The Long Exile (11 page)

As southern Canada wakes up to her northlands so Josephie Flaherty begins, slowly, to forget them.

I
T IS AUTUMN
1952 and Constable Ross Gibson, Royal Canadian Mounted Police number 16593, is stepping off the ski-plane at Inuk-juak and taking in the scene. This is his first Arctic posting. He smells the air, so frail it is almost as if the world into which he has landed is an alternate universe perched above the clouds. Still, he is here, and determined to make the most of it. The Arctic detachments, “G” Division, are a proving ground. They possess a certain cachet back at RCMP headquarters in Ottawa, where it is said that if you can survive in “G,” surrounded by thousands of miles of lonely tundra, with Inuit and no one else for company, then you can survive pretty much anywhere.

Ross Gibson was born in Gibsons, British Columbia, of Irish immigrant parents in the year before losephie Flaherty, the greatgrandchild of Irish immigrants. As a young boy, Ross Gibson passed his first years uneventfully enough. The tiny town gave out pretty quickly into deep country and there Ross learned the rudiments of bushcraft. When he was eleven or twelve, the family moved east to southwestern Ontario, where Ross Gibson grew into a loyal, straightforward, unsophisticated young man, not handsome exactlylivid skin and thick facial features perched like sausages on mashed beets put paid to thatbut pleasingly tall and as strong and as solid as a tree trunk. Even then, people who met him could see
that, while not all that bright, he was an honest kind of a fellow, with a certain bluff integrity.

The Gibsons did not stay long in Ontario. At the age of fourteen, Ross moved back to British Columbia with his family and it was here, while passing his free hours crashing through the nearest patch of birded forest with a sharp dog and a loaded rifle, that Ross began to think about what he might want to do with his life. Clearly he was not cut out for a desk job, but neither was he sufficiently unconventional to be able to set out on his own, as Robert Flaherty had. He needed something that would earn him a steady income and keep him out of doors.

His decision was deferred by the onset of the Second World War. Ross Gibson signed on for duty with the Canadian navy. The navy took him as far as South America and it was here that he found himself face to face for the first time with “natives,” Ross Gibson's word for anyone who was not white. The “natives” made a great impact on the young Gibson. He was struck by how cheerful they seemed, in spite of their piteous living conditions. Their smiles and nods and handshakes he took at face value. He assumed they were smiling simply because they were happy and, if they were happy in the dismal situations in which they found themselves, then it was because they were admirably simple. Though he would never have admitted it to himself, the simplicity Ross Gibson thought he saw in “natives” chimed very much with his own. In admiring them, he was cheering on some aspect of himself.

By the time the war ended, Gibson knew what he wanted to be. He signed on to the Hudson Bay Company as a fur trader and post manager and was assigned initially to a trading post at Telegraph Creek, British Columbia, then to Fort St. James in the heart of beaver country. His job was to negotiate with the local trappers, most of them Indian, who brought muskrat, wolverine, wolf, rabbit and, of course, beaver pelts to the trading post. Once the furs had been inspected and a price agreed, it was Gibson's job to bundle them up, label each bundle and sort them for dispatch to the great
fur depots in Winnipeg and Montreal. The work was lonely and modestly paid, but Gibson did not mind all that. There was one problem with the job, however; it was a big one, and it would not go away. It turned out that Ross Gibson was allergic to fur. The stacked bales of uncured pelts in the Bay storeroom left him so swollen-eyed and sniffly his life became impossible. Sensing the limits of his fur-trading career, Gibson eventually felt he had no choice but to quit the Bay and, shortly after, he applied to take the entrance examinations for the British Columbia Police. The force appealed to his blokeish sense of loyalty, as well as his fondness for authority. The B.C. Police accepted him and he entered the service as a constable. Two years later, when the regional force was taken over by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Ross Gibson put in for an Arctic attachment and in 1952 he was dispatched on a two-year posting to Inukjuak.

By that time, Inukjuak had seen more two-year men than there were ticks in a clock. Twenty-four months of frostbitten toes, seal-head stews and pitch-black winter days were enough to see off most, and those who did stay longer were usually on the run from something in the south, or else so permanently soused as to have lost all sense of time. Ross Gibson's new boss, Corporal Fred Webster, was one of these semi-permanent Arctic fellows and a hopeless dipsomaniac. He had been stumbling around the north for a number of years in the hope, perhaps, that his drinking would go unnoticed back in Ottawa and he would reach pensionable age without getting fired.

Nineteen fifty-two is a bad year to pitch up in Inukjuak. After all the strictures of the war, most Westerners have grown used to dressing modestly, and the pre-war fashion for fox-fur muffs and trims has all but evaporated. In 1950 the price of Arctic fox pelts goes into freefall. Only seven years before, when losephie Flaherty was first settling into
his piliriji's
hut, an Ungava trapper could expect to sell a good fox pelt for C$35. By the beginning of the 1950s, the same pelt is worth C$3.50. To make matters worse, the collapse in the price coincides
with the cyclical downturn in the fox population so trappers cannot make up for the fall in the price per pelt by trapping more fox. At the same time the price of flour, lard, tea and other trade goods in the north doubles, leaving the Inukjuamiut in an impossible situation. Most have no savings. The Hudson Bay store pays them for their pelts in store credits, and those who have any surplus credits see them quickly gobbled up by rising prices on ammunition and fishing line. The Hudson Bay Company policy is to advance credit only on future earnings from fox pelts. Families, like the Aqia-tusuks, who have previously been encouraged to give up their hunting in favour of trapping, have to return to hunting for their food, but with no credit at the store, they cannot buy ammunition and other hunting supplies. The concentration of camps around the fur post makes the situation trickier still. Many of the areas close by have already been heavily hunted, so the hunters have to travel long distances, taking their families with them. Some Inuit are moving inland to trap otter, whose pelts now fetch more than fox. Everyone is hoping that the situation is temporary. A report by Alex Stevenson, head of the Eastern Arctic Patrol, in the summer of 1953 notes an increase in the population of snowy owls and lemmings that year, signalling that the fox is likely to be plentiful in the year to follow. But the Inuit cannot eat reports and for now, the situation is tough. Ninety-five families, consisting of 124 men, 122 women and 218 children, are living in and close by to Inukjuak. Those with heavily pregnant wives, elderly parents, new babies or sick children who cannot make the long trips begin showing up at the settlement, hoping the police will issue them with destitution rations: a few pounds of rolled oats, a block of lard, some flour and several pounds of useless beans. (The beans take up too much precious cooking fuel and, in any case, the Inuit find them indigestible.) For months at a time, whole families survive on a daily diet of gruel supplemented by the odd piece of seal fat or walrus skin offered up by a neighbour. The more needy they become, the less willing Corporal Webster, who is now responsible for deciding who gets destitution rations, seems to
be to help them. His instructions are to discourage requests for welfare and disperse Inuit who come into the settlement looking for it, so as not to encourage what HQ in Ottawa describes as “vagrancy.”

The moment Constable Gibson steps down from the ski-plane he is entering a world of trouble, though he does not know it. Webster is not the end of it. By 1952, Inukjuak has gathered to it a tribe of well-meaning bossyboots each of whom has their solution to the problem. First is Margery Hinds, the welfare teacher, a woman of stout morals and stouter methods. Since September 1951, Hinds has run Inukjuak's first school, teaching English, arithmetic, natural science, social studies, singing, hygiene and handicrafts. She has drafted a report to the Department of Northern Affairs protesting the policy of sending Inuit out of the settlement. Among those being sent away are fourteen children who are regularly attending the school. Once they are out of the settlement it will be impossible to educate them. “Two of the families who have been told to go have, I understand, never asked for relief and they resent being told to go as their families have always lived here,” she writes. “Probably the reason the Eskimos made this place a camping place, is because it is about the same distance from the floe edge in winter and from the ptarmigan hunting region in the opposite direction. In the fall and early winter many Eskimos fish in the lakes back beyond the hills in the opposite direction to the floe edge.” Then there is the community nurse, Margaret Reynolds, who is all for sending the Inuit packing with a bottle of kaolin and a few senna pods. The Hudson Bay Company factor, Rueben Ploughman, is anxious that the best trappers be encouraged back out on the land to trap. The Radiosonde manager has another view, the visiting missionary another still. No one thinks to ask the Inuit for theirs.

From his choreboy's hut, losephie Flaherty can see Gibson unpacking his things, folding them, perhaps, and putting them away. In the early days, Gibson seems content just to stand by the detachment building sorting his equipment and watching settlement life go by, not so much finding himself in the north as the
north finding itself in him. He sees Inuit men oiling their dog harnesses, mending nets, icing the runners of their
komatiks
, Inuit women chipping chunks of freshwater ice, scraping sealskins and jigging for char through the ice down by the pier. Over those first few months, he observes, gains confidence, begins hatching his plans.

By spring, Ross Gibson's self-appointed mission is to restore some discipline and dignity to the Inukjuak police detachment, which is to say, to find whatever means necessary to subvert the louche decrepitude of Corporal Webster. He begins to make himself more visible. In the mornings, he patrols the settlement, casts an eye over the activities of the Inuit, drops in for a chat of sorts with Rueben Ploughman, the fellows at the Radiosonde, the missionary and, less comfortable with women, gives a quick nod to Miss Hinds and Mrs. Reynolds. In the afternoons, if he can think of nothing else to do, he returns to the detachment and settles to his paperwork. Administrative afternoons are his bane. He is a lousy record-keeper, at sea with the reports and forms and bureaucratic paraphernalia of his posting. Sitting in front of the typewriter in his cabin, he longs to be out there, among the rocks, the great, blank skies. Not that the cabin is uncomfortable or particularly claustrophobic. On the contrary, for an Arctic lodging at the time it could almost pass as luxurious. The clapboard walls are thickly insulated, the floor raised on a gravel bed from the permafrost below, the windows bring in the daylight and can be shuttered off during the cold, dark days of winter. There is a living room made cosy by a coal stove, a kitchen with a coal-fired range, a snowporch, two good sized bedrooms, a bathroom with running water, the office with its chaotic scatter of papers, telegrams, budget sheets, outlines for reports. A wind turbine generates electricity. A radio transmitter in the office provides a connection to the outside world.

From time to time an Inuit man might knock at the door, anxious to tell of some grievance or problem, or keen to collect his family allowance payment. Gibson finds it difficult to deal with
these callers patiently. After a few weeks in his post he makes up his mind that most grievances can be dealt with by repetition of the Inuktitut words for “no good” and “dog” which are the only ones he knows, accompanied, where necessary, by the appropriate hand signals and facial expressions. The Inuit give him the nickname “Big Red” from the colour of his face during these manoeuvres, though, of course, they do not let him in on this private amusement.

The great joy of Gibson's life in Inukjuak is patrolling, chiefly because it allows him to combine his two great passions, for hunting and for dogs, and also, and not incidentally, because it requires him to put a great deal of empty space between himself and Corporal Webster. The annual RCMP patrols usually begin in late winter, once the sea ice has settled in, and continue until the ice has rotted in early July. Come January, Ross Gibson is away often, sledging his way across hundreds of miles of coastal tundra in the company of the Inuit special constable and a dog team, until he grows familiar with the web of coastal paths cut by a thousand years of occupation and the tiny, willow-covered inlets and clamshell-rubbled beaches lying along Ungava's western coastline. The more he discovers about his new home, the more Inukjuak begins to seem less and less like a posting and more and more like a way of looking at the world.