Although I’m not a Northerner, I’ve been drawn strongly to the North and its people since I was first there in the spring of 1955 researching a piece for Sports Illustrated. The topic was what seemed then to be a significant, even dangerous, decline in the great caribou herds. In Yellowknife I met a Canadian Wildlife Service biologist and a Wardair singIe-engined Beaver flew us to Fort Reliance on the eastern tip of Great Slave Lake. There each night after a lot of strong tea and fascinating talk I’d sleep on the floor of the Mountie detachment’s combination home and office (three rooms in all). By day our pilot flew a grid pattern over the Barrens toward Artillery Lake and the Thelon River and beyond while the biologist counted animals below and I just sat there, I guess with all my senses open, because I remember the sights and sounds and smells to this day.
I kept that memory warm for years and in the mid-1960s returned. That time I chugged down the Mackenzie river by tugboat and barge from Hay River to Inuvik, stopped for a day at Norman Wells and for a cup of coffee at Tuktoyaktuk, and in Inuvik played in a baseball game, The Drunks versus The Bartenders, at 2 a.m. in the 24-hour daylight of June in the schoolyard across the street from the Mackenzie Hotel. This was research for a CBC-TV documentary about the Mackenzie (the river, not the hotel).
In 1969 as a Globe and Mail reporter I travelled with Governor General Roland Michener on a tour of the Eastern and High Arctic as far north as Alert, about 500 miles from the North Pole, and in 1987, researching this book, spent a few days along the Mackenzie again. Betweentimes I visited the Arctic Institute museum in Leningrad, one of the most interesting and little-publicized sites in that city. So though I’m not a Northerner, when I’m there I wish I were; which I guess is why the Inuk Mountie detective introduced in this book has been growing in my mind for years.
In that regard, I am deeply grateful for the help given me. Among those based in Inuvik I thank Cece McCauley, the woman who is Chief of the Inuvik Native Band and long ago was my first friend in the Arctic; Inspector Kelly Folk, officer commanding the Inuvik subdivision of the RCMP; Arctic consultant Dick Hill of the multi-faceted Hill Enterprises limited; and Mike and Jackie McVeigh as well as Mike’s Inuit, Dene and Metis students in the communications class at Arctic College.
I also thank RCMP Corporal Jim Herman and Wayne Irwin of Esso Resources, both at Norman Wells; Miles Shaw of Esso in Calgary; Don Wishart of Interprovincial Pipelines in Edmonton; oldtime trapper Gus D’aoust for his matter-of-fact writing about the North; Dr. Jules Sobrian for his encyclopedic knowledge of firearms; Sheldon Fischer for his conscientious editing; and most particularly Barbara Heidenreich of Trent University and the Canadian Environmental Law Association, who worked for years among Native people from Labrador to the western Arctic and whose knowledge and cultural insights helped—plenty.
By all of which I mean: if there are errors, they are my own.
I have used actual place names in this book, but only refer (and that briefly) to one actual person, the redoubtable Chief Cece McCauley. All others in the story, including the Mounties and their wives, are fictional, and all events and characters are solely products of my imagination, not resembling to my knowledge anyone living or dead.
Scott Young,
July, 1988