal.
May 18th. A grey day in Ottawa, this grey-minded city of bureaucrats and bullshit. A mist swirls over the airport. Out on the tarmac looms a massive Lancaster bomber recently demobbed from war to peace. In the foreground stands a small green jeep from which two figures swathed in heavy arctic clothing make their way toward the big RCAF plane, rifles in hands and heavy packs upon their backs. Alongside the jeep a third figure, a small one in a blue naval raincoat, with a gaudy kerchief tied around her head, watches them go. The sky seems to glower and a wet, sulphurous wind sweeps in from the Ottawa River
.
An odd assortment of other passengers climbs a ladder into what had formerly been the bomb bay. They include two private soldiers from the Three Rivers Regiment nursing monumental hangovers; a handful of U.S. enlisted men and officers from somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line on their way north for the first time in their lives; a middle-aged Newfoundland nurse escorting an Eskimo child who has spent two of its three years of existence in the Hamilton Tuberculosis Sanatorium. The nurse is herself returning to another year of exile at a lonely post on Hudson Bay. And there is a smattering of civilians looking slightly ashamed, as civilians tend to do when in the military presence
.
Our steward, a saturnine, gum-chewing RCAF corporal, waves Andy and me to our seats – wooden benches against the plane’s sides. If I strain my neck I can just manage to peer through a tiny window behind me and see Lulu Belle at the distant edge of the field and huddled beside it the small figure of my wife. A signal light flashes from the tower and the Lanc begins to vibrate alarmingly as all four Rolls-Royce motors bellow. We begin to roll … become airborne. Ottawa looms in view for a moment or two then is lost as we climb into a dirty overcast and the world disappears
.
Of the flight, which takes us a thousand miles in a little less than seven hours, there is not much to say. There was not much to say or do aboard either. The thundering engines precluded conversation and there was hardly enough light to read by. Like cattle, we could do little but ruminate. A civilian meteorologist beside me stretched his long legs half way across the plane and dozed with mouth gaping and
prominent teeth bared as if in the rictus of death. As on any long journey where human beings are crammed together in a confined space, an aura of frowziness soon gathered over us. Faces grew slack and an oily film seemed to overlie the skin. Only the Eskimo child seemed untouched by the slow decay which seemed to assail the rest of us. It slept contentedly for most of the journey
.
The bomb bay was not pressurized and there was no supplementary oxygen so we flew at only a few thousand feet, immersed in cloud and unable to see anything outside the plane. Three-quarters of the trip passed before we escaped into clear skies over the bizarre country that lies southwest of Hudson Bay. Not long emerged from an ancient polar sea, this vast coastal plain seems half-submerged. Bereft of trees and filled with bogs, muskegs, ponds, and meandering streams, it appeared to Andy (as he yelled into my ear) ”good for sweet fuck-all except ducks.” Most of the other passengers gave this, their first view of the sub-arctic, an appalled glance then gloomily returned to staring blankly at the inside of the plane. But I was fascinated by the palette of Dutch Masters’ colours and the infinite variety of sinuous watery shapes. I thought that if an ancestor who had been alive when the earth was very young was to see it, he would greet it familiarly and call it by a name we will never know
.
In late afternoon we swept out over still-frozen Hudson Bay, its old ice dark and forbidding. The corporal/steward appeared, to yell a laconic ”Twenty minutes!” Passengers began to stir, scuffling about for lost scarves and gloves. Combs came out amongst the soldiery and hats were cocked at rakish angles as we came in sight of an immense concrete
grain elevator looming like a mountain titan over the scattering of shacks still half-buried in winter drifts that is Churchill
.
We spent an infuriating week in Churchill dealing with matters Captain Banfield had failed to arrange, such as the hiring of Charles Schweder. The Schweder brothers had made their way to Churchill by dog team late in the winter and I had since been in touch with Charles, but now when I ran him to earth he gave me the bad news that the ”officer from Ottawa” (Banfield) had refused to pay rent for the cabin at Windy River and, in consequence, Charles’s father refused to let his son accompany us. Instead, Charles had been put to work on a local construction site to help support his father’s family.
This major disappointment was followed by a second when we called at the home of young Gunnar Ingebritson, who had been chartered to fly us to Nueltin in his old, ski-equipped Norseman. We learned he was in Winnipeg getting his airplane repaired and by the time he returned to Churchill the season would be too advanced to fly us in on skis. We were advised to relax and enjoy the ”amenities” of Churchill until the thaw brought open water to the lakes and made it practicable to fly float-equipped planes into the interior. When we asked how long that might be, the discouraging answer was ”Mid-June, or maybe later.”
At this juncture Churchill inflicted a severe attack of food poisoning on me.
The gods finally took pity.
Late on May 22 Gunnar’s Norseman stuttered over the sleazy hotel where we were staying. An hour later this laconic
son of a Norwegian fisherman joined us to announce that next day he would attempt to coax his plane, laden with us and our ton of supplies, off the disintegrating ice of the nearby tundra pond where he had just made a ”dicey” landing.
The sky next day was heavily obscured by fog and snow flurries. The Norseman laboured mightily to get airborne, its skis sending up fountains of meltwater as it plunged across the rotting ice. Somehow Gunnar jockeyed it into the air, and we turned northward along the coast only to find ourselves pinned down by the fog to thirty or forty feet above a ragged jumble of sea ice.
I was for returning to Churchill, until Gunnar shouted into the intercom:
”We turn back now and you guys have lost it. Might be a month before I can fly on floats.”
I glanced at Andy. Cheerfully he waved us on.
Somewhere near the mouth of Seal River we swung inland, thankfully leaving the fog behind. The weather still held us down to five hundred feet as the coastal barrens were replaced by rolling highlands whose massive black rock ridges slashed across the softer reds and browns of muskeg glittering with meltwater. Great eskers (the reversed beds of one-time glacial rivers) ran their dry courses beneath us, gigantic yellow serpents overriding the ponds, rock barrens, muskegs, and living rivers that lay in their path. Caribou trails laced the muskeg, but we saw only one herd, a small one, and I was afraid we might have already missed the main northbound migration of
la foule
.
I tried to follow our course on a chart filled with white voids containing the cryptic word ”Unmapped.”
”Never you mind the maps,” Gunnar shouted, noticing me peering at mine. ”Can’t trust the buggers! Steer by the sun and the stars and by the feeling in your gut. Never failed me yet.”
Two hours after leaving the coast of Hudson Bay, the Norseman was abreast of a singular black basalt outcrop that Gunnar thought marked the entrance to Nueltin’s northwestern arm. Soon we were flying at deck level above unbroken ice toward the mouth of Windy River, where the Schweder cabin stood.
Gunnar made such an abrupt landing that the plane skidded and slithered for several hundred yards before he was able to ease it to a stop. With scarcely enough fuel remaining for the return trip and with ominous black clouds rolling in from the west, he was not about to waste any time.
”Get your fucking stuff outta my plane!” he shouted as he flung open the doors. ”You got five minutes before I’m off!”
Andy and I threw everything onto the ice, and five minutes later waved the plane away into the darkening sky. Only then did it register on us that we were half a mile from shore.
A cock ptarmigan on a nearby islet called mockingly. Two ravens circled overhead, hopefully perhaps. I looked shoreward and saw a two-legged object bounding toward us. Soon it resolved itself into the sturdy fur-clad figure of a man I recognized from the summer before, an Inuit named Owliktuk.
When we three had finished beaming at one another and shaking hands, Owliktuk let us toward the empty
cabin. Later we would learn he had walked down from the Ihalmiut camps near the Kazan River some sixty miles to the north, bringing five white fox skins he had hoped to trade with Charles Schweder. Finding the cabin abandoned, as it had been for months, Owliktuk searched for but found no useable supplies except a few pounds of tea. There being nothing else for it, he had exchanged his pelts for the tea and set off for home but had gone only a mile or two when he heard the Norseman.
Now he led us into the dank and dismal Schweder cabin where, with difficulty, we managed to get a fire going in the rusty old cookstove. As we waited for the tea water to boil, Owliktuk explained that his people had endured another starvation winter (their third in five years). Although the migrant deer were now returning north, the people were unable to hunt because the Schweders, their only source of ammunition, were still absent.
We would learn that in February the surviving Ihalmiut, numbering forty-seven men, women, and children, had come to the cabin in search of help. Finding none they had nevertheless remained close by, hoping Charles would soon return. They had sustained themselves chiefly with what they could scavenge from the frozen carcases of wolves and foxes skinned then tossed aside by Charles and his brothers, and on the bones, guts, and hides of caribou the Schweders had killed the previous autumn.
All but four of the Ihalmiuts’ remaining dogs had died of starvation during the weeks of waiting for Charles to return – and had been eaten. There had been just enough sustenance to keep the people alive through March when they had straggled back to their own camps hoping to kill
some caribou with bows and arrows at natural defiles. They had in fact been able to kill enough to keep themselves going.
Owliktuk viewed our arrival as the salvation for his people and was desperately anxious to take the good news and ammunition back to them. Despite this, he agreed to remain with us for a few days to help us get our gear ashore before the ice weakened. He did this even though the creeks and rivers across his homeward path were already flooding with meltwater and he knew if he delayed too long he would have to wade shoulder-deep or even swim many of these obstacles.
Making use of some old dog sleds the Schweders had left behind, we hauled everything to the nearest point of land – Cache Point, we came to call it – and stored it under canvas there until we could find time to move it to the cabin. When we began opening some of our crates, we came across two items of special interest. The first contained our supply of cigarettes and pipe tobacco. This find triggered ecstasy in Owliktuk. The second held an Inuit-English dictionary, which was as good as a Rosetta stone to me.
A third, government-packed crate plastered with red
FRAGILE
labels contained a battery-operated short-wave radio with which we were supposed to keep in contact with our employer. But instead of the ten-watt model we had been promised, we had received a mere toy of 2.5watts’ power.
Nevertheless we rigged it up, attached the battery, and made our first attempt to communicate with the outside world. We were unable to get a response from anyone, including the powerful Churchill Radio, which was supposed to be our point of contact. When our voice transmissions went unanswered, I tried using Morse code, but this too failed to
elicit any response. All we could hear in the earphones was the manic chuckle and whistle of static. When anxious efforts to report the dire situation of the Ihalmiut succeeded only in draining our batteries, we decided to give up the attempt for a few days in hopes atmospheric conditions would improve.
The thaw was now well under way, which meant it ought soon to be possible for us to travel by water. We had planned to bring a canoe in with us lashed to one of the plane’s pontoons but on arrival at Churchill had been told a ”collapsible boat” had been substituted for the canoe.
We had seen no sign of such a thing until, at Windy River, we began unpacking some peculiarly shaped packages tightly swathed in sacking. These turned out to contain intricately shaped pieces of plywood which, when finally assembled (with much cursing and bad temper), proved to be a kind of boat.
I wrote this about it in my journal:
It is evidently Banfield’s version of the 18-foot freighter canoe we asked for. If it floats, it
might
prove useful for something but God help us if any of the little snap-fasteners that hold it together let go. And it sure and hell won’t support an engine, which leaves us with a fine new 5-horsepower outboard and a boat that won’t have anything to do with each other. Maybe we can use it for a bathtub
.
By the end of our first week at Windy Cabin the thaw was well advanced.
There’s an exhilaration in the air. You can almost feel it as an electric buzz in every nerve and muscle. It
makes you feel so goddamn full of life you want to climb a mountain, swim an ocean, or screw an entire chorus line. There are priceless moments sitting on the skinned log we use for a john with the rising sun on your face, looking out over the Windy Hills scarified by ten thousand caribou trails; listening to the first flies of the season trying to get their wings unthawed; hearing the rumble of ice beginning to move in the river; and watching the tumbling flight of a pair of ravens celebrating the most important things in the whole bloody world – the coming of spring and the need to make love
.