The Long Exile (6 page)

Glaciers are also responsible for dumping sand and gravel into ridges, or eskers. In the deep interior of the Ungava Peninsula, where Alakariallak met his end, the eskers sometimes rise a hundred feet into the air and they are broken by spillways and erosion gullies. Many are marked with
inukshuks
, the man-shaped mounds of rock built by Inuit to act as pathfinders. Arctic foxes and caribou also use eskers as lookouts, so they have historically been good places to hunt. Despite all this glacial carving and dumping, the low, scoured hills around Ungava are, relatively speaking, not deeply eroded. The tops of what were once hills have been reduced to naked rock but you find none of the horns, corries, U-shaped valleys or fiorded coasts that there are further north, on Baffin Island, say, or among the islands of the Queen Elizabeth Group. In Arctic terms at least, Ungava is a gentle, open land with less to hide than its more northerly neighbours.

Its relatively mild nature does not render Ungava any less bleak. There is plenty of naked rock. On the edges of the eskers no plant-life is able to endure the relentless, desiccating westerly winds and in the absence of any firm purchase for plant roots, these formations are usually naked. The worn slopes of the granite hills are also bare, partly for the same reason and partly because no soil is able to settle there. But the westerlies are not all bad. In the summer they bring cloud and summer fogs and so, in spite of the drying effect of the
wind itself, the area is damper than much Arctic tundra, and there are grey-green lichens to be found in every sheltered spot.

Arctic soil everywhere is, unsurprisingly, poor and nitrogen deficient, but on the rocks beneath bird colonies or on perching knolls or fox lookouts, nitrates accumulate and there the tangerine splash of nitrophilous lichen,
Caloplaca elegans
, blends with the more familiar grey-greens creating points of brilliant colour. More important than the clouds and wet fog to plant growth is the permafrost which keeps the moisture brought by the westerlies in the topsoil allowing dwarf shrubs to thrive across much of the inland plateau. The areas not directly fringing the sea are covered by scrubby heathland. As in the rest of the Arctic, the growing season is too short for annuals, but on the heathland below the nubs of rock and esker, the ground is carpeted in creeping willows whose branches can reach as high as two feet in sheltered spots. By Arctic standards a willow that high is as much of a giant as a sequoia in Yosemite. In Arctic conditions a willow may take as many as four hundred years to grow as thick as a man's thumb.

Around Inukjuak itself, dwarf willows are the only tree-like shrub, but south of Inukjuak a few dwarf birches grow, though these rarely venture out more than six inches or so from the root. Among the perennials are the Arctic heathers,
Cassiope
, and Arctic cotton-heads, whose stems Maggie Nujarluktuk gathered to serve as wicks in her stone lamp. In September, the berry-bearing members of the genus
Vaccinium
growing on Ungava's southern slopes produce the tiny blueberries and lingonberries so beloved of Ungava Inuit and of their children in particular. Furry mosses grow around Ungava, too, and, in summer, Arctic poppies, rosy sedges and pretty, bobbing saxifrage poke up from the willow carpet. On alluvial flats beside the Ungava's many rivers, cotton grasses wave above the thick cushions of sphagnum moss which the frost heaves up into tussocks. Where the rivers disgorge into the bay there are white strands of sand, and in the pockets of soil trapped by boulders, sandworts and scurvy grass flourish. Sea pinks raise their heads above the rocky parapet
and crowd the tops of the low cliffs where the air is warmer than at the frosty selvage of the shoreline.

In Ungava human life has always been concentrated along the coast where there are seals, walrus, beluga and, in the past, large whales. By comparison, the interior is forbidding, and in Maggie's time it had become more so, because the once dense herds of caribou had been reduced by the introduction of rifles. Before 1900, the caribou were uncounted and uncountable. Like the American buffalo, they ranged in herds with no discernable beginnings or ends. In 1900, when naturalists, sensing a sudden and dramatic drop in their numbers, began counting, there were something like 1,750,000 caribou living in the Canadian Barrens. Fifty years later this figure was 670,000,60 per cent down on the previous half-century and in 1955, only five years after that, the herds had diminished to 277,000 individuals, 60 per cent down again. Changes in the pattern of the weather and gradual variations in the tree line have always made caribou populations vulnerable to catastrophic but temporary declines but nothing had done anything like the damage caused by the rifle. By the fifties, those quarter of a million or so surviving caribou were scattered across land far larger than western Europe and locating them had become a hunt for needles in haystacks. Between 1900 and 1950, caribou had virtually disappeared from central and northern Ungava and Inuit living around Inukjuak were forced to paddle south by
kayak
or
umiak
, often as far as Richmond Gulf, near Kuujjuarapik, a round trip of four hundred miles, to stand any hope of hunting them. And hunt them they must, not so much for the meat, nutritious though it is, but because the animals' skins were absolute necessities of Inuit life. Caribou hair is cone-shaped and hollow, making its insulating properties second only to those of musk-ox hair, while being a good deal lighter and more flexible. Without caribou pelts for clothing and sleeping bags, neither Inuit nor any other human being would ever have been able to settle in Arctic conditions.

In Maggie's time, Arctic hare and fox remained relatively plentiful
in Ungava and there were trout in the lakes and Arctic char in the rivers. The waters of Hudson Bay have always been home to large numbers of sculpin, harbour, ring and bearded seals and, more rarely, beluga whales and walrus. Ravens and ptarmigan have always been permanent Ungava residents and migrating birds arrive in their millions as early as July and stay until the September snows. The islands off the coast of Cape Dufferin are so densely populated with birds during the summer months that the rocks and cliffs at the shoreline seethe and foam like pots of boiling milk. At McCormack Island, twenty miles north of Inukjuak, vast colonies of murres nest on the leeward side along the headlands and in the hollows carved by glaciers beneath them. Nourished by their guano, clumps of deep, luxuriant moss grow. Fantastic numbers of geese and ducks gather on the rocky edges of the Hopewells, the Sleepers and Nas-tapokas. All along the island festoons of the Belchers, one of which now bears Robert Flaherty's name, eiders, snowgeese and American pintails make their summer homes. During the annual moult, when the birds temporarily lose their flight, Inuit go out in boats and scoop them off the beach.

Autumn arrives relatively late at Inukjuak and is relatively mild. The first snows begin in September, but it does not start snowing heavily until October. By November the snow is so dry and wind-packed you can walk on it with the same ease as asphalt. The days draw in and the nights are coloured by displays of the Northern Lights. The snow continues to build up through December. In January, conditions change sharply as the sea ice in Hudson Bay thickens and stabilises. It stops snowing and temperatures plummet. The air becomes crystalline. The Arctic midwinter begins. In contrast to the summer, with its bustle of insects and yammering birds, midwinter is almost deathly silent. There is rarely a sound to be heard beyond the rush of the wind and the cracking of the ice, a terrible, raw, geologic sound. Midwinter is all about ice. A short way out to sea an ice foot forms, its base lying on the beach. Beyond it sits a rough strand of barrier ice, which takes the brunt of the tide. Farther out still, the
land-fast ice stretches smooth all the way to the floe edge. The pack ice, or floe, slides over and under the land-fast ice and grinds against it, lifting pressure ridges as solid as ice walls or as jumbled as ice boulders. As the tide pulls out, a hinge appears where the barrier ice and the land-fast ice join and the floe edge separates more widely from the land-fast ice, creating a tumbled mass of ice which moves with the tide. Frost smoke, ice flowers and hoar crystals appear where the floe edge pulls away from the land-fast ice, exposing liquid sea. These movements all have their own sounds. As children, Inuit become accustomed to them and learn to distinguish between them but to any outsider it can seem as though they herald the end of the world.

In Ungava, the temperature rarely slips below −40°C in winter and in the blaring January, February and March sun it can feel much warmer. Conversely, when a northwesterly wind is blowing, the windchill can take another ten or fifteen degrees off the ambient temperature. January is often still, though, and January, February and March are all good months for hunting seals at their breathing holes and for trapping foxes. The wind is low, the snow is packed and the ice is stable. The sun shines for at least a few hours on most days and by March the days are long and almost blindingly bright. In April it snows again but this snow never really dries and hardens. By May it is beginning to soften, by June it is in full rot and ice is beginning to melt from the edges of the lakes and at the shoreline. Summer arrives in July, along with the birds.

Generations of Maggie Nujarluktuk's family had made this land their home. Ungava was all they knew and all they were. They were bound to it by blood and by the spirits of their ancestors. Their stories were all here. For centuries, Ungava Inuit had moved around the coast following the migration of whales and birds, jigging for fish in the lakes and rivers and hunting seals, walrus and whales just off the coastline in the bay. They had married and given birth and died. They had played drums and cat's cradle, staged sled races and played football using walrus skulls for balls. They had sung their
songs of great hunting exploits and passed them down to younger generations. At times they had eaten well, at other times, starved.

Contact between the Ungava Inuit and white men had been infrequent and short-lived. Every so often an explorer and his crew would overwinter somewhere along the east Hudson Bay and hire a few locals to hunt or sew skin clothes for a few months. The explorers often traded metal needles, harpoon heads and blades, tobacco and cooking pots in exchange for the Inuit's skins and meat and, sometimes, for sexual favours. While they stayed, the whites seeded a few half-breed babies and passed on their diseases, but for the most part, life on the east coast of Hudson Bay went on as it had ever since the Thule had settled the place.

Then, in the mid-nineteenth century, whalers came into the bay, and although whaling along the eastern shoreline never assumed the large-scale industrialised killing that was taking place along the bay's western coast or off Baffin and Herschel Islands, the presence of the whaling ships and, in particular, of those from New England which, unlike the Scots, overwintered in the region, increased the fraternising between white men and Inuit, with mixed results for the natives. Tuberculosis, measles, diphtheria, syphilis and missionaries spread through the region with equal enthusiasm. Entire families died of TB, whole settlements were ravaged by influenza. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the population of Southampton Island, around three hundred souls, was wiped out in a measles epidemic.

The first mission was established by E. D. Peck in 1894 at Kuuj-juarapik. Increasingly, the Ungava Inuit congregated around the whaling and trading posts and missions to trade pelts, meat and clothes with the whalers and receive medicines, food and benediction from the missions. They began to settle, or at least to limit their previous wanderings to within a day or two's travel from these little settlements. The more concentrated their populations, the more game they took from the surrounding areas. Before long, all the land close to those stations had been hunted out and the Inuit found
themselves more and more dependent on the largesse of the whaling crews or the missionaries.

The missionaries helped bring an end to the desperate Inuit practice of infanticide by parcelling out destitution rations to starving Inuit families and by taking in babies, particularly girls, whose parents could not feed them, and bringing them up as servants in the missions. They also helped put a stop to the widespread, if last-resort, Inuit custom of leaving their elderly to die. The fact that this was most often voluntary, the elderly themselves caulking in the final snowbrick, or setting themselves adrift on the waves in a pad-dleless
kayak
, made it no less traumatic for the families. But God's messengers also had a sinister side. In the space of a generation they had persuaded the women of Ungava to dump their warm and very practical caribou-skin trousers for flimsy tartan skirts and Mother Hubbards. And on the subject of sex they were particularly punitive. They forbad Inuit men to take more than one wife, which sometimes left widows and their children to starve to death, and frowned on the age-old Inuit custom of wife swapping which, though it could be hard on the wives, nevertheless helped keep most camps free of the toxic intrigues of sexual jealousy. But what was more devastating to the Inuit sense of themselves was the missionaries' relentless suppression of their traditional beliefs and complex system of taboos. In most Inuit communities where missionaries held sway, shamans were banned from their customary practices and there were stories of missionaries smashing Inuit skin drums and forbidding the drum dances and songs by which Inuit passed on news from elsewhere. In the course of only a few years the doughty men of God had set the lid on a rich stew of belief which had been bubbling for a thousand years. Inuit were so cowed by what appeared to them to be Christianity's unsparing dogmatism, and so awed by the material riches it seemed to bring, that within the space of a few short years, most Ungava Inuit were refusing even to speak about the old beliefs and there were cases of families preferring to starve rather than take themselves hunting on a Sunday.