During the trip to Great Whale River, Peter Sala kept repeating, “I am a bad man.…” He did not elaborate.
As soon as Peter and Ernie arrived in Great Whale, Peter went to see Harold Udgarten, who had met Robert Flaherty in 1914 and who was still working for the Hudson’s Bay Company twenty-seven years later.
Many of the Hudson Bay Inuit, including Peter himself, referred to Harold as “our white brother,” although Harold was actually of mixed blood—part Norwegian and part Cree.
All of a sudden Harold burst into the room where Ernie was chatting with another Hudson’s Bay Company employee. “Have you heard about the recent murders in the Belchers?” he said to Ernie.
During his long tenure with the Hudson’s Bay Company, “Old Harold,” as he was now called, had developed a reputation for protecting the Inuit from the not always pleasant demands of qallunaat, which was probably why Peter chose to tell him rather than Ernie about the murders.
I wondered whether Peter had implicated himself during his visit to Harold. “I’ll find out for you,” said a Cyberian friend to whom I had told the story of the Belcher murders. He spent close to two hours with his computer … to no avail.
Two hours seemed to me a long time, but the Cyberian admitted that he got a surge of adrenaline every time he successfully downloaded something, and the longer he worked at it, the more potent the surge.
Confession: I get a surge of adrenaline every time I upload myself—i.e., get up and walk away from my computer.
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys,” wrote Thoreau. “They are but improved means to an unimproved end.”
I asked another friend who happened to be a psychic rather than a Cyberian to call up the spirit of Thoreau and ask him (it?) what he thought of computers, so she went into a trance. The spirit’s response was, “All the folks in the afterlife use them except me.”
Until the end of his life, Ernie Riddell couldn’t get Harold’s voice “asking that question” out of his head.
Telegraph message from the HBC store in Great Whale River to the Company’s headquarters in Winnipeg on March 14, 1941:
HAVE RECEIVED INFORMATION THAT THREE MURDERS HAVE BEEN COMMITTED RECENTLY IN BELCHERS. ADVISE IMMEDIATE POLICE INVESTIGATION.