CHAPTER ONE

Very little investigation has been made in Canada of the native races, and what has been done had been under the auspices of foreign institutions. The opportunities for such studies are fast disappearing. Under advancing settlement and rapid development of the country the native is disappearing, or coming under the influence of the white man’s civilization. If the information concerning the native races is ever to be secured and preserved, action must be taken very soon, or it will be too late.

—GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF CANADA, 1908

ONE MORNING IN EARLY JULY 1911, AN ODD LITTLE MAN walked into a saloon on the shore of the mighty Mackenzie River and dipped his filthy fingers in a sugar bowl. John Hornby was just twenty-seven years old, five feet four inches tall, and barely one hundred pounds, but in the north country he was, among white men at least, a legend. Once, it was said, he ran next to a horse for fifty miles, trotting sideways, like a wolf. Another time, on a bet for a bottle of whiskey, he ran one hundred miles in under twenty-four hours. And Hornby was not a drinking man. His instincts most resembled a trapper’s, but he loved animals and hated traps. He never hunted except for food, and often, like the native people with whom he traveled, he went without eating for days at a time. He probably knew the Barren Lands, the country in which he lived, more intimately than any other white man in history.

Hornby had fierce blue eyes that seemed to always be focused on something off in the far distance. Exactly why Hornby decided to explore Canada’s north country has been lost to history. He may have ventured north with vague notions of finding gold, but the Klondike rush had long since dried up. He may have been lured by rumors of vast giveaways of land, which the government had promised in an effort to populate the north. More likely he went north to go north, to see what he could see.

John Hornby did not like darkening the doorways of Fort Norman, the dreary oupost that comprised little more than a Hudson’s Bay Company store, the Anglican Mission of the Holy Trinity, and the Catholic Mission of Saint-Thérèse. Even among the usual rough men who passed through such places, Hornby stood out for his disinterest in the trimmings of civilized society. He didn’t need the company of white men, and he usually did as much as he could to avoid them. He was happiest living among the Barren Land Indians, chopping wood, carrying water, stalking caribou. But the previous summer, Hornby had had a stirring experience. Scouting territory north of Great Bear Lake, he had come upon a group of people he believed to be the last in North America to have remained outside the reach of white explorers. They were not Indians; they were Eskimos who had followed the caribou inland from Coronation Gulf, some 150 miles to the northeast. Hornby had been so excited by his discovery that he had written a letter to the only other permanent European resident of the Barren Lands: the priest in charge of the Mission of Saint-Thérèse. “We have met a party of Eskimos who come every year,” Hornby’s letter said. “The Eskimos come at the end of August and leave when the first snow falls. They seem very intelligent.” The letter then sounded a somber note. “The Eskimos and Indians are frightened of each other and it would be dangerous for Indians to try and meet Eskimos without having a white man with them, because the Eskimos have a bad opinion of the Indians. If you intend on sending someone to meet the Eskimos, we shall be pleased to give you all the help we can.”¹

Word of Hornby’s letter moved through Canada’s northwest Catholic missions and quickly landed in the hands of Gabriel Breynat, a man so exhuberant about wilderness missionary work that he had been made bishop for all of northwestern Canada by the age of thirty-two. Breynat had made his reputation ministering to Dog Rib, Hare Skin, and Slave Lake Indians, but for nearly a decade he had been praying for the chance to extend his missionary work to the continent’s northernmost people. “No one knows how many they are, or what they are like,” he had written the Oblate chapter general seven years before, “but we would like to send a few specimens to Paradise.”

Breynat had also begun to worry that the Catholic Church might be beaten to the region by the Church of England. Just as French and British trappers had battled for territory all over the Canadian west, so did their churches compete, often using the language and strategies of warfare, for their nationals and the natives with whom they traded. They established outposts. They recruited hardy missionaries and sent them out as scouts. In the Canadian hinterlands, Europe’s age-old religious struggle found a new battleground. “We have against us here, a silent, vexatious and persistent opposition on the part of a handful of Protestants, freemasons and materialists, old-fashioned adherents of Darwinian theories who think they are in the vanguard of progress,” a Catholic missionary would write some years later. “Souls cost dear, and they have to be gained one by one.”²

The subtleties of the conflict between Catholics and Protestants, of course, were often lost on the Eskimos. They had a hard enough time understanding that these strange men in black robes were holy men and not just another batch of traders.

To say the least, bringing religion to Eskimos would require talents that were not part of the typical seminarian’s training. The territory between the church’s northern outposts and the central Arctic coast were virtually unmapped. Even the survival techniques that missionaries had learned through their work with Indians would be of limited value. There would be no building a log church on the Arctic coast, which sat at least a hundred miles above the tree line. And what would these people think of European religion, when many of them had never even met a European?

Nonetheless, when Bishop Breynat read John Hornby’s letter, he could sense the veil lifting over the northland. Hornby’s letter “had every appearance of an invitation from heaven,” Breynat wrote. And he had just the man for the job.³

Father Jean-Baptiste Rouvière was a small-boned, dark-haired man with melancholic eyes set deeply behind prominent cheekbones. He had a sensitive mouth and an expression that seemed not dour but resigned, as if he had come to terms with the difficult but rewarding life of remote missionary work. Rouvière had been born on November 11, 1881, in Mende, France, to Jean Rouvière and Marie-Anne Cladel. After his traditional studies, he entered the novitiate of Notre-Dame de l’Osier on September 23, 1901, took vows at Liège on August 15, 1903, and was ordained as a priest three years later. In 1907 he transferred to the Northwest Territories, spending his first four years at Fort Providence on Great Slave Lake, then moving to Fort Good Hope, about one hundred river miles north of Fort Norman.

To Breynat, Rouvière seemed to have a number of qualities that would serve him well in the Far North. He was patient. Deliberate. Slow to anger. He had a certain seriousness of purpose that Breynat considered appropriate to a country that for many months of the year was cloaked in darkness. On the other hand, Rouvière was, as Breynat had been upon his own arrival from France, utterly inexperienced. Natives acknowledged that learning the skills needed to survive in their country took a lifetime. Rouvière had arrived in northern Canada as an adult, with few skills and no experience living outside a temperate European climate. The warmest clothing he had was made of wool. He planned to live through winters that would kill a sheep in a day. And though he had been ministering to Indians living near Fort Good Hope, Rouvière had spent little time away from the relative security of a mission in the middle of the Mackenzie River’s busy trading route. Compared to where he would end up, the posts along the Mackenzie were practically crowded.

Yet like all Europeans who came to the Arctic, Rouvière seemed both enamored of and intimidated by the breadth of the land. Vast open spaces of any kind—save the odd belt of mountains running through Switzerland or between Spain and France—had been in exceedingly short supply in Europe for centuries. Dropped into a world where forests blanketed many thousands of square miles—where trees might cover a landmass as large as France—colonists were shaken to their bones. A young priest, in other words, could be forgiven his early trepidation.

Bishop Breynat showed his young priest the letter he had received from John Hornby, and asked Rouvière if he would be willing to take the church’s work into the Barren Lands, and from there to the Arctic coast. Though Rouvière would be on his own, at least initially, Breynat promised to try to find him a companion. “I will do everything I can to send someone to keep you company next year,” he said. In the meantime, Rouvière could at least count on help from Hornby. To Breynat’s delight, Rouvière agreed to the challenge with happiness in his eyes, a smile on his lips, and a quote from Isaiah: Ecce ego, mitte me. Here I am, send me forth.

AS A YOUNG missionary trying to navigate the people and places of Canada’s vast wilderness, Father Rouvière knew he was standing on the shoulders of some of the church’s most adventurous men. The Oblates of Mary Immaculate had been founded in Provence in 1816 by Eugène de Mazenod, who would later become bishop of Marseilles. They first came to Montreal from France in 1842, and within three years had already placed a missionary at Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca, five hundred miles to the north of Edmonton. In 1853, a priest named Father Henri Grollier became the first priest to visit the Eskimos, and seven years later he even managed to perform four baptisms at Fort McPherson. But compared to Rouvière’s overland assignment, this had been relatively easy, requiring only a trip to the mouth of the Mackenzie River. Grollier was to die in his prime near the Arctic Circle, after founding the mission of Our Lady of Hope. “I die happy,” he said on his deathbed. “I have seen the cross planted at the extremities of the earth.”⁴

In 1865, a priest named Father Petitot made it to the Arctic coast with a Hudson’s Bay Company man and met several Eskimo families. Just three years later, Petitot began suffering from a “painful disease”—doubtless a kind of darkness-induced psychosis—that manifested as an obsessive terror of being killed by Eskimos. Overtaken by a fit, Petitot abandoned his canoe and his gear and fled south. He was not the first European to become traumatized by the sheer emotional difficulty of living through months of total darkness. Nor would he be the last.⁵

AS IT DID in other remote corners of the globe, Arctic missionary work presented the Catholic Church with both real opportunity and real expense, and calls went out from early on to support this difficult work. “The great Catholic Church cannot be too generously supported, and great rewards hereafter must be in store for all those who ungrudgingly by acts of self-sacrifice aid on Christ’s work on earth,” a Catholic newspaper reported. “Without a thought for personal comfort, these Oblate Fathers harness their dogs and render all that great comfort which they alone can give, giving all the last sacraments so that a happy death shall be theirs. Yes, it is a touching sight, all too frequent, as epidemics are not rare in the Far North. Indians are a delicate race, and their human frames will not stand much in the way of the various fever outbreaks.” The article did not mention that whites were the likely source of the epidemics. Native people were only “delicate” in the face of European viruses to which they had never needed to be immune. ⁶

Indeed, during the winter of 1899, Breynat and the Indians suffered a terrifying epidemic of influenza. Breynat could do nothing. People began dying in large numbers, often before he could arrive to offer last rites. How the virus first infected the community is unclear, but foreign illnesses routinely followed European settlers into native regions, often with disastrous results. With their immune systems unaccustomed to the microbes, people died in swaths.

With so little firewood, and no way to dig graves in the frozen ground, bodies began to pile up. Those who did not succumb found themselves with still less food, and fewer people to find it. Those who had taken to Breynat’s religion seemed resigned to their fate. “Father,” an elderly Indian said to Breynat. “I have never suffered so much before. The Almighty is punishing us. But it will only be for a day. Look at us: don’t we scold our children? Give them a clout sometimes, a bit of a spanking? But it’s for their good. Well, our Father in Heaven does the same with us. We have displeased Him. That’s why He corrects us. But it won’t be forever. It’s for our great good.”⁷

BY THE TIME Father Rouvière set off for Eskimo country, the Catholic Church had already converted most of the Indians living around Great Bear Lake. The Anglican Church, by comparison, had only a half dozen churches north of Edmonton, and seemed to be struggling to keep up. Finding someone up to the task of proselytizing among the Eskimos had become one of Bishop Breynat’s most passionate ideas. Had he had fewer responsibilities, Breynat might have done the work himself. By the time he approached Father Rouvière, Breynat must have seen something of himself in the young priest. He could only hope that Rouvière would be as enthusiastic about his work as Breynat had remained about his own. No one in the Catholic Church knew more about the challenges of ministering to people in the Far North than Breynat, who over the next fifty years would become known as “the Flying Bishop” for winging around the Arctic in a single-engine plane.⁸

For Breynat, as for all missionaries in remote areas, there had been significant challenges along the way. Up in the Barren Lands, Indians would arrive at the settlements shortly before Christmas, and would stay for only a week or two. Though most had long since been converted to Catholicism and many attended church, they came primarily to trade furs for tea and tobacco, cartridges and shot, axes, knives, and needles. Breynat was fascinated by his new charges and the ingeunuity with which they navigated their lives. Their summer clothes were made of caribou hide, its hair scraped off with a piece of bone. Brains were rubbed on the hide to make it supple, and it was smoked for rain resistance. Their winter clothes were similar but were worn with the animal’s hair left in place. Young animals, including those that had been stillborn, provided a luxurious material for hoods. Skin clothing, Breynat would find, could keep a human body warm in weather reaching forty below zero, yet was never too heavy to wear traveling on foot. Tents were also made of caribou skins and were left empty, except for a few packages of meat. Family members squatted on their heels around a stove in the center of the tent and lay down at night side by side, fully dressed and wrapped in a blanket or caribou-skin gown. Breynat called his charges “the Caribou-Eaters.” The Indians referred to Breynat equally simply: “ Yalt’yi gozh aze sin”: There’s a new little praying man.

For their part, priests who had grown up on the agricultural bounty of France had to get used to a diet that consisted, at its most diverse, of caribou and fish and the occasional potato. Priests learned to clean trout and slice chips off caribou-grease candles to light a campfire. They learned to toss a little altar wine in the skillet for flavor. There were no vegetables, of course. And there wouldn’t be; none grew in the north country. Yet compared to the people to whom they ministered, Breynat and Rouvière had it easy. As long as they stayed near their mission base, there was little chance that they would starve to death or die of exposure. It was only out in the field that things got dangerous.⁹

On his way home one day from the hunting grounds, Breynat found himself in snow up to his knees. His legs were spent, his food nearly gone, the sun almost set. His dogs, starving and exhausted, were barely moving. A common enough situation for a native, but Breynat was at a loss. He didn’t know how to build a snowhouse or a bough shelter. He had no sleeping bag. He had no family around him to lay a fire or hunt a caribou. Should he push on to the mission or turn around and return, humbled, to the camp he had just left? Breynat decided to follow an Indian hunter who was tracking a gut-shot caribou.

Suddenly, to his right, Breynat heard the blows of an axe. Breynat’s dogs shuffled forward. There, up ahead, was the hunter, deftly butchering the caribou. Exhilarated, Breynat gathered up some spruce branches and laid a fire. Warmed by the flames and waiting for the meat to roast, Breynat and his provider treated themselves by sucking the frozen marrow from one of the caribou’s foot bones. They threw some meat and entrails to the starving dogs and settled in for a feast.¹⁰

With his newfound admiration for native hunting skills, Breynat decided soon afterward to try his own hand at bringing down a caribou. Armed with an old carbine, he managed to shoot an animal, but his prey did not die. It lay where it fell, quivering. Rather than expend another precious cartridge, he smashed the butt of his rifle into the caribou’s skull, killing it instantly. But now he had no knife or axe to dress the kill. Instead, he undid the girdle on his black cassock, tied it around the caribou’s neck, and dragged it to the top of a nearby woodpile.

Word quickly spread among the Indians. They were horrified at the blundering indignity of the kill. Breynat had disregarded rituals of respect for prey animals that hunters had long held dear; his actions might, at the spirit level, cause the caribou to let the people starve. “It was a major scandal among the whole population,” Breynat wrote. “The spirit of the caribou thus struck would go and tell all the rest of its race. These would never come back. Very shortly there would be a complete famine. An utter disaster!”

After working so hard to earn the trust of his congregants, Breynat now had to figure out how to repair a gaff of shocking proportions. He decided to try to convince the Indians that “there was nothing in it, that their belief was mere superstition. The good God, I told them, had created the caribou to serve as their food, and it was of little or no importance with what instruments they were killed.” Breynat’s choice—to argue against traditional beliefs rather than confess to his own ignorance—did not go over well. The tribe’s chief arrived and reproached the priest for his foolishness. In a fury, he blamed Breynat for exposing his people to the risk of starvation.

Breynat responded by saying that he would write to his bishop and ask his opinion about whether Breynat should leave his post. The chief did not understand, but he grudgingly let Breynat go off to conduct a service. It was Christmas Eve. With hundreds of dogs tied up outside the church, baying at the moon, Breynat somehow got his “Caribou-Eaters” to chant the liturgy in Latin and sing “Il est ne le Divin Enfant” in their native tongue.

Three months later, a letter arrived from Monsignor Grouard. Breynat addressed his people. “The Big Praying-Man wishes me to inform you that he had not the time, still less the inclination, to address you a pastoral letter in order to explain that God created the caribou to provide you with the food you need, and that you can kill them any way you like, with the snare, with a gun, or if necessary by hitting them with a stick!”

Breynat then read an excerpt from the letter. “Tell your Caribou-Eaters to understand what you have told them, and what I now repeat myself, that I can do nothing about it. Let them ask the Author of all good to give them such understanding. . . . I bless them, just the same, with all my heart.” ¹¹

IF ANYTHING, the cultural divide separating Europeans and Eskimos would be far wider than it had been between Europeans and Indians. Just a few years before Hornby delivered his fateful letter, the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson had learned that extreme isolation had made the native people highly suspicious of people they did not know. The introduction of Christianity, and especially Christian prohibitions of certain behaviors, would make a complicated fit for the Eskimos, Stefansson predicted. On its face, some of the Church’s rituals might wear well. Since as far as he could tell the Eskimo religion consisted primarily of prohibitions and taboos, the many prohibitions of Christianity were easy for them to understand, Stefansson wrote. Eskimos, he observed, believed that sickness, famine, and death were caused by the breaking of a marrowbone with the wrong kind of hammer, or the sewing of deerskin clothing before enough days had elapsed from the killing of the last whale or walrus. To avoid breaking these taboos meant prosperity and good health. Adding notions of sin and salvation seemed perfectly logical.¹²

But even early on, Stefansson wondered about the impact of Christian doctrine on the practical realities of Arctic life. For one thing, Stefansson had talents most missionaries did not. An excellent linguist, he would eventually become fluent in several Eskimo dialects. More important, he had an unusual willingness to learn from native intelligence rather than ignore it. He often relied on a small handful of Eskimo guides and interpreters, notably a young man named Ilavinik, who had become one the region’s most reliable translators. Over the next few years, Ilavinik would use his language skills in an increasingly complex series of negotiations, from translating for wandering anthropologists to interpreting details of a grisly double murder in an Edmonton courtroom. In 1911, of course, all that seemed impossibly far away.

Now that they had been admonished against breaking the Sabbath, the Mackenzie Eskimos refused to “work” on Sundays, a decision that yielded some strange results. Around Christmastime in 1908, an Eskimo couple came into Stefansson’s encampment at Cape Smythe hoping to sell skins. They had traveled some two hundred miles, they said, and had left another couple, including the man’s sister, behind. There had not been enough food to feed both the people and the dogs, they said; they had left the man’s sister and her husband forty miles to the east. Their dogs were already dead of starvation.

As soon as the Eskimos living near the cape heard this story, they organized a party to go out and rescue the man and his wife before they starved to death. But just as the rescue party was about to depart, someone pointed out that since it was Sunday, no journeys could begin. It was not until after midnight that the group finally set out. A fair day had turned foul, with snow blowing into great drifts that covered any sign of the sled trail. The search party had no luck.

Later that morning, the man of the abandoned couple turned up, barely alive, at a cabin three miles north of the Cape Smythe encampment. A second search party went out immediately and found his wife, a half day’s journey away, sitting beside a dead fire, her hands and feet completely frozen. Curious as to why the stronger man had decided to abandon his sister and her husband, and why they had waited so long to rescue them, Stefansson asked the man from the stronger couple his thoughts on the matter. The man had been a Christian for about ten years, knew more prayers than any other Eskimo, and was very careful not to break any Christian commandments. For many years he had done no work on Sunday; for many years he had never eaten a meal without saying grace; and he had in every other way lived according to the Christian law as he understood it. “I asked him whether he had never heard that such things as leaving his sister to starve to death were also against the law of the Lord,” Stefansson wrote. “He replied that he had never heard anything about that. His Christianity, he told me with evident regret, might not be the best and most up-to-date, for he had never had the chance to get any firsthand from a missionary. He had learned his Christianity entirely from the converted Eskimos of the Kuvuk River who, he said, might not be well informed about all the prohibitions necessary for salvation.” ¹³

CHAPTER TWO

“Of what are you thinking?” Peary asked one of his Eskimo guides. “I do not have to think,” was the answer; “I have plenty of meat.”

—WILL DURANT, Our Oriental Heritage

IF JOHN HORNBY’S LETTER DESCRIBING HIS MEETING WITH the Eskimos ignited Bishop Breynat’s imagination, Hornby’s offer to lead young Father Rouvière to the Arctic coast was almost too good to believe. Only a very few white explorers had ever attempted an overland route from the south, and during those few crossings the Barren Lands had seen some of the Arctic’s most spectacular tragedies. In 1771, Samuel Hearne had heard rumors of vast Arctic copper deposits from local Indians. When he arrived at the mouth of the Coppermine River, he became the first white man to see the Arctic Ocean. The promised mountains of metal, however, turned out to fit in his palm. But it was something he saw before reaching the coast that left him permanently shaken. Traveling north along the Coppermine, Hearne watched his Chipewayan guides carry out a horrifying “Eskimo hunt,” in which they crept upon two dozen Eskimos sleeping in tents above a waterfall twelve miles from its mouth and slaughtered them. Hearne described the scene as “shocking beyond description.”

The poor, unhappy victims were surprised in the midst of their sleep, and had neither time nor power to make any resistance; men, women and children, in all upward of twenty, ran out of their tents stark naked, and endeavored to make their escape, but the Indians having possession of all the land-side, to no place could they fly for shelter. One alternative only remained, that of jumping into the river; but as none of them attempted it, they all fell a sacrifice to the Indian barbarity! The shrieks and groans of the poor expiring wretches were truly dreadful; and my horror was much at seeing a young girl, seemingly about eighteen years of age, killed so near me that when the first spear was stuck into her side she fell down at my feet, and twisted around my legs, so that it was with difficulty that I could disengage myself from her dying grasps. As two Indian men pursued this unfortunate victim, I solicited very hard for her life; but the murderers made no reply till they had struck both their spears through her body, and transfixed her to the ground. Then they looked me sternly in the face, and began to ridicule me, by asking if I wanted an Esquimaux wife; and paid not the smallest regard to the shrieks and agony of the poor wretch, who was twining round their spears like an eel.¹

From that point forward, the scene of the massacre was known as Bloody Falls. Eskimos had been terrified of strangers ever since, and ventured into Indian hunting grounds only as a last resort. The few white expeditions that moved through Bloody Falls over the next 150 years saw mostly the backs of Eskimos running away from them. In his Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, John Franklin included a pen-and-ink sketch of Bloody Falls with a pile of human skulls in the foreground. Not long after this, Franklin would come to his own catastrophic end in the Barren Lands.²

Just when Father Rouvière first learned of the legend of Bloody Falls is hard to ascertain. But surely the stories about Samuel Hearne and John Franklin were among the first things he heard in the spring of 1911, when he arrived at Fort Norman to meet John Hornby and begin planning his trip north. And surely he learned of another, far more recent story that must have frightened him to his core. At virtually the same moment that Rouvière reached Fort Norman, a trio of Canadian explorers arrived on the Mackenzie River steamer, bound, like Samuel Hearne 150 years before them, to investigate rumors of Barren Land copper. The team, consisting of George Douglas, his brother Lionel, and a geologist named August Sandburg, had outfitted in Edmonton, then hopped steamers along the string of trading posts between Lake Athabasca and Fort Norman, on the Mackenzie River. Though they had never been to the Barren Lands, let alone the Arctic coast, the members of the Douglas team were remarkably confident in their ability to navigate the worst the region could offer. They were competent, experienced woodsmen and sailors. They were physically strong, and—far more important—they had unshakably sound judgment. Over time, this probity would set them apart from the scores of explorers for whom the Arctic had become a graveyard. Yet just days before unloading at Fort Norman and meeting Father Rouvière, the Douglases stumbled across a scene of terrifying violence that to all four newcomers must have seemed a dark archetype of life and death in the Barren Lands.

On their way north on the Mackenzie, the Douglases had been asked to help the Royal North West Mounted Police investigate a report of a murder-suicide that had taken place in a trappers’ remote winter base camp. They had obliged. Near a pretty spot with views of both the Salt River and the mighty Mackenzie, they found a log cabin, about twelve feet by fourteen feet. The scene inside was terrible. The stench was overwhelming, “worse than any other form of decomposing animal matter, and blended with it was the peculiarly acrid smell of old smoke from spruce fires,” George Douglas reported. The two dead men were still in their bunks, one with his head “a shapeless mass, blown out of all resemblance to anything human by a soft point bullet from a high powered rifle.” Beside the bunks, on a small table, lay a filthy notebook and a bottle of carbolic acid, but beyond that, Douglas could not stand in the cabin long enough to take notes. “One could remain in that loathsome atmosphere only a few minutes at a time,” he wrote. “The bodies were in a state of decomposition so advanced that it was necessary to break the bunks down and carry them out as they lay.”

Once they got the bodies out of the house, Douglas snapped a photograph of the men, laid head-to-head on the ground. He and the police buried them in a single grave, dug as deeply as they could manage in the frozen turf. They then returned to the cabin and tried to make sense of what had happened. In the notebook, they discovered a series of comments, written on different pages and at different times. Apparently the man who’d written the notes had shot his companion and then killed himself by drinking the carbolic acid.

“Cruel treatment drove me to kill Peat,” one note said. “Everything is wrong he never paid one sent ship everything out pay George Walker $10. . . . I have been sick a long time I am not Crasy, but sutnly goded to death he thot i had more money than i had and has been trying to find it. I tried to get him to go after medison but Cod not he wanted me to die first so good by.”

A final note concluded, “I have just killed the man that was killing me so good by and may god bless you all I am ofle weak bin down since the last of March so thare hant no but Death for me.”³

What lasting impression the murder-suicide had on the Douglas team can only be imagined, since George Douglas wrote no further about it. To what degree they described it to Father Rouvière also can’t be known. But bearing witness to such a horrifying crime, carried out by one man against the companion who was apparently asleep in his bed, could hardly have failed to have unsettled these men as they set out on their own journey north. What had happened in the minds of those trappers, shuttered in against the pressing darkness? What minor disputes, what petty irritations had led to anger so unyielding that death seemed the only escape? Perhaps the alternative—suffering in silence until spring, then hiking the hundred miles back to the nearest trading post, and from there home—seemed impossibly trying. Eskimos, who had faced such conditions since time immemorial, had a term for this malady: perlerorneq, an extreme winter depression that brought on symptoms of psychosis. Barry Lopez has described it as “to look ahead to all that must be accomplished and to retreat to the present feeling defeated, weary before starting, a core of anger, a miserable sadness.” Under its spell, “the victim tears fitfully at his clothing. A woman begins aimlessly slashing at things in the iglu with her knife. A person runs half naked into the bitter freezing night, screaming out at the village, eating the shit of dogs. Eventually the person is calmed by others in the family, with great compassion, and helped to sleep. Perlerorneq. Winter.”⁴

No matter how much time the trappers had spent in the region—a year? two?—they were apparently ill equipped to deal with such darkness. For Rouvière, other questions must surely have arisen. Who could say what torments were possible in the middle of this northern country? Compared to where he was heading—the mouth of the Coppermine River, on the coast of the Arctic Ocean and fully five hundred miles north—the scene of the murder was relatively southern and far more accessible. As one of the continent’s primary trading routes, the Mackenzie River corridor was dotted with at least a half dozen busy settlements. Where Rouvière, Hornby, and, coincidentally, the Douglas team were going—overland to the deep interior and the farthest reaches of the unexplored Northwest Territories— there was nothing. The Barren Lands. And with plans to spend the winter in the crushing cold and unyielding darkness, in a place where the sun went down at the end of November and didn’t come up again until the end of January, each step the team took felt like a step deeper into a Dantean wilderness. Where they were going, twenty-four hours of winter darkness would give cabin fever an entirely new dimension. Even the outside would seem claustrophobic, close, inescapable. Fifty years earlier, Father Petitot, one of the few missionaries to make it to the coast, had apparently lost his mind.

In the early twentieth century, you could count the number of Arctic expeditions on a couple of hands. Yet the reports that had trickled back to the living rooms in Toronto, New York, London, and Paris revealed the place to be as intriguing, in its way, as Africa. This was a place where shamans could turn themselves into wolves. Where polar bears could be seen swimming five miles out in the open ocean. Where women nursed their babies, outside, in howling blizzards. Where in a good season a caribou hunter “might wade in the blood-stained water spearing the bemused animals by the hundred, until strength failed, in a liturgy of destruction that celebrates the bounty and the terror of the land.” The land was full of musk ox, and wolves, and wolverines. It was one of the few places in the world that accommodated both grizzly bears and polar bears. The rivers were stuffed with char, the lakes with trout. Formed by the retreat of the Wisconsin ice sheet ten thousand years ago, it was the youngest ecosystem on earth.⁵

For white explorers, traveling to the Arctic was like traveling back in time. The people who lived there were as strange as Pygmies. Esquimaux! The very name seemed to be derived from Eskiquimantsic, an Algonquian-Abenaki word meaning “an eater of raw flesh.” To the turn-of-the-century urban imagination, one caught up in the anxieties of industry, crime, and warfare, the simple people of the Arctic seemed to offer a culture untainted by the poisons of greed, decadence, and imperial aggression. If the Eskimos had never learned how to farm, let alone compose symphonies or build suspension bridges, they were also not cursed by modern problems. They possessed virtually no material goods, and seemed to desire none. Several white explorers noticed that most Eskimos seemed unable to count beyond two or three. Why was that? And how would they figure in a culture where quantifying possessions—money, furs, souls—was practically a religion in itself? Eskimos had so little variety in the way of food (nothing grew there!) that they seemed almost ascetic. Pure. In fact, Eskimos did not seem like contemporary humans at all. They were more like a culture frozen in time. For people of European descent, visiting an Eskimo community in 1911 was time travel: studying Eskimos, they thought, was studying the very roots of man. ⁶

The reality, of course, was that Eskimos were not ancestors of Europeans; they were their contemporaries. Though Western explorers could be forgiven their leaps of imagination, the fact was that they and the Eskimos had been “evolving” for exactly the same amount of time. And despite the rhetoric that Europeans used to describe these primitive “nomads,” the Eskimos had been in the same place for at least five thousand years. It was the Europeans who had been wandering. Eskimos didn’t search for safe passage to Florida, or make pilgrimages to Rome. They didn’t send mining expeditions to California, or look to Africa for slave labor. They stayed home. The fact that they functioned so well, with so few material goods, also made the heroic rhetoric of European Arctic exploration narratives somewhat suspect. Ships from Victorian England would disgorge hundreds of men with tons and tons of equipment to spend a few months or years in a place Eskimos lived domestically with virtually nothing. Europeans imposed themselves on the land; the Eskimos simply adapted to it. Missionaries and explorers often showed up ragged, hungry, and sick. They discovered locals who were healthy and hardy. If the explorers made it home to their drawing rooms—an end that was never guaranteed—they would tell grand tales of having conquered another corner of the globe. Eskimo hunters returned to their tents or their snowhouses, went to sleep, and got up and did it again.⁷

To the traveler from the south, exploration was held closely akin to a spiritual quest. You leave the comfort of a known society and enter an entirely new dimension. Along the journey, you are exposed to dangers both foreseen and unforeseen. You accept as givens the powerful and dangerous challenges of isolation from kin, exposure to new territory and harsh weather, and uncertainty about food and water supplies. Very little can be taken for granted. Heat and shelter and food and drink are not easily gotten. Securing even the most basic components to sustain life requires local experience and native skill, and travelers from the south, by definition, lacked both. Rather than eating vitamin-rich caribou and seal, British explorers ate preserved food and relied on vitamin C supplements that became worthless after a few months in the cold. They treated lethargy as a morale problem; it was often an early sign of scurvy. They treated hunting as a sport rather than a necessity. Knowing how to hunt for fun in a community that would feed you if you came back empty-handed was very different from knowing how to hunt to prevent the starvation of your family. Knowing how to pitch a tent in a temperate climate was very different from knowing how to build a snowhouse to fend off weeks of weather at thirty degrees below zero. Knowing how to lay a fire in a hearth had little value in a place where there was no wood.⁸

Traveling to an extremely remote land, you also expose yourself to strange people, who may or not welcome you. They may or may not offer assistance. They may or may not treat you as a friend. Given the extreme remoteness of the region, and the traveler’s relative experience and self-sufficiency, relationships with native people become critical to the traveler’s survival. The more skilled, savvy, and diplomatic the traveler, the greater the chance for success. The more rigid, the more arrogant, the more inflexible, the greater the chance for disaster. In 1820, Sir John Franklin and his men, moving through the Barren Lands, had such trouble finding food that they ate their own shoes. Two men starved to death. When a guide brought in some meat, Franklin’s men exulted and feasted hungrily. When they discovered that the meat had come from a missing member of their own party, they shot the guide. Two decades later, Franklin tried exploring the Arctic again. This time he brought curtain rods, silver cutlery, and silk shoes. He and more than a hundred of his men died of starvation and lead poisoning from their canned food. They almost certainly cannibalized some of their companions. Just a few months after Father Rouvière arrived at Fort Norman, at the other end of the world, Roald Amundsen, adopting Eskimo survival techniques, particularly the use of sled dogs, reached the South Pole. Robert Falcon Scott had insisted on sticking with British know-how, particularly the use of horses, and perished.

THAT FATHER ROUVIÈRE trusted his life to John Hornby, a man he had never met, in a region whose hostility he could not possibly conceive was a testament to the depth of his faith. But if Hornby’s wilderness expertise and knowledge of the Barren Lands was infinitely superior to Rouvière’s, he was not, in fact, an ideal guide. He was independent to a fault, often picking up and wandering off on his own without concern for his travel companions. Far more worrisome, for a man as inexperienced as Rouvière, was Hornby’s apparent refusal to plan more than a day or two ahead. Hornby thought highly enough of his own hunting skills that he rarely stored enough food to get him through the Arctic’s inevitable seasons of famine. Another white explorer warned Hornby that the practice would one day lead him to “die like a rat.” For now, though, Hornby was the best guide Father Rouvière had.⁹

Just what Hornby’s motives had been for contacting the Catholic mission in the first place are hard to fathom. He was not, by a long stretch, a churchgoer, and he seemed deeply ambivalent about the impact a mission in the Barren Lands might have on the native people there. To some degree, he felt proprietary over the country itself. To someone with Hornby’s personality, another influx of white people could only make the land seem cramped. But perhaps Hornby believed that the tide of history had already begun to flow, and that it would be better to know the white people setting up shop in the north than not. Perhaps he would get some fur-trading business in the bargain. In any case, he agreed to accompany Rouvière from Fort Norman to the northern shore of Great Bear Lake. They would try to coordinate their departure with the Douglas team, but nothing, at this stage of their respective journeys, was simple. Indeed, as confident as George Douglas felt in his own group’s wilderness skills, the fact remained that none of them had been remotely this far north. Their intent from the beginning had been to travel quickly and to rely on the help of no one. They viewed with trepidation the prospect of shouldering the burdens of other travelers. Crossing the Barren Lands and getting to the Arctic coast would be difficult enough without worrying about the mental and physical competence of strangers.

Crossing Great Bear Lake would be one of the most difficult legs of the entire expedition. After leaving the relative comforts of Fort Norman, the men would haul their boats and gear one hundred river miles to a southwestern lobe of the lake. They would use canoes and York boats, fifty-foot-long open vessels with just over three feet of freeboard and a twelve-foot beam that could be rigged with a canvas tarpaulin sail. With a combination of rowing and sailing, they would cross the enormous breadth of the lake itself. Their destination, diagonally across, was the old Fort Confidence site, where a Hudson’s Bay Company man had already built a cabin; at a second site, six miles up the Dease River, there was another small camp. The shortest route, straight across the lake, would be risky in the extreme. Great Bear Lake is the ninth-largest freshwater lake in the world, fully 250 miles from the southwestern shore to the northeastern shore. Sailing an open, fully loaded boat across such an expanse of water, in a region that could instantly whip up a ferocious windstorm or a blizzard, would have been foolish. Waves on a body of water that big could reach twenty-two feet, easily five times the height needed to swamp a York boat.

For the first time since they’d left Edmonton, twelve hundred miles to the south, even the supremely self-confident Douglases realized they would need some help getting to the region’s fabled mineral deposits. Gathering their gear together at Fort Norman, they approached a group of Bear Lake Indians and said they would trade them their York boat in exchange for help dragging it up Bear River to the lake. The Douglases would not need the York for the river trip to the Arctic coast, and figured they would be able to make their return trip in canoes. The Indians hesitated. They were amazed at some of the gear the Douglases planned to carry, particularly the old floorboards and two small windows they hoped would make a winter cabin more cozy. The offer of the York boat was more troubling. Since it could not be divided, the boat would inevitably end up in the hands of one man, and was therefore likely to cause more strife than it was worth. The Indians also took offense at the canvas Duxbak pants the Douglases had on. Apparently, the pants closely resembled the uniforms worn by officers of the Royal North West Mounted Police. They represented something that clearly made the Indians nervous.

Since only one of the Indians spoke English—a man with the unlikely name of Lixie Trindle—coming to terms was not easy. Finally, after negotiating a more attractive fee that did not include the York boat, six Indians from around Fort Norman agreed to haul three and a half tons of gear in the York boat, packed with two canoes on top, up the Bear River. They would haul the boat “like mules,” and when they reached Great Bear Lake, they would return, floating downriver in their own birchbark canoe.¹⁰

Before he left, George Douglas reminded Father Rouvière of his plans to push as far into Eskimo country as possible before the precious summer weather changed. If Rouvière wanted to come along, he had to cross Great Bear Lake as quickly as possible. If too many days passed, there simply would not be enough time to make it north and back again before winter. The Douglases would travel fast. They needed to make a reconnaissance run this summer before embarking on a fuller expedition to the Arctic coast the following spring. If Rouvière wished to join the party, he was welcome. If he was late coming to meet them, they would leave without him.

Though Rouvière had no reason to expect help from the Douglas team—they had never promised to take him north—their obvious competence would solve some significant problems for the young priest. Making a round-trip journey with the Douglases from Great Bear Lake to the Coppermine River, the main trunkline to the coast, would make a lot more sense than trekking all the way to the coast and spending the winter there with John Hornby. Rouvière had never spent a warm summer day in the Arctic, let alone an entire winter. He had few supplies of any kind, and virtually no cold-weather gear. He had no hunting skills. He had never met an Eskimo. And he barely even knew the mercurial Hornby. What would it be like living with him in a snowhouse for five months of utter darkness?

But by July 8, when the Douglases and their hired hands left Fort Norman, Rouvière and Hornby were still not ready. Hornby didn’t even have a boat. He had planned to borrow one from a retired Hudson’s Bay man who had not yet arrived at Fort Norman. With Hornby insisting on waiting, Rouvière made the bold decision to leave without him. He joined some Bear Lake Indians who were planning their own trip across the lake. What Rouvière would do once he got to the far shore of Great Bear Lake, he had no idea. “After that, I don’t know how I shall make out,” he wrote Bishop Breynat. “Nothing has been decided about where to winter. [Hornby’s] idea is to get as close as possible to the Eskimo, perhaps going right to the sea-coast to winter. His scheme seems all right to me; but if we adopt this plan, our winter supplies are no use; almost impossible to take them so far without enormous expense.”

If he ever did manage to locate the Eskimos, Father Rouvière also wondered how he would find his way back south. Presumably any Indian guides he could persuade to bring him north would be loath to spend much time in Eskimo country, and Eskimos would be unlikely to travel deep into Indian country. Perhaps Rouvière could find a place to build a cabin in between the two peoples and meet an Eskimo family willing to spend the winter with him. “This way we could learn their language fairly quickly—an indispensable step towards the ministering among them,” he wrote. Rouvière ended his letter, as he often would, with a tone that reflected his own humility in the face of trials so far from home. “So far the good God has kept me well and I ask him every day to preserve me to the end, until I can fulfill the difficult mission which has been entrusted to me. I rely also upon your good prayers.”¹¹

When Rouvière and his Indian guides finally got under way, he quickly realized that even making it to Great Bear Lake would be a trial. For all their seaworthiness on open water, York boats were exasperating to haul against the current on a swift river. Five of the boat’s eighteen inches of draft were keel, which helped the boat track in open water but seemed like a plow blade in the river shallows. Although Rouvière and his guides occasionally found a lip of beach that allowed some decent footing, more often than not they were forced to drag the boat through thigh-deep, icy water, navigating all the while an Arctic Scylla and Charybdis—whirlpools on one side of them and sheer ice walls on the other.¹²

THE DOUGLASES made it from Fort Norman to the southwest shore of Great Bear Lake on July 14, and were around the lake on the northeastern shore ten days later. They picked a site for their cabin on the banks of the Dease River, six miles up from the lake, and laid out the windows and floorboards they had hauled five hundred miles from Fort Simpson. They immediately set out their gear for the reconnaissance trip to the Coppermine River, and waited impatiently for Rouvière to arrive. When five days went by with no sign of the priest, George Douglas and the geologist, August Sandburg, set off without him, leaving Lionel Douglas behind to build the team’s winter cabin. As always, they executed their plans like clockwork.¹³

The same could not be said for the men lagging to their rear. By the end of July, when Rouvière finally showed up, Hornby was still nowhere to be seen. What was taking him so long was hard to fathom. Perhaps he’d been hampered by equipment troubles or a shortage of food, both of which were constant worries in the Barren Lands. Perhaps Hornby had gotten sidetracked, as he often did. With the summer season quickly slipping away, Rouvière grew anxious to move north. But with his Indian guides unwilling to venture farther into Eskimo country, Hornby lagging behind, and not even an abstract idea about how to get to the Coppermine River, Rouvière was stuck. There were no credible maps, and even if there had been, Rouvière lacked the experience to use them. He had no choice but to hang around Great Bear Lake, day after day, watching the sun slip incrementally lower in the sky. Finally, two critical weeks later, Hornby dragged his canoe ashore. It was August 10. A trip to the coast and back was now out of the question. Winter would be setting in soon.¹⁴

CHAPTER THREE

Unuak naguyuk
Talvani nunami
Uilagahuk nutaganikpaktuk
Angutinuak ataniuyuk
Negiyutikagvingmi-ituk
Anilihaktuk Jesus

 

—FIRST VERSE OF “SILENT NIGHT, HOLY NIGHT” IN INUINAQTUN

BEFORE LEAVING GREAT BEAR LAKE, GEORGE DOUGLAS AND August Sandburg packed fifty days’ worth of food into a canoe they had dubbed the Polaris. If they were unwilling to wait for Rouvière and Hornby, perhaps their string of caches and campsites would serve as useful signposts if Rouvière and Hornby did try to make a run at least partway into Eskimo country before winter arrived.

For both teams, the journey between Great Bear Lake and the Coppermine River would be challenging in ways their trip so far had not. No map had ever been made of this section of Canada. All the men had to go on was an imprecise sketch from the Canadian Geological Survey, and a series of descriptions they’d picked up from reading a narrative written by the explorer David Hanbury. And it had been nearly a decade since Hanbury had passed through this country, going in the opposite direction, from the Arctic Ocean via the Coppermine, Kendall, and Dease Rivers to Great Bear Lake. For much of his trip, Hanbury had had a comparatively easy time of it, for one simple reason: after leaving the Coppermine River, he was traveling downstream, following rivers that led one into the next. For the Douglases and Rouvière, trying to follow small tributary creeks upstream would be far more challenging, since each one could lead to a solitary water source—and a dead end. Since every river has myriad branches leading into it, explorers moving upstream have exactly as many ways of getting lost as there are creeks. Minus one.

The early stages of the trip north would be relatively easy. In its lower reaches the Dease River was a shallow stream typically 130 yards wide, though some sections narrowed to rapids just ten or fifteen yards across. Canoes could be paddled up the wider sections of the river, but in the rapids one man always had to exit the boat and pull the other man through. In camp at the end of the day, they could hunt wild geese and pick blueberries they found growing on the riverbanks.¹

Farther north, the country became increasingly bleak. The landscape looked pulverized. Blackflies were a torment. The region that lay between the Dease and the Coppermine Rivers, at the north end of the Barren Lands, was a plateau known as the Dismal Lakes. The largest lake was ringed by lowlands, which were, in turn, shut in by high, bare, rocky hills; those to the north still had huge, probably permanent drifts of snow. The hills on the southern side were built of sharp broken rocks “unmitigated by any softening influence of plant life,” Douglas wrote. Along the shore were scattered the bones of caribou “like driftwood along the beach.”

Navigating this region—getting their canoes safely from one river to the other—would require several miles of overland carrying. As difficult as paddling a canoe upriver can be, there is nothing quite as counterintuitive as carrying a canoe for miles across dry land. This is something like a cowboy carrying his horse, or a cyclist shouldering his bike; it is a physical incongruity, in which the weaker, less efficient half of an otherwise graceful pair is forced to do the dirty work. Shouldering a canoe, perhaps with a bag or two of gear occupying hands that would otherwise be engaged in swatting clouds of blackflies, offers challenges to a paddler’s patience that are far less happily engaged than, say, a good set of rapids. It is impossible, for one thing, to see anything other than your own legs and, perhaps, if you are carrying the stern of the boat, the feet of your bowman. Conversation is labored, since every word is strained by the weight of the canoe and hollowed out as it bounces off the inverted hull. The man in front has little more peripheral vision than the man in back; since his face is stuck in the bow, he can see sideways but not much in front. If the portage requires moving through woods, low-lying branches can cause no end of aggravation for both parties. There are no moments of exhilaration when trudging in this fashion across tundra with a hundred pounds of gear on your back. There is only exhaustion, and maybe a blister or two. Unless you are in Eskimo country. Then there are some surprises.

Atop the Dismal Lakes plateau, George Douglas had just risen from a rest and was beginning to make his way back to camp when, raising his binoculars, he spotted a man walking along the top of a hill about a mile away. The figure disappeared as soon as Douglas brought him into view, but Douglas was certain that the man was an Eskimo. Scanning the hilltop, Douglas thought he could also see some sort of a camp, and he and Sandburg, beside themselves with excitement, decided to cautiously investigate. They walked quietly toward the hill, afraid of frightening the man, and got quite close to him before he noticed their approach.

“Whether it was merely the unexpectedness of it, or whether he had never seen any white man before I do not know, certainly he was very much frightened,” Douglas wrote. “We threw up our arms calling out ‘Teyma Teyma’ about the only Eskimo word I knew.” In return, the man, trembling with fright, kept repeating something over and over in a low moaning tone. Though Douglas would not have known it, the eerie chant was almost certainly the same sound Vilhjalmur Stefansson and his companions had described just a year before. According to Eskimo legend, a man in the presence of malevolent spirits could be struck permanently dumb if he failed to make a sound with every breath. On and on the surprised man would moan, until his visitors either disappeared or somehow convinced them that they were, in fact, human beings.

The man was sturdily built, about five feet four inches high, and dressed in caribou skins and sealskin boots. Douglas noted his clothes were “quite as clean as our own, and a pleasant contrast to the dirty, sulky Indians we were used to.” The man’s hair hung straight and black, with the bangs cropped close to the skin. His face seemed open and intelligent, with rosy cheeks and, once he got over his fear, an engaging smile. He carried some spears, and on the ground next to him were a bow, a sealskin case full of arrows, and an animal skin drying on a rack of crossed sticks. Douglas and Sandburg did their best to communicate with him, using what little native language they knew. When they asked if the lake they could see in the near distance was Teshierpi Lake, the man nodded his head and repeated, “Teshi-arping, Teshi-arping.” Douglas reached into his pocket and produced a small piece of chocolate and watched as the Eskimo put it dubiously into his mouth. Instantly, the man’s face broke into a wide grin, and all three men shared a moment of delight.

With the chocolate working its magic, and seeing an opportunity to lighten their load, Douglas did his best through a variety of hand gestures to ask the man if he would follow them back to their camp and help them portage their gear. At first the man seemed willing, and followed the pair south for a stretch. But after a while he began to lag farther and farther behind, and finally he bolted back to the top of the hill, where Douglas and Sandburg watched him gather up his few belongings and disappear toward the lake. Douglas was perplexed. Had their pace been too quick? Did he have obligations elsewhere that were being compromised by his distraction? Or did he simply not trust them? They would never find out.²

Following the creeks flowing down the northeastern slope of the Dismal Lakes plateau, Douglas and Sandburg quickly found the Kendall River, then, at last, the broad Coppermine. Getting from here to the rumored copper deposits near the Arctic Ocean the following spring would be a matter of ruddering the Polaris to the coast. Douglas and Sandburg spent a couple of days scouting out the river and its surrounding hills, looking for spots to which they might return. Satisfied that they could make the spring trip without too much difficulty, they declared their reconnaissance mission a success, and began the trip home.

On their way south, Douglas and Sandburg were treated to glorious displays of northern lights, extending across the sky “in the form of a spiral like a loosely twisted rope,” Douglas wrote. “There was no color, it looked more like a slightly luminous cloud. A rapid movement was running through it from end to end, and I thought at first it was some kind of a cloud, some violent atmospheric disturbance, and for a few moments I was quite alarmed until I realised what it really was.”

They were also struck by a more terrestrial surprise. At a campsite near the junction of Sandy Creek and the Dease River, where they had also stopped on their way north, they saw a number of footprints that had not been there before. Trees had been chopped down, but in a very strange manner—they seemed to have been bludgeoned with blunt tools rather than chopped or sawed, and they lay across the river, as if to form some sort of barricade. Douglas decided the work must have been done by Eskimos rather than Indians, who, as full-time forest dwellers, had more efficient tools. The barricade, he supposed, must have been some sort of deer-hunting blind, but who could say for sure? Douglas also noticed that a canvas bag he had strung between two trees on the way north was now tied up differently. When he opened the bag, he was astonished to find a small sealskin coat and a beautifully made pair of sealskin slippers. In addition, the cache had been restocked with a bunch of arrows fitted with spruce shafts and copper-tipped bone heads, along with some walrus-tusk ivory trinkets. It would be a year before Douglas figured out that one of these last items could be used to shove a sinew-rope through the noses of marmots, to form a kind of carrying stringer; the other, a small handle with a loop of sinew attached, was useful for carrying the stomachs of caribou.

Apparently, a group of Eskimos had found Douglas’s cache, rifled it, picked out what they needed, and left what they considered fair compensation. When Douglas cataloged everything that had been taken, he came up with exactly one object: an empty lard pail. The things left by the Eskimos seemed “liberal payment,” he wrote, an impressive act of civility from one group of travelers to another.

BY THIS TIME, back at Great Bear Lake, Father Rouvière and John Hornby were just beginning their own reconnaissance trip north. Though he had little chance of making it all the way to the coast and back before winter, Rouvière hoped at least to push into the southern reaches of Eskimo territory. Perhaps he would even get lucky and run into a few people before they disappeared to their frozen winter hunting grounds. Like Douglas and Sandburg, they struggled mightily against the currents of the Dease River as they made their way toward the Dismal Lakes plateau. Locked in by a thick fog that severely limited their line of sight down the river corridor, they found themselves crisscrossing the steppes near the lakes for several days. And Despite Hornby’s experience in the region, their early going was never assured; indeed, it was only when they came to a campsite left by Douglas and Sandburg that they were certain they were on the right path. “What a river!” Rouvière wrote to Father Ducot, the priest in charge of the mission at Fort Norman. “The current is very strong and there are places where there isn’t enough water for the canoe—and it goes on like that for a distance of fifteen miles. There are at least thirty or forty rapids to go up and each turning of the river is a rapid. We have to take the canoe one at each end and lift it in order to get it forward at all.”³

Finally, in mid-August, their luck changed. Following an impulse, Rouvière, still wearing his black cassock and carrying his Oblate’s cross, decided to try going northwest. Hornby refused to follow. Rouvière went off on his own. Forty-five minutes later, he saw three shapes in a fold in a nearby hill. In the evening light, he was uncertain whether they were caribou or men. Quickening his pace, he trotted along for another ten minutes. Suddenly, on the side of a knoll, he spied a small crowd of people. As soon as they saw him, they moved in his direction; a man in front, his head bent to the side, raised his arms in greeting. Then, several times, he bowed his whole body to the ground. Rouvière stood in silence, stunned. But his mind raced. “Thanks, O mother Mary,” he said to himself. “One of the first points of my mission is about to be fulfilled. Be pleased to bless this first encounter.” He raised his arm. The entire group of Eskimos picked up their pace.

When he got close enough to see Rouvière’s face, the man in front turned to his companions and shouted a single word: Krabluna! Rouvière knew the word. Depending on the translation, it could be interpreted differently. “Long Eyebrow” was one translation. “Stranger” was another. With a great show of affection, the man took the priest by the arm and presented him to the rest. The young priest shook hands with everyone. Rouvière’s cross captured their attention immediately. What could they have thought it was? An arrowhead? A spearpoint? Flashing his fingers, Rouvière tried to explain. “As they gazed at it I did my best by signs to make them understand that He who was on the cross had sacrificed His life for us.”

He then hung some crucifixes around their necks, and accompanied them to their camp. He was famished, after a long day’s walk, and accepted their invitation gladly. “Refuse? Not likely, because I had been walking since eight in the morning, it was nine in the evening, and myself nearly starved,” he wrote. One cannot help but wonder what he would have done for food had he not met the Eskimos. Here he was, far from camp, with no provisions in his pack. Hornby was nowhere in sight.

In any case, once in camp, Rouvière was immediately crowded and peppered with questions. Not able to communicate, he tried again to tell them of his reason for being so far north, “that I had come on their account, and to stay among them.” A group agreed to go back with him to fetch his gear, but Rouvière managed to convince them that one volunteer would be enough.

“These Eskimos are really hospitable people,” Rouvière wrote to Bishop Breynat. “The first impression they made on me was very favourable, and I think, if one can meet them often, it should be possible to do a great deal of good.” Unfortunately, Rouvière found communicating with the Eskimos frustrating. “We can’t understand each other,” he wrote, “but their language seems quite easy and very little different from the language of the Mackenzie Eskimo, if I can judge from the few words I’ve been able to pick out.”

Even after the first meeting, Rouvière was aware of the pressure the encroachment of whites was having on the Eskimo community. Already a number of them had been trading with whalers. One had exchanged eight white foxes for a rifle. Clearly, learning their language would become critical to a satisfactory ministry. Whether Rouvière could learn it fast enough to make himself an effective missionary or whether he would need some help from an interpreter remained to be seen.

Perhaps, Rouvière thought, Bishop Breynat would make good on his promise to send along another priest, one with training in the Eskimo language. With its proximity to Eskimo hunting grounds, the Dismal Lakes region would make a far better place to set up a missionary base than the more southerly Great Bear Lake, even if it meant living apart from people like the Douglases and John Hornby. The only thing for Rouvière to do now was to head back to Great Bear Lake, gather up his communion vessels, and return to the Dismal Lakes. Once back north, he would build a winter camp and try to convince an Eskimo family to spend the long, dark season with him. He had an idea of a place to build a cabin: on the shores of a small body of water that would one day be named Lake Rouvière. The natives knew the lake as Imaerinik, “The Place Where People Died.” ⁴

CHAPTER FOUR

Therefore it is that our fathers have inherited from their fathers all the old rules of life which are based on the experience and wisdom of generations. We do not know how, we cannot say why, but we keep those rules in order that we may live untroubled. And so ignorant are we in spite of our shamans, that we fear everything unfamiliar. We fear what we see about us, and we fear all the invisible things that are likewise about us, all that we have heard of in our forefathers’ stories and myths.

—AUA, A SHAMAN OF THE IGLULIK INUIT

IF A POOR UNDERSTANDING OF THE ESKIMO LANGUAGE WAS THE most obviously frustrating part of his assignment, at least as significant an obstacle for Father Rouvière would be overcoming a complex system of beliefs his new charges had been passing down since thousands of years before Christ was born. Rouvière could be forgiven for starting at a point of genuine ignorance. Even Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who had spent years talking over such things with Eskimos all along the Arctic coast, admitted to large cognitive gaps in his understanding of Eskimo traditions. “Direct questions seldom bring them out, because one does not know what to ask,” Stefansson wrote. “Besides, Eskimos have a very definite idea as to what a white man believes in and approves of, and what he disbelieves in and ridicules, and shape their replies accordingly.” What such a demeanor meant for the likelihood of genuine Christian conversion was open to speculation. If Eskimos told white men what they wanted to hear, how could a missionary ever be sure they had truly accepted the faith? And what, exactly, could a missionary say to a group of people to convince them to abandon a system of belief that flowed in their lives like river water? ¹

Traveling near the Horton River, Stefansson had once become friendly with an Eskimo family that included a twenty-five-year-old woman named Palaiyak and her eight-year-old daughter, Noashak, whom Palaiyak insisted on calling “Mother.” When another family came to visit, the matriarch of that family also called the child “Mother.”

“Why do you two grown women call this child your mother?” Stefansson asked.

“Simply because she is our mother,” they said.

Intrigued, Stefansson came to learn that when a Mackenzie River Eskimo died, the body was taken to a nearby hill and covered with a pile of drift logs. The body’s soul, however, remained in the house where the person died for four days (if it was a man) or five days (if it was a woman). At the end of this period, a ceremony was held in which the spirit was convinced to join the body on the hill, where it remained until the next child in the community was born.

When a new child was born, it arrived with its own soul, but since it was inexperienced and feeble, it required an older soul to do its thinking and help care for it. The child’s mother then summoned the spirit from the grave to become the guardian of the child’s spirit. When the departed spirit heard the call, it entered the child’s body. From then on the older spirit assisted the child in every way, helping to teach it to walk, to grow strong, to talk. When the child spoke, it spoke with the accumulated wisdom of the ancestor, “plus the higher wisdom which only comes after death.” The child, then, was the wisest person in the family, even the community, and its opinions were listened to accordingly. “What it says and does may seem foolish to you, but that is mere seeming; in reality the child is wise beyond your comprehension.” If a parent denied a child’s request, preferring, in effect, his own wisdom to the wisdom of the spirit, the spirit might grow angry and abandon the child. The child might become stupid, or physically deformed, or even die. To offend a child deliberately would be to actively solicit the child’s misfortune, and the parent’s act would be construed that way by the community. It was for this reason that Stefansson’s translator, Ilavinik, even at the end of an arduous day of traveling, would always put his daughter on his shoulders rather than force her to walk on her own.²

That Stefansson spoke the Eskimos’ language gave him an almost miraculous advantage over other Europeans who would follow him into the central Arctic. The people he encountered spoke a dialect similar to the one he had mastered years before in the Mackenzie delta, immediately giving him an almost magical credibility. “It cannot have happened often in the history of the world,” he wrote, “that the first white man to visit a primitive people was one who spoke their language.”

If Stefansson’s tongue stunned the Eskimos, he felt sure his next trick—one that white explorers had used to great effect all over the world—would fill them with awe. He brought out his rifle, lifted it to his shoulder, and in a flash shattered a target two hundred yards away.

He didn’t get the reaction he expected. The Eskimos were only mildly impressed. They knew a shaman, they said, who could do the same thing with a “magic arrow.” Stefansson showed them binoculars, which could make distant things look close. The Eskimos were interested, but then asked him to use the glasses to look into the future. Tell us which way the caribou would be moving, they said. Our shamans can do this.

Stefansson told them of a surgeon he knew who could put someone to sleep and remove a kidney, though he had to admit he had never actually seen this procedure done. An Eskimo told Stefansson of a man he knew who had had back pain. A shaman had put the man to sleep, removed the entire diseased spinal column, and replaced it with a new one—all without leaving a scratch. The man confessed he hadn’t actually seen the procedure happen. Stefansson had to admit that this was beyond the skills of his own people. The wonders of Western science “pale beside the marvels which the Eskimos supposed to be happening all round them every day,” he wrote.

Though Stefansson’s hosts admitted that they had never met white men before, they had apparently heard stories about them. White men, they said, were the farthest of all people to the east. White men were reported to have various physical deformities; some were said to have just one eye in the middle of the forehead, but the veracity of this rumor could not be proven. White men were considered to be of a strange disposition, one moment giving valuable things to Eskimos for no pay and the next demanding exorbitant prices for useless articles or mere curiosities. White men would not eat good, ordinary food but subsisted on things “a normal person could not think of forcing himself to swallow except in case of starvation. And this in spite of the fact that the white men could have better things to eat if they wanted to, for seals, whales, fish and even caribou abound in their country.”³

AS DEEP AS Stefansson’s curiosity ran, it wouldn’t be until about the time of Father Rouvière’s murder that another white man would begin an intensive study of the spiritual life of the Copper Eskimos. Like Stefansson, Diamond Jenness, a New Zealand member of the 1913 Canadian Arctic Expedition, would report on a remarkable palette of beliefs and practices that vividly reflected the lives he observed over five years of study in the Arctic.

While Christian doctrine considers man to be at the pinnacle of God’s creation, the Eskimos had a far more subtle understanding of the relationships between man, animals, weather, and landscape. For the Eskimos, understanding the mysteries of these relationships was not a passive meditation, not a means of musing on the hand of God. In the most concrete, physical sense, the health and survival of an individual, a family, and an entire community depended upon a person’s understanding of the threads connecting the seen and the unseen, the human and the nonhuman, the physical and the mystical. With such small margins for existence, ignorance meant death for a man and his family. It wasn’t just courage that an Eskimo needed; it was experience and wisdom. “A people that lives by the chase and glories in hand-to-hand combat with such adversaries as the polar and brown bear can hardly be lacking in physical courage,” Jenness wrote. “But the Copper Eskimo is the reverse of foolhardy; courage with him is nearly always subordinated to prudence.” Even their language reflects this uncertainty. When Eskimos leave one another, they don’t say, “When we see each other again.” They say, “If we see one each other again.”⁴

Indeed, “Eskimos do not maintain this intimacy with nature without paying a certain price,” Barry Lopez writes in his masterpiece Arctic Dreams. “When I have thought about the ways in which they differ from people in my own culture, I have realized that they are more afraid than we are. On a day-to-day basis, they have more fear. Not of being dumped into cold water from an umiak, not a debilitating fear. They are afraid because they accept fully what is violent and tragic in nature. It is a fear tied to their knowledge that sudden, cataclysmic events are as much a part of life, of really living, as are the moments when one pauses to look at something beautiful. A Central Eskimo shaman named Aua, queried by Knud Rasmussen about Eskimo beliefs, answered, ‘We do not believe. We fear.’ ” ⁵

Although Eskimos held a universal belief in an existence after death, their notion of what this existence might look like was vague, or so it seemed to Jenness. Some Eskimos asked Jenness if he had seen their dead living in other parts of the Arctic; one woman thought her dead husband was living on the moon. Whenever he asked a direct question about the fate of an individual after death, Jenness often got an honest answer: “I don’t know.”

When a man died, his tools were broken and laid beside him, since he would need them in a future life. One day Jenness discovered a very old campsite, where an old woman’s implements still lay beside the place where she had died. Jenness wanted to burn two of the woman’s tent sticks for fuel, but was told that the woman still needed them to keep warm. Occasionally, when Jenness pressed, he might hear that perhaps a dead man was “still alive in some other place, but we have no knowledge.”

It is possible that this vagueness was deliberate, that the people Jenness interviewed preferred not to offer him access to what they knew. It is also possible that something precise was lost in the translation of such difficult ideas. How easy is it to articulate such abstractions in one’s own mind? But it is also possible that the answer “I don’t know” mirrored the Eskimos’ emphasis on knowledge based on experience. Who could say, from their own experience, where dead men went? Who had seen such a thing? It is also possible that the answer reflected a humility in the face of the mystery that was such a full part of their lives. With so much in the world that existed beyond the grasp of the human mind, what better answer was there than “I don’t know”?

Of course, like people everywhere and during all times, Eskimos had come up with stories for their mysteries. The universe as Eskimos conceived it comprised a flat, unbroken expanse of land and sea, covered over during the greater part of the year with snow and ice that stretched farther than any man knew. At each of its corners stood a pillar of wood holding up the sky. Above that was another land, abounding in caribou and other animals. Wandering across this upper expanse were semihuman, semispiritual beings: the female sun, the male moon, and the stars, which had once been human. The three stars of Orion’s belt were known as the Sealers or the Early Risers. Other constellations were named for other animals. The polar bear. The caribou.

The earth itself was full of magic, and populated by strange and often ominous spirits that could be conjured only with the help of a shaman or the telling of an ancient tale. There were dwarfs and giants, creatures who lived underground, people with mouths in their chests. Indians, for their part, were thought most likely to be human, but beyond them were white men, a people whose customs and manners were utterly strange.

Jenness heard very few stories about benevolent guardian spirits. Indeed, it seemed that the Eskimo spirit world was mostly populated by shades that were malignant, or neutral at best. These spirits remained unseen until they decided to haunt or even kill a hapless person; the shade of a man who died in one place might cause the death of another man a thousand miles away.

The religious doctrines of the Copper Eskimos brought them little or no comfort. “Life would be hard enough if they had none but natural forces to contend with, forces that they could see and estimate,” Jenness wrote.

But mysterious and hostile powers, invisible and incalculable, and therefore potentially all the more dangerous, hem them in, as they believe, on every side, so that they never know from day to day whether a fatal sickness will not strike them down or a sudden misfortune overwhelm them and their families—from no apparent cause, it may be, and for no conceivable reason, save the ill-will of these unseen foes. Young and old, the good and the bad, all alike are involved in the same dangers, and all alike share the same fate. Death rolls back the gate, not of a happy hunting ground, or of a heaven of peace and happiness where friends and lovers may unite once more, but of some vague and gloomy realm where, even if want and misery are not found (and of this they are not certain), joy and gladness must surely be unknown.

Given his own understanding of this system of beliefs, Jenness found the Eskimo persona an unusual mix of sadness and resilient good humor. Though they seemed perpetually melancholic about the possibility of death, they exhibited no dread about it, and showed none of the desperate anxiety that Jenness had come to associate with Europeans. “Generally they lowered their voice and assumed a mournful tone when speaking of dead relatives or friends, though occasionally one heard the remark, half-jest, half-earnest, that ‘the foxes have eaten so-and-so,’ or ‘so-and-so’s remains retained no semblance of a man.’ ”

It was little wonder that the mind of the average Eskimo was deeply tinged with fatalism, Jenness continued. “Life would be unbearable indeed with this religion did he not possess a superabundant stock of natural gaiety and derive a joy from the mere fact of living itself. The future holds out no golden promise, not even the hope of a life as cheerful as the present one; so the native banishes as far as possible all thoughts of a distant tomorrow, and drains the pleasures of each fleeting hour before they pass away forever.” ⁶

Since shades controlled everything from the weather to the migration patterns of caribou, Eskimos had created rituals to appease them. Neglecting these rituals could bring about catastrophe. Whenever a hunter killed a caribou or a seal, a scrap of the organs or piece of blubber had to be thrown to the spirits. Products of land and sea were never to be cooked in the same pot at the same time, though they could be eaten in the same meal. Any time an Eskimo traded an animal skin to a white man, he had to cut off a small piece and keep it. Otherwise, all animals would leave the country.⁷

As a rule, animals were considered far wiser than men. Animals knew everything, including the thoughts of men. But there were certain things animals needed that they could not provide for themselves. Seals, for example, needed fresh water to drink, but since they lived in salt water they had no way to get it. So seals would allow themselves to be killed in exchange for a dipperful of fresh water from the hunter. If a seal was killed and not offered water, all other seals would hear of it, and no smart seal would ever allow itself to be killed by that hunter. Likewise, polar bears in the afterlife desired tools like crooked knives and bow drills. Since a bear’s soul remained with it for four or five days after death, hunters would hang these tools beside a drying skin inside their snowhouse. When the bear’s soul was finally driven from the house, it would take the souls of the tools with it.⁸

IF MALEVOLENT SPIRITS seemed capricious in their visitations, Jenness learned, they could also be conjured and driven off by shamans, who knew incantations handed down from “men of the first times.” The word “shaman” derives from the Tungus people of Siberia, who used it to describe a person who has the power to cross from the human to the spirit world and to make journeys in disembodied form. In shamanic mythology, the line is blurry between good and evil, playful and serious. A ghost becomes a boy becomes a raven becomes a feather becomes a man, Hugh Brody writes. The mystery of the material world is boundless, and must therefore be respected. People must pay exquisite attention, to learn the secrets of the land. There is a profound and intelligent uncertainty. No one knows what is going to happen, or which decisions about any part of life will turn out to be correct. The world defies binary ways of thinking and speaking: there are no certainties, and truth is approximated only with humility. It is for this reason, as much as anything else, that Eskimos feared moving into unknown territory. Since spirits are full of trickery and exquisitely sensitive to disrespect, people had to know the subtleties of the land and the spirits that inhabited it.⁹

Shamans could also enter a trance, during which they were possessed by a “familiar,” or spirit guide, who would give the shaman access to the spirit world. Once possessed, shamans could perform extraordinary acts: they could swallow fire, fly through the air, change into animals, sink into the ground or water, kill and restore to life. One man would put his bow over his shoulders and fly like a ptarmigan. Another, during a séance, shrank and shrank until he sank through the floor of the snowhouse, only to emerge through the floor of another snowhouse. A female shaman once swallowed a snowknife all the way to its handle, then stood by as a male shaman pulled it from her stomach. In previous times, they had been able to visit the moon, but recently they had lost that power.

Unlike priests, Jenness found, shamans wore no distinguishing clothes, even when they were performing séances. They could be either men or women, and came to their powers not through appointment but by performance. Although they had a power that other people did not possess, they were not afforded sanctity or social status. To Jenness, shamans more closely resembled physicians than priests, and they gave their services free for any public cause.

The greatest spirit of all was Kannakapfaluk, who lived in a snowhut at the bottom of the sea and was protected by two bears, one brown, one white. Her consort was a three-foot-tall dwarf called Unga, so named because of the cry he issued whenever a shaman dragged him to the surface. In a foul mood, Kannakapfaluk could bring bad weather or cause pack ice to crack beneath the feet of a hunter. If a person broke a taboo—if a woman sewed too much out on the ice or a hunter neglected to offer a mouthful of water to a seal—Unga would call all the seals inside the snowhut. Hunting on the surface would then be fruitless.

To appease Kannakapfaluk, a shaman would gather the people inside a dance house, cut a hole in the ice, and lower a rope with a noose on one end. The people would chant:

The woman down there she wants to go away
Some of the young seals I can’t lay my hands on
The man he can’t right matters by himself
That man (the shaman) he can’t mend matters by himself
Over there where no people dwell I go myself and right matters
He can’t right matters by himself
Over there where no people dwell, thither I go and
right matters myself.

 

When the chant was done, the shaman would slip a noose around Kannakapfaluk’s wrists and haul her up to just below the surface—never closer, for Kannakapfaluk must never be seen by anyone but a shaman. The shaman would then plead the people’s case. We are starving, he would say. Please tell Unga to release the seals. Or the shaman might dive down to the snowhut, kidnap Unga under his coat, and return to negotiate at the surface, all the while keeping the spirit out of sight.¹⁰

One May, with the sun never setting, a group of Eskimos wondered whether to go traveling to find a group of people living near Prince Albert Sound. They asked a shaman named Higilak to conduct a midnight séance to see if their travel would be safe. All the Eskimos, save the small children, got inside one large tent, with Higilak sitting in a back corner. She began with a long speech asking about the wisdom of the excursion, then suddenly gave a piercing cry of pain and covered her face in her hands. The entire tent remained quiet for several minutes, the silence broken only by the low, somber murmur of someone in the audience. Then Higilak began to howl, and growl like a wolf. She raised her neck and, opening her mouth wide, showed two oversized canine teeth. She leaned over to a man and pretended to gnaw his head, then uttered broken, barely decipherable remarks that her audience could not understand, but that they latched onto nonetheless and tried to discuss. Every few minutes, Higilak would reach up and reinsert the teeth. After fifteen minutes of this, she once again cried in pain and hid her face in her hands. She then discreetly dropped the wolf’s teeth inside her boot. Now, apparently, the wolf’s spirit was fully inside her body. She uttered a few broken words in a feeble, barely audible falsetto, the audience leaning forward to catch every nuance. Two minutes later, it was all over. Higilak cried again as her familiar left her, then gasped. At last, the séance was over. Close to collapse from exhaustion, Higilak claimed to be ignorant of what had just transpired, and had to ask others in the tent what she had said. Later, when Jenness inquired, everyone agreed, without the slightest reservation, that Higilak had not been acting. She had been transformed into a wolf.

If these ceremonies piqued his intellect, Jenness never gave himself over to them. To begin with, he depended on his translator, Patsy Klengenberg, the teenage mixed-race son of an Eskimo woman named Qimniq and a Danish trader named Christian Klengenberg. And he acknowledged that shamans, when under a trance, often spoke in “old or semi-poetical expressions that greatly increased the difficulty of understanding them.” Jenness confessed that “it is not at all impossible that I may have missed the correct interpretation in some instances.”

“To a critical and unsympathetic outsider it may seem that a seance of this type is simply a case of palpable fraud on the part of the shaman, and of almost unbelievable stupidity and credulity on the part of the audience,” Jenness wrote. “A little amateurish ventriloquism, a feeble attempt at impersonation, and a childish and grotesque blending of the human and the animal, all performed in full daylight before an audience incapable of distinguishing between fact and fancy, between things seen and things imagined, or at least so mentally unbalanced that it reacted to the slightest suggestion and hypnotised itself into believing the most impossible things— that perhaps is all there may seem to be in Eskimo shamanism.” ¹¹

Indeed, for all the stories he heard, and all the séances he witnessed, Jenness remained skeptical. He needed physical evidence. In some cases, this standard created interesting results. Once he asked a man to sing into a recording phonograph. When he played it back, the man was convinced a spirit was trapped inside the machine. When a bemused Jenness asked the man to look for himself, the man said sure enough, there the spirit was: a tiny being about an inch and a half high, down in the phonograph, singing. If Jenness could hear with his ears, he could not see with his eyes.

“Hysteria, self-hypnosis, and delusion caused by suggestion are well known to every psychologist and medical practitioner, and everything that I witnessed could be explained on one or more of these grounds,” he wrote.

The natives have many tales of far more wonderful phenomena, phenomena which, if true, would be as mysterious and inexplicable as the much discussed walking over red-hot stones that is practised by a certain Fijian tribe. But of these marvels I saw nothing, and until we have the evidence of some more critical eye-witness than the Eskimo himself, it is safest perhaps to attribute them to the over-wrought imaginations of a people whose knowledge of the workings of our universe is far more limited than our own; a people who have no conception of our “natural laws,” but in their place have substituted a theory of spiritual causation in which there is no boundary between the possible and the impossible.¹²

Strangely, shamans often considered the God described by missionaries as a new spirit, not a false one. The Christian God seemed to be connected to a glorious life after death. Add him to the mix, shamans seemed to say. The Eskimo religion was a religion of life. The missionaries’ religion was a religion of death. “We have to follow our ways in order to get our food here on our land, to live,” one man said. “But we have to follow the Christians in order to get into heaven. When we die. So we need them both.”¹³

Missionaries, of course, also heard stories about spirits and trances and dreams, with shamans able to move through the porous barriers separating man and animal, man and woman, visible and invisible. At best, priests considered this foolishness. At worst it was devil worship. “We must be indulgent toward Eskimo superstition,” one priest concluded, “but we shouldn’t forget that superstitions are signs of clouding faith, and that the spirits the Eskimos believe in are the last faint glimmers of an extinguished religion. As one shaman put it, ‘Since the missionaries came, we are finished.’ ” ¹⁴

CHAPTER FIVE

In the times when that sort of thing happened, there was so much that was incomprehensible. Now we know no more that the human mind and human speech once had mysterious powers. A fancy, a word, cried out without any intention at all might have the strangest consequences.

—KNUD RASMUSSEN, The Netsilik Eskimos: Social Life and Spiritual Culture

AS ENTHUSIASTIC AS HE WAS ABOUT HIS MISSIONARY WORK, Father Rouvière could not help worrying about the prospect of spending a winter in the Arctic. Lake Imaerinik sat at the northern extremity of the tree line. Beyond it lay nothing but boundless, rolling hills, then the Arctic Ocean. Even the Eskimos, who had accommodated themselves to Arctic winters for thousands of years, still prepared for them with a certain degree of dread. Though winter offered Eskimos a cozy communality, with seal-oil lamps lighting festive dance houses and long nights spent sharing stories with neighbors, there was always the fear of starvation. “Always at the back of their minds there is the lurking dread of hunger and of cold in those in those dark sunless days,” Diamond Jenness would write, “when the huts perhaps are empty of food, the lamps extinguished for want of oil, and the people, driven indoors by the howling blizzards, huddle together on their sleeping platforms and face starvation and death.”

Among the things that most perplexed white explorers of the Arctic was how these northern people managed to survive on a diet consisting almost entirely of animal fat and protein. How could they live without the vitamins found in vegetables? History was rife with stories of British sailors dying of scurvy simply because they had failed to pack any fruits rich in vitamin C. Virtually nothing edible grew where the Eskimos lived. The only vegetable matter that ever entered their diet, in fact, was the partially digested moss they gleaned from inside the stomach or entrails of a caribou. In summertime, people would eat as much of this as they could. In colder months, they relied on the vitamins from seal blubber, or would slice up caribou stomachs that had been allowed to freeze with the herbs still inside. Though the Eskimos preferred to boil their meat when they could find fuel, they frequently ate it raw or dried it in the sun.

Depending on the season, Eskimo meals consisted of multiple courses, usually including frozen caribou fat, frozen caribou meat, dried and moldy fish, and portions of boiled caribou leg. In winter, they ate mostly bearded seal meat, skin, and blubber; strips of blubber were often left out for visitors, who would cut off pieces the size of a sugar cube. Caribou hearts were split in halves and laid out to dry in the sun; seal livers and kidneys were always eaten raw and unfrozen. Seal intestines were a delicacy, as were flippers. Blood poured into a sealskin bucket was used to thicken soup. Unborn caribou fawns were skinned and dried or cooked at once, often for children to eat. ¹

Especially as the weather turned colder, hunters were exceedingly careful to preserve every ounce of fat from caribou and seals. Fat skimmed from the surface of boiled bones was ladled off with a musk-ox horn, poured into a pericardium bag, and left to solidify into a white tallow considered a delicacy.²

In midwinter, an Eskimo wife would rise early to light the lamp that had gone out during the night and begin boiling seal meat to warm her husband for the hunt. Children would emerge from their snowhouses and walk about distributing food. Men would gather together, harness their dogs, and set out looking for seals. With their dogs trained to sniff out seal breathing holes, hunters would stalk on their hands and knees, sometimes until their wrists were black from frostbite. When a hunter discovered a breathing hole, he would erect a delicate system of fine, knitting-needle-sized bone sticks. Kneeling beside the hole on a pad of bear- or deerskin, the hunter, with astonishing patience, would hold a harpoon aloft, and wait. If a seal did eventually rise, the bone sticks would fall, and the hunter would strike with all his might. Then, often with the help of several men, he would drag the seal to the surface and jab it in the eye with the sharp handle of his ice shovel. After a few years of this, most men had huge rope scars on their hands; many others had lost fingers. One man told of watching a harpooned seal plunge below the ice and drag the hunter with him; off in the distance, the seal could be seen popping to the surface to breathe, apparently still dragging the man behind.³

One winter was so severe that people were forced to eat their sealskin boots. Night after night their shamans would interrogate the spirits they believed to control the weather, to try to appease their anger. Whenever the storms did abate, even slightly, every man and youth would sally forth and hunt seals for hours in the bitter cold. There was not a man whose face was not covered with great blotches where he had been severely frost-bitten. “Sometimes the natives would recall dreadful tales of years gone by, how, not a generation before, the Kanghiryuarmiut had chopped up the corpses of their dead and eaten the frozen flesh to save themselves from starvation,” Jenness wrote. “Away in the East, too, the Netsilingmiut had cut off a man’s legs while he was still alive and tried to appease their hunger with his flesh. Fortunately, a change came over the weather about the middle of March. Before the month was out the crisis was over; the huts of the Eskimos were filled once more with meat and blubber, and the dance-house resounded with song and laughter.”⁴

SOON AFTER their arrival on the shore of Lake Imaerinik, Father Rouvière and John Hornby managed to kill three caribou, which allowed them to concentrate their energies on the urgent work of building Rouvière’s cabin. They needed to work quickly. Throughout the fall, the weather remained dull and cold, with temperatures often dipping to twenty below zero. Though he was willing to help build the cabin, Hornby once again got restless. Against the wishes of Rouvière, and long before the cabin was finished, Hornby took off for Great Bear Lake to get his own winter cabin in shape. When he got there, he told the Douglases that he had left Rouvière “on quite friendly terms with the Eskimos and well fixed for food.” Though he would always have the option of trekking the fifty miles to visit Hornby and the Douglases, Rouvière nonetheless faced the prospect of spending his first winter in the Arctic by himself. As he had done many times and would do again, Rouvière elected to suffer in order to improve his chances of ministering to his chosen people.⁵

At first, Rouvière’s decision seemed to pay off. In September, a group of ten or twelve Eskimo families came and pitched their tents near his cabin. Rouvière was thrilled. Perhaps, in the end, his flock would find him, rather than the other way around. Through the middle of October, Eskimos dropped by every single day. Sometimes it would be a family or two, sometimes four or five families at once. There were repeat visits, which made Rouvière feel he was making headway. Over the course of six weeks or so he figured he saw close to two hundred people. His reputation seemed to be spreading.

Yet there still remained the terrible awkwardness of his not knowing the native tongue. “The language—that’s the trouble,” Rouvière would write. “I have collected some words, but not as many as I would have liked.” Rouvière’s struggle with the native language was more than an inconvenience. It was a source of great anxiety. Coming as he did from a country and a landscape utterly different from this vast expanse, Rouvière not only lacked the physical talents for Arctic survival, he lacked, in a way, the intellect. Without the ability to name a tree or a river—let alone a food source like a char or a caribou—Rouvière was deficient in far more than a native vocabulary or a means of social communication. He lacked the very means of navigating the place itself. The inability to call even the simplest things by their name, especially when these things were unique to his new environment, left Rouvière feeling even more alone in the world. This was not Italy, where the language was different but the art and the wine familiar. This was not Spain, where a keen ear might pick up a stray noun or verb. The language the Eskimos spoke was as different from French as ancient Chinese, and the customs of the people and the land they inhabited were, if anything, even stranger. Rouvière was not just shut out from the barest comforts of human conversation. He was also alone in the physical world. Because he lacked words, he was incapable of knowing, or even seeing, the same world as the people whose territory he was hoping to understand.

More pressing, his cabin was nowhere near complete, and Rouvière, with limited carpentry skills, had no idea what the Arctic winter held in store for him. “I must say frankly [it] is Mr. Hornby’s fault for leaving me alone for almost a month,” Rouvière wrote. “Having to finish the house— or practically to build the thing—I have had only a little time to devote to [the Eskimos].”⁶

ON OCTOBER 20, down at Great Bear Lake, John Hornby hitched up a dog team and packed a big sled he had commissioned from a group of Indians and, with the Douglases dragging a pair of toboggans, set off to convince Rouvière to spend the winter with them near Great Bear Lake. They found the priest “looking well and cheerful,” apparently quite glad to have company once again, since the last of the Eskimos had left for the coast just the day before. The Douglases spent the day with Rouvière, taking a hike over the hills to the north of the lake. As it did time and again, the wet, foggy weather limited their view. “That part of the country was bad enough in summer,” Douglas reported. “In early winter with the sun only a short distance above the horizon and the air full of frozen mist the outlook was miserable indeed.” With the Eskimos gone, Father Rouvière at last agreed to move back to Great Bear Lake for the winter. His decision was undoubtledly wise. Spending the winter alone could well have cost Rouvière his life. And compared to the isolation and loneliness of his cabin at Lake Imaerinik, to say nothing of the mercurial behavior of John Hornby, Rouvière found the atmosphere inside the Douglases’ cabin remarkably cheerful.

While the rest of the men had been exploring Eskimo country, Lionel Douglas had spent the time building a fourteen-by-sixteen-foot log house that appeared particularly sturdy and welcoming compared to Rouvière’s quarters at Lake Imaerinik. Constructed of spruce logs, it had a floor dug six inches below ground level, composed of wooden blocks pounded in on their ends and grouted with sand. Douglas had chinked the seams between the logs on the walls—both inside and out—with a layer of mud plastered over a stuffing made from moss and caribou hair. The roof he’d built with a lathe of small spruce poles chinked with caribou hair, covered with a layer of dry sand, and then wrapped in a sheet of waterproof canvas the team had brought to make canoes. The two small windows the team had carried all the way from Fort Simpson gave the lodge just enough light to keep it from feeling claustrophobic. One window was placed on the west wall, the other on the south, next to the cabin door. Lionel had papered the interior walls with the illustrated pages of magazines that Hornby had left behind.

As pleasant as the windows and walls were, it was the stone fireplace, diagonally across from the door, that gave the cabin a charm that made the coming winter seem wholly tolerable. Rather than following the regional custom of building a narrow hearth in which logs were burned standing on end—a style he considered both a nuisance and inefficient— Lionel had made his fireplace wide and deep, with a big slab of quartzite for a mantelpiece. The chimney drew smoke beautifully, leaving the air in the cabin’s close quarters surprisingly clear. All in all, George Douglas wrote, the fireplace was “a regular triumph.”⁷

As the Arctic autumn began to set in, the days became markedly shorter and temperatures began to fall in earnest. Although there was little early-season snow, the Dease River was completely frozen over by October 20. The Douglas party routinely ran into a group of about twenty-five Bear Lake Indians, who would emerge from the woods after a caribou hunt and set up their tepees on the shore of the lake. As the season progressed, the Indians concentrated their attentions on netting fish, which they fed to their dogs.

Situated twenty-five miles above the Arctic Circle, the little house that Lionel built was ready for winter. On November 26, the sun went down. It would not be visible at the house again until January 9.⁸

BY NOVEMBER 1 Rouvière and Hornby had settled into Hornby’s cabin near Great Bear Lake, and the Douglas team was in their new house six miles away on the Dease River. By now, Rouvière’s hair had grown longer, and his clean-shaven face was covered by a full beard. George Douglas took a photo of Rouvière standing outside in the snow, wearing nothing but his black robe. His face, framed above and below by unruly hair, appears sober, weathered. The priest was beginning to look more and more the frontiersman. In a December letter, Rouvière wrote that he and Hornby had decided to return to Eskimo country in March. Rouvière’s plan was to somehow attract the Eskimos as close as possible to Great Bear Lake—perhaps only as close as Lake Imaerinik—to make their tending easier. Once he established himself with the people, the chances of setting up a permanent mission base on the Arctic coast would be vastly easier. Yet his letter also seemed tinged with doubt, and even homesickness. He asked his superiors’ advice about his idea, and inquired whether they thought the plan was “useless.” If they wanted him to abandon the mission and return to Fort Norman, Rouvière said, he would happily “take up the community life as soon as possible.” ⁹

The Douglases, as always, did their best to make the winter sociable. They invited Rouvière and Hornby over to play chess and bridge. Rouvière and Hornby had made a lovely chess set out of carved wood, but George Douglas confessed to being unsure about which pieces were which. Pieces would be pawns one day and bishops or castles the next. Playing chess, Rouvière was serious but unskilled. Playing cards, Hornby was brilliant but erratic. He never knew when to stop bidding. With only two packs to play with, the cards got so dirty that the men had trouble distinguishing between hearts and diamonds.

Christmas Day arrived on a Monday, during Lionel Douglas’s turn as chef, and he proved as adept cooking in the kitchen as he had been building it. The Douglases had reserved an arctic hare—the first they had ever seen around the Dease River—for Christmas dinner, and to this Lionel added a plum pudding, which he served with blueberry jam he had made the previous summer. This was followed by a round of Teshierpi toddies and a game of twenty-one, with squares of chocolate, divided evenly among all the players, for stakes. By the end of the night, Lionel and Rouvière had cleaned the others out. The evening meal consisted of the region’s great delicacy, smoked caribou tongue, which also happened to be a particular favorite of Rouvière’s. Outside, after the meal, George Douglas had Hornby snap a photograph of Rouvière standing alongside the Douglas brothers, Sandburg, and a sled dog. The entire day, Douglas wrote, “was really one of the most pleasant Christmas Days that ever I spent.”

AFTER CHRISTMAS the weather turned bitter. For five straight days in mid-January, temperatures stayed well into the minus fifties, with high winds and drifting snow. The spruce trees, frozen solid, had lost their previous grace in the wind, and now creaked stiffly, like masts at sea. For drinking water, they kept open a hole in the six-foot ice sheet over the Dease River, in a quiet spot between two rapids.

Most of the talk that winter returned to plans for a spring trip to the coast. The Douglases’ plans were firm, but Rouvière felt obliged to wait for the okay from his superiors back at Fort Norman. In March, a letter arrived by an Indian dog team from the mission. Far from giving Rouvière the go-ahead, it instead demanded that he return at once to the mission. Just why he had to leave the Barren Lands, the priest did not say. If Rouvière was disappointed at being unable to join the Douglas trip, the Douglases seemed equally sad to part from their young friend. They gave him a compass and wished him Godspeed. “We were sorry to say good-bye to him,” Douglas wrote. “He had added greatly to the pleasure of our life in winter quarters, and it was with sincere regret that we saw him off on his journey back to the mission.”

Dutiful as ever, Rouvière set off for Fort Norman. On his way west, he ran into John Hornby heading east, back to Great Bear Lake, and gave him a letter to pass to the Douglas brothers. He wanted to apologize, he wrote. He had lost their compass.¹⁰

By late July, Father Rouvière was heading back to the Barren Lands for what would be the last months of his life. He had with him something he had never had before: a companion from the church. The prospect of sharing his experiences with another man of the cloth could not have been anything but joyous for Father Rouvière. “The missionary is as human as any other man, and he feels the need of a human companion with whom he can talk of familiar things, with whom he can exchange ideas, share his joys, his triumphs, his anxieties, his failures,” another Arctic missionary has written. “That is why the chance to visit with a fellow priest is such an exciting event to the lonely padre off there on the ice. He is all atremble at the prospect of a visit, nervous as a bride.”¹¹

The priest heading into the wilderness with Father Rouvière was a highly educated man who, early in his life, had been torn between spending his career as a professor of philosophy and serving as a missionary. Born Guillaume Joseph Yves Marie LeRoux on March 30, 1885, in Lanviliau, to Yves LeRoux and his wife, Marie Anne Poudoulec, he had studied at the seminary at Pont-Croix, then entered the novitiate at Bestin, Belgium, in October 1904. He took his formal vows at the Scholasticat at Liège on November 4, 1906, and was ordained as a priest there on July 10, 1910. He ultimately joined Bishop Breynat’s Vicariate of Mackenzie, where he managed to learn some of the Eskimo language. He moved first to Fort Resolution, on Great Slave Lake, and had been at Fort Good Hope, north of Fort Norman, since 1911.

Despite his time in the north country, Father LeRoux did not seem terribly happy about his newest assignment. Not long after leaving Fort Norman, he and Father Rouvière crossed paths with the Douglas team, now on its way back to Edmonton after a quick and remarkably efficient run to the coast. The Douglases had not, despite their initial objectives, found a great deal of promising copper deposits; August Sandburg would report that though some Eskimos had fashioned eight-inch knives from the stuff, “in our search we did not find any large slabs.” But they had done something that many far more celebrated Arctic explorers had not: they had thrived. George Douglas had to confess that the longer he remained in Eskimo country, the more he admired the people who managed to make their lives there. He had heard stories of whites contributing to the rapid degradation of the Eskimos living near the Mackenzie River delta. But from what he had seen of the kindnesses of Father Rouvière, Douglas was optimistic about the relationships that might develop between Eskimos and missionaries.

This last meeting with the Douglases was also difficult for Father Rouvière. After a warm, if melancholic, greeting, during which the Douglases told of their coastal adventure and Rouvière relayed the news about the sinking of the Titanic, the young priest expressed his gratitude for all the Douglases had taught him about Arctic survival. Their departure could only mean more difficulties. Rouvière had not only just missed another excellent chance to get to the Arctic coast, a chance he would not have again for at least another year; he was now also losing his most trusted companions, men who had made his first winter in the north not merely tolerable but a real pleasure. The Douglases had offered a consistency and a reliability that Hornby did not. There was also something about the Douglases’ firm adherence to a thoughtfully outlined schedule—explore the Coppermine, winter back near Great Bear Lake, run to the Arctic coast, go home—that stood in marked contrast to the plans of both the itinerant Hornby and Rouvière himself. The Douglas team came to the Arctic for a brief expedition with narrow objectives and comparatively simple desires. They came to look around, then leave. Hornby and Rouvière seemed, by contrast, to be hooked into the place in far deeper ways.

This final encounter with Rouvière and his new companion left a sour impression on the Douglas team. As far as George Douglas could tell, Father LeRoux did not seem pleased to be living outside the relative comfort of the mission at Saint-Thérèse. Rather than deferring to the gentle guidance of Rouvière, a man the Douglases had come to respect and admire through a winter and two summer seasons, LeRoux seemed domineering, even insolent. Though younger than Rouvière and considerably less experienced in Arctic travel, LeRoux seemed intent on speaking as the leader of the team.¹²

Having successfully navigated a journey that had begun a year before with the discovery of the trappers’ murder-suicide and reached a climax with the trip to Bloody Falls and the Arctic coast, the Douglases were all too aware of the importance of trust and diplomacy between travel companions. A team in the wilderness is only as effective as the weakest of its members. When conditions are stressful, the breakdown of a single man can quickly put the entire group in danger. The Douglases had come to enjoy Rouvière as much for his gentle demeanor as for his quiet competence in and around the cabin. There was nothing like an Arctic winter to bring out a man’s volatility or sharp edges, and Rouvière had not only survived in good stead but had made everyone else’s experience more pleasant. This first brush with LeRoux—lasting a matter of hours—seemed ominous. The Douglas party took their leave, doubtless pleased with their own team’s successful chemistry but worried for their friend Rouvière. If LeRoux proved to be as volatile as he appeared, the priests’ experience in the frozen north could turn out to be trying indeed. And how the Eskimos would react to such a domineering personality was hard to guess. George Douglas took a photograph of Rouvière and LeRoux paddling a heavily loaded canoe. “We saw the outfit get started, thankful now at any rate that we were not traveling in the same direction,” Douglas wrote.¹³

Sure enough, on their way north, Rouvière and LeRoux were immediately confronted by their own relative inexperience. Windbound for a full week at Fort Franklin, they then spent another full month crossing Great Bear Lake, a trip that had taken the Douglas team just eight days. In all, it took the two priests six weeks to make their way from the mission at Fort Norman to the Douglas cabin. The Douglas team had made the journey in sixteen days.

For the priests, the slow progress was doubly agonizing. The diminishing sunlight meant the onset of another brutal Arctic winter, which in turn meant that the community of Eskimos waiting for them at Lake Imaerinik, fifty miles from the Douglas cabin, would soon begin moving north toward their winter seal-hunting grounds. When they finally reached the Dease River on August 11, the priests found John Hornby waiting for them. Hornby was apparently no more impressed with LeRoux than the Douglases had been. He considered him a scold, and overly controlling for a man with virtually no experience in the Barren Lands. Over time, his dislike of the new priest would fester.

The two priests set up in the Douglas cabin on the Dease River. Though the Douglases hoped to return to the Barren Lands the following summer, they had agreed to let Rouvière use their cabin over the winter, and had left sizable stores of food—flour, bacon, sugar, and beans—at the cabin and in caches on Lake Imaerinik and along the Coppermine. They’d also left rifles, ammunition, blankets, furniture, tools, and winter clothing. George Douglas was well aware of how little the church had given Rouvière to survive, and how little he was likely to receive in the future. But his generosity also seemed certain to cause trouble, now that the cantankerous LeRoux was joining Rouvière and Hornby. How would the trio, with competing interests and complicated personalities, divide up the food, once winter set in in earnest? Granted, two of the three were priests, but as the Douglases had discovered with the unfortunate trappers at the beginning of their journey, starvation and months of sheer darkness could make men do unspeakable things.

On August 27, Rouvière and LeRoux pushed north to see if any Eskimos were still waiting for them at Lake Imaerinik. When they arrived on the first of September, they found that most of the Eskimos had left for the northern coast. Only a handful remained. To Rouvière these people still seemed “very good natured to us and very well-disposed.” He was delighted to find that those Eskimos he had taught to make the sign of the cross the previous summer not only remembered it but seemed to have taught a number of others as well. Apparently, given their experiences with Rouvière and Hornby, the Eskimos were slowly getting over their fear of both whites and Indians. Perhaps with the idea of working on his own language skills, Rouvière asked a young Eskimo man to spend the winter with him. He also hoped, come spring, to bring the man to Fort Norman. The young man seemed enthusiastic about the proposition, perhaps in part because Rouvière offered him generous compensation: a .40-44 rifle. Writing a letter to Bishop Breynat two weeks later, Rouvière seemed well aware of the rifle’s dear expense. “Since I have only one, I should then find myself without a firearm—a very useful thing, even indispensable at this point; for we still have to count on ourselves, and not much on the others, for food.” How Rouvière planned to feed himself without a gun, he did not say.

Even LeRoux, at least at first, seemed to make a positive impression on some of the Eskimos, most likely because of his cursory language skills. He asked for help hunting, in anticipation of the coming winter, and spoke of his desire to reach the coast the following spring. “These two men were telling us about the land above the skies,” an Eskimo named Hupo would later relate to the police. “They showed us coloured pictures of Heaven, and they said that after we died we would go there. They used to sing just like the Eskimos when they make medicine. They held our hands and taught us to make the sign of the Cross, and they put a little bread sometimes in my mouth.” The Eskimos came up with names for the two priests: Rouvière they called Kuleavik. LeRoux they called Ilogoak. ¹⁴

In fact, LeRoux continued to have difficulties with the Eskimo language. “I was able, Monsignor, to note a few words, see a little into the language, but it was very little that I could gather this year,” LeRoux wrote Bishop Breynat. “It is a labour so slow that I can scarcely see if we are getting ahead.” LeRoux’s difficulties with the language were hardly surprising. For one thing, the Eskimos had a daily vocabulary extending to some ten thousand words, four times that of Europeans. Human speech has 140 separate pieces of sound. Norwegians use sixty. Eskimos use fifty. English speakers use forty. The possibilities for error were rife. In one dialect, the word uttuq means “a seal sleeping on ice; ujjuk is a bearded seal; ujuk is soup; uksuk is “the fat of sea mammals”; utsuk is a vagina; usuk is a penis. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who was surely LeRoux’s superior as a linguist, illustrated the differences between Eskimo and English this way: English speakers used four forms of a noun: man, man’s, men, men’s. The Greeks used fourteen. The Eskimos used twenty-seven. The Eskimo language had evolved to a precision that astonished its first Western listeners and vividly reflected the subtle relationships they had with the land. There was no direct translation for “fish,” but there were distinct words for “arctic char,” depending on whether the speaker meant arctic char that were running upstream, arctic char that were moving down to the sea, or arctic char that remained all year in the lake. For Arctic natives, precision was a matter of survival. What astonished the Eskimos, of course, was how strangers could expect to survive in this country without such language. The answer, for quite a few of them, was that they couldn’t.¹⁵

LeRoux’s limited language ability could hardly have failed to dismay Rouvière, who had counted on precisely these skills in his new companion. If LeRoux couldn’t communicate with the Eskimos, what exactly was he doing joining this mission? He plainly did not have the wilderness skills needed for the job, and his impatient and ornery temperament seemed particularly ill suited for a life that depended first and foremost on cooperation with native people. In a letter to Bishop Breynat, Rouvière acknowledged that LeRoux already seemed to be wearying of the work, but managed to strike a determined tone nonetheless. “The devil took a hand in the game, I suppose, and our visit has probably not produced the results we hoped for. We will eventually know enough of the language to tell the Eskimo that we are missionaries. . . . Some day they will know how to render true homage to God.”¹⁶

On September 13, Rouvière wrote Breynat describing the Eskimos the Douglases had met near the Dismal Lakes and near Bloody Falls. He said he hoped to follow in the Douglases’ footsteps, hopefully with John Hornby as a guide. Perhaps, he wrote, Father LeRoux could stay behind. “I keep wondering whether it wouldn’t be better for one of us to stay. I’m not afraid to undertake the journey myself and go even to Bloody Falls where they spend the spring.” Though he did not say it explicitly, Rouvière’s implication that he and Hornby ought to undertake the mission without LeRoux was hard to miss. If Hornby was only moderately reliable, he had never been anything but competent in the field and diplomatic with the native people. Apparently, after just a few short weeks, Father LeRoux had already become a toxic presence. He had already infuriated Hornby by refusing to share the stores the Douglas team had left behind— stores that, Hornby maintained, had been intended at least in part for him. Worse, LeRoux had scolded Hornby for his five-year relationship with the Indian woman named Arimo. Hornby had abruptly refused to continue his relationship with LeRoux.

In October, things got worse. Hornby fell seriously ill, possibly with pneumonia, and for a month was barely able to leave his tent. Athough LeRoux took credit for tending Hornby, police testimony would later reveal that most of the nursing may in fact have been done by a small group of Eskimos, who came by every day to see how much weight Hornby had lost. Once again, LeRoux’s lack of wilderness skills may have compromised his abilitities. One day, on his way to visit to replenish Hornby’s wood supply, LeRoux somehow got lost. Hornby had to crawl out of his tent to keep his fire going, and “damned near died as a result.”

A short time later, Rouvière found LeRoux in a funk that managed to contaminate even his own genial mood. “The Father is aware of his own quick temper and is striving to subdue it,” Rouvière wrote to Bishop Breynat on January 29, 1913. “He has never tried to hurt my feelings. I like to think that our good relations will not be soon disturbed. After all the reports I was given last year, I was afraid there would be some difficulties; but the good God has taken everything in hand and nothing has come about to disturb our good understanding.” ¹⁷

Though it is impossible to know just how bad things had gotten between Rouvière and LeRoux, each man seemed to take every chance he got to go off on his own. In mid-March, LeRoux left for Fort Norman to recharge his flagging enthusiasm for remote missionary work. On cue, John Hornby suddenly reappeared. Once again, he wanted to talk to Rouvière about a trip north. Without LeRoux. Hornby and Rouvière could hike to the Coppermine River and, weather permitting, make it all the way to the coast.¹⁸

Besides the prospect of traveling with Hornby, something else had begun to make Rouvière anxious to get to the coast. A Church of England missionary was reportedly moving quickly toward Coronation Gulf, and the Catholic Church wanted very much to get to the needy souls first. Rouvière wished to establish a mission “in order to arrest a little the zeal of Mr. Fry who comes to sow the bad seed in our fields.”¹⁹

As it turned out, Hornby and Rouvière never made the trip to the coast. A journey that would have been challenging under any circumstances suddenly took on a distinctly dangerous aspect. Out on a fishing jaunt one day, Hornby had a nasty run-in with one of the Eskimos Rouvière and LeRoux had met in the fall. The man, Sinnisiak, tried to steal one of Hornby’s sealskin fishing lines, and when Hornby caught him in the act, Sinnisiak threatened to kill him. “Sinnisiak wanted to kill Hornbybenna in the summertime,” another Eskimo named Hupo would testify later. “Hornbybenna dropped a sealskin line and Sinnisiak picked it up and wanted to keep it. Hornbybenna saw him with it and took it back from him, and Sinnisiak wanted to kill him. Sinnisiak is a bad man, everyone says so, and he told me lies.” ²⁰

To Hornby, the encounter with Sinnisiak was shocking. Along with most whites who had traveled in the region, Hornby had known the Coronation Gulf Eskimos to be far more more pleasant than the people corrupted by whalers over near the Mackenzie River delta. Perhaps this encounter was a harbinger. Perhaps here too, in three short years, the Eskimos had overcome their initial fear of Europeans. How they would treat white travelers from here on out was hard to fathom. Hornby told Sinnisiak—and, later, any other Eskimos he met—that murdering a white man would result in the extermination of all Eskimos. When he returned to Great Bear Lake, Hornby warned the priests about the encounter with Sinnisiak. Things with the Eskimos were “getting ugly,” he said. How other Eskimos responded to Hornby’s warnings is hard to know, but the fight over the fishing line plainly left Sinnisiak emboldened. How serious could Hornby’s threat be? In all his life, over all the thousands of miles he had walked, Sinnisiak had seen perhaps a half dozen white men.

On July 17, Father LeRoux bid adieu to the mission at Fort Norman for the last time and began, also for the last time, walking into the Barren Lands.²¹

CHAPTER SIX

When an Arctic missionary finally falls in his tracks, he does so as silently as a snowflake falling from the Arctic sky.

—ROGER P. BULLIARD, Inuk

ON OCTOBER 8, 1913, FATHERS ROUVIÈRE AND LEROUX LEFT their cabin on Lake Imaerinik and began walking north, following a group of Eskimos that included Sinnisiak, the man who had threatened to kill John Hornby over the stolen fishing line. Their decision to move north so late in the season seems, in retrospect, to have been foolish, an act of desperation. Perhaps Father Rouvière was exasperated at all his missed chances to get to the coast. Perhaps Father LeRoux felt a successful reconnaissance trip to the mouth of the Coppermine would allow him, come spring, to take on a less taxing assignment. Whether they were fully aware of the sheer difficulties of moving north just at the onset of winter is also uncertain. What does seem certain is that the two priests were anxious to establish themselves among the Eskimos after so many months of frustration. That they would make such a trip so late in the year, with people they barely knew and with at least one man recently known to have been violent toward a white man, can only have resulted from their fierce determination to move their missionary work forward. Waiting until spring must have seemed intolerable.

Their challenges, as it turned out, did not even begin with the lateness of the season. Physically, both missionaries were in bad shape. In addition to being sick from chronic malnourishment, Father LeRoux had a severe cold and Father Rouvière had recently suffered an injury while repairing the cabin on Great Bear Lake. For their journey, they depended utterly on this small band of Eskimos, who acted as guides, hunters, and protection. Without the natives, Rouvière and LeRoux would never have managed to navigate the vast empty spaces between their cabin and the Arctic coast. They would have gotten lost, or starved, or died of exposure. As it was, the Eskimos considered the idea of the priests traveling without women extremely strange. Were they asking for trouble? Men depended on women as much as women depended on men. Men provided food; women provided clothing. The priests, it seemed, could provide themselves with neither.

Leading a small caravan of sleds, two men named Hupo and Kormik guided the priests across the Barren Lands to the coast. By this time, after just a few months together, the priests were beginning to look scruffy. Rouvière’s beard had grown to a full three inches long. Both men wore long black coats, buttoned down the front from their necks to their feet. As they walked, Rouvière and LeRoux discussed their plans, at least as far as they could imagine them: they only wanted to see the coast on this trip, they said. Next summer, once the weather turned warm again, they would return to Fort Norman, catch the Mackenzie River ferry to the coast, and fill a giant ship with lots of supplies. Then they would sail east to the mouth of the Coppermine and set up a new mission post.

The sun, already very low in the sky, would, within a few short weeks, disappear for the winter. November is the month when Eskimos move from hunting on land to hunting on ice. It was a precarious time, since the caribou herds were thin and the ice on the lakes and the sea was not yet thick enough to allow confident fishing or seal hunting. Men dug into their caches of caribou meat, dried fish, and pokes of blubber to prepare for the season of deprivation; women spent their time sewing all the clothes their families would need for six months of darkness. Families that had been scattered during the summer months now began to congregate, there being great strength in numbers when it came to surviving an Arctic winter.¹

Each night, the group would pitch their collection of eight tents. At first, things seemed to be going well for the priests. Kormik not only invited them to use his sled to transport their things north but asked them to live with him in his tent as well. It took the group twelve days to walk the ninety miles from Lake Imaerinik to the mouth of the Coppermine River. When they reached the coast, the priests looked out on the gray expanse of Coronation Gulf, and for a few moments could imagine themselves the Catholic Church’s most northerly pioneers. The landscape itself was hardly inspiring: an endless roll of treeless hills behind them; to the east and west, a gravelly beach extending hundreds of miles, perhaps unbroken by a single human footprint. The wind blew strong and damp, and the sky foretold nothing but months of crushing cold and darkness. The entire picture was so ceaselessly monochrome and flat that the Frenchmen could not have helped feeling physically disoriented. Like Arctic sailors who discover their compasses to be useless so close to magnetic north, the priests felt their own internal gyroscopes muddled and confused. Here, at the very place they hoped to build a mission base, they found their connection to their church and their home as thin as it could possibly be.

Fathers Rouvière and LeRoux were greeted by some other Eskimos who had also just arrived for the winter hunting season, and together the groups set up camp on an island in the mouth of the Coppermine. They remained together for five nights. The sun was very low. An Eskimo named Angebrunna would later report that the ice out on Coronation Gulf “was not yet strong for spearing seals.” Hupo’s wife, Ohoviluk, fixed holes in the priests’ boots and their mittens and sewed up their clothes. ²

Despite the generosity of some of his hosts, Father Rouvière was beginning to feel real danger, and only some of it was generated by the extreme remoteness of their camp. The priests were five hundred treacherous miles from their closest brethren, a distance that seemed far greater given that, without Eskimo guides, they could not possibly find their way back. The winter was coming on hard, and the priests, remarkably under-equipped even back in their primary cabin near Great Bear Lake, had only the most rudimentary clothing and gear. They had virtually no hunting skills, and could not have known how to build a snowhouse. They relied in every sense of the word on the hospitality and skills of their Eskimo hosts. Undoubtedly they were perpetually hungry, perhaps starving. And judging from Rouvière’s private journal, not every Eskimo had the best interests of the priests in mind.

“We have arrived at the mouth of the Copper River,” Rouvière wrote soon after arriving at the coast. “Some families have already left. Disillusioned with the Eskimos. We are threatened with starvation; also we don’t know what to do.”³

The word “disillusioned” was heavily underlined. The sentence it began was one of the last Rouvière would ever write.

To Bishop Breynat, reading the journal entry later, the emphasis on the word “disillusioned” represented “the first occasion on which Father Rouvière ever spoke with anything like bitterness of his flock.” But the underlining could have pointed to any number of feelings. Perhaps Rouvière was glimpsing just how complicated Arctic missionary work would be. What, exactly, would he ever be able to teach these people? What did they expect from him, and what would they tolerate? Could he really imagine a time when Eskimos, who were migratory by nature and by necessity, would someday willingly build a Catholic church and attend mass? How could Christian doctrine, its parables sprouted from a world that was both warm and agricultural, ever have a practical relevance to people who lived where nothing edible grew? Where stories about people fleeing oppression by crossing a hot, sandy desert would have seemed utterly abstract? Where lessons about the superiority of man to all other creatures jarred up against an ancient, intricate system of subtle relationships between man and beast? What was Rouvière doing up here?

Perhaps, in addition to physical weakness, Rouvière was at last beginning to understand the magnitude of the task he had undertaken. Here he was, miles from the nearest mission and thousands of miles from his family in France. His partner, Father LeRoux, was by all accounts a difficult man in the best of circumstances. Pushed up against the Arctic Ocean in the middle of October, with weeks of hard travel just to get back to their drafty cabin at Lake Imaerinik, and surrounded by people who spoke a language he could only barely comprehend, LeRoux could not have been in a cheerful state of mind. How LeRoux felt about Rouvière is hard to determine, since he left little evidence. But surely Rouvière, as the only one to whom LeRoux could freely speak, served at least as a cauldron into which he could pour his resentment. As the weeks and miles of travel wore on, and the priests got thinner and weaker, with only cached meat to eat, the intense difficulty of their plight must have begun to seem overwhelming.

Perhaps, given their utter lack of experience with coastal winters, they were already beginning to suffer from the depression-induced madness that the Eskimos understood as a seasonal given. Perlerorneq.

The camp at the edge of the gulf, it turned out, offered little relief to the sick and hungry priests. The number of caribou passing through the area was unusually small, and with the ice still too thin for sealing and the fishing season long since past its peak, the Eskimos had already run out of fish to feed their dogs. Most of the men in the camp were forced to spend their days scouring the gulf and the river searching for food. Among the men was Hupo, who just a few months before had seen Sinnisiak threaten John Hornby over the fishing line.

With so little food to spread around, the addition of two more mouths to feed could not have been a welcome fact for the Eskimo hunters. Rouvière and LeRoux holed up for five or six days in a skin tent belonging to the Eskimo named Kormik. What little food they had quickly disappeared. Later, people would say, the food was stolen, probably by Kormik’s wife. It may have been that the Eskimos were testing the priests. Perhaps they were trying to assess their intelligence. What skills did they have? What could they contribute to the community? Could they provide food? Could they hunt? Could they build a snowhouse? Would they be a help to the community or a hindrance?

One night, Kormik himself crept over to LeRoux’s pillow, removed a carbine hidden beneath, and hid it. Shouldn’t the best hunting weapon go to the man most likely to bring food home to the people? Surely neither priest would have been considered even moderately reliable as a hunter, and neither, despite their claims of being representatives of a holy order, would have been considered anything like prominent members of the group.

The rifle’s disappearance meant the end of the priests’ last vestige of autonomy. They did not have the tracking skills of their hosts. They could not trap. Given the late season, they could no longer rely on fish. The theft of the rifle, to the priests, meant an utter dependence on the Eskimos, who, given the thin food supply and the approaching winter, were dangerously strapped themselves. In another way, the theft of the gun presented a challenge of a different kind. What place did personal property have in a missionary’s life, even a piece of property that could mean the difference between life and death? And what would it mean for a priest to forcibly, perhaps violently, wrest a gun away from someone at least nominally a member of his own flock?

Whatever their ambivalences, LeRoux, always the more aggressive of the two priests, acted quickly. While Kormik was outside the tent, he dug around and found his gun. Learning of this, Kormik burst in and, in a rage, hurled himself at LeRoux.

As the two men fought, an elderly Eskimo named Koeha stepped into the tent and, after a struggle, managed to pull Kormik off the priest. Intervening more with unspoken authority than physical strength, Koeha ordered Kormik to stay in the tent and motioned for the priests to follow him outside.

“You are in danger,” he said. “Kormik and his crowd are after your blood. You must return to your hut right away. Next year, you will come back in better company.”⁴

With that he helped the priests harness a team of four dogs to a sled and agreed to accompany them for a half day’s hike south along the Coppermine. Simply navigating the landscape would be exceedingly difficult for two men not accustomed to traveling through the Barren Lands. “There are no trees here,” Koeha said. “Go on as far as you can. After that you will have no more trouble. I am your friend. I don’t want anyone to do you harm.” Koeha shook their hands and disappeared. The priests were on their own, days from their cabin at Lake Imaerinik, with no one to help them make their way across the difficult and confusing ground.⁵

FOR THE NEXT three days, the priests struggled along through soft, early-season snow, never making more than a few miles in a day. The temperature began dropping rapidly, and they had no shelter, no wood to make a fire, and virtually nothing left to eat. They had nothing to feed their dogs. They did have the rifle, but a rifle with no hunting skills is a walking stick.

Sometime during the second night, back at the Eskimo camp, two men grabbed a dog and set off for the south, following the tracks of the priests’ dogsled. By midday Sinnisiak and Uluksuk overtook Rouvière and LeRoux and their famished dogs. In three days, the two priests had managed to cover about ten miles.

When Sinnisiak and Uluksuk arrived, they explained that they were an advance party returning to hunt around Great Bear Lake, and that their families would be following shortly. Sinnisiak said he was looking for his uncle.⁶

Since all four men were headed south, Father LeRoux asked the hunters for help pulling the sled. In return, he said, he would pay them in traps.

With that, Sinnisiak and Uluksuk harnessed themselves to the sled and began pulling. Hauling a sled by hand, especially in soft snow, was simply what one did. The dogs could not do it alone, and on long journeys every member of a family might take a turn at the harness, with women up front, dogs in the middle, and men in the rear. But the work was hard, and the foursome did not make much progress.

By late afternoon the weak autumn sun had already begun to disappear. Sinnisiak and Uluksuk built a small snowhouse, about eight feet in diameter. They laid caribou skins inside, and invited the priests to sleep with them.

The next day bitter weather descended fully on the Barren Lands, sharp winds and blowing snow making even minimal progress difficult. For the priests, already nearly incapacitated by hunger and cold, the change in the weather meant desperation. After vainly searching around for the trail that led south, Sinnisiak and Uluksuk gave up. They couldn’t find their way in the storm, they said. They wouldn’t go any farther. They wanted to return to the mouth of the Coppermine. They brought the priests back to the river and showed them the way to go.

Suddenly, back at the sled, the dogs started barking and straining at their leads. Unharnessing himself, Uluksuk walked over to see what had caught their attention. Peering through the blowing snow, he discovered a cache of gear, apparently left by the priests, and motioned for Sinnisiak to come over and take a look. Amid a pile of gear—traps, deerskins, axes— they could see a bagful of rifle cartridges. The two hunters stood over the gear. Were they going to steal the bullets? It was hard to tell. Rouvière reached for his sled, grabbed a rifle, and handed it to LeRoux. LeRoux ran toward the Eskimos, brandishing the weapon. LeRoux started shouting, obviously furious, but the Eskimos, as was often true, could not understand what he was saying. Seeing the confrontation growing hot, Father Rouvière rushed over and began throwing the cartridges into the river. Why would he do that, the Eskimos wondered? Since they had first met white men, ammunition had become one of the Arctic’s most precious commodities, often representing the difference between survival and starvation. Rouvière had given the rifle to LeRoux, an unexpected gesture of aggression for the gentle priest. But his decision to throw the cartridges into the river seemed to represent a change of heart. Perhaps Rouvière, despite his terrifying fear, managed to catch himself. Not so LeRoux, whose quick temper had suddenly exploded. To the Eskimos, all this indecision and anger was confusing. The priests had suddenly become unpredictable. Dangerous. The cartridges especially represented the only hope the priests had of getting food for themselves. Throwing them away seemed foolish to the point of self-destructiveness. What was going on? Was the prospect of another Arctic winter more than the priests could bear? Had the crush of living so far from home, in such trying circumstances, pushed them beyond the pale? To the Eskimos, it seemed clear that something in the priests had snapped.

SOMETIME LATER, Sinnisiak and Uluksuk returned alone to the community at the mouth of the Coppermine. They arrived by the second day of November and went straight to the tent occupied by Kormik, who had first struggled with LeRoux over the rifle.

“We have killed the white men,” they said.