I’m sitting on the second and top floor of the Polar Bear Lodge in Moosonee. It’s exactly 8 a.m. and the sun has just come up over Moose Factory Island, and that’s what I want to tell you about, but without an instant colour camera and a dictionary of superlative phrases, how can I?
To begin, it’s a clear, cold, absolutely still morning. There is a light frost haze which lies just above the level of the snow. My window looks over the road across the ice and the vehicles duck in and out of the haze and the condensation trails left by other vehicles. In a way they look like ducks feeding in a pond. They are visible, disappear and become visible again. The air is so quiet. The haze and condensation hardly moves at all. The sun shines on the roofs of the cars and they are all nicely finished with burnished gold, and there is one lonely dog that came trotting along on his way to somewhere. He is now just a moving dot on the ice, half way to Charles Island.
But it’s the sun I want you to see. It’s a big red molten ball. It’s finally shown its whole circumference above the trees and all the drifts on the river now have rosy tops, underlined in black on the side of the drift facing me, exactly as if mother nature were unsure I’d appreciate the picture she is creating and wants to draw my attention to some of the fine points. Little does she know, or perhaps she does, that I have seen many of her sunrise specials and never seen two which are alike.
So often we would like to freeze time, for me sunrise, whether across the snow, over the mountain, over the sea. If there is a moment of rebirth, that is it. One special moment, before “the cares that oppress the day,” only that one moment, because it only takes that much to fill a heart that already has uncounted memories to overflowing.
The moon is different, she can create so many feelings of gladness, sorrow, love. She is a silver chamber of delight. She holds memories, messages. She rises, smiles gently, and passes on her unurgent way over and leaves only her cool breath behind. She has no mandate to create life and colour as she passes. She is there to calm and cool us after the impatient passage of the sun. Much as I love her, much as I would fail without her, much as I love her during long hours of serene sailing, or the storm tossed hours when she frantically rushes through the cloud strewn sky, I will always turn gratefully from her for that one moment in the morning when the first tiny ray of the sun shows, because then a person is renewed.
An old Naskapi Indian on Labrador, Pasteen Assini, was dying. He was very old and had two desires left. One was to see his priest again, the other to commence his spirit voyage at the right time. They brought him by canoe from away inland, just a frame of bones, covered with leathery skin. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t eat, he couldn’t speak. He lay like a dead man in the canoe when my dad and I paddled across the river when the band arrived.
His son said he would not go to the hospital. There was no need. He was only waiting. Later I took two doctors to see him. One was Dr. Paddon who spent many years at North West River, the other a famous surgeon from the States who gave several months of each year to Grenfell’s work in the Labrador. My mother was there too. I’m sure Pasteen had not moved since I had last seen him. The doctors checked him and said if he lived another day it would be a miracle. Because he would need a coffin, they measured him so the hospital carpenter could start getting ready. His son smiled and said, “He will speak in the morning only. He will not die, he will see the priest first.”
Claudia, it was several days, perhaps a week before the priest arrived. Pasteen’s tent was set as close to the water as possible facing the rising sun, and every morning at sunrise he would rouse, ask for the priest and when he was told that Father O’Brien had not arrived he went, it seemed contentedly, back to sleep.
The doctors were interested and, when they could spare time, one or both would be there at sunrise. I took them to and fro, and several times my mother went along. There was no grief or any change in the routine at the camp. It was just as if the old man had finished preparing for another hunting trip and was resting before departure. The men lay in the grass talking as they always did after the long winter travelling and trapping, and the hard trip down the river to the coast. The women tended the tents, fished, made snowshoes and talked. The children played, that was all. He was sleeping.
Then, one day, Father O’Brien’s little white St. Christopher puttered up the bay and into the river. He came at nightfall, saw the doctors, and acting on what they said, went to Pasteen’s tent. Only he and Pasteen’s wife and son were there inside the tent, but standing outside waiting, my brother and I could hear the old man’s whispered responses, and when the priest came out he said that Pasteen had revived just for minutes, long enough to accept the priest’s ministrations, that he had indeed recognized and spoken to him. The son said, “Perhaps he will die in the morning now, not before.”
The next morning, Dr. Paddon was there. At sunrise, Pasteen roused, asked clearly how the weather was, and relapsed again when his son said simply, “Raining.” And every morning for several days the same thing happened. Then one morning, I got up and it was clear and bright. The sun was just showing. My mother and I left immediately to cross the river, and when we were half way across, the sun was fully risen.
When we came to the tent, the old man’s body was lying facing the sun which was pouring in through the tent door, full on his old weather beaten face. In that direct light the wrinkles and clefts were a written memorial of a life, a long life, lived under hard, and at times, impossible conditions. But the ravaged features had only dignity, even a sort of gladness. The eyes were not completely closed, as though he were looking his last at the sun which had helped guide him over so many trackless miles. There was not the faintest warmth in his bony hand, no moisture on his forehead.
His son said that he had roused as usual, and when they said the sun was coming up, he said, “Let me see.” After seeing indeed that the sun was up, he smiled and drew no more breath. My mother was crying and I, all of twelve or thirteen, was in the same condition. The son smiled at the old wife and she smiled back, and the son said gently, “He is travelling.”
I heard the doctors talking. They agreed that it had taken an incredible amount of will to accomplish, but that was all, no real miracle. I don’t think it was a miracle either. The old man had to see his priest before leaving on a far journey, he needed a good day to start, and he rested in preparation. But it was the sun, the early morning sun. I wish you could be here to see what I can see. I wish I could tell you properly what I mean, what I know you’ll understand about Pasteen, and why my cheeks are wet, why in spite of that, I am not sad.
Now the sun is well above the trees. The rose colour on the ice is fading, the black shadows underlining the drifts are gone. It’s another day, one of the many that have dawned on the Moose River.
The land has changed so, the buildings, the roads, but one is impressed with the lack of change on the river. Really it is never the same, but never changes. It freezes in the fall and stills the water, and the snow comes and covers it and forms intricate drifts along the banks and furrows to show the direction of the wind. And man comes and scratches his tiny mark across, and no doubt congratulates himself on his fine road, but miles and miles of the river never see man or his tracks and it remains unchanged. Every fall it freezes, every spring it breaks and puny man must build around its desires, and when the time comes, it takes man’s little road and hurls it downstream to melt on the shoals in the sun at low water. What are three hundred years of occupation to the river? A minor irritation perhaps, nothing more.
This afternoon I had to go to Moose Factory Hospital to see old Joe Grom who is there. He has been having breathing problems for some years and they take him in every so often for treatments. So, though the lodge manager offered to run me across, I decided to walk.
It takes about forty-five minutes each way but since the road is ploughed to the bare ice, walking is good. There was no wind. The sun was shining and while it was still about thirty below F, it didn’t seem cold at all except when I stopped to take a picture of the old church in the snow. Then my fingers realized it was cold. It was a nice walk. No one else on foot and I kept away from the track of the cars and ski-doos.
I love to walk, if not with someone special, then alone. On a day like today, one can wrap himself in a cocoon of silence and thoughts inside his fur lined hood, and like Christopher Robin, “No one knows that I’m there at all.” It is wonderful. You are aware of the snow, the ice, the bare poplars and the prim spruce, the tracks of the squirrels that jump boldly in twin imprints from tree to tree and result in neat little piles of dissected cones, and the nervous, timid little marks of the mice that scamper across the surface of the snow from one little hole to another, the least sound or motion sending them diving out of sight in the snow. The solitary independent right and left track of a fox, the blurry prints of a ptarmigan’s feathered feet. Not much, and only a raven overhead, but one sees it all while his mind walks other trails in other days, or dares to leap ahead to walks that will be.
When it was Sunday School time and I was very small, it was not difficult for me to grasp the part about, “not one swallow falling,” because I felt that way about things so much smaller. In spring there used to be a tiny-tiny, dark red flower that grew along the paths that followed the beach, and in due time they formed the small raspberry-like fruit that I showed you on Willow Island. We are strictly rationed. One never finds more than a dozen or so at any one place, and those flowers are so impossibly tiny and beautiful and even in their size have such a seductive scent. I would find them almost as soon as the snow had gone and I’d be in dread that some careless person would walk on them, and I’d put stones as big as I could carry near them so people wouldn’t walk there.
I’d sit on the huge laundry box in my mother’s back kitchen on wash day, when the steam hung heavily in the air from the big iron boiler bubbling slowly on the stove, and the windows were misted with condensation. It was important that the little droplets that formed from nowhere I could see would roll down the pane, leaving a little track to reach the sill to collect one by one, till the little gutter cut in the wood was full and they could all rush outside and go wherever raindrops go on a fine day.
There were so many small things that seemed to need our attention for reasons I would never be able to explain. The millions of transparent minnows in the water, all destined some day to be cod, trout, salmon, or whatever. I never knew, but I felt that they needed protection and I’d feel a little panic when a greedy sculpin would leave the bottom and swim clumsily up with its huge mouth open and engulf half a hundred of the little minute shreds of sea weed. I’d drop a stone or push a pole down and disturb the sluggish old sculpin and feel that I’d saved lives, that perhaps one day one of those almost liquid little fish would come back as a huge silver salmon and perhaps thrash furiously in old Bill’s net so that he could come quietly into our kitchen with most deprecatory air and produce once again his “first fish,” hanging by the gill on his scarred brown finger. And another of my fears was that someone else would be the first to bring a sea run salmon to my mother in the spring. It was terribly important that nothing change I guess, and if Bill wasn’t “first fish,” why, anything could happen to the world, my world.
So when spring came, I alternately dreaded and hoped till the wonderful day when Bill slipped in the back way, face expressionless, and eyes about to dance out of his head, to say, “I suppose you been ate a dozen salmon already, but this one do seem a mite better than some.” And he’d carefully lay it on the huge metal tray my mother kept, I’m almost sure, for Bill’s first offering, and he’d sit there and eat a huge pile of raisin cookies. “Missus, I likes all buns and biscuits, but them there raisin ones do seem better.” And he’d drink his tea and regard the great fish which my mother would never take away. When he was finished and his stubby pipe was loaded with his “Light Beaver Plug.” and reeking away, he’d say, “Well since I’m here anyway,” and he’d take the fish with me and perhaps a younger brother following, and walk to the beach where, with his huge splitting knife, he’d reduce it to two bright red fillets and the fat back bone, which we thought the finest part of the fish.
Then, when he had brought it back, my mother would say, she always did, “You have to stay now and help eat it.” Bill was shy, and he’d protest and mangle his sou’wester in his hands. Finally he’d agree, providing he could eat in the summer kitchen with the two girls and the overflow kids from the big dining table that sat fourteen. Yes, there were a lot of us including several clerks, the customs officer and tidewaiter. There was an overflow.
Bill was always the same age, at least I never saw him any different. He had white patches in his bushy hair, and half his moustache was brown, half white. He had pale blue eyes that watered copiously when the sun was bright on the water or snow. He was the kindest man on earth and used to supply the post with firewood.
He had a team of undisciplined fat dogs and never punished them. Many the time we’d see Bill pushing mightily on his load, while shouting the most monstrous oaths ever heard, and threatening each and every dog by name with all sorts of horrible punishments. “Soon as I gets this load to the bank,” he would threaten he never did, and they took advantage of him, day by day, so that he was famous for his big lazy dogs. They were so used to his constant swearing that they plain ignored it.
One warm day in the spring when the dogs were lazier than ever and Bill worked harder than ever at getting them going, quiet Will Shewak, the post foreman, a man I always felt could easily give God a constructive hint or two, said, “Bill, I’ve not been in the wood path for so long. How about I take your team and get a load of dry wood for my house.” The dry wood cutting was farthest away. I knew Will had a reason, he always did, and he was known as the best teamster in the bay, the best carpenter, engineer, you name it.
So when he started off, I grabbed the back horn and rode along. I don’t remember, perhaps I accidentally missed school, but there was no way I was missing whatever Will planned. Looking back, I saw Bill strolling off to the net loft with his usual cloud of smoke around his head. I knew he and Peter would be having a long yarn. Will let the dogs take their own pace in through the wood path. They tried to turn off at the green wood, which was closest, but he firmly ordered them on, and sat quietly while they balked a bit, but he never changed the tone of his voice and they glanced back, no doubt missing Bill’s frantic cursing.
Finally they went on, and Will whistled to himself and occasionally tipped me a grinning wink. We got to the big dry wood pile, turned the sled around and loaded it with a load much heavier than Bill would ever put on. When he was ready, he called the dogs and they went out slowly and when the tracer came tight, instead of breaking the load out, they stood there, expecting to hear Bill’s oaths and threats while he strained to break it out himself. Will spoke sharply and most of them glanced back, a bit apprehensive, but not trying any harder. Then he roared and I wasn’t expecting it either. He cracked the long whip right over their heads. It was a mighty unexpected crash, and it scared them half silly. Not one was hurt but they put their bellies close to the ground and they yanked that load out and took off down that path as if all the devils Bill had promised were there. We didn’t push on any load. We sat on top and had a royal ride home. Will’s commands were sharp and incisive and they obeyed to the letter.
When we reached the pile on the bank and stopped, they all lay in the snow and watched Will out of their slanting, calculating eyes, and I could see their minds working. Bill came strolling back. Said, “How did um do?” Will said, “Well enough, Bill, but any two are heavier than you, so don’t push on the load any more, no good for you or the dogs.”
Bill promised with mighty oaths that “them so and so’s won’t get away with nutten.” And Will snapped at them to go. They sprang up and were away like a team of the best. When they were half way across the little cove, they realized Bill was back, and before they disappeared into the wood path on the other side, they were idling along and Bill was trudging between the runners pushing as usual. Will’s perfect white teeth showed in a smile and he shrugged. No one was going to change Bill.
Yes, Claudia, Bill was something that could not change. All through my childhood he didn’t, and if Bill, and James, the cooper, and Will didn’t change, the world was always there, always right. I was so secure that perhaps I invented things to worry about just to prove my security and great fortune to myself. And I can walk across a lake to this day with Will or John, or James or Bill, as well as I could then. Onliest thing is, in the years between, I also met other special people who walked with me today.
Last night I went to bed with O’Halloran’s moon shining in the window, exactly as it was last summer. Don’t sleep in the moon path, they say. You can have dreams that can change you from young to old. Where can my fear possibly be at that? The reverse I could hope for. Sleep in the moon’s path, they say, and you’ll dream the dream of your own going. They say a lot of things, but I like to sleep in the moon’s light and I’ve never had cause to fault the dreams she’s given.
And when I woke the world was wrapped in whitest cotton wool. Visibility was down to yards and every wire was ten times its normal diameter and the trees were like a kid’s dream of Christmas. Maybe not a dream either but what he actually sees. When I was very little, my dad took me into a little old wooden church and there were a lot of brass lamps and chains and wall plaques to honour the war dead and those lost at sea. There was a huge brass eagle with wings outstretched to hold the Book. Everything was old and polished by generations of loving, careful hands, and I thought it was the most beautiful place I would ever see.
When I was older and had seen other beautiful things, I realized that the beauty I saw was only partly the brass and the ornaments. The rest was the love of many people I would never know. I can still feel my dad’s hand on my shoulder as I looked at the tiny church and I know now why he took me there. He did things like that.
Today we had planned to leave at 8:30 to fly up to Paint Hills but the fog held on until ten. The sun was out when we left and there was no wind.
We flew straight up the bay, over the frozen surface for the first twenty miles. This is the land of fast ice. It congeals in the fall and never moves until spring. It is snow-covered and smooth. The tide cracks show as lines, stitched seams almost, made by a demented tailor. And as we flew, the little cruciform shadow followed us on the snow, hurrying along neither gaining or losing. It would break into a hundred pieces when we flew over islands and trees, pieces that tore their mad way till we again flew over the snow-covered ice when they reassembled again, as if by magic, and the little shadow again paced us on the flat surface. I like that shadow, filled with one purpose, to be able to follow and arrive at our destination with us. How many little shadows have been covered by cloud and lost forever. Tireless little shadows.
Soon we were flying over the unstable flow ice. It is regulated by the tide and can close up and remain that way for days. Then for no apparent reason, it can break up into leads and lakes that freeze over until the next change pushes them together again and the glass-thin new ice is formed into improbable, unbelievable figures. Angular and geometrically correct, they run for miles like the shingles on a roof, so square, so correct you could not believe it was natural.
Then for no reason, the pattern changes, and the wily artist, Kee-way-tin, the North Wind, seizes his brushes and paints great circles and scrolls, and white mile after white mile of impossible designs. Year after year he paints, and each work is never the same. To fly over a hundred miles of sea ice is to see a hundred patterns every mile, and at the end of the flight your head swims with the mass of impressions which are rolled into one breath-taking panorama in your head, till you wonder where you can possibly store the impressions. But you do, and tomorrow’s, and tomorrow’s.
And you wonder as you fly ever farther north, what it must have looked like ages ago when fire was born, and the first spark seen in the velvet darkness where man and his new toy crouched and fed the flame with twigs, afraid he would lose that precious flame. It must have looked almost exactly as it does today.
Is it loneliness that one feels? I don’t think so. It is something else, awe perhaps, envy that our time is never so long, that we change and that huge piece of real estate was there before a human voice was heard and may well be there when human voices are again stilled. I have had so much of the big and lonely land, but I never fail to be glad when I can go once more, never fail to be a little sad when I stay behind to let the boys or Jackie go. But it is their heritage, and my heart never stays behind. My whole being demands, just once more, even though I have had so much.
After a while we flew parallel with a huge lake of open water, black and menacing against the white ice. No summer whitecaps there. The water is thick with frost.
It is calm, and a little sheen of new ice shows in the sun, and there are tell-tale marks, tiny little blocks thrust up where a seal has put his head through to lie with only his eyes and whiskers above water while he slowly twirls his body to give him three hundred and sixty degree visibility. The floe edge is firm, but it is still March. A few more weeks must pass before he can haul out and bask in the sun, alert for his one natural enemy in this land, the solitary polar bear, who knows that an opening like this will result in a concentration of seals. Sure enough, we shortly see the line of massive footprints leaving Trodley Island and pointing toward the open water.
William has already banked the plane and the line of tracks flows smoothly under the nose. From where I sit, the ice is reflected in the shiny underside of the plane’s wing and I can see an indistinct line of tracks. (Imagine seeing polar bear tracks from an airplane by looking up.) The tracks come to the edge of the heavy ice and follow it north.
In a very short time we have incarnadine proof that the king has dined. As we go into a slow circle over his table, two white bushy-tailed ghosts race madly away from their feast on the master’s leavings, and in the way of arctic foxes, they stop a hundred yards away, watch the plane closely, then scamper back to their repast, hunger or greed getting the best of fear.
Of the bear there is no sign. The tracks suddenly cease to be. He has taken to the water, the water that will kill a human in three minutes, and is perhaps now going his moody way on the far side of the water. We fly over Trodley just in case he has left a mate there. On the bare rocks we lose his tracks, but as we pass over the north coast, there is a dandelion puff of white, and a couple dozen ptarmigan rocket away in as many directions, only to regroup under our plane and glide to a landing half a mile away, while the noisy creature with the frantic shadow passes overhead and away.
It is dark now back in Moosonee. The bear is miles away. The foxes are fed and curled up near the remains of the seal on the bare snow, bushy tails over noses and eyes, two silent white circles. They will sleep off their banquet and there will be miles of nearly open water till they again find their royal provider whom they will follow till his next kill. The ptarmigan have buried deep into the snow and sit quietly, perhaps watching the moon that is again shining on my bed.
And I glance in the mirror at my wind and sun-reddened face and I am satisfied with my day, which I enjoyed telling you about. I hope your day was good. May the silver moon shine on you so you feel its good vibrations. Tomorrow we go back to Paint Hills. I will enjoy that too, but today was like the first cold drink from a rushing stream after miles of travel over a dry land.
I am so sleepy I can barely see to write, but I had to tell someone about my day.
In a short while I’ll be going downtown. I’ll walk down, not because I have the time, or for any reason except nostalgia, to the HBC Raw Fur on Princess Street. I’ll go talk to Eric Curnew who is a fellow Newfie, and look at beaver, otter and muskrat pelts, and yarn for hours. I know Greenpeace would be mad at me, but it would be good to be a lot younger and be up north again where the beaver and muskrats are coming in and where the air is clear and the snow is going and the geese are back. The hurt that comes with remembrance is almost too much.
I wasted a perfectly good morning as I knew I would. We looked at fur and more fur and it was good to know that knowing fur can never be forgotten. There is a feeling to watch a prime pelt flow under your fingers. I couldn’t trap any more, I know that. The time of my life that included hunting is behind me, but am I sorry I once did it? I’ll be honest, no, and I won’t be, because there were other things that were part of it, things that were so good, like the hours I could spend in a canoe.
Claudia, that first time you slide a canoe into the water and climb in and watch that black element that has been solidified for months swirl beautifully around the paddle is special. That first time can never again be duplicated, you think. But it can, again and again, and some people were never born to sit behind fences or ride in cars along narrow little paths.
Evenings alone at dusk on a lake that turns black when the sun drops, when hills against the sky becomes dark and full of mystery. The water disturbed by the paddle has a comforting sound. The whisper of the keel on the sand as you touch shore is a poignant little punctuation that ends a paragraph of a day’s delight. Your muscles ache pleasantly, and your knees feel creaky from kneeling and the slat of the cross bar seems to be permanently engraved on your seat.
Just to step out of the canoe in the twilight and stand in the quiet, to hear the secret night sounds when everything is so still you can open your mouth and hear your blood in your veins. You know in an hour there will be fire, food and rest, but first the precious minutes before sleep that are devoted to thought of the day, the morrow and those that have been.
It’s possible to leave your body and watch your own frame lie relaxed and content? There is no feeling like it. Why is it, when we have everything, we become unwise and want other things? But it’s good that when we have the other things that turn out not to be so wonderful after all, that nature or providence, who may be one and the same, recognizes our need. That impetuosity that overcame reason is forgiven, we are provided with the people, the friends, who make the barely tolerable pleasant. Well, friend, spring is hard on the heart strings, especially when distance is involved.
Word is that the ice is going out in Moosonee this morning. Not much of a spectacle though. Guess the water is low and it isn’t crashing and roaring like it sometimes does. Some years it piles up so that we can’t see out the office windows. Once it came to within three feet. Didn’t touch the building but was away higher than the roof. Makes one feel pretty small too.
I was at Norman Wells one year when the Mackenzie went out. Old Herman Pipes and I were at the C.P. staff house that is right on the bank. It was a warm Sunday morning and we sat on the veranda and watched the ice move a few feet then stop, move a bit more and stop. It was being held back by Goose Island. Then there was a bigger nudge from the current and the whole mile wide sheet of ice started moving. It simply buckled a bit and rode completely over Goose Island. One minute the island was in sight, the next there were huge slabs of ice moving slowly across it.
There was a huge wooden barge on the island, abandoned there by the American army when they built the Canal pipeline. It was the highest thing on the low island. When the ice reached it, there was no hesitation. The barge started moving. It would have taken a dozen bulldozers to even start it, but such is the awful power of the ice that it came diagonally across the river to the shore on our side of the river and straight up the high steep river bank. There wasn’t much noise and it didn’t move all that fast, but there it was twenty feet from us and still moving. It finally stopped a mere span away from the lower part of the veranda that we were not sitting on any more.
The last time I saw Norman Wells the old barge was still there. No one had any idea how to move it without huge expense, and there it will sit till some spring, the ice will have a change of mood and casually pick it up and push it higher. Of course, that means it will push the staff house over, or it may just play with it for a while and put it ashore miles downstream. You are very helpless when Mother Nature cleans out her drains in the spring. After it’s all over and you see ice five or six feet thick piled up fifty feet high, you realize how insignificant man is, a grain of sand on Nature’s cuff. She could flick us away just that easily.
But I think one of the most spectacular things I’ve seen was at Hebron one spring. There is a lake high behind the settlement between two hills that form a very narrow channel for the lake to flow down about fifty feet to form the little river that gave us our drinking water. One year a huge snowdrift formed across the outlet and a sudden mild spell caused the lake to fill with melt water that couldn’t get away because the outlet was closed. Bill and I walked up one day to look. The water was rising very quickly in the lake, and only that plug of snow was holding it back.
We couldn’t do anything. The village was some distance away and there was no danger of flooding anyway because the ocean is right there. But we kept watching, and one day the snowdrift turned yellow showing that the water was coming through. Bill and I had been out on the harbour ice fishing through cracks, and had just turned facing the hill when the plug blew out. There was one huge gush of mixed water and snow that shot straight out, almost as if it were out a giant hose. It must have spurted a hundred feet or more, and then the sides caved in, and the moving water that was probably ten feet deeper than the lake ever was started coming out of the small valley. It brought thousands of tons of snow with it in one great avalanche. We were a good way out on flat ice and I had a momentary fear that that huge pile might reach us, but it fell almost perpendicularly and filled the riverbed with solid wet compressed snow and the water ran over the top.
By the time we reached the shore the sea ice was covered for a mile with yellow muskeg melt water. There were a couple of loose dogs that were in the path of the water. They had to swim a bit but no one else was affected, except the Moravian mission garden. They had built it with bits of soil from wherever they could find it, plus a few bags from home every year on the ship. The main part of the snow-plug sat on the garden, and it was covered till late summer and realized no crops that year. If you have never seen a few thousand tons of snow shoot straight out into the air by hydraulic pressure, you might find it hard to visualize what it looks like. Scary believe me, but something I’m glad I saw.
Friday morning: [Len had just put me on the train in Toronto.]
At the moment you are sweeping a wide path down the rails from Toronto. Ever imagine what the engineer sees at night as he sits way up there and follows his light along straightways and around curves as he blows his horn quietly because of the sleeping people.
I wondered too. Then one New Year’s Eve, talk about the proper night for the job, Harry Winney, a WW II pilot and one of the greatest bush pilots, and I, were at Wabowden, away up on the Churchill Railway, waiting for daylight to fly north. Ray Bohay, the owner of the cleanest, nicest little hotel, was an engineer on the HB Railway. Wabowden wasn’t exactly a city terminal, and one word led to a suggestion, and we arrived at the roundhouse about the time a brand new year, 1947, was born.
It was warm and dark inside, and Old 202 was sitting there. There is a smell about steam engines, Claudia, steam, coal, metal, brass polish, travel, distance, reliance, so many ingredients. And steam engines are warm, put your hand on them. They breathe and they know people who like them. 202 had a banked fire and the bright red coal looked a bit surprised when the rattle of the chain hoist that opened the door woke her. She shivered a little when the midwinter cold flowed in around her but the fireman that was dozing in the engineer’s chair gently stirred the coals and she sniffed the air and was ready to go.
Ever been in a steam loco’s cab? Everything is huge. Harry was so pleased. He was used to dinky throttles in a plane cabin; here the throttle was a massive iron bar. His gauges were tiny; here they were huge and polished. The searchlight came on and Bohay gently moved 202 out on the tracks, pointed her towards Churchill, and put the throttle in Harry’s hand.
The surge of power in that huge machine was tremendous and we were away, out of Wabowden in seconds, with only the bright light ahead on the rails. Bright stars overhead pointed out the dark forest on each side. A steam whistle has a sound all of its own. Once away, Harry pulled the cord and we left a fairytale of heart-catching sound behind on a chiffon skein of white steam. The light raced down the track and 202 puffed and the big drivers on either side rose and fell and the polished faces glittered in the starlight and the reflection from the snow. It was magic as pure as if newly distilled by a hundred leprechauns. I stood there and was warm and safe, enclosed in a womb of such delight that I’m sure most people never experience.
There was none of the bellow of the diesel, no clattering pushrods, no vibration. Just the feel and smell of the release of steam, the sense of power, controlled power. None of the feeling that you get with the internal combustion engines that the whole thing might get wound up too fast and never stop or even fly apart. Not that, but a feeling that 202 was alive and pleased to be giving us an unforgettable experience.
We calculated our time to arrive back in Wabowden to celebrate the New Year. As we slowed down, the whistle on the roundhouse screamed its delight that a new year, free from war, had come, and 202 expanded her stupendous lung and roared her challenge and welcome to 1947. Her whole frame shook and I shook with her. The delight I felt was mirrored in Harry’s eyes and in Bohay’s smile. Those two men have never been simply humans since, and something came into my soul that will never be washed away.
We eased back into the roundhouse to the diminishing joy of the horn and 202 panted softly as we left her and the ruby eye in the grate winked its wish for us.
The guns were firing in the native village in the old fur trade welcome to a new year, and the frost was sharp and invigorating so that you felt you could walk all night. We went back to the hotel, our clothes smelling with the exquisite (yep, that’s the right word for the right time…) mixture of coal and steam and intense joy.
There was a free trader (no HBC man could ever describe him differently) in the hotel. He had been looking down the neck of a bottle all evening. He shouted for us to join him but after our experience it was not possible to endure the smell of liquor and tobacco and the sour odour of discontent and the inability he had to relate to the precious surroundings and the magic of that particular night.
“Where were you,” he said, and Harry said, “Riding a locomotive down the track.” He turned away and said, “Big deal!” I felt pity for him because if that could not fire him, he was dead. As I went up the stairs to sleep and to such dreams that cannot be expressed, I wondered how and where he might have been conceived, and I felt an even sharper pity for his parents. I know what your engineer sees as he rumbles down the track. You love trains, I know why. I am sitting here in the early morning while you run lightly along the shining steel ribbons with O’Halloran pacing you in the moonlight.
Well the poor old earth is still in pain. No one likes anyone else in the Middle East and the USA and Russia are hollering nasty things over a very shaky missile fence. You know, when I was little there wasn’t a single radio on the Labrador coast, and news was weeks late when it got to us in summer and months old in winter. A lot came by word of mouth and arrived probably distorted anyway.
So once we heard about any ship losses we were caught up. Travellers by small boat or dog team brought local news. We probably didn’t realize how lucky we were to go to bed at night knowing we’d wake up to the same world tomorrow.
Strange, now, we’d think. No medical help if something goes wrong. It just never entered our minds then. We couldn’t have cared less about world conditions and what they might be when the first ship appeared in spring, and deliciously, she just appeared, we never knew when. The thing we wondered about was did she bring oranges and apples and, to us anyway, new potatoes.
Our big shed on the dock was generally unused in winter, a few salt fish and salmon stored there plus hundreds of barrels of flour. So over the winter all its smells disappeared and we weren’t aware of it. Then the first boat came and the freight piled ashore and into the shed. To open that door on a warm spring or summer morning, to smell fruit, biscuits, rope, pitch, sugar, molasses, cloth, was all so tangy and wonderful.
I used to sit on a big beam just above the men’s heads when I was too little to work, and watch and smell. It was a horrible imposition if school was still in, as one of the men would reach up, grab me, deposit me on the boardwalk outside in the warm sun, and point me toward school. Standing orders from my dad, because I’d get in the carpenter shop or cooperage and time would cease to exist. I’d arrive at school on a dead run at the last clang of the bell, or if they were painting boats or barking nets which I had to pass on the way, I’d be late.
I must have been a frustrating pupil because summer or winter there was always something happening outside that I must see or hear. One of my teachers told me later that I was a bright kid if I could only bring my brains in from outside. You know, Claudia, you would have likely been the same. I’ve forgotten a lot that I was taught, but I don’t think I’ve lost one thing of the almost intolerable joy of being a small boy in that place, at that time and with those people.
I can feel old James’ hand on my shoulder, willing me to have the strength I needed to force the heavy croise around the top of a barrel, but never a finger’s weight would he give as I struggled. He knew that I must do it. I’ve seen Will bent at a comical angle, using the full force of his body English to help me plane fair and true, but all he’d ever do was put his straight-edge on and indicate where I was out of line. They must have had the saints’ own patience with boats, dog teams, ropes, nets, gear, sails, but they taught me because I wanted so badly to learn. They were good teachers because what I learned is there still, much of it unused now, but it is my fortune in memory and satisfaction.
They were also artists, craftsmen if you wish, but creators, and they made the things that we needed. I could easily go back fifty years and fit in perfectly while there are many things in the life I lead now that I’ll never be comfortable about. At least I know I can tell you about things and know you can see the little boy in his funny clothes and understand the things that entered his heart so long ago, wonderful enduring things. I think maybe you might have liked that funny, serious kid.
It’s mild again, supposed to get up into the high teens today. We usually have four pretty well defined seasons here but this year we have more I’m sure, a sub-winter and spring. Winnipeg has lovely seasons but they come so quickly. It’s fall, then, wham! Winter, then abruptly spring, and without a pause, summer again.
There are longer springs and falls in the east. We did so many things too, especially in spring with boats and nets and animals. I had so much fun when I was little. The days were so long, so filled. Two deadlines perhaps, school and bed. My mother was very understanding about meals. If I wasn’t there because I was busy training a dozen pups to harness, or lying on the dock trying to get the biggest sea trout for supper, she’d shake her head and put my meal to warm and I’d get it later. As like as not, I’d be too excited and full of news to even notice it was hours old.
Winnie, the girl who helped my mother for a long time, used to bake a special cookie that I and the horses, and by gosh, Ira, who liked Winnie, liked. So, I’d eat what had been kept for me and fill my pockets with cookies and go out to where old Maggie, who had been in World War I and had scars to prove it, would be waiting for her cookies. Have you ever had a gently friendly old horse search your pockets? Well she doesn’t always wipe her lips first, and that big wet tongue can leave stains, especially in new grass time in spring.
Maggie worked hard in winter hauling wood and water to all the hospital buildings on a sled, but somehow no one ever got a wagon, so summer was hers unless someone hooked her up to a stone boat for a while. She used to come to school with me, graze around close by until she heard that unmistakeable clatter that meant we had been released. Then she’d come galloping with her great feet throwing clumps of precious sod around, and investigate my pockets again in case more cookies had gotten in there during school.
She was a bit shell-shocked and would have her bad moments remembering, but she was a dear old animal and everyone loved her. I remember once a volunteer worker from the States got annoyed with her when she got in his way and he walloped her with a flat board. It probably made no impression on Maggie, but it did on a number of local workers who were nearly all trappers in winter. The poor WOP (worker of pleasure) was suddenly aware that he was in the most hostile crowd he’d ever likely see. Murdoch McLean, who had also been in WW1, told him to make sure he never did that again because that “reever out there was a little cold.”
Murdoch always talked around a bent stem pipe and I sometimes wondered how he looked sleeping with that thing in his mouth. Found out one day when my dad and I were hunting in a canoe one warm fall morning. We found Murdoch sound asleep on a little beach, his canoe broadside on the beach, his two huge feet up on the side, his packsack under his head and the pipe squarely in the centre of his mouth.
Humorous old Murdoch was one of my dad’s favourite people but he couldn’t resist. So we took a line we had, slipped it through a tracking ring on Murdoch’s canoe and fastened it to a huge boulder. Then we woke old ’Doch and had tea and a yarn, and in time the tide rose and we got into our canoes and started away. About three paddle strokes later, ’Doch’s canoe came to an abrupt stop but he never turned a hair. Sat there calmly paddling and smoking his big pipe. I’m sure he got back at my dad, he always did.
With Murdoch, everything was a leetle…leetle cold, or warm or windy, leetle whatever. He was carrying a canoe up the river bank one day and the mission bull, a mean creature if there was ever one, got loose. Murdoch couldn’t see it and in the soft sand couldn’t hear it, and the bull impaled the canoe and relieved Murdoch of his burden. He said it was “leetle suddenly.”
The bull couldn’t see too well and ended up across the United church doorway, canoe and all. The parson and the congregation ladies were spring cleaning and there was no way out, and no one was particularly interested in squeezing past an irritated bull, so my mother sent me up. Rufus and I had a working agreement. I fed and watered him, he tolerated me as he did Ira because we were necessary.
I got in close and grabbed the rope attached to the ring in his nose. He hated that ring and was very docile when someone had the rope. So we released the church prisoners and I led Rufus back to his yard, where it took some doing to release Murdoch’s canoe. We had three bull calves one spring, all Rufus’s sons, and they grew up to be real Ferdinands, I guess because the boarding school kids played with them night and day. I’m sure Rufus must have been disgusted. When the kids went inside at night, the bulls would line up at the fence and bawl.
Rufus was a champion donated by the Morgan interest in the States. I heard he was worth thirty thousand dollars, which in the late twenties was a fantastic figure. His sons were all called after opera singers. One with a reedy voice was called Caruso and when he ended up as steak for the boarding school kids, at first they refused to dine, but “hunger is good sauce,” and I guess everything came to a good conclusion. My dad always had a laugh about Murdoch and the bull, and ’Doch would grin and say, “leetle funny.”
It’s another lovely morning. Didn’t freeze last night and the sun is high just after seven. My yard is drying up and soon Ellsworth will have Robbie and Jim up here to clean up the winter’s debris. I can tell how good business at The Bay and at Willie’s is by the amount of potato chip bags and pop cans in my yard. The yards around the stores don’t bear mention. I know it’s a ceaseless job, but they should have a truckload away once in a while. The old company image of neat paths and buildings has been lost here. Now, if someone could invent an edible chip bag…
Believe it or not, when I was at Hebron for instance, a scrap of paper blowing along would be picked up, not perhaps in the interest of tidiness, but who knows when it might be necessary to write a letter. No writing tablets, as the little magazine says, in “them days.” The mission school had only slates. All the people knew syllabic writing and it was not unusual to get a piece of seal or caribou skin with someone’s shopping list inscribed in soot from the igloo lamp. Once got a wolf head, ears and all, sorry that should be the skin off a wolf head, with five white fox pelts. On the skin inside the head was a message from a young man which said, in effect, give Elias Tuglavinia the foxes, and have him send Jararause a wife. In sort of a post-script, he added, “a fat one.”
Elias had several daughters. He worked for the mission and his daughters had had the benefits of school and, due to mission influenza, were not married off young. I delivered the foxes, and a couple days later, demure little Susie, who had the roundest moon face and a constant grin, came to sell the foxes and was helped by her sisters, who were all roly-polies anyway, to choose her bridal gear. Not what you might expect. A new .22 rifle…who needs a bride who can’t help fill the pot? Material for travelling clothes, and since one must be practical, a length of duffle for a married woman’s atiki, with the long tail that acts as a seat for momma and enough left over to keep junior off the cold snow. Needles, thread, a few yards of ribbon so she could change her decorations from young woman to married, a plug or so of black tobacco for the pipe I knew was secure in her boot leg. The missionaries didn’t like women to smoke, so they didn’t in front of the parson. Then as a serious about-to-be-married woman, the greater part of her dowry went on ammunition and hunting gear for her prospective groom, who hadn’t even specified which of the chubby girls he hoped for, though I feel that was likely well known. To be properly polite, I said, “I will see your son in the fall,” and she said she’d likely be unlucky and have a girl, with a grin that indicated she’d be just as well pleased.