10

The Land Beyond the Great Sea

The Great Sea has set me

in motion

Set me adrift

And I move as a weed in

the river.

The arch of sky

And mightiness of storms

Encompass me,

And I am left

Trembling with joy.

—Uvavnuk, recorded and translated by Knud Rasmussen in the Hudson Bay area, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition

The sled tracks were clear in the snow, the first tracks the visitors from Greenland had seen in the new land. The style of the runners was different from theirs—broader, and set closer together. The Greenlanders had stopped to thaw their cheeks and for Rasmussen to enjoy a puff of “the sweet sin,” as he called tobacco, when a gunshot rang out. In the distance they saw a cluster of “black objects” moving on the ice. “I had often imagined the first meeting with the Eskimos of the American Continent,” Rasmussen wrote, “and wondered what it would be like. With a calmness that surprised myself, I realized that it had come.” He took out his spy glass and scanned the horizon, where he saw that a line of sleds had stopped to look at him and his team. Then one man dashed forward.

Rasmussen became excited and, with a shout and a crack of the whip, urged his dogs toward the people he imagined to be hunters. As he drew near, “tearing along at top speed,” the people brandished their rifles. Freuchen shouted a warning, which Rasmussen predictably ignored. He leaped off his sled, removed his fur mitts, and raised his hands above his head. Freuchen and Nasaitordluarsuk, known as Bosun, followed Rasmussen’s example, whereupon the hunters brought their rifles down and raised their hands. They all stood there momentarily, a few humans amid panting dogs on a vast, snowy plain, until one hunter stepped forward. “We are only plain common people,” he said. Because of the pale colour of the Greenlanders’ coats and pants, at first the hunters had thought the newcomers were ghosts.

“We also are only plain common people,” said Rasmussen.

Rasmussen marvelled that “I had yelled at the dogs in the language of the Greenland Eskimo. And, from the expression on the stranger’s face, in a flash I realized that he had understood what I said.” Papik, the leader, was “a tall, well-built fellow, with face and hair covered with rime, and large, gleaming white teeth.” Soon all the people were chatting amiably. “As soon as they saw we were friendly folk, as interesting to them as they were interesting to us, they went wild with delight,” Rasmussen wrote. “There was a shouting and laughing and cracking of jokes.”

The delighted hosts were called the Akilinermiut, whom Rasmussen had heard about in Greenland. They had been moving their village to its winter location. Rasmussen decided to set up camp in some nearby snowdrifts and have a feast to celebrate the encounter. “The meeting could hardly have been more effectively staged,” Rasmussen recalled. “A whole caravan of them suddenly appearing out of the desert of ice, men, women, and children, dressed up in their fantastic costumes, like living illustrations of the Greenland stories of the famous ‘Inland-Dwellers’… All was so unlike the fashions I had previously met with that I felt myself transported to another age; an age of legends of the past.”

The crossing from Greenland had not been easy. The ship’s destination was the coast of Hudson Bay, north of Southampton Island. Storms, thick ice and fog had impeded the expedition’s progress across Davis Strait and through Hudson Strait. “The ice one finds around Greenland is treacherous and never to be relied upon,” Rasmussen wrote. “It grips the traveller, holds him, carries him about and mashes him. It is ever on the move, ever changing. But here in Hudson Bay we encountered for the first time in our lives ice that froze and remained where it froze, some of it gray and rotten and lifeless.” Their ship, Søkongen, even under Captain Peder Pedersen’s expert guidance, barely covered a few miles each day. “The wind howled and the days became increasingly wretched,” and their plans changed. Originally, Freuchen and a companion were to be dropped off in Hudson Strait to head north and meet up with the rest of the party the next summer, but the “jungle of ice” would not let them near land. Eventually, however, through the haze, a low range of mountains appeared. Rasmussen cheerfully described the scene as “a smiling valley opening seaward upon a shelving beach, and landward sheltered by a great crescent of guardian hills.” It proved to be a small, uninhabited island, now called Danish Island, just off the mainland and Vansittart Island.

Finding a harbour, the Søkongen landed the expedition’s equipment and seventy-five now-scrawny dogs. The thirsty animals rushed to a pond and drank until their bellies bulged, then sniffed the new land on legs still wobbly from disuse on the voyage. From the top of a nearby hill, the explorers had a welcome view of the surrounding coast and fjords: walrus lounged on the ice nearby and caribou grazed in the distance. It was “a land truly hospitable in its promise of game.” Freuchen and the two scientists, Birket-Smith and Mathiassen, began working on the winter house while Rasmussen and some of his Inuit companions ventured out to explore. Rasmussen quickly hunted a dozen caribou and many other animals and began storing meat for the winter. He continued his dogsled journeys, exploring the land around their new home.

Freuchen and the two scientists learned how to work together, with Freuchen teaching them how to dogsled and generally how to survive in Arctic conditions. At first Birket-Smith and Mathiassen were disgusted with the filthy conditions of camp life. “It is not easy,” Freuchen wrote, “for students who come from the university to be with guys like me. I scared them in part with my actions. In particular, we were amused by the horror that was painted on Therkel Mathiassen’s face when he saw that I let one of my dogs lick the pan clean after our meal. As if he’d seen me practicing murder, he whispered in the greatest excitement to Birket-Smith: ‘He lets the dog lick the pan!’” But the scientists were soon inured to the reality of life in the Arctic and they all got along well during their time at “the Bellows,” as they called their camp, on account of the wind.

On December 4, 1921, one month after arriving in the new land, Rasmussen, Freuchen and Bosun encountered the first group of local Inuit. Their dialect was slightly different from that of the Greenlanders, but Rasmussen had no problem understanding them. Freuchen and the other members of the expedition, lacking Rasmussen’s facility with the language, had more difficulty, but soon they too could pick out the rhythms and idioms of the local dialect. Rasmussen learned that in the vicinity of the Bellows there were many bands of Inuit. He also learned of a nearby Hudson’s Bay Company post at Repulse Bay, so he and his entourage set off to introduce themselves at the post and inquire about the possibility of mail delivery in the spring. Captain George Washington Cleveland—known locally as Sakoatarnak, the harpooner—was a legendary figure in the region. Cleveland was the only white person to live alone at the post, which was a gathering place for Inuit traders. American by birth, he had lived in the area for more than two decades, first as a whaler and eventually as the Hudson’s Bay Company representative. When Rasmussen arrived at the post, he produced a letter from the company’s head office in London. Cleveland waved it away: “I don’t care to read it,” he said. “I know good men by sight.” Rasmussen later learned that Cleveland was illiterate.

The old whaler had a warm relationship with alcohol, despite Prohibition—he was allotted only six bottles per year, for “medicinal purposes”—so he was happy to receive some Danish aquavit. “Liquor is my favourite drink—any kind and any brand,” he claimed. Rasmussen’s donation to the medicine chest ensured a warm welcome on this and many other occasions during the next year and a half. Over a meal of caribou, canned fruit and aquavit, they solidified their friendship. Then followed a late-night dance party. Cleveland was garrulous and helpful, but not all his claims and stories were to be trusted. Nevertheless, Rasmussen obtained the information he needed to plan the next two years of exploration, including tips about which groups lived in which regions and a strategy for visiting them all. He also learned something unexpected: that there were two distinct groups of Inuit in Canada, one concentrated around Baffin Island and along the Northwest Passage, who lived much like their Greenlandic cousins, in a culture based on marine mammal hunting, and another smaller group that kept more to the interior and lived on land mammal hunting. The expedition would have to cover as much territory as possible in the next two years to become familiar with both these groups.

While Rasmussen and Bosun returned to Danish Island to see how the others were getting along, Freuchen sledded south alone to visit the Hudson’s Bay Company ship Fort Chesterfield, commanded by Captain Jean Berthie, which was frozen in farther south in Wager Bay. Rasmussen later met Berthie on several occasions—as everyone in the sparsely populated region was eager to meet new people—and described him as having “all the good qualities of the French Canadian.” Berthie was also “thoroughly familiar with all forms of travel in the Arctic, and speaks Eskimo fluently.” His crew were young Newfoundlanders, full of “cheerful hospitality.” Freuchen and Berthie agreed to meet at Captain Cleveland’s station for Christmas, along with the crew.

On his way back to Danish Island, Rasmussen encountered more sled tracks. Not being able to resist seeing where they went, he urged his dogs on. He soon found an old woman, Takornaoq, ice fishing for trout on a large lake. She brought Rasmussen and Bosun to her small village of three snow huts. One of the notable residents was an old man named Inernerunassuaq, an angakoq from farther north, near the North Magnetic Pole, who told them many tales that evening by the light of seal-oil lamps.

Just before serving a meal to her visitors, Takornaoq, overcome, seated herself between Rasmussen and Bosun and sang an impromptu song in their honour:

Aya iya, aya ya-iya,

The lands about my dwelling

Are grown fairer this day

Since it was given me to see

The face of strangers never seen.

All is fairer,

All is fairer,

And life is thankfulness itself.

Aya, these guests of mine

Bring greatness to my house,

Aya iya, aya ya-iya.

After they had eaten, Rasmussen continued to ask many questions. Now Takornaoq told him stories, including one that illustrated the terrible fragility of life in those regions. “I once met a woman who saved her own life by eating her husband and her children,” she said softly. One winter, she told Rasmussen, she and her husband were traveling by dogsled when they “came to a spot where strange sounds hung in the air.” The words slowly became clear: “I am one who can no longer live among humankind, for I have eaten my own kin.” Searching for the source of the lament, they found a small snow shelter, and nearby a human head. They crawled into the shelter and saw a near-skeletal woman muttering about her deeds. She had eaten her husband and children. “You had the will to live and so you are still alive,” they claimed and nursed her back to strength before taking her away, to the place where her brother lived. “She is still alive to this day,” Takornaoq recalled, “and married to a great hunter, named Igtussarssua, and she is his favorite wife, though he had one before. But that is the most terrible thing I have known in all my life.”

Rasmussen stayed with them for several days before returning to Danish Island, full of hope that these people would not only provide a wealth of ethnographic material, “the first intimate picture of a little known people, but also… produce evidence of the origin and migrations of all the Eskimo Tribes. The key to these mysteries would be found in hitherto unexplored ruins of former civilizations on the shores adjacent to the Barren Grounds, and in the present-day customs of isolated aborigines who were themselves strangers alike to the white man and to the Greenland Eskimos I knew so well.” The Barren Grounds, also known as the Barren Lands, was the name given to the region between east Hudson Bay and the Arctic coast, “among the most isolated and inaccessible portions of the globe.”

At first the Inuit living near Danish Island were afraid of the Danish and Greenlandic travellers, but word soon spread of Rasmussen’s hospitality and charisma. The Inuit learned to regard the small collection of huts on Danish Island as a home away from home, coming and going as they pleased, which is exactly as Rasmussen wished. Only in this way, by building confidence and mutual respect, would he gain the advantage of studying their history and culture. Within a few months he was, according to Freuchen, “already their dearest friend, and wormed every secret out of them.” In addition to learning about their material culture—their houses, clothing, weapons and food preparation techniques and tools—Rasmussen wanted especially to know about their religious practices, their songs, dances, stories and ceremonies.

Throughout January and February 1922, Rasmussen began to organize the expedition into teams for the summer fieldwork. Mathiassen and Birket-Smith would first sled south to visit Cleveland and obtain more detailed information about the tribes in the vicinity of the post. Then Birket-Smith, with Jacob Olsen as an interpreter, would continue south to Chesterfield Inlet and proceed inland to investigate the Inuit who lived near other non-Inuit native peoples. Rasmussen was keen to head inland to study “people who were even more interesting”—those who eschewed marine mammal hunting and lived in the Barren Lands. Mathiassen would return to Danish Island and head north with Freuchen to map the shores of Baffin Island (called “Baffinland” by the expedition) and to meet the people of that region. Their journey would take them to Igloolik, where they would part company: Freuchen would chart the unexplored portions of Baffin Island and Mathiassen would chart Admiralty Inlet, before meeting again at Igloolik for the return journey. Later, Mathiassen was to begin excavating the nearby ruins at Repulse Bay and Southampton Island—the remains of what would come to be called the Thule culture.

But the winter was not all taken up with planning and preparation. Rasmussen went on many hunting expeditions, although sometimes it was so cold that “every time we picked up our guns with the naked hand the cold steel took the skin off.” On one such journey near the end of January, after a hard day on the trail when they “wished for nothing better than to find a shelter without having to build it ourselves,” he and his two Inuit companions were surprised to see a huge sled with six men and a team of fifteen dogs coming toward them. A small man with a frosted beard leaped off the sled as it drew alongside, held out his hand “in the whiteman’s fashion” and gestured behind him to a cluster of snow huts that Rasmussen hadn’t seen. “Qujangnamik!—Thanks to the coming guests!” he yelled. He introduced himself as Aua, an angakoq, and proved to be a superior host as well as a valuable source of local spiritual lore.

Aua brought them to the shore of a large lake, where a small group of Inuit emerged from their snow houses to greet them. About sixteen people lived there, in multiple dwellings and store rooms connected by tunnels. The entire complex was lit by blubber lamps, and the floors were strewn with thick caribou hides. It was the largest housing complex Rasmussen had ever seen in the north, and he was delighted to be introduced to the residents, to sip tea and relax, feasting on a roasted hare. They agreed to go walrus hunting together, an event that took two days of organizing and packing. The provisions were stacked outside in a chaotic mound that looked much like the piled-up possessions of any “suburban family waiting on the pavement for the furniture van.”

The sleds were loaded and the dogs panting and eager again to “give tongue,” as Rasmussen was fond of writing. But before they set off, he had the rare pleasure of seeing an intimate domestic ceremony: a prayer for a newborn infant’s first journey into the world, to give it good fortune on life’s greater journey. Aua leaned over the swaddled baby and sang quietly:

I rise up from rest,

Moving swiftly as the raven’s wing

I rise up to meet the day—

Wa-wa

My face is turned from the dark of night

My gaze toward the dawn,

Toward the whitening dawn.

Soon they had arrived at a good campsite and set to work cutting snow into blocks and building a new cluster of snow houses against an outcrop. Once again, these were large dwellings. The largest hut could sleep twenty people with ease and was linked by tunnels to adjoining rooms. The interior was made homey with the use of plentiful furs and skins, while numerous oil lamps provided warmth and light. Here Rasmussen remained with Aua for several weeks, until mid-February, hunting walrus, feasting and singing. The hunting was good and the food was plentiful. “A well-stocked larder sets one’s mind at rest, and,” Rasmussen observed rather loftily, “one feels more at liberty to consider higher things.” With the lamps casting mysterious shadows in the evenings, their stomachs full “and the place so warm that one could go about half naked and enjoy it,” night after night the people settled in to hear Aua’s stories of the supernatural and his responsibilities as an angakoq. “Men and beasts are much alike,” he said. “And so it was that our fathers believed that men could be animals for a time, then men again.” He told the story of a polar bear that hunted walruses like a man, creeping across the ice to their air hole and then leaping up to crush the beasts with a giant ice block.

“With eloquent gestures and a voice that rose and fell in accord with the tenor of his theme,” Aua spoke of the Mistress of the Sea, a creature who dwelt on the bottom of the ocean. How she began as a girl who had been kidnapped by a petrel that was disguised as a handsome young man. How she had been rescued by her father and then abandoned when the powers of the petrel- man raised a mighty storm. Her father, seeing her clinging to the side of the boat, chopped off her fingers and wrists, which became the seals and the walruses. How she sank below the waves and now ruled the sea and its myriad creatures. Aua intoned that the girl’s father lived nearby and was responsible for punishing those who had sinned on earth until they were ready for the afterlife.

Aua spoke quietly to Rasmussen of the two regions of the afterlife: the Uvdlormiut, a place near the dawn where lived the People of the Day, those who were drowned or murdered. And the Qimiujarmiut, where lived the People of the Narrow Land—an island under the sea populated by those who died of sickness. In both places, game was plentiful and life was full of laughter. The souls of the dead played kickball with a walrus skull, and their singing was the source of the northern lights. Aua also told Rasmussen about the rites of an angakoq, and the ceremony to prepare an angakoq for a visit to these two realms of the afterlife. And how, in times of famine, an angakoq would visit the Mistress of the Sea to beseech her to release more animals for hunting. Rasmussen, entranced, recorded all he could; but the most surprising thing to him was that much of what Aua told him was familiar. He had heard it from angakoqs in Greenland. These were obviously closely related people.

Although he was occupied primarily with legends and beliefs, Rasmussen had observed some similarities and differences in material culture between the Inuit of Greenland and those of central northern Canada. These included slight variations in the construction of snow shovels, snow huts and harpoons. The sleds were also longer, narrower and heavier than those commonly used in Greenland. But it was the Canadian Inuit method of making sled runners that stood out. Because of the dry climate, the snow along the coast of Hudson Bay was “dry and powdery,” making the traditional Greenlandic sleds slow and sluggish. It was like driving through sand, the runners screeching and whining with the friction. Under these conditions, even light loads were “troublesome to move” and wore out the dogs. The Inuit here had adapted to this by doing what Rasmussen called “ice shoeing.” In Canada, the Inuit made the icy runners not from ice-encrusted hides but from frozen mud. The mud was dug up in the summer specifically for this purpose and applied in a two-inch-thick paste to the runners. When it froze it was smoothed with a knife and then covered with water and saliva squirted from people’s mouths. During travel, the ice on the runners wore off several times a day. If the drivers’ mouths were too dry to spit, they urinated on the runners’ mud. If a runner was damaged by hitting a stone, repairs were done by applying a piece of chewed meat to the runner. “With a good ice shoeing and reasonably level ground,” Rasmussen noted, “even heavy loads will run as smoothly as in a slide, without fatiguing the teams… the sledges run almost by themselves, with just a momentary pull every now and again.”

Because they had missed the season for digging up mud, Rasmussen and Freuchen came up with the ingenious idea of using frozen rye-flour paste as an alternative until they could obtain mud in the spring. They later made pancakes out of the paste. Rasmussen, who had bowed to propriety in his quest for professional credibility, claimed in his account of the journey, Across Arctic America, that the pancakes were fed to the dogs. Freuchen was more revealing: “As I said before,” he remarked, “we were rather careless of what we smeared on it, and I gladly dispensed with my share of the pancakes.”

By mid-February, Rasmussen knew he was running out of time if he wanted to reach the inland caribou hunters. He and his crew returned to the Bellows through a blizzard “with bent backs and bowed heads; we had literally to creep along, following the well-worn sledge track with our noses almost to the ground.” After a brief reunion with the other expedition members, they set off on their respective journeys, according to Rasmussen’s plan. They had about eight months of work to do. The two Danish scientists were now well trained in Arctic travel—they were nowhere near as proficient as Rasmussen, Freuchen and the Inuit assistants, but they had enough skills not to hold anyone back and were unlikely to perish from bad decision making.

Rasmussen’s team consisted of three sleds, three men, two women and twenty-four dogs. With the sleds weighing over one hundred pounds each without riders, the dogs were happy to have ice shoes on the runners as they shot east and south along the frozen coast of Hudson Bay. They were headed toward Chesterfield Inlet, following Birket-Smith and Helge Bangsted, who had gone ahead. The team rested at Cleveland’s Hudson’s Bay Company post at Repulse Bay for a few days and then pushed on, stopping only briefly when the travellers encountered hunters or small clusters of snow huts, or the abandoned stone ruins of older encampments. Several days out, they noticed a lone traveller sledding toward them from the south. It was Constable Packett, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, travelling from the police headquarters at Chesterfield Inlet to meet Rasmussen and write a report. Packett spent his winters alone, dogsledding thousands of miles and sheltering in snow huts. He told Rasmussen that his main work was to bring order to the whalers who sometimes wintered along the coast—they could be unruly and “required a good deal of looking after.” As part of the Canadian government’s initiative to bring a more universal application of law and order to the Arctic region, Packett occasionally had to investigate murders committed by Inuit as well. In all other aspects, the Inuit were left to regulate themselves. Rasmussen agreed to submit a report to police headquarters, such as it was, at Chesterfield Inlet before he headed inland. “I confess to being somewhat impressed by the Canadian Mounted Police as undaunted travellers,” he wrote.

By early April, when they passed the ship Fort Chesterfield iced-in north of Wager Bay, the sun was lighting the sky for half of each day and warming the snow. Rasmussen called for a few days’ rest, not only to visit the crew but also because a band of Netsilik Inuit were camped around the ship. One of the Netsilik elders, Manilaq, was “an excellent story-teller,” but Rasmussen knew he must hurry to get inland before the warmth of spring made sled travel to the interior difficult. He made plans to meet Manilaq later, to share stories, but it was not to be. Manilaq committed suicide soon afterward, “in the presence of his family, preferring to move to the eternal hunting grounds rather than live on growing feebler under the burden of days.”

Rasmussen frequently wrote about the cultural custom of suicide, and other seemingly harsh and unsavoury traditions, in Inuit communities in Greenland and North America. For all his romantic portrayals of Inuit life—the freedom, mystery, celebrations and fine oral traditions of poetry and story—Rasmussen was unsentimental in recording the less-than-ideal aspects of life in the harsh land. Suicide was a necessary social adaptation to an unforgiving world, and individuals were responsible for killing themselves when they were too old to keep up with the efforts that survival demanded and became a burden to others. Usually communities did not have excess food, and life was too precarious for families to maintain dependents other than their own children. Rasmussen wrote in detail about the death of an old angakoq many years earlier in Greenland:

“Sagdloq is growing old,” he said to me. “Sagdloq is losing his power. His wife will die.”

This was Sagdloq’s last great inspiration; his wife died when the summer came. Shortly after her burial, people began to report that Saqdloq would not leave his tent. No one could get him to take food, and he refused to speak. I went down then to see him. He was sitting in a heap on the stone sleeping-place, and had already grown strangely yellow in the face. His excoriated eyelids were bleeding.

When I went in, he signed to me, with a movement of his hand, to sit down; and, interrupted by constant fits of coughing, he explained himself: “You are a stranger, to you I am glad to speak; I act as I am doing because life is no longer good for me. I am too old to be alone. She who looked after my clothes and prepared my food for so many years is dead. For many years I have lived with her, and it is best that I follow her.”

I went softly away; I did not like to intrude upon him. And I did not visit him again.

The villagers came and brought him food, which they left in his tent. But he was never heard to speak after that. Old Sagdloq literally starved himself to death; all the gifts of meat that his countrymen had brought lay heaped up by his body.

In mid-April, Rasmussen was welcomed into the home of a family of five Inuit who lived in three roomy, connected snow huts. Generous as usual, the people offered to feed Rasmussen, his companions and their dogs, and soon they were “firm friends.” Rasmussen wondered “where else in the world could one come tumbling into people’s houses without ceremony, merely saying that one comes from a country that they do not know, and forthwith begin to question them on matters which are generally considered sacred—all without the least offence?” Even though they were only a day’s travel from Chesterfield Inlet, where they would turn inland, Rasmussen decided to stay with his hosts for eight days—the walrus hunting was excellent and the patriarch Inugpassugssuk was a loquacious and forthcoming narrator. Of course, Rasmussen should have realized that it was his own charm, familiarity with their customs and fluency in their language that eased his way in their world; no one else could have done it. No one else did do it.

Chesterfield Inlet was a city in comparison with any community they had visited since leaving Greenland. It consisted of a handful of white-painted wooden buildings, including Hudson’s Bay Company storehouses, the barracks of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, “in lordly isolation on the farther side of a frozen creek,” and astonishingly, a small Roman Catholic church built of wood. Many snow huts filled the spaces between the buildings, “the open entrances of which gave the whole the appearance of a rabbit warren.” When the visitors arrived, the church bell was ringing and a handful of people were shuffling across the snowy clearing toward the “civilized and city-like” building. A photograph of the community taken by Rasmussen exudes desolation, but to him and his companions it was very welcoming.

He introduced himself to the non-Inuit residents at the Hudson’s Bay Company post, to the police and to the three Jesuit priests, who were “highly cultured and most interesting to talk to.” But he declined an invitation to stay at the home of the station manager. Wanting to maintain close contact with the Inuit, he continued to live “Eskimo fashion on the stores of walrus meat” so that he would always be perceived as being part of the Inuit community “in their free and easy fashion” rather than a cultural outsider. It was essential, he believed, to maintain this distinction in order to be accepted and therefore entrusted with their cultural secrets.

On May 3, he and his companions harnessed the dogs and set off along the north shore of Chesterfield Inlet en route to Baker Lake, hoping to meet the remote inland Inuit, who lived entirely without access to marine mammals for food. The sun was warm, and as the snow was moist and soft with the temperature above freezing, Rasmussen removed the ice shoeing from the runners. They pushed on quickly through the fast-corroding snow, drinking from freshly melted ponds. On May 12, they reached Baker Lake and were reunited with Birket-Smith, who had been waiting “impatiently” for Rasmussen to arrive. They did not linger at Baker Lake because the people who lived there were in frequent contact with whalers, traders and missionaries, and thus “much of their original character had been lost.” The explorers pushed on into the unknown interior. It was now so warm during the many hours of daylight that they travelled at night to keep the heavy sleds from bogging down in slush.

On May 18, they reached a region about 250 miles west of Baker Lake where “isolated masses of rock [rose] up here and there amid the innumerable lakes and streams.” Ridges of rocky hills undulated and shrank into a great, swampy plain that was “tinged with beauty” in the lingering sunset. Rasmussen skied ahead of the sleds, and from the vantage of a slight rise he saw, not far away, a village on the shore of a small lake. They were in the land of people generally known as the Caribou Inuit, the inland Inuit who had no history of the marine mammal hunting that so clearly defined the Inuit cultures of Greenland and Hudson Bay.

The villagers ran about in confusion when they saw Rasmussen’s band on the rise. By the time he reached the settlement, all the women and children had vanished and two men sat on blocks of snow waiting for him. The Caribou Inuit were frequently in conflict with the coastal Inuit and southern Indian groups, so the arrival of strangers with sleds might easily signal a war party. “For centuries past,” Rasmussen wrote, “the Eskimos and the Indians had been at feud, and the atrocities on both sides were not yet forgotten.”

But he knew the preferred greeting in such situations. He yelled out in Greenlandic: “Ilorrainik tikitunga!” which meant “I come from the right side!” The inland Inuit understood the language perfectly. The two men leaped up with grins on their faces and ran up to Rasmussen; the tent flaps flew open, and the women and children rushed out. It had been a severe winter, during which several people and many dogs had starved to death. They were now waiting for the spring caribou migration and had sent off runners to the nearby settlements along the Kazan River. Rasmussen’s crew made pancakes and tea for the entire village, and the Inuit started preparing a celebratory meal while Rasmussen chatted with them. He discovered, to his great interest, that some of them had never before seen a white person. Before the afternoon was over, runners arrived, shouting, “The caribou are coming!” and the village went into action with “extravagant rejoicing.” Soon the land was “so thick with game” that it made travel by dogsled difficult.

As they pushed farther inland, Rasmussen and Birket-Smith met other bands that were busy with the caribou hunt, and they were invited to “an extravagant banquet” of boiled caribou by Igjugarjuk, the leader of the head tribe of the Padlermiut, or Willow-Folk. Rasmussen was again astonished at how much meat could be consumed at one sitting by people accustomed to the vagaries of an erratic food supply. As they relaxed after the “heavy meal,” he broke out some tobacco to share. At first he was disheartened by what seemed to be the “worst kind of tinpot store and canned-provision culture”—a result of trade with the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Padlermiut had a gramophone that played songs sung by the great opera tenor Enrico Caruso, leading Rasmussen, who usually travelled with a gramophone in Greenland, to remark that he had arrived here “about a hundred years too late.” As he mingled and chatted, though, a young man came up to him and asked if seals had horns, like caribou. At this, Rasmussen was so pleased that he “forgot [his] disappointment altogether.” These people may have had metal pots and guns, but they were culturally distinct and very regional in their worldview: exactly what Rasmussen sought in his exploration of Inuit folklore and legends.

As the snow melted with the late spring sun hot and high overhead, hares, birds, lemmings and marmots emerged and crept about in the tall grass. Caribou were visible everywhere, and wolves and foxes were birthing their cubs. Gulls and terns and loons covered the lakes. Igjugarjuk said, “A youth is dead and gone up into the sky. And the Great Spirit colors earth and sky with a joyful red to receive his soul.” At the end of June, only patches of the snow lay over the ground, and sled and ski travel was only possible through the slush and along frozen lake shores. The local people preferred travel by canoe at this time of year; they had never seen skis and delighted in experimenting with them in the snowdrifts still remaining at the summer solstice.

Rasmussen asked questions of all the old people, wanting to hear their stories and discovering that many of these stories were already familiar. One was especially intriguing—a story about conflict with “red Indians” from the south, who would sneak up and attack the unsuspecting Inuit villages. Rasmussen had heard and recorded nearly word for word the same tale in Greenland—but Greenland has no other native peoples, and he had always wondered about the story’s origins. Now he knew that it must have come from people who had migrated from North America at some time in the distant past and had brought their stories with them.

Many other stories Rasmussen heard here were nearly identical to those he had heard and collected in Greenland. Indeed, when he began to tell his stories, he found that his Canadian listeners had already heard them before and were surprised that an outsider should know their stories and legends. This was a power ful discovery, bolstering Rasmussen’s theory of a pan- Arctic culture that had migrated at some distant time from west to east. But he now began to think that perhaps the origin of the culture lay not in Asia but somewhere along the rivers and lakes of the northern Canadian mainland, and that the people had migrated from the interior to the coasts.

The inland Inuit had no stone houses, unlike the people of Greenland and the coast of Hudson Bay, and Rasmussen and Birket- Smith during the summer expedition found no evidence they had ever been built here. Also, because the Inuit here had no access to marine mammals, they had no blubber for lamps and their snow houses were unheated in the winter. They lived a harder life than people along the coast, leading Rasmussen to pronounce them “the hardiest people in the world.” He and Birket- Smith ascribed the differences in these people’s material and social culture to their distance from the coast, as well as noting the similarities in various Inuit cultures. Out of fifty-two stories Rasmussen recorded here, thirty were identical to Greenlandic stories, despite the many centuries that must have elapsed since the time of the Inuit migration. “An unquestionable connection exists between the Greenlanders and their Canadian kinsfolk in the matter of story and legend,” he wrote. “Many of these stories show a forceful simplicity, a touch of epic strength, and a poetic sense.”

Of those stories that were unique to the region, Rasmussen observed that metaphors from the wild and tales concerning animals were used to reflect on human life. Some of the memorable titles include “The Owl That Wooed a Snow Bunting,” “The Raven and the Loon,” and “The Owl and the Marmot.” The songs were fascinating, too, with several being unique to the region.

Kivkarjuk’s Song

I am but a little woman

Very willing to toil,

Very willing and happy

To work and slave…

And in my eagerness

To be of use,

I pluck the furry buds of willow

Buds like beard of wolf.

I love to go walking far and far away,

And my soles are worn through

As I pluck the buds of willow,

That are furry like the great wolf’s beard…

Akjartoq’s Song

I draw a deep breath,

But my breath comes heavily

As I call forth the song…

There are ill rumors abroad,

Of some who starve in the far places,

And can find no meat.

I call forth the song

From above,

Hayaya—haya.

And now I forget

How hard it was to breathe,

Remembering old times,

When I had strength

To cut and flay great beasts.

Three great beasts could I cut up

While the sun slowly went his way

Across the sky.

Rasmussen travelled across the tundra to the west of northern Hudson Bay throughout the summer, meeting as many people as he could, until he reluctantly began the long journey east to the coast. Sometimes he met up with Birket-Smith and Helge Bangsted, who were now doing botanical collecting, but often he travelled only with his two Greenlandic Inuit companions and a variety of local Inuit guides. Hauling their dogsleds through the slush and grasses and across raging rivers swollen with melt water, they shot caribou and feasted on meat roasted on flat rocks over large fires in the near-perpetual light. It was an exhausting journey, especially for the dogs, dragging the heavy sleds over less-than-ideal terrain, but Rasmussen thrived. “The weather was fine,” he wrote after one tiring jaunt over the tundra, “and as sleep is not so essential in summer, we were soon on our way once more.” It was all a great adventure to him, even those times when he and his companions were trapped on the wrong side of a flooded river and struggled to get the sleds across while ice smashed into them; or when one of the canoes, holding valuable equipment, washed away and they spent over two hours chasing it downstream, grappling with the lead lines to haul it ashore, leaving their hands bloody while they shivered with exhaustion; or when they “had to cross a lake on a block of ice… using our skis as paddles.”

They returned to Chesterfield Inlet on July 31. Rasmussen hardly recognized it. When he had passed through months earlier, the village was firmly in the grip of winter, “one’s nostrils froze in the icy blast and the blood fairly hardened in one’s cheeks”; now it was warm, and instead of seeing fur-clad people in snow huts, he saw the Inuit living in large white canvas tents and wearing cheap, factory-made clothes, which in his opinion were ugly and ill-suited to them. He was also surprised that none of the Inuit hunted the numerous seals and walruses that had congregated just offshore; they were inland Inuit, who had made their way to the coast to be near the Hudson’s Bay Company post, and they had neither the skills nor the knowledge to hunt these animals. Rasmussen was amazed at the power of culture and custom, so strong that it prevented hunters of land mammals from taking advantage of the abundance of marine mammals.

Two weeks later, Birket-Smith and Bangsted rejoined him in Chesterfield Inlet. The men set off together in a schooner heading north to Repulse Bay, where they planned to meet Freuchen. There, Cleveland informed them that although Freuchen and Mathiassen had returned to the Bellows from their northern excursion, migratory ice had prevented Freuchen from bringing a boat south to meet them. A blast of winter weather kept them at Repulse Bay until September 1, when they were fortunate to meet the Inuit whaler and trader John Ell, who spoke English fluently. Ell owned two boats and several sleds and dog teams and offered them passage to Danish Island. What astonished Rasmussen was the man’s easy fluency in two cultures, much like his own—Ell was also a distinguished angakoq, renowned for his magic powers. The world was indeed changing, and cultures were no longer distinct.

Rasmussen and his entourage arrived at Danish Island on September 18 to find the Bellows empty. But their disappointment was temporary; they found Freuchen and several Greenlanders out hunting walrus, “and our reunion was as joyous as any meeting in the Arctic is likely to be between companions long separated.” It was time to compare notes and make plans for the next phase of the expedition. Rasmussen spent the fall sledding around the region, meeting with people he had missed before or who had arrived recently, searching for more stories and legends. He made several visits to the angakoq Aua, still the source of a vast collection of stories. The information about many of the local religious beliefs, taboos and festival rituals that Rasmussen wrote about, and much of his information about angakut in general—their skills, duties and spiritual adventures—came from his meetings with Aua.

One of their most revealing discussions shows just how thoroughly Rasmussen could be taken into a community, how much he was trusted and respected. Aua explained to him why the Inuit remained respectful of so many ancient customs and taboos, why their behaviour was so frequently governed by rules that had no apparent practical foundation and seemed annoying and arbitrary. He took Rasmussen to see Natseq, his very ill and elderly sister. “Why should we human beings suffer pain and sickness?” he said. “All fear it, all would avoid it if they could. Here is this old sister of mine, she has done no wrong that we can see, but lived her many years and given birth to good strong children, yet now she must suffer pain at the ending of her days? Why? Why?” Rasmussen listened respectfully, and Aua continued his long philosophical discourse: “You see, even you cannot answer when we ask you why life is as it is. Our customs come from life and are directed towards life; we cannot explain, we do not believe in this or that; but the answer lies in what I have just shown you.” He then chanted:

We fear!

We fear the elements with which we have to fight in their fury to wrest out food from land and sea.

We fear cold and famine in our snow huts.

We fear the sickness that is daily to be seen amongst us. Not death, but the suffering.

We fear the souls of the dead, of human and animal alike.

We fear the spirits of earth and air.

Aua conceded that they did not know why they obeyed all the old customs and rules, except that these traditions were “built upon the knowledge and experience of generations.” Perhaps clinging to them helped the people to live in peace. “For all our angakoqs and their knowledge of hidden things,” Aua said, “we yet know so little that we fear everything else. We fear the things we see about us, and the things we know from the stories and myths of our forefathers. Therefore we hold by our customs.” In this way, in discussion and debate, Rasmussen passed the final months of 1922.

The members of the Fifth Thule Expedition celebrated Christmas by decking the Bellows with Danish flags and hanging cords of homemade ribbons from the ceiling. They cleaned their cabins, brought out a tablecloth, sang Danish songs and ate boiled trout and caribou. The gramophone scratched out Danish carols as they reread old letters from loved ones, letters now many months old. Outside, the northern lights swirled under the starry dome of winter.