The Long Exile (29 page)

The Ellesmere Island stretched out ahead confounded every expectation. Recalling the scene later, Rynee said she thought they would be crushed by rock and ice.

A cluster of tiny people appeared on the beach beside the police detachment and began waving. From where the Flahertys were standing on the deck of the C.
D. Howe
it was impossible to make
out individual faces but the shapes and contours of these people, the way their bodies stirred the air as they moved about among the rocks, were so familiar to the Flahertys that it was hard, in spite of their surroundings, not to imagine they were back in Inukjuak and that Aqiatusuk's departure and death and their own long, exhausting journey were just elements in a dream from which they had at last awoken. The sense of being among fellows hit them like a sudden wind and in that single, tremendous moment of recognition, all the uncertainty and confusion of the past two years melted away and they were left with the only thing that mattered or had ever mattered: to be among family.

The ship dropped anchor and the crew came out on deck to prepare the cargo barge. Sometime later, Josephie, Rynee, Martha and Peter Flaherty were dropped on the beach. There were tears then, and wide, open grins from the men. The children ran between the newcomers' legs, laughing with excitement. Aside from a party of Greenlanders, these were the first Inuit the settlers had seen in two long years and they were bundled along to Mary Aqiatusuk's tent and offered hot sweet tea. A barrage of eager questions followed. The Inukjuamiut wanted to know everything about the camp at Resolute Bay. How was the hunting going? Where were the people camped? Was Big Red bothering them? Had they caught caribou or bear? Were there any foxes? Did they have trouble finding sweet water? Had anyone come down with illness? Was Cornwallis as empty as Ellesmere? And as cold? After a long series of investigations, they began more tentatively to enquire after Inukjuak and their relatives there, but their questions were now hesitant and oddly detached. It was as if their homeland had taken on the character of an ancestral place, revered but remote. losephie could not know then that in a few years from now he too would find himself set loose and drifting whenever the old country was mentioned, reluctant to call up the image of a place to which he longed so fiercely to return.

While the Flahertys were enjoying their welcome, Corporal
Glenn Sargent was taking note of how little equipment or food the newcomers possessed. No boat, no
komatik
, no dogs, no lamps, the list went on. This worried him. He ordered the special constable to fetch some destitution rations and noted the donation of flour, oats, sugar, tobacco, lard and tea in his report book. When the time came to file his usual quarterly dispatch on “Conditions in general among the Natives,” he would let HQ know, as diplomatically as he could, that he thought it had been irresponsible to allow this new family to travel to Ellesmere with so few clothes and such spartan supplies. His instructions were to interfere as little as possible but he knew the newcomers had not a hope of surviving the winter without a great deal of assistance and good will from their family already at the camp.

A new constable had come up on the C.
D. Howe
at the same time as the Flahertys as a replacement for Clay Fryer. He was Bob Pilot, a tall, genial man with a rocky exterior. Pilot was very young, only twenty-one or twenty-two. He had begun his police career in Calgary but his only Arctic stint prior to the posting at Craig Harbour had been in Iqaluit for summer duties the previous year. Still, he was very obviously keen to do whatever it took to earn his “G” man stripes. Sargent thought it would be good for him to get a feel for life on the land. Once he had had a chance to unpack his things and settle in a little at the detachment, Sargent resolved to dispatch his new junior to live in Akpaliapik's sod house at the camp, where he could learn how to handle a dog team on the ice before the winter came. Once the dark period arrived, he could return to the comforts of the detachment, but while he was out with Akpaliapik, Pilot would be able to keep an eye on things in general and on the Flahertys in particular. It seemed like a good solution to their concerns.

By evening the new Inuit arrivals had settled in their tent. The baby began to cry. Rynee cooked up some porridge, dipped an Arctic hare's foot into the mixture and held it to the lips of her son, who took it in his mouth and sucked a little. She had no milk of her own for him now. The journey north had dried her up. Twilight fell and
the cliffs closed in around them, blocking their view of what lay behind. It seemed to Josephie and Rynee then that all the events of the past few months, the arrival of Aqiatusuk's letter, his death, the
qalunaat
uncle, the journey north and the loss of Mary had already blurred into a past that felt all the more remote in time for having happened so far away. An atmosphere of abstraction, a thin, life-denying feeling crept into their tent that night. In the half-light, only Martha still seemed full of spirit. They fell on to their few sleeping skins, exhausted, and woke the next day to a floury sky. Out in the sound, the C.
D. Howe
had finished unloading her cargo, and was preparing to weigh anchor and head back down south to Montreal.

T
HE NEXT DAY
the Inuit moved from the detachment to their camp. In the past year, they had shifted from the site chosen by Henry Larsen and were now established along a small beach twenty miles east of Lindstrom looking out to the southeast across Jones Sound at the folds of the Devon Island mountains, just visible nearly a hundred miles away. A fierce blue sky loomed overhead, punctured here and there by high, drifting cloud and the sun clung to the safety of the horizon line. A few crows soared by as the Flahertys began erecting their tent, the sea sighed and flopped against the beach but these small sounds were no match for the clank and groan of the loose ice pan. The Flahertys had never seen so much summer ice as there remained in the waters of Jones Sound and at the mouth of nearby Grise Fiord, nor had they ever heard ice growl and moan with more anguish than here, where it never melted.

The winter before, the camp's second in the High Arctic, Simon Akpaliapik and Samuel Anukudluk had shown the Inukjuak families how to build the sod huts,
qarnaq
, typical of the inhabitants of the Arctic's arid zones, where there was often too little wind-packed snow to build snowhouses until late in the winter. In Pond Inlet, Akpaliapik and Anukudluk had built their
qarnaqs
into the rock, but here they had had to rely on scrap lumber from the supply ship and improvise roofs from pieces of old canvas. Now, as it was summer, the huts lay unused, their roofs put to use as tents. The
Inukjuamiut and the Ingluligmiut were living separately, the Inuk-juamiut tents zigzagging along the shoreline at some distance from where the smaller group of Ingluligmiut was camped. The two groups had discovered they had less in common than Henry Larsen had supposed and they had gradually drifted apart. More experienced in high-latitude survival, the Ingluligmiut were the favourites of the police detachment, which showed them greater consideration and respect. The Inukjuamiut resented this. For their part, the Ingluligmiut were still waiting for the payment they had been led to believe would follow their efforts to help the Inukjuamiut settle in and could only imagine that the Inukjuamiut were in some way responsible for the fact that they had never been paid.

From the camp, losephie set off directly to Paddy Aqiatusuk's grave, a rubble of stones piled up on a nearby slope where some loose rock formed a gentle, upward curve and losephie had to scramble to reach the spot, which was marked by a red stone
inuk-shuk.
It looked unbearably lonely. There were a few patches of vegetation growing there but nothing else and everything living seemed to point southwards.

He returned from his first sortie subdued. He missed his stepfather greatly. To him, the land was
nangijuanngittuq
, empty, not in any literal way, but in the more profound sense of having no meaning. Paddy Aqiatusuk was, or, rather, would have been, the meaning whose presence would have filled the land. Now he was gone, buried not among his ancestors, but here, surrounded by emptiness. The
qalunaat
place namesGrise Fiord, Craig Harbour, Lindstrom said nothing to losephie about the land. In the absence of Aqiatusuk's tales of hunting routes and traplines, Ellesmere Island felt like a place that did not really exist.

There was only one way to make it exist and that was to experience it. losephie knew the task ahead would be enormous. Learning the land here would be as much a lifetime's work as it had been in Ungava. He already sensed there were conditions here that he had never before had to confront. Elijah, Samwillie, loadamie and the
other men at camp later told him that he would have to get used to very dynamic ice and moving floes, to whirling winds and rip tides. He had already seen how the movement of light through the thin air baffled distance and produced strange mirages out at sea. He would have to learn how the currents moved and where there were safe beachings. When winter came, he would need to familiarise himself with the way the ice heaved up into pressure ridges and the places where the tides broke through. The hunting conditions on Elles-mere were very different from anything he had ever known. The game was so scattered that he would find himself having to be away from the settlement for days, sometimes weeks, at a time, leaving Rynee and the children to manage with whatever cache of meat remained. He would have to learn how to hunt narwhal, creatures with which he was completely unfamiliar. Occasionally, the men advised him, he would run into musk ox, which would think nothing of charging the sled if they felt cornered. If he shot one, he would risk being sent to prison. Before long, he would come face to face with a hungry polar bear. He would be afraid. Trapping would be no easier. The foxes often followed bears way out on to the sea ice to scavenge from their leavings and Josephie would have to follow them. Food was so scarce that crows and wolves would often get to the bodies of trapped foxes before he would be able to retrieve them. The men had discovered that the only way to work was to go out hunting in pairs during the summer months and split up during the winter to work their separate trap lines. For months at a time, the only animals they would get, aside from the foxes, would be seal.

Rynee and the children would have to adapt themselves to
their
new conditions too. In Inukjuak, Rynee and Martha had only to venture out so far as the river to find sweet water or freshwater ice, but on Ellesmere Island, the women of the camp warned them, it could take hours to gather enough ice for a couple of days. Heather and grass were hard to come by and there were no berries to be found, no insect grubs and very few ptarmigan or hare. It was rare to find gull eggs or sculpin. For protein, they would be dependent on
whatever Josephie could bring back from his hunting trips and they would have to get used to Josephie's being away for days, sometimes weeks, not knowing where he was, or even if he was still alive.

Josephie would need harpoons with
avataqs
, or floats, for spearing seal, traps, seal nets and ammunition, harpoon heads, fishing line and hooks, holland twine for mending nets, a lamp, a flashlight, a hare-skin baffle, fox-fur
kamik
soles to soften the sound of his step across the shale, a seal breath detector for hunting the animals at their breathing holes, a spare snowknife, a new flensing knife, a
komatik
and dog team with the attendant harnesses and equipment, and access to a boat. Rynee would need a couple of dozen stretched sealskins with which to make
kamiks
, hare skins for baffles and underwear, caribou skins for parkas and other winter clothes and sinews for sewing, blubber for the
qulliq
and, eventually, a primus stove. They could only hope the detachment would supply them.

A few days after the Flahertys arrived, Bob Pilot and Special Constable Kayak, who had replaced Areak, turned up in the detachment Peterhead, bringing tea and sugar and hardtack biscuits and offering to take the men hunting. Just as they had done in the previous two years, they would cache walrus for winter dog food and any seal they caught they would use immediately. The men climbed on board the boat. If Josephie hoped to see his new equipment there, he was disappointed. There was nothing resembling traps or a lamp or a snowknife.

The few weeks between summer and winter streaked by in a fury of activity. There was much to do to patch up the tents, prepare the winter caches, repair the
qarnaqs
, spruce up the
komatiks
, feed the dogs, look after the pups, haul water, make walrus-meat cheese, and sew new sets of clothes to prepare the camp for the onset of the dark period. When freeze-up came, Josephie and Joadamie went out along the coast, setting traps and going after seal where the shore-fast ice gave out to the pack. While he was away, Rynee moved part time into Mary Aqiatusuk's tent and the two women shared the burden of searching for grass and heather for the
qulliq
and ice for
water. When twilight fell, as it did earlier and earlier, they sat inside scraping skins and sewing sealskin clothes. Neither woman mentioned her troubles, though each sensed the wound in the heart of the other. Work activity took their minds off the sudden fall-off in temperatures and the spiralling winds which came with the start of the autumn and it shielded them a little from the painful memories of people lost to them.