Otherwise (31 page)

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
Tulemaliguak.

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….”

W
e 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.

We stayed close to shore. This vast lake was clearly no place to be caught out upon by one of the country’s instant gales. An hour’s easy paddle brought us to the mouth of a deep bay on whose eastern shore we came upon a sandy beach dominated by three tall wooden columns standing like bizarre sentries. We landed beneath a trio of roughhewn pillars. Each was about a foot square, ten or twelve feet tall, with a prominent
V
-shaped notch cut across its top.

I turned to Ohoto for an explanation, but he had nothing to offer, apart from assuring us the columns were not his people’s work. We were all puzzled. These wardens of the beach looked like nothing we were familiar with
except for a loose resemblance to uncarved Pacific coast totem poles.

They were guarding the mouth of a valley behind the beach. We ventured into it along an overgrown trail that led us to the largest trees any of us had ever encountered in the Barren Lands – some of them forty or fifty feet tall and two feet in diameter. We found a number of stumps, but of the felled trees there was no sign until we emerged into a cleared area of high ground and were faced by six even more imposing columns.

These towered twenty or more feet high and must have extended another three or four feet into the sandy soil of the ancient esker. They had been roughly squared with an axe and, like the smaller ones on the beach, each had a deep
V
-shaped notch cut across its top. Four of these massive pillars stood as corner posts of a rectangular space enclosing a ruined structure that looked to me like some kind of habitation, but which Ohoto feared was a grave.

The remaining two columns were sited in front of the enclosure. Inside were the remains of a log cabin whose walls and roof had collapsed to form a dense layer of broken scantlings, rotted sphagnum moss, and the hair and fragments of skin from uncured deer hides.

Ohoto watched nervously from a safe distance as Andy and I poked about in the debris. We identified the remains of a pole bed, a rough-hewn plank table, a broken chair contrived from caribou antlers, a rusty sheet-iron stove, and a battered trunk. Weather and wolverines seemed to have destroyed almost everything else except a few tins containing remnants of flour, rice, and tea. The trunk was broken, and its contents had been reduced to a jumble of water-soaked and
mouse-ravelled cloth and paper. Nearby we found a glass Mason jar still firmly sealed and half full of white powder.

Andy cautiously tasted the contents – spat vigorously – and announced it was arsenic, the mainstay of Barren Lands white trappers.

Our interest in rooting about in the debris cooled when we turned up a well-chewed long bone that
might
have come from a caribou but which bore an ominous similarity to a human tibia. Memories of the Kinetuamiut cemeteries at Angikuni flooded back upon me and by unspoken agreement we withdrew from the wreckage of what had apparently been one man’s transient, but maybe final, home.

An ominous haze in the western sky and the first skirl of wind gave notice that a storm was brewing. Turning our backs on the inscrutable sentries, we launched the canoe and hurried to regain the security of our camp before the storm could break.

My first real lead to a solution of this mystery surfaced forty-five years later when I heard that Charles Schweder, my companion and mentor in 1947 during my first major venture into the Barren Lands, had died, and shortly afterwards one of his relatives sent me several little black notebooks in which Charles had kept a perfunctory record of his life.

Leafing through these I came across the following entry for January 16, 1946.

Reading this, I recalled that somewhere in my files I had a sketch map of Charles Schweder’s trapline. On a hunch I dug it out. Beginning at Windy Camp, a dotted line meandered northward to an unnamed lake forty miles south of the cryptic wooden pillars Andy, Ohoto, and I had come upon on the shore of Kamilikuak.

Forty miles was an easy day’s sled travel. Could Eskimo Charley – a legendary Barren Lands trapper about whom I had heard many strange stories – have been responsible for the strange structures we had found?

The search for an answer to this question would involve me in a ten-year quest that ranged from central Europe, west and north to Alaska, then east across the top of the world to the Keewatin Barren Lands, south to the Gulf of Mexico, north again up the Atlantic coast to Montreal, and finally back to the Barrens.

I was able to discover little enough about the early part of Eskimo Charley’s story. The bare bones seemed to be that, about 1885, a boy by the name of Janez Planinshek was born on a farm in Slovenia. While still in his teens, he set out to make his fortune in the New World. Arriving in New York in classic immigrant fashion without money, friends, or prospects, he worked his way across the United States to San Francisco. Then, following the lure of gold, he went north to Alaska, where he was charged with being an accomplice in a murder.

He fled across the unmarked border to Herschel Island in the Canadian Arctic, where he signed on as a deckhand
aboard a Yankee whaler. The old wooden vessel carried him a thousand perilous miles eastward in arctic waters until it drove ashore and was wrecked near the mouth of the Back River.

Most of the crew apparently made their way back to Herschel in the ship’s frail whaleboats but Charley (as Janez now called himself) chose to remain behind (or perhaps was left behind) in the territory of the Back River Inuit, where he was the sole intruder from the white man’s world.

Slightly built, Charley’s narrow face was dominated by his fierce black eyes. In the words of an old fellow Keewatin trapper, ”he was a queer-looking bird. Make your flesh creep if you looked at him too long. Tough as a wolf trap and just as touchy! Nobody couldn’t get close to him. Not that many wanted to.”

Charley Planinshek seemed to make a point of avoiding human beings – unless he could impose his will upon them, something he was more successful in doing with native people than with his own kind. Charley spent about a year imposing upon the Utkuhikilingmiut (Soapstone People) of the Back River. When his welcome there began to grow perilously thin, he commandeered a dog team and drove two hundred miles south and west to try his luck among the Thelon River Inuit, who were neighbours and relatives of the Kazan River Ihalmiut.

Here Charley struck gold – white gold, in the form of pelts from arctic foxes – and became a Barren Lands trapper. He took to his new trade with enthusiasm, helping himself to foxes caught in traps set by the Inuit and on occasion taking over their entire traplines by threatening to loose evil spirits on the owners and their families.

He next appeared in the taiga/tundra border country, which constituted a kind of no man’s land between the Ihalmiut and the northern Idthen Eldeli. Charley built a cabin in the thinly forested country, near a smaller lake that still bears his name, between Kasba and Ennadai. Here he set about making himself something of a middleman between the outer world and the Ihalmiut and Idthen Eldeli.

He succeeded in doing this through threats, bribery, and violence – including shooting the natives’ dogs so the people could not transport their furs to distant trading posts and by shooting at least one Ihalmio who refused to let Charley do his trading for him.

Charley ”bought” pelts for whatever value he chose to put upon them and sold them to legitimate trading companies farther south for whatever the traffic would bear. An astute businessman, he also ran his own extensive traplines. He seldom set steel traps, preferring to use strychnine and arsenic, which killed anything and everything that took the bait, including ravens, eagles, wolves, foxes, dogs belonging to the natives, and, on occasion, starving human beings. He was not at all perturbed by the fact that, before succumbing, his victims were often able to drag themselves so far away from the bait stations that they were lost to him. In those times fur-bearers were still so abundant that such losses did not signify.

Charley did very well until the collapse of fur prices during the Great War reduced white gold to dross. By then Eskimo Charley, as he had now become known to his own kind, had done so well he could afford to take a prolonged holiday in the forested country of the Cree peoples some three hundred miles to the south of Charley’s Lake.

Here he found himself a young Cree woman and here he encountered and established a wary relationship with Fred Schweder, father of my friend Charles Schweder.

Engaging in a variety of shadowy, not to say shady, enterprises, Eskimo Charley stayed ”down south” until the Great War came to an end and the value of white fox pelts began to recover. Then he went back to the ”real north” and openly set himself up as a free-trader in opposition to such long-established firms as the Hudson’s Bay Company. He did this to such effect that the
HBC
, the greatest commercial power in the Canadian North, proscribed him, and Charley found himself blacklisted at most legitimate trading posts in Keewatin Territory and the adjacent northern regions of Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

Although the mercenary details of the struggle were of little interest to me, I was fascinated by the rumours and legends that swirled around Eskimo Charley as, during the 1920s, he abandoned all pretence of living within the law – within
any
law except his own – and tried to turn the world of the Ihalmiut into what amounted to his own personal fiefdom.

By the middle of the decade he was such a scourge to the remaining People of the Deer (Ihalmiut and Idthen Eldeli), taking from them whatever he wanted, including fur, food, and women, that it had become only a question of when and how they would rid themselves of him. They tried setting fire to his outpost cabins. When this failed, he and his dog team were lured onto dangerous ice in a narrows of the Kazan River from which he made a hair’s-breadth escape that was taken as indisputable evidence he really did possess occult powers. Finally Ooliebuk, an Ihalmio whose wife and
daughter Charley had sexually abused, took a shot at him. The bullet missed.

Not long afterwards the bodies of Ooliebuk and one of his cousins were found on the shore of Ennadai Lake. Both had been shot.

Charley withdrew into the Cree country south of Reindeer Lake, where he spent the next several years sustaining himself and his several children (whose mother had died) ”by hook and by crook” while gestating the most grandiose enterprise of his entire life.

Eskimo Charley was ready to set out on a journey he believed would win him immortal fame, and a fortune. Together with Frank O’Grady, a recently arrived, impressionable, young Irish immigrant, Charley proposed to make a canoe-and-dog-sled journey south from the Arctic Circle to Cuba and the Tropic of Capricorn.