St. Pat’s day, or as Al Snyder used to say, the 17th of Ireland. Al was one of the great bush pilots. I don’t know how many miles he and I flew together. All put together in a straight line they’d sure reach to Vanuatu and probably back.
He was a natural happy non-worrier. If the weather was bad we sat it out. He knew someone every place we landed. If the conditions were good, we flew.
He could fix anything, and when we were at HBC posts, he repaired generators, washers, typewriters, sewing machines, ski-doos, dolls, you name it. No wonder he was popular. There haven’t been too many men like Al in my life. I don’t think anyone has likely met more than one, if he’s been very lucky, that is.
Seals are pretty sharp people. Over the years they learned how to have their young born in a white jacket so that they would be almost invisible. Then as the sun melted the ice and the rocks, pebbles, sea weed and various flotsam thawed out, brother seal changed his coat for a ragged jacket and could still be relatively unobserved. Then man caught on I guess. Some seals didn’t figure he was that smart so they didn’t change their habits and got clobbered. But the Ranger, or dotard as the old ones are called, figured it out and in a couple centuries or so they decided to abandon the ice and have their youngsters ashore on the rocks.
But there a white jacket was no use, so a little more figuring and junior was born on the rocks in a black jacket, and whereas his white cousin couldn’t swim till he’d managed to go through his white and ragged jacket phase, your Ranger could swim as soon as he was born.
Wily man still could find him on his rock though and did, because the pelt of a newly born Ranger is as beautiful and soft as a pussy willow bud. So Mrs. Ranger gave it more thought, and she decided to go up the rivers at a time when man was about immobilized by melting snow, deep mushy drifts and raging downhill water. That stopped him, cold and wet. And in the beginning all it meant was a change of mating dates. I wonder how grouchy old Pop felt about it all. I wouldn’t be surprised if he tried to stay on schedule and got a sharp mouthful of teeth across his nose for his trouble.
Ha! You said, how do I know? Well it all falls into line when you know that the little seal inside the mother is white as snow in January, February and March. That’s when white coats are born, March. They can’t go in the water with their mothers because they can’t swim, so they lie there and the wind howls around them, their fur freezes to the ice and they cry. They are so fat they probably don’t feel the cold, but it’s miserable out there alone with your eyes and whiskers full of drift.
And I guess little rangers were born in March too once. But in late June when they are born now they are black. Somehow the mother manages to be impregnated three months later than other seals, and she manages to have her youngster change colour before he’s born. Mom Ranger has her baby in the nice warm sun on a rock when the ice is gone. He can swim and he can live in fresh water so if it should rain he likes it all that much more, lucky kid. He won’t be crying in the cold. Wouldn’t Mr. Darwin have been pleased?
There was a mother seal who lived in our harbour at Rigolet. She stole fish from our nets but no one ever saw her do it. You’d see her head away out in the Inlet. She’d dive in that distinctive way Rangers have. They hump their backs while most other seals just draw their head straight down. Then perhaps you might, on a calm day, see the net floats bob up and down, nothing more, and later again you might see her out in the Inlet floating there enjoying a fish.
There were a dozen men with rifles on the post who’d have loved to get that seal and she knew it too. Perhaps she also knew who shot at her. The fact remains that when it was time to give birth, she’d come boldly ashore in front of the store and stay there while the youngster was born, and leave with him later that day. The wharf was a hundred yards away with boats coming and going, engines running, people talking, hammering, all the usual things that went on day by day and she’d still come.
So many people coveted the shiny black skin of her baby and she knew it. When the tide was high away they’d leave together, and we’d never, as far as we know, ever see the baby again, for sure not with its mother. She’d be back with her usual caution, to steal fish. She’d be seen daily in the Inlet. But no boat, no hunter ever got near. Her skin after the first year was worthless anyway and her flesh so rank that not even a sleigh dog would eat it. She was pretty safe herself and no trigger-happy character would try a long shot at her from the post because of my dad. But she’d hide that baby some place somehow, and treat us all with extreme caution until it was time for her next baby and she’d be back to that same rock as bold as brass.
I wasn’t there when the war came. There was an army camp built right at Rigolet, where the HBC had been supreme for nearly two hundred years and my dad for most of his life. They cut his trees that he allowed no one to touch. He loved that grove spreading up the hill behind the post. Every fall he’d go in there with his big axe and clear-cut small stuff that might one day strangle the big old fellows that were there when HBC came and many years before.
There were no roads of course, only a long boardwalk around the rocky shore between the buildings for wheelbarrows and handbarrows in summer, dog sleighs in winter. The army brought a tractor and they built immediately behind the post. No way would they spare the big trees. Down they came, up went the ugly huts. Hundreds of years of beauty were destroyed, hundreds of years of quiet gone in a month. Guns were set up to stop submarines from going up the inlet to attack the airbase at Goose Bay. What better target for the guns but the slow moving black whales that had been there every summer for years, some so well known to us that they had names.
No one had ever harmed them. We’d lived in peace together. They’d swim right up to our wharf when we were processing salt salmon, and feed on the capelin that swarmed around because of the brine that was dumped in the water out of the boats that brought the salmon in. The whales would open their big mouths and scoop up a half barrel of tiny capelin and swim slowly away, never touching a boat. They’d surface so close to us youngsters that the warm steam from their breath would blow across our boat and remind us that whales don’t use Scope or Listerine.
And the army gunners would shoot at them. Soldiers would range all over with rifles and shoot at the huge black-backed gulls that had nested on the top of the wooded hill across from the post for years. An osprey nest that was there when my dad first saw Rigolet was as big as a small house and perfectly visible across the inlet. Excellent target for the army.
Then one day two off-duty soldiers strolled out on the HBC wharf and started taking pot shots at the seal that visited our harbour. That finished it, my dad declared war on the army. He raged into their camp and he roared as only he could do. He saved what was left of his trees, and he insisted that no soldier carried a rifle any place on Company property. He got lots of things changed, but they broke his heart anyway.
The tractor tore up the caribou moss that made a walk up to the top of Sunday Hill an exquisite delight. They put an observation post on the hill opposite and shoved the gulls out of the way. They used the great symmetrical sand hills across the inlet, the only ones of their type, except the “Wonderstrand” of the Vikings at the mouth of the inlet, in all of Eastern Canada, for target practice and blew huge craters in them which will take forever to fill again. They spoiled a place of beauty that had been since time began. They banished the big harmless whales and the submarines came and went anyway. Only after the war did they find photos of Hamilton Inlet in German archives that could only have been taken during the war. Well, you know it was what you’d call a legitimate casualty of the “War to End All Wars.” As I said, I wasn’t there to see it happen, and I’m glad I wasn’t. I think they broke my heart a little too, because, even though we moved around a bit, Rigolet was my home, not my birthplace, my home.
And about seals, you tired of seals? Well just this one bit more. One summer my brother was coming back from somewhere when he saw a female Ranger seal dead on a rock with her tiny baby alive beside her. The baby was pretty lonely and the only thing to do was bring him home. Our big old Newfoundland dog had just had a litter of pups and the young seal fitted right in, except that Kit, who was real good natured, seemed to be a bit surprised that this big clumsy pup had sharp teeth while the rest had none. Well, you win a few, lose a couple, so unless he bit too hard, she put up with him. Now and then she’d get up and move away and he’d take a while to find her again.
He grew like a seal, apt description, but he didn’t know he was a seal. We didn’t give it much thought. He had a big wooden tub that he shared with the pups who also loved water of course. As time went on, the pups went to other homes, and Kit was quite resigned when she was left with her ugly duckling. Fall came, then winter. Brother seal lived in the house, perfectly content under the big wood stove. He’d hump himself over to the door a couple of times a day for a brief visit to the great outdoors. He must have had a bladder as large as himself. The rest of the time he lay around the house. Kit worried a bit because he never romped around like the average pup but she wasn’t as young herself any more. He made up for the loss of her pups and she’d play with him, mostly rolling him over and over till he got peevish and snapped at her. They spent the nights sleeping near the stove.
Came spring and the ice went, so what do we do about Ranger who was getting to be a big boy, and who soon, after the nature of his family, would be getting a bit objectionable and probably a bit more than slightly irritable. So the male seal rookery, (why rookery? they ain’t birds, but the experts say it’s rookery) was across the inlet. Let him into the water and he’ll soon find his way over and all will be well.
Like heck it would. We took him down to the beach, shoved him in and he commenced to scream and flounder back toward the land. Kit jumped in true to her life saving heritage, and after all, wasn’t he her kid? And she hauled him out. So now, what do we have? A seal who can’t swim, and one who had no intention of learning. He thought he was a dog. We tried him in salt water, we tried him in fresh. If it was shallow so he could sit on the bottom, he liked it. But get out in that deep stuff, a fellow could drown out there. No way man! It was a silly predicament. Sunny days our dog-seal lay out in the grass and the goats grazed around him and wondered what he was. Rainy days he hauled indoors and slept the day away. He ate anything, he minded his own business, and he barked hoarsely at some people. Others he ignored. As far as he was concerned life was pretty good.
My mother started putting her foot down. She liked him as well as anyone, but a seal grows. A male dotard can get to be six feet long or more. Like all male seals, he can have an aroma that the Avon Lady doesn’t supply, so where do we turn. Well, a chap in the charity business used to make regular trips along the coast in his boat all the way from Boston. Once my mother had given him an orphan caribou and he’d picked up various animals for zoos in the States.
Would he care for a seal? One that couldn’t swim but who belonged to a relatively rare species up our way and one that was unknown in the States. Honest. The Carnegie people didn’t even admit that such a seal existed until 1938, when one of their people got a piece of a skin from a native of Richmond Gulf. Then they sent an expedition in to check on it and got two specimens from Seal Lake. Freddie Moore’s brother was one of the guides on the expedition. Read all about it in a book called Needle to the North . Strange thing is, these seals ascend the rivers on the Labrador Coast, find their way all across the Quebec Peninsula, and are seen inland from Richmond Gulf in Hudson’s Bay, but no one has ever seen one on the Hudson’s Bay or James Bay coast.
Anyway, the man would like such a seal, and we crated Ranger, who travelled far and wide and ended up in a pool in Seattle with a gang of sea lions, who accepted him as a slightly nutty relative I guess. He found that his roommates got tasty fish for dunking themselves in that cold wet stuff, and a guy has to do what a fellow must, so he finally learned to swim, half a world away from his home and with different companions. Perhaps it just goes to show what I tried to say pages back. Ranger seals are smarter and more adaptable than anyone.
Now what I want to know is, if Ranger and his offspring, always providing he could have found a mate with his personal limitation, had been kept on dry land, how long would it have taken for them to grow legs? What sort of fellow would he have become? Except for a different shaped head and his short arms and legs, his skeleton is very similar to a human’s. Be something if they should come out of the water and shove us back in. No more than we deserve I guess, but uncomfortable with no car, no TV. Oh well, it would take a long time. I can sleep easy, especially way back here on the prairie.
The HBC pensioners met last week at the Museum of Man and Nature. Someone thought we should know about whales. The only people there, including the lecturer, that had ever seen a whale were Henry Voisey and I. We had a long tour looking at the exhibits, mostly small stuff, beluga and narwhals, listened to a recording of whales singing and saw a film, mostly on California grey whales, which I’ve never seen or heard. The noises they make are similar to the Atlantic whales but they had the tape speeded up fourteen times to show the similarity to humans singing, so I don’t know.
We used to listen, especially at Hebron, to the Greenland whales talking, but it was slower and seemed to be deeper in sound. Another language I suppose. One thing for sure, they can hear and communicate over great distances.
At Rigolet we used to hear the little black porpoises. They sound like a gang of teenaged girls giggling about boys. They are the most pleasant intelligent little fellows. They get themselves tangled up in salmon nets sometimes. If you handle them roughly, they get scared, and fight like all get out. If you are gentle and talk or whistle to them, they’ll allow you to untangle them, even open their mouths so you can get the twine from around their teeth.
An old fisherman, Sam Wolfrey, could speak to them, at least he could whistle, chuckle and make spitting sounds so they’d stand up in the water and reply. I’ve had them reply to a whistle and swim round and round the boat, but that’s all. They’ll do it in fall on a calm snowy day. For some reason they are exceptionally tame then.
People are very superstitious about porpoises over there. They are the souls of drowned seamen. No one would hurt them then. I wonder how it is now. Everyone had or had heard a yarn about porpoises bringing a drowning man ashore. How many places are there in Eastern Canada that have a porpoise who always escorts a newcomer into the harbour but ignores local boats? Quit a few. Why, I dunno. No one does, but every here and there is a local pilot. You can believe anything after you have been in a small boat on a quiet dark night watching a lighted ship pass, and have seen a group of porpoises standing on their tails in the water watching her, and talking in their bubble and squeak language. You can feel very happy that you have been so close to the friendly little fellows.
You know the difference between our letters is that yours are written today about things that are happening now, leaving room for things that may happen tomorrow, while mine are memories about things that have happened, some of which can never happen again. I only hope you get some interest out of mine to return a little of the immense joy yours give me.
Last letter got me a quick look from the lady in the post office. Vanuatu? Where is that? It shows on the list as so much per ounce, but no one knows where it is. She wasn’t busy and leaned across the counter asking questions.
She doesn’t forget either, and when I go in to get rid of my Hydro bill, she wants to know what’s new in Vanuatu. I told her about the letter written in the midst of a hurricane and she was so interested in how you must have felt not knowing when the roof might go, sitting there in the candle light, you, the man, the boy, the parrot, the dog and the guitar.
The Crees say “nis-ko-mitten,” the Eskimo “nak-o-mak,” but English can only say “I am grateful.” You have to have an old native lady hold your hands and for some trifling thing, say, “nis-ko-mitten” or “nak-o-mak,” and it’s something else indeed. That’s how I want you to know I appreciate your letters.
Gratitude is a big thing among some people. I think I once got much more than was coming to me. It was at Repulse Bay, and a starvation year. Everyone was hungry. The father and I had given all we had; we hunted daily for our next meal too.
One day I shot two foxes; they were thin too, but they were meat. I was on my way home when I met a tiny little woman, old Pealak’s wife. She was out on the barren hills where the snow had blown away picking twigs of tiny arctic willow to make a tiny fire and perhaps boil a cup or two of water to drink; no tea, but when you had nothing, a cup of warm water can be a treat.
She was small, old, her face wrinkled and lines from a lifetime in Arctic wind and cold. Her eyes, black as ebony, sparkled and she was always smiling. She was so kind and so generous and very precious. When she saw me, she came running. She had a bundle of twigs smaller than a bride’s bouquet for part of a day’s work. She exclaimed over the two foxes and immediately said she’d skin them and dress the skins for me if she could have a little of the meat.
I said that I had been lucky the day before too; I had meat and she could have both foxes. I knew full well that a fair share of what was there would go to every igloo in the camp.
You never saw anyone so delighted. She abandoned her hunt for willows and skipped ahead of me, laughing and encouraging me to go faster. “Hurry, white man, you are slow. You will let my meat freeze.” Two starveling foxes, not much to make a person happy perhaps. But she held my hands when she got to her igloo and she told me how happy she was. She said, “One day I will work for you.”
The year ground down. There was hardship, there was death, but spring eventually came and the snow started to melt. Long before we could expect to see any seals on the ice, between the post and John Rae’s North Pole River was a wicked morass of water and snow fourteen miles wide. Pealak and his wife walked all that way to see if any fish were to be had in the river. Fourteen miles knee deep in water and slush, and they were not young by any standard, old by Eskimo figures.
The river wasn’t out, but after hours of trying, they caught one small char in a crack in the ice. That gallant little couple walked that fourteen miles back to their family at Repulse.
I saw them coming and walked down to meet them and to see how they had done. Laughing, they told me the river wasn’t out yet, no fish. The worse things are, the more an Eskimo will laugh. She pulled the little fish out of the bag to show me, and from some place under her shawl, she brought out her ulu, her woman’s knife. She cut a piece of the tail of that fish and insisted that I take it. Twenty-eight miles knee deep in water on an empty stomach and she’d give away part of the only fish she had. I shall never receive anything that I appreciate more.
And she did work for me. When the ship finally came, when things were better and no one was hungry, she came one day and scolded me about my ragged parka, and dragged me to the store to get duffle and thread and what not, and she made me a fancy new parka.
When I left Repulse, she came one day with her little granddaughter, and they gave me a bowl made of amber coloured musk-ox horn. I never see it but I see Mrs. Pealak’s happy face and hear her chuckling, “Hurry, white man…”
I suppose nature is busy covering up the scars of the hurricanes. One thing about the warm countries, they heal so quickly. Not so in our climate and less so the further north you go. When I was quite young, let’s say about sixty years ago, almost three quarters of an everlasting century, but no matter, well my dad had an ice chisel he used to punch holes through the harbour ice to keep records of how much ice grew each month of the winter. Like his special axe and other tools, no one, but no one, ever used that ice chisel, and one year the wooden handle just plain wore out, as Don Learmonth said about the engine in the old tug the Watson Lake.
Anyway, my dad needed a new six-foot handle for that special chisel and one day he must have caught me looking bored, though I never ever was, and told me to get into a pair of snowshoes and go up the valley about three miles to where there was a stand of the most lovely white birch trees you ever did see. I was to find a nice new handle there. I was all for the idea. It would take me out in the bush for a long spring afternoon, so away I went.
That birch grove was one of my most favourite spots, summer or winter. In summer, the side of the hill was ankle deep in caribou moss, and the trees, which would be in full leaf, could take your breath away. There was always the chance of seeing a fox or a lynx. They liked the place too, and families of willow grouse would nest there, one reason for the fox and lynx, and now and then a grumpy porcupine passing through. He liked balsam and spruce and never chewed the bark on the birches, though he would eat the new green shoots now and then.
In winter, you would love the place. There was a high steep hill going up from the bottom of the valley and the snow would cover it like a great sheet of paper. I never see a blank movie screen but I think of the backdrop formed by the hill. Standing in the valley looking up in winter, the bare black branches against the white snow looked like delicate tracery on purest white paper, not stark and cold-looking, but somehow warm, as if one had placed his hand on a paper after the artist had finished work and felt the warmth still there. You see many Christmas cards showing bare branches against white sky. In that valley, you saw the most beautiful Christmas card ever painted.
In spring, there would be that lovely green tinge that birches have against the remaining snow or the newly exposed reindeer moss, which has a colour all its own. Always reminds me of a pail of creamy milk, foaming and warm from the cow. In passing, did you know that if you sprinkle deer moss with molasses, cows will eat it and produce milk that is heavy and yellow with cream?
And in fall, when the birches turned colour and the tall larches behind put on their fall dresses, you could get light-headed with the colour and the absolute vitality of the place. We would get a light snowfall before all the leaves were down and there would be another dimension to the picture. The white background would have an embossed design of partridge tracks, almost invisible till you got them at the exact angle of sight, and there they were, printed right into the paper. Willow partridge have feathery feet and they leave feathery tracks. They go winding around all over looking for low bush cranberries that grow all along the hill, and where they stop to eat there are often little red circles in the snow beside their tracks. White snow, perforated with delicate tracks and red, red marks for contrast, all so beautifully worked in with the pencilling of the bare branches, the bold yellows of the remaining leaves and the bordering of the tall russet larch. Russet sounds dull, like Maid Marian’s dress in the forest, but the larch colour is never dull. It’s only that I have no word on my tongue to describe it.
What I started to tell you was once I got in there with my sharp axe on my shoulder per directions, I couldn’t find my tree. Trees of the right size aplenty, the right length, lots, but how could I axe a lovely creation that, in that cold climate, had probably taken a hundred years to grow. I couldn’t put my axe to any one of them. Sixty years may be a while, but I can remember exactly how I felt, that each and every tree of the hundreds was watching me, each one holding its branches tightly in fear of me. I patterned the snow with snowshoe tracks up and down, and not a tree could I cut. Ha! Geo. Washington had nil on me. He only had to say why he cut a tree. I’d have to explain why I didn’t, and my dad, who was outwardly stern and inwardly as conscious of lovely growing things as anyone could be, would most likely have understood completely. I have wondered if he sent me because he wouldn’t have wanted to harm one of those trees either.
But a handle the chisel must have and I must get it. Well, there was one last chance: our carpenter, net maker, engineer, talented master of a dozen trades, Will Shewak, an Eskimo, a man so capable that highly trained people not only listened to what he said, but came long distances just to ask his advice. A medium-sized brown man with black eyes and the most perfect teeth you ever saw. Prince Andrew, eat your heart out.
Well, Will had never failed me. No matter what the problem was, he’d drop his work and fix it. From the time when I was four or five and would go into his work shop with a shapeless chunk of wood to be made into a toy boat, till I was old enough to own my own sailboat. Will was always there to help, and not only me. Everyone on the post depended on Will. He could join wood together like no one else but Mother Nature could. When he died, I hope they gave him a nice work shop in that far, far off country and a supply of nice straight grained wood and sharp tools to shape it. He would not have asked for anything more.
So, sitting there on the tails of my snowshoes, I figured I’d better get back to Will, post haste. He was working in the net loft looking over dozens of huge salmon nets and figuring out what repairs were needed. I told him my problem and he just smiled. He said, “Remember last summer, when the mail boat bringing the mail ashore from the steamer broke a paddle when it got caught in the wharf?” Well, that paddle was seasoned ash. He’d fished it out of the water and put it away to make hammer and chisel handles, but the best part was still there and needed only a little dressing to fit perfectly. Well my dad got a handle for his special ice chisel, which became just that much more special, the only one around with a lovely grain in the varnished handle. He never did ask me how come I didn’t get birch. I have never told anyone till now, it all comes out on account of a birch tree standing on my lawn and showing the first shimmer of green and a desire to tell someone about a very special place that is in my life and in my heart. There is an airstrip in that valley now I’m told. My birches? Oh they are safe and well, every one of them, in my memory. They can’t be cut, they can never fall. They’ll stand always and hold their branches just so, to make a design that is never the same and never changes. See? If I ever go back, my valley will never change. I just wanted you to see it.
A friend of mine started talking about when he was in the Red Lake area in 1955, working with Lands and Forests on a survey. He said he always remembered the two Indian packers that were on the party and the amount they could carry over any sort of surface, the way they could pack all day and never seem tired at night. So I asked what were their names. He said he had forgotten, but knew they had the same first name. So I said, “Were they Moses Turtle and Moses Pascal?” and they were. How did I know? I was at Pikangikum, and Forestry asked me to hire two extra special packers for them, as they would be operating in dry country and couldn’t fly their gear from lake to lake as usual. They needed packers.
They got packers, the very best. It’s hard to believe but when we had a load of flour flown in to Pikangikum, it came in eighteen-sack loads, one hundred pounds per sack. We had a very steep hill from the dock to the warehouse. Angus and I found a hundred pounds quite enough to hike up that hill and across to the store. If either of the Moses was around he’d take it up in six trips, three sacks per trip, only because of the hill. On the level or going down, they’d handle four every trip. They never entered a packing contest when you only have to go ten yards or so. I’d bet on either of them taking seven or eight hundred on a short deal like that.
They were tall rangy men, but once in Lac La Ronge, a little shrivelled-up man, Thompson Venn, conned me out of a good deal of cigarette tobacco by carrying sacks of flour down the hill and putting them in a canoe. We were wheeling them down a couple at a time, when he came wandering along looking like the next gust of wind would blow him away. Bill Sanderson, who knew better, asked me why I didn’t give the poor old fellow my wheelbarrow and let him earn a dollar or so.
I agreed, but Thompson said he’d only come by for a tin of cigarette tobacco. Would I give him a tin for every sack he could carry down at one time. I figured he might make it with one, seeing it was downhill all the way, so I said fine, let’s see how many you can handle at one time. When he whipped out a well used pack strap from his pocket I figured that I might have been had. He straightened it out on the platform and Bill piled first sack, then, looking very doubtful, the sneak, he put on the second one.
Thompson stood like an ox, so Bill, with a glance at me, put on number three. Thompson still stood fast. I was about to tell Bill to quit when I thought, if this is a game, let it be played. Bill said, “Keeabity,” and Thompson nodded, so on went numbers four to seven. There was a pile of flour about as high as the packer. Seeing he was on the ground and the flour on the platform, it towered away above Thompson’s head. Bill said, as if he didn’t know, “Keeabity.” Thompson shook his head regretfully, no, the tumpline wasn’t long enough for more.
I sat there expecting the big laugh that was bound to come from the gang that had gathered. No way could that wee undernourished looking little man carry that amount, but I had told myself that I’d give him his tin of tobacco. The joke was worth it.
Thompson put the tumpline around his head, and squared his feet for the mighty lift. Suddenly, he slipped out of the line and went over to the onlookers where he cadged a tailor-made cigarette and a light, and stood there smoking, looking mildly at the formidable heap of flour.
Then he suddenly went back, slipped into the tumpline, leaned forward, lifted the seven sacks and walked steadily and quietly down to the canoe with the cigarette sticking out the corner of his mouth.
Yes, the big laugh came, but at me, at the look on my face. That small powerhouse came back and he wasn’t breathing heavily. He said, “Seven sack, seven cans,” and I was dazed enough to say, “How many were going to St. Ives?”
He didn’t understand or react. He just stood there, and I sent Bill for seven tins of tobacco. With a blank face, he put them on the platform, put his tumpline around them, backed up, and put his head in the sling. After two or three mighty efforts, he lifted the three and a half pounds of tobacco, and staggered away down the path with no change of expression, and everybody laughing at me.
The old rogue never bought a tin of tobacco while there was an ignorant white man to impose on. He had all his cronies, who’d let him know about a victim and he’d be there, so timid and weak looking to pick another bone. Yes, I helped him too. A planeload of Great Big American Sportsmen landed, and behind them another planeload of baggage. They wanted a packer to take it to the lake. I suggested Thompson.
They were doubtful but had the time, so agreed to give him ten dollars a man. There were nine and the pilot. Then one kindly fellow said, “Look at him, he’ll be hours, but he needs the money. Come on fellows, let’s make it fifteen a man.” So pathetic Thompson accepted his fee, and hiked the gear across so fast that the Yanks hardly had the time to pick up the souvenirs all big hunters need to take home. Like me, I think some of them felt that they’d been had, especially the good-hearted fellow. Where the strength came in that little fellow I’ll never know, but it was there, as my seven tins of tobacco will prove.
You may or may not have noticed Jim Linklater at Moosonee. Not much to look at for sure, and he lived on a pretty steady diet of potato chips and soft drinks. He never had breakfast. Ellsworth used to stop the truck outside his house and honk till Jim woke and came running out. Something to be said for sleeping in your clothes I guess.
Jim never changed. He wore a garment till it wore out and if he could afford it he put on new. If not, well a piece of string or a couple of nails can repair quite a rent. Just before noon Jim’s wife would show up with a bag of chips and a soft drink. That was his lunch. At quitting time he’d jump off the truck at the store to restock on chips and pop and head for the movie show in the church basement. But Jim could work like a machine, he’d unload box cars all day and he was fast. He never seemed tired.
One year I had a big young kid from Winnipeg. His dad had pull with our manager, so this fellow got a job. He rode to Moosonee with me in a new truck I was taking in. In case you think there was a road that you never noticed, have no fears about your eyes. We rode to Cochrane and put the truck on the train. On the way along, Neil explained to me that he was an athlete, that he wouldn’t expect any of us to have the same degree of fitness that he had. Very decent of him, and to reward him I decided long before we got to Moosonee, that I’d let him work with Jim, especially as he had been kind enough to offer to show the natives how to get fit by exercise and jogging.
Poor Neil, he had a lot to learn. Before he got around to his usual early morning job, he spent a day in a box car with Jim in charge. Frank had made it clear that there were to be no exceptions on race or colour. Neil leapt into the car and fell out at noon, exhausted. At one he asked me to assign him to some task more suited to his brain, but I explained that he came to work, and that he was double the size of any Indian in the car, which was a car of canned goods. When Frank and I looked in at mid-afternoon, the Indians were handling three or four cases at a time. Neil, poor innocent, was picking out the little ones and staggering to the door with one per trip, and his trips were about one to the natives’ three. That evening I asked him if he wanted to talk about a training session for the natives and he didn’t answer me. He forgot all about his regular morning jog, and lay in his bunk reading body-building magazines after supper.
Neil is now an executive in a bank in New York, doing well I’m told. I saw him last fall at a party on the occasion of his parents’ for tieth anniversary. He said that he’d never before seen people with stamina like those Indians. He also said, to his credit, that he wouldn’t have dreamed of going jogging at Moosonee because he was sure the little kids would get out to deliberately show him up. He said as a learning experience it was fantastic. As a carefree summer in the bush it was a bummer.
And he might not have been wrong. One of the young policemen used to run every morning and evening. Then one day he was overtaken and passed by old Joe Koostachin’s fat wife heading for the liquor store with two cases of empty bottles on her back. He used to laugh about it but he was a bit shaken when it happened. It’s a pity we have to collect natives on reserves and settlements when hundreds of years of training has put them so far ahead of us as long as they are in their own country.
I could go on, and I usually do, but enough is enough. Some day when we can sit nice and quiet and not have to move I’ll tell you about Johnnie Turtle, whose name didn’t fit. Doctor McCammon told me the story even though he said he could hardly believe it after seeing it. I could. You see I knew Johnnie Turtle and Isaac Guill,34 and Roderick Keeper, and Bill Suggaski, all of whom could leave me miles behind at what they’d call a slow walk.
Then there was D’Moose Kakegumik, who’d run forty miles to sell a couple of weasels for candy for his adored son, and yarn for a few minutes in the store and run back again. There are many tales about D’Moose, all told to me by old Father Dubeau, who wouldn’t lie just to make a good story better. In fact, he used to say one couldn’t lie about these people. The truth was often less believable. And he was right. That’s why it hurts so much to see them hanging around the beer parlours in the city—with all the big clean country that they can live in up north, they don’t need what they find here. The white man has a lot on his conscience.
I am always thankful that I have a halfway good memory. I can bring back the wonderful and precious things. I can lie in my bed before I go to sleep and bring back a special day, almost hour by hour. I can remember conversations with special people word for word and see the expressions on their faces, but I can never remember what days the refuse is picked up, or what store hours are, or TV programs, or airline flights. I can sit down and write you a list of every man who had an account at Hebron fifty years ago. I know because I tried it and check in the archives. The ceremony of handing over The Bay’s Northern Stores was on May 2nd. It was the same day as our fortieth anniversary dinner, so neither Carol nor I was there. I would like to have seen it. It took place on the deck of the Nonsuch. They hauled down the corporate flag and gave it back to the HBC Governor after 318 years. I have asked that the actual last flag flown on HB House be sent to the Archives, tattered and not as clean as it might be, but a very significant item in history.
None of us quite know how we feel about the Northern Stores being sold. Me in particular. They had been going 247 years when I was born; they were always there when I was young, when I grew up and when I retired. Hard to describe. No one else except the army ever paid me a cent of wages. They provided security all my life and even more, they provided people. People who were completely loyal HBC servants. You have to live in that sort of atmosphere, you must feel it to understand it. The Company was our life, what was good for it was good for us.
Today is the pensioners’ meeting. Debbie Stutski at Hudson’s Bay House, who arranges it with help from Miss Harris and yours truly, will be leaving in June to have her second child. She’s the only youngster among all us greyheads and everyone is so concerned about her. She laughs; it’s her second time, she’s young and healthy and very happy. I’ve known her since she came to HBH seven years ago. We became friends, in short, and I have enjoyed knowing her. She works in what I think of as personnel, but these days is known as human resources. I suppose I was a human resource when I was working, but I would rather be called an employee or even, as in the old days, a Servant. My dad and his staff put in their time proud of being HBC Servants; he’d have had a sour word for anyone who called him a human resource. I get old and crabby. I can’t reconcile to gallons being litres now, and pounds being kilograms. I saw a kid of ten who couldn’t tell the time on my wall clock. He said at home he only had digital clocks.
Anyway, with a new company, I suggested to Debbie that the female part of the staff should agitate for several female executives and since wholesale and The Beaver are moving out, there should be room for a day-care centre. She thinks it’s a great idea. I’ve been trying to get them interested in a day care centre for years. So many good people leave because they have no place to leave babies and they spend time training replacements who will likely have babies in their turn. I’ll keep pushing.
Out to Pointe du Bois on Sunday last with Carol Preston to see an HBC widow, Mrs. Anderson. She and her husband were in the Arctic many years and the little house is full of all sorts of things. Since Geordie’s mother lived in Africa most of their later years, you have flavour of Arctic, Canadian, Scottish and African to enjoy. Her ivory collection, Arctic, is wonderful. I hope it will get to a museum intact one day, but there are Boer War and WWI medals side-by-side with Canadian Indian bead work.
She has a lot of 8-mm film that she and Geordie took at their various HBC postings. One which the Arts and Culture people in Ottawa want is of the last great whale killed by the Eskimos at Pangnirtung. The HBC helped them to tow the great animal in to Pangnirtung and gave them the old whaling plant to process their catch. For them it represented a winter of security as far as food and fuel went. No threat of hunger if hunting was poor. But, and it was a huge but, the poor HBC hit the papers and the International Whaling Commission got up and howled. Greenpeace, or whatever stood for Greenpeace in those days, wrote to Ottawa and Geneva and anywhere else you could think of. The people at Pangnirtung, white and native, were confused. They were a native group doing what they’d done for centuries, and the HBC lending them a helping hand, and all hell broke loose.
So Geordie did the sensible thing. It was fall. No ships could get in and he was the only radio operator, so he ignored anything about whales and whaling. At times the demands for an immediate answer to “ours of the umpty first” were pretty threatening, and he must have wondered how many years of a jail sentence he was accumulating, but he persevered. Messages in plain language and in code were filed and forgotten. His district manager in Winnipeg was an old Scot, very set on his own way, and he grew more and more furious that regular messages about business etc. were acted upon as usual, but no reply to any of his or Ottawa’s demands for the why and wherefore of the whale.
I remember listening to one. I was at Wolstenholme at the time, and the message informed him that, “You seriously imperil your standing with the Company by refusing to act on certain messages which we know you have received.” The Eastern Arctic had an almost daily situation comedy to listen in on. We all had the same code so we had no problems in keeping up with our own soap opera. Many the midnight the air would be busy with people contacting one another or Geordie to discuss the latest.
Meanwhile, a few dozen busy jaws and a multitude of dog teams were reducing the whale to its basic components and the flame on a hundred kudloos kept many an igloo warmed and lit that winter. In fact, that turned out to be one of the poorest hunting years ever experienced. We all envied Geordie and his happy gang at Pangnirtung.
Then came spring. The annual supply ship was on her way north. In those days, she went direct to Arctic Bay or Fort Ross from Churchill, and serviced all the other posts on her return. The RCMP, of course, had no alternative but to reply to the messages directed to them at Pangnirtung during the winter, just as Geordie had no alternative but deliver the messages to the police. However, at the time of the whale hunt, the RCMP were on the south coast of Baffin Island hunting walrus for the needs of their own dog teams and were not around to see or hear of the great whale.
So the corporal, a man of a lot of good sense, replied to all his messages and always referred to “the alleged killing of one Greenland whale.” He also reported that while he had visited many scattered camps, he had been unable to interview any of the natives who had participated in the alleged killing, and that he had seen no materials that he could identify as part of a whale, Greenland or otherwise. I was picked up at Wolstenholme and went to Churchill to go from there on holiday and another posting. However, as one of the motormen had been injured, Captain Smellie asked me to make the round trip on the ship to replace the injured man. This would allow me to get off on Labrador where my parents were, so I gladly went along.
Excitement built up as we went from post to post, and finally, one bright fall day, we entered Pangnirtung fiord and anchored off the post. The spic and span post boat came alongside and Geordie, who was no shy violet, came bustling up the ladder to be met by the district manager, who warmly shook his hand and inquired what sort of a winter he’d had. “Well enough,” said Geordie, “but whit was a’ that senseless havering I had from you about some dammed whale?” There was a short difficult pause and the DM recovered enough to invite Geordie to his cabin for a touch of Nelson’s blood and a conversation. The police inspector smiled at the corporal and they went off to the inspector’s cabin to discuss this, and perhaps that, and a little of the blood, and we who’d come for that purpose went about the business of landing the supplies.
But a bit later, when most of the passengers had gone ashore, and the police and district manager were either sleeping or about their lawful concerns, Geordie slipped into the officer’s mess room for a meal with us and told us the story of “the dammed whale.” A year had passed. The International Whaling Commission was screaming about Russian and Japanese excesses, and one solitary whale that had probably prevented much hardship among the natives at Pangnirtung were forgotten.
Why the great love and loyalty to a commercial company? That I don’t know, but I think the affection and loyalty had always been more to one another than to the firm. The company was only the mortar that bonded us. We were special people. We lived where few would want to live, almost in complete isolation, months for some of us without hearing another human voice, white or native. My longest was nearly ten months but none of us would have it otherwise. We dealt and lived with one of the world’s most adaptable people, people who could live in comfort in one of the world’s most barren environments, people who did not need us but who, with all the grace and good breeding in the world, allowed us to enter their world and taught us how to live there.
The Arctic people of HBC and the people who worked in the bush were two different types, each as important in his own area as the other, but there were many fewer of us in the Arctic, and we were, perhaps for that reason, closer. I know that today I can meet a person who served in the Western Arctic, or one from the Central or Eastern, and we are friends and companions. We are Arctic people. Not so with the Indian trader from Hazelton and one from Mistassinni. There is too much difference. They are Company people and respect one another as such. We were Company people and Arctic people and that is what makes us special to one another. When I see Ches Russel or Scottie Fall who worked a whole Arctic apart, I feel no difference. One day perhaps, there will be only one old time Arctic “man” left, maybe not too long in the future. He/she will be the loneliest man/woman in all Canada. I hope that I am not that man.
So, Guy Fawkes Day is not long past. When I was a kid in Fogo, there was a certain amount of religious difference. There were Catholic, Anglican, United and Salvation Army schools, and to each his own. People coming from Lion’s Den had to pass three schools to get their own, people from Back Cove ditto in the other direction. Everyone in Lion’s Den was Anglican and every one in Back Cove was RC. So as Nov. 5 approached, the Protestant kids started collecting anything burnable for the bonfires, which were always lit on the highest hills to celebrate the failure of the Gunpowder Plot.
And how about the RC kids? Well, forbidden by parent and priest to have any hand in such ungodly doings, they couldn’t leave school and go with the happy gangs that begged, borrowed and stole anything burnable for a month before the great night. Just being seen would be cause for penance, but God is merciful, and October evenings in Newfoundland close in early, so humping a huge load of starrigans. Gotcha didn’t I? A starrigan is a little tree that grows on or near the cliffs and never comes to any size, but is sappy and makes a most crackling fire and the smoke is aromatic bliss. Well, humping your back load of starrigans to the fire, you might chance to fall in with a shadowy figure similarly laden and find it was your friend Ben from the other school who, under friendly darkness, had joined the sworn enemies of Catholicism. If you stood fifty of us up in a line, and under pain of instant death, you demanded an explanation of the Guy Fawkes celebrations of November fires, you’d better be prepared to nail the whole hundred Protestant or Catholic. I’d be prepared to swear that most would only know that it was bonfire night. Anyway, while, or when, kids here in Canada were overturning outhouses on ctober 31st, we were carrying them away bodily to the burning.
Which brings to mind a tale. Seems that one cantankerous old fellow had shut off a portion of his fence that had been more or less a right of way for kids for years. So his outhouse was one of the first to go. Well, some adults inevitably arrived at the fires and the old man’s next door neighbour had himself a wonderful laugh when old Enoch’s one holer was heaved into the flames. In fact, he laughed right heartily till he recognized his own seat of state as it went sailing into the fire. From then on it wasn’t so funny.
Appearances are everything. There was no way the parents of Catholic kids could be ignorant of where their kids were, but, like Nelson, they turned the blind eye. One night I went home with Ben after the fires had died down. We went into the kitchen of his house innocently. His father was there knitting a herring net.
“Where you been?” “Just out on the road.” “You smell of smoke, you do.” Quick thinking by Ben. “Everybody does. The roads are thick with smoke from all the fires.” Then, to me, “You’re a Protestant boy. How come you’re here wi’ Ben?” “Oh I dunno, we just met up.” Then to Ben, “You got the excuse for the smoke, tell me about all that “vaar” (balsam sap) on your clothes. You been to the fires, boy.” So we admitted, yes, we were at the fires, and it was fun.
A warning, while his eyes twinkled over the net: “Me, I don’t care, but God help you if your grandmother finds out.” “Yes Sir,” and silence while we watch the busy needle and card from the meshes of he net one by one, silence that was broken by the old grandmother’s voice from the next room. “Don’t let Gran know, shore nuff! Why I washed more vaar out his clothes when he was a boy. More’n fifty years he is. Listen to him tell the byes, don’t let Gran know. Gran knows plenty and one day she might tell.” And in she comes with his tea and a grin of delight on the Irish face of her. It wasn’t our generation that broke the rules by a long shot.
Gran, you’d have loved. She was little and neat, in a long black skirt and a brilliant white apron that never seemed to get soiled, no matter what she did. She was old, very old, and she had a leprechaun’s face and smile. She feared no one because she had no reason, as she said. She “borned” half the Catholic kids around the harbour and many of the Protestants too. Old Mrs. Fury once said to her that she should let “the others” look after themselves. She said a Protestant woman borned three of my boys and I’ll born a child for any woman that needs me, even you, my girl, but you’re a mite past it now, but blessed miracles do happen, so I’ll watch for you. From there on, as you might guess, “blessed miracle” covered many a case.
But Gran was someone to go to with any problem. She always had a reasonable solution. Bob Scott used to tell a story about a conflict between two men as to which owned a big drift log that both claimed. Bob said the magistrate said for heavens sake go see Gran Walbourne, I haven’t the time to fool around with sticks of wood. Bob said Gran’s decision was short and sweet, shake hands like sensible people, then saw up the log and give the wood for chobies (kindling) to the poor widows around the harbour. “Not me, I got sons to bring my wood and they don’t fight about it.” It could be true; Bob was a good sort.
Gran was near a hundred when I last saw her. I went to her house. She had been bedridden for a year, but she knew what I’d been up to, and her eyes were as keen as ever. She said, “Boy, are you feared of sickness?” I said I didn’t think so. She said, “Are you feared of dying,” and I said not now, maybe later. She said, “I’m dying. I won’t be here when you get back in the fall.” I didn’t know what to say. She looked so small there and yet she was the same mighty Gran that I’d always known. My eyes filled and I felt terrible. She said, “Come here,” and I went over and took her small, ancient hand, and on impulse, I leaned over and kissed her forehead. I said, “Fine time along, Gran,” which is what one says to a traveller. She smiled and said, “Mind the rocks bye, and hail for a deep vessel every fall.” She was gone when I got back, and when I was in her empty house, I wept harder than I’d ever done.
She was no relation, but she was Gran, and men from all over the island came when she died, to carry her to her rest, and the casket never touched the ground the whole five miles to the grave. Men and boys stood in line for the honour of carrying her to the place she would rest, overlooking the village that she loved and served and probably never went more than a few miles from for all of her hundred years, and every religion on the island had its place in her funeral.
I couldn’t be there, but people enough told me that as the little casket was passed from one set of shoulders to another, men who had never been known to show any emotion wept bitterly. Her family put up her headstone and the community fenced and tended her grave. Even many years later, the word Gran meant only one person. The rest, and there were many wonderful old ladies, were Gran Piercey or Strickland or whoever.
There were few doctors in the outports, and midwives or “Granny people” borned all the babies, no charge. They would go for miles overland or by boat and in the cold of winter or during the busy summer. It was only necessary to knock on a door and in minutes the Granny was on her way. Some were younger women with families of their own. No matter, she left, and a neighbour came in for as long as was necessary. One pretty custom: the new baby’s first gown usually went to the Granny who borned her or him. It was carefully kept, and a bit later might go to another baby and back to the Granny again. Many a child went into a well-worn gown at birth while its motherhad a drawer full of new things. No matter, it was Gran’s perquisite. The older and more worn the gown, the more credibility for the mid wife, though I don’t think any one looked at it like that. I wander a lot, sure sign of old age. If I were on my own home island now I’d probably be “Old Uncle Len.” You only need a few grey hairs to qualify. Sort of nice to be everyone’s uncle.
34 It is difficult to discern the spelling of this name in the original letter.