The Long Exile (23 page)

The land was no refuge. It was rocky and covered in loose boulders and scree and there was barely enough snow to sledge across it without the
komatik
runners' catching on some upstanding piece of rock or ice. In the darkness it was almost impossible to tell where the cliff edge lay and there were no established hunting paths or customary routes.

Even out on the sea ice, they often had to rely on their dogs to scent the way home and they would find themselves trapped on moving ice floes or lost in the fiords, waiting for a moonlit day or night. Sometimes they were away for days at a time, leaving the women and children alone at camp to fend for themselves, not knowing where their men were, if they were still alive, or how long they would be gone.

With the dark came the cold. In Inukjuak the snow always fell heavily at the end of September and by the beginning of October the Inukjuamiut were living in snowhouses, but here in the High Arctic the snow arrived in sporadic and unpredictable bursts, and when it
did come the wind refused to allow it to settle so they were forced to remain in their flimsy canvas tents. The temperature hovered around −30°C and when November arrived, it plunged even lower. With winds roaring from the Arctic Ocean the windchill could drop the air temperature on the sea ice to −55°C. Whenever they went outside, their heads pounded, their eyelashes froze together and little ice balls collected around the tear ducts in their eyes. The hairs inside their noses stuck together and pulled apart each time they breathed and the breath came as a shallow pant. The lungs burned, the eardrums ached and the brain struggled to locate the body's extremities.

November merged into December and the Inuit were still in tents. The inside temperature rarely rose above -15°C and the women were forever breaking the icicles from the inside of the tent canvas. Everyone was constantly cold but there was not enough fuel to light fires and the only warmth they could generate came from the blubber
qulliqs
and their own breath. At night, the children slept bundled together with the adults and, during the day, their skin turned raw from all the rubbing their mothers had to do to keep them warm. The men caught a few wolves and the women sewed little suits from the pelts of these, and from the skins of dogs that died and the scraps of spoiled fox pelts, but the hunters had to be given first priority for caribou skin clothes. If they died, the whole camp would die with them, and so the children had to make do with whatever was left over.

By December, the camp was struggling to stay alive. There was not enough meat and for weeks at a time they had to live on bannock bread and tea, but the bannock did not fill their stomachs and the tea did not keep them warm. Their bellies demanded
niqi
, fresh meat,
nirimarik
or real food, flesh and blubber, but by December there was no
niqi
to be had. To satisfy their cravings they began to eat the carcasses of starved wolves or foxes they found lying in the ice. They ate ptarmigan feathers and bladders and heather, they boiled up hareskin boot liners and made broths from old pairs of
sealskin
kamiks.
They chewed seagull bones and dog harnesses. They ate fur and lemming tails. They consumed their sick dogs and the bodies of their aborted pups. But nothing was ever enough. Before long some kind of stomach sickness began to spread among them. Their bellies knotted into fists, and their muscles trembled. The children leaked diarrhoea then vomit which the women in the camp fed to the dogs rather than have it go to waste. Sargent came to see them, leaving rations of flour, tea and a little sugar, but it all raced through their stomachs and out of their bowels more or less undigested. The illness dimmed their spirits further. Everyone grew so demoralised that not even songs and music could cheer them up. They began to fret and pine for the people they had left behind, and to talk about them constantly, remembering old times, events, celebrations. They came up with a new word to describe the dark period, Qausuittualuk, the Great Dark Time, and they named their new home Qausuittuq, the Place that Never Thaws. In the dark, their loneliness and isolation took on a peculiarly schizophrenic quality so that they were no longer able to distinguish what was real and what not. Qausuittualuk was more than mere physical blackout, it was a blind drawn across their souls.

Glenn Sargent reported the situation in his monthly dispatch to headquarters under the heading “Stomach Influenza,” but he played down the cause and severity of the sickness. He was under pressure to make the experiment work and he was mindful of the competition at Resolute Bay. In truth, he didn't really know the worst of it. The camp was forty miles distant and the Inuit rarely made the trip into the detachment. When they did, they were often too afraid of Sargent's authority, his temper and his gun to speak out.

Often, in the later days of the winter, Aqiatusuk would take off up the cliff and sit in the darkness with his face to the south. Whenever he thought about the situation he was in, he felt gusts of angry resentment against the
qalunaat
and their promises. They were wrong. There was no better life to be had in Qausuittuq. He missed
his stepson, Josephie. He missed Inukjuak and his old hunting grounds. It was time, he decided, that he and his family went home. Halfway across the world in London, at about the same time, an exhibition of Inuit sculpture was opening to tremendous acclaim. The exhibition included works from several Inuit artists, but chief among the pieces on display were Aqiatusuk's wonderfully understated depictions of hunters. The
Art and News Review
commented that the pieces were “astonishingly subtle, these are works of art in the fullest meaning of the word.” The
Manchester Guardian
went further. “Remarkable,” said their critic. “Powerful enough to make the most fervent admirer of Henry Moore pause a moment.” The exhibition proved so successful that galleries in Edinburgh and Paris asked for it on loan and Aqiatusuk's name became well known in certain art circles. Aqiatusuk knew nothing of this exhibition. No one had thought to tell him it was on. He was stuck at the top of the world, barely surviving.

S
IX MONTHS
into the relocation experiment, two very different stories were emerging. According to the Department the whole thing was proving a great success. Larsen, Stevenson and Departmental administrator Ben Sivertz had visited Resolute Bay and Craig Harbour and made inspections of the camps. At the detachments, Corporal Glenn Sargent and Constable Ross Gibson had been encouraged to submit positive quarterly reports and to play down any problems. The Canadian Broadcast Company's film of the drop-off had been well received in the south and within weeks of the relocation, The
Toronto Sun
, the
Montreal Gazette
and the Hudson Bay Company's paper,
The Beaver
, had all published glowing accounts of the new, improved lives the Inuit were living on Corn-wallis and Ellesmere islands. The good news had spread to the U.S., and a
National Geographic
journalist, Andrew Brown, had flown up to Resolute Bay to interview Ross Gibson.

None of these newspaper reporters or Departmental officials had asked the Inuit what they thought about the move in any detail. If they had, their stories would not have been admiring tales of pluck and grit but something more shocking, a detailing of the privations of more or less abandoned families trying to survive in the harshest terrain human beings had ever inhabited. These stories would have mentioned the disorientating, demoralising darkness
which made hunting and trapping not only tremendously difficult but extremely dangerous and the huge distances hunters were having to travel on mobile pack ice in order to be able to hunt and trap enough to survive. Had they been asked, the Inuit might well have told the reporters and Departmental officials that while the hunters were away, the women and children were often forced to survive on bannock and thin broth made from seal heads, and that everyone regularly went hungry and thirsty. The group on the Lindstrom Peninsula might have pointed out that the women of the camp were having to walk miles out on the floating pack to chip freshwater ice from bergs mired in the floe and at the Resolute Bay camp they might have mentioned that no large game ever came on to the island and that they had been reduced to sneaking up to the air-base rubbish dumps under cover of darkness and stealing the remains of the pilots' packed lunches in order to stave off starvation. The Inuit would have certainly reported that both camps were too small and too remote to be viable and that the attempt to mix the Inukjuamiut and the Ingluligmiut had been, all in all, a bad idea. Parents might have brought up the fact that their children were now being denied schooling or access to medical care and single men, like Samwillie, would perhaps have complained that it was going to be impossible to find a wife up there, among women who were either already married or close blood relations. They all would have said they were homesick and they wanted to go back home.

Over the months it became Glenn Sargent's unenviable task to navigate a path between this untold truth, only part of which he really knew or understood, and the Department version being fed to the press. Perhaps for this reason, he turned down the requests of Paddy Aqiatusuk and some of the other Inuit at Lindstrom Peninsula to make radio contact with their relatives in Inukjuak. Sargent said it would be too difficult to organise, but it may well be that he just did not want the awkward facts to emerge.

At Craig Harbour Christmas came and went. Corporal Sargent
put on a festive meal of corned beef and sent everyone away with tinned sardines, some sugar and a few hardtack biscuits. Shortly afterwards, snow arrived and within days the biting winds had compacted it down so that it could be cut into snowbricks. This was a turning point in the new migrants' fortunes. With a sense of relief, the Inukjuamiut began building their snowhouses along the beach in a neat line topped off at one end by the sod houses of the two Pond Inlet families. The Aqiatusuk family snowhouse was, like most of the others, about twelve feet in diameter and about six feet high. Its entrance was elevated above the level of the living space, which was accessed by a tunnel so that warm air would not escape from it. The tunnel led from the outside first to a kind of porch, where Paddy, Samwillie and Elijah stored their dog harnesses, snowknives, harpoons and floats and frozen clothes. Another tunnel opened out to the living area, which had an ice floor and snowbrick walls lined with caribou and buffalo skins. At one end of the living area, the ice floor was built up into a sleeping platform and covered in more skins. In the centre of the house sat the
qulliq
over which Mary Aqiatusuk had built a simple wire frame on which to hang the cooking pot. By the side of that sat a large stone which acted as a store for frozen meat and blubber, when there was any. The space was cramped and often thick with the fumes from the
qulliq
but at least it was possible to stay warm inside, for the temperature in the snow-houses often rose as high as −5°C. As the winter progressed and the sea ice stabilised, the camp hoped they would be able to build more snowhouses out on the sea ice, away from the permafrost, where it would be a few degrees warmer and they would be nearer the edge of the shore-fast ice where most seals were to be found.

The men now felt able to leave the settlement for longer periods in the knowledge that their families would probably not freeze to death. They passed the late winter carving out new hunting routes, as far as Hell Gate in the west and south across the great ice sea to Devon Island. For week after week, they hunted seals at their breathing holes and in nets hung under tight leads in the ice and, though
they were never able to catch enough meat to fill the bellies of their families, the camp did at least draw back from starvation. And so they passed the remainder of that winter, hanging on to life by a few threads of sealskin, some snowblocks and a stone blubber lamp.

At winter's end, when the immediate crises of survival were over, Paddy Aqiatusuk began to realise that something powerful had happened to him. For the first time in his life, he had been overcome by the thing that every Inuk dreads, often even more than death. The feeling had begun as a slow thump in the chest then strengthened until it became a sickness. Paddy Aqiatusuk was
hujuujaq
, homesick. Not any ordinary homesickness, but the deep, griping longing for kith and kin to which Inuit, perhaps of all people, are most prone. Paddy's
hujuujaq
was not merely a sense of missing. As it worked its way inside him, he felt himself invaded by a savage absence, a sense not simply of not being but of never having been. Away from his homeland he no longer really knew who he was. There was no escape from it. Working on his sculpture only furthered his distress, since so much of what he carved related to his life back in Inukjuak. He realised that to retrieve some sense of himself and restore some equilibrium to an existence which tottered dangerously towards the abyss he would have to go home.