CHAPTER SEVEN

The literature of Arctic exploration is frequently offered as a record of resolute will before the menacing fortifications of the landscape. It is more profitable I think to disregard this notion—that the land is an adversary bent on human defeat, that the people who came and went were heroes or failures in this. It is better to contemplate the record of human longing to achieve something significant, to be free of the grim weight of life. That weight was ignorance, poverty of spirit, indolence, and the threat of anonymity and destitution. This harsh landscape became the focus of a desire to separate oneself from those things and to overcome them. In these Arctic narratives, then, are the threads of dreams that serve us all.

—BARRY LOPEZ, Arctic Dreams

RUMORS ABOUT THE PRIESTS SWIRLED AROUND THE ARCTIC like a winter wind. An Eskimo woman named Palaiyak told the anthropologist Diamond Jenness a story about some white men over near the Coppermine River who had been shot but who had come back to life again. Jenness had heard the story before; it sometimes included a third man who “flew up a tree.” Jenness filed the story away as another bit of Eskimo mysticism and did not give it another thought. Until February.

In the middle of the month, Jenness visited a band of Coppermine Eskimos camped near Locker Point and met a man sipping afternoon tea. The man, who had two small cups, two saucers, and tea he had obtained at Great Bear Lake, was in the midst of “regaling himself, his wives, and the assembled company.” But it wasn’t the teaware—or the plug tobacco, or the American magazine—that struck Jenness as strange; these odds and ends routinely turned up in the possession of Eskimos who mixed with white traders. What intrigued Jenness were the weapons the man possessed: a .22 Winchester rifle and a double-barreled Hollis fowling piece. Even more bizarre, the man had in his possession a series of religious objects, including a Roman breviary in Latin, a French illustrated Scripture lesson book, and a black rosary. Not long afterward, Jenness would see something stranger still. He saw the man wearing a priest’s cassock, a small metal crucifix suspended from his neck.¹

CONJECTURES ABOUT THE priests’ fate also circulated among the Barren Land Indians. When a group of Bear Lake Indians asked an Eskimo man and his son if they had seen the priests, the Eskimo boy ran away, terrified. In early spring, some other Indians had gone to the priests’ cabin at Lake Imaerinik and found the door splintered by an axe, the fireplace and the chimney smashed, and the windows shattered. Snare wire was scattered over the ice. Soon after, the Indians ran into an Eskimo family and a quarrel erupted. One of the Indians grabbed an Eskimo woman and threw her out of the tepee. When the woman fell, a number of strange objects spilled from inside her clothing, including a communion plate and a pall with a cross on it, used in covering a chalice. The man of the family was wearing a black cassock, cut off at the knee. On the left side, at the heart, was a knife-sized hole. Around the hole there was dried blood.

Like most rumors in the Barren Lands, word of the missing priests also eventually reached Fort Norman. In July 1914, an explorer named D’Arcy Arden reported seeing two Eskimos in priests’ cassocks walk into camp as if they had worn such clothes for generations. “My opinion of the missing priests is that, judging by their condition of health when they left their houses (reputed to have been poor indeed), they have become sick and died somewhere on the Coppermine River,” Arden wrote. “I am convinced that they were sick and that they should not live with the Huskies as they intended.”²

John Hornby also refused to believe that his friend Rouvière had been killed. Father Rouvière, he said, was too gentle to invoke such passion. About Father LeRoux Hornby felt differently. “I hardly think the Esquimaux would kill them, unless they had done something to make them afraid,” Hornby would write to George Douglas. “Father Rouvière was not of the kind to do so, but Father LeRoux was a little too quick-tempered and not accustomed to handle savages.”³

Father Ducot, the priest in charge of the Fort Norman church, quickly transmitted his fears to other missionaries, but given the huge distances over which mail had to travel in the Arctic, word that the priests might have perished did not reach the ears of Bishop Breynat until August 1914, just as Europe exploded into war. Breynat was returning from a trip to Rome, where he had been lobbying the Vatican to contribute to his mission’s thinly spread resources. Back in Montreal, he received a shocking telegram. A rumor had been circulating for some time that the two young priests working near the Coppermine River had been murdered.

“An Eskimo has announced by signs the death of two whites,” the telegram read. “He had had no communication with the band that accompanied the Fathers. Their house was pillaged by Eskimos of a different gang.”

In a panic, Breynat rushed off to Ottawa to see Laurence Fortescue, the controller of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Finding Fortescue away, Breynat left a note and a copy of the telegram. Fortescue later replied that he had made the necessary arrangements for a thorough investigation by a competent young officer of the Royal North West Mounted Police. He concluded, “Trusting that he will find the priests alive and well and that the rumor of their murder is without foundation, I remain, Sincerely yours, Laurence Fortescue.”

Given the number of men signing up to fight in Europe with the Canadian or British armies, police barracks throughout Canada’s frontier regions were stretched terribly thin. In 1916, the Royal North West Mounted Police covered hundreds of thousands of square miles with exactly two inspectors, three sergeants, three corporals, ten constables, two ponies, and forty-five dogs.

With only two murders officially reported in the Northwest Territories (and only thirty-three in all of Canada that year), much of the force’s work involved investigating horse and cattle stealing. Police found themselves looking into a blotter full of diverse cases: there were six cases of bigamy (one convicted, three dismissed, two awaiting trial) and twenty-six cases of “carnal knowledge attempted” (nine convictions, eight cases dismissed, nine awaiting trial). Police in Alberta handled four cases of “wife desertion”; nine cases of “dogging cattle”; four cases of “keeping savage dogs”; twenty-four cases of swearing and obscene language (twenty-two convicted, two dismissed); seven cases of “buggery” (two convicted, four dismissed, one awaiting trial); forty-one cases of keeping a house of ill fame; sixty-four cases of “frequenters of house of ill fame”; and 218 cases of “insanity” (197 convicted, twenty-one dismissed). ⁴

His ranks depleted by men signing up for the war, the region’s police commissioner had a difficult decision to make. The investigation of the missing priests would require a man capable of living thousands of miles from home, with no contact or support from police headquarters. There were no reliable maps and, since the priests had disappeared north of more familiar Indian country, no reliable guides. The investigation would require a man skilled in wilderness navigation and survival, possessing diplomatic skills of a kind the police force had not previously had to employ. Just for starters, it would require scouring the Arctic for one of the very few Eskimos who could speak English. Though a tiny handful of explorers, trappers, and missionaries had made contact with some small bands of Eskimos in recent years, no one in the police force had had any experience with the people of the Barren Lands. And this mission north would have a distinctly more aggressive tenor than any of its predecessors. How the Eskimos would react was impossible to gauge.

On May 8, 1915, as one writer put it, “the long arm of the law made ready to reach out over the frozen north.” The man for the job was a twenty-five-year-old named Denny LaNauze.⁵

Charles Dearing LaNauze was tall and wiry, with broad shoulders and blue eyes. He had been born in Ireland of French Huguenot ancestry. His father had been a member of the Royal North West Mounted Police in the Edmonton district but had taken the family back to Ireland after inheriting property there. As a young constable, LaNauze had worked a number of assignments in Indian country. He had opened the Fort McMurray detachment, a couple hundred miles north of Edmonton, in 1913. Since July 1914 he had been stationed at Hay River, on Great Slave Lake. But to a man of LaNauze’s adventurous demeanor, this new assignment seemed like a dream come true. He had read Stefansson’s book, as well as any other books he could find on the Arctic. So far, he had never been anywhere near that far north. He did not speak a word of the Eskimo language. As soon as he was chosen for the investigation into the missing priests he was promoted to inspector, a rare honor for one so young. ⁶

Nevertheless, LaNauze felt ambivalent about abandoning the chance to fight in the escalating war in Europe. Both his brothers would join the fight in France, and both would eventually be killed in action. His sister would serve in Flanders as a nurse in a Red Cross hospital. For LaNauze, “the hardest task was to go north at such a time when the Dominion was arming and the Canadian casualty lists already appearing.” ⁷

In Edmonton, LaNauze and two constables, Corporals D. Withers and James E. F. Wight, outfitted themselves for two years of hard travel. Things had changed in the four years since the Douglas team had begun its journey. Where the Douglases had boarded a stagecoach for Peace River Landing, LaNauze and his men took a train. They made their way to Fort Resolution, on the southeastern shore of Great Slave Lake, where they bought toboggans, snowshoes, sled dogs, and a York boat. Then they boarded the Mackenzie River steamer and began hopping up the string of trading posts dotting the Mackenzie. Given the extreme remoteness of the ultimate search area, LaNauze decided to set up camp at Great Bear Lake, 350 water miles northeast, where the Douglases, Hornby, and Rouvière had spent the winter of 1911–12.

As the Mackenzie River pulled up at Fort Norman, LaNauze, Withers, and Wight were greeted by the two black-robed priests from the Saint-Thérèse mission, Fathers Ducot and Frapsauce. Ducot, the elder of the two, had been in the Far North for forty years, ever since he had left his native Brittany. Though he had been a regular correspondent with Father Rouvière, and had more experience with the people of the Barren Lands than anyone in the church, he was plainly too frail to join the investigation. He agreed to let his younger colleague, Father Frapsauce, go instead. Speaking in clear English, Ducot told LaNauze that when he had first heard of the Eskimos wearing the priests’ cassocks, he had not been concerned. “The Fathers had a change of gowns with them and as strange Eskimos were reported to have come from the East, I think it likely that they stole the Fathers’ spare gowns they had left behind them. I still believe that the priests are safe and that they will come back this summer.” Frapsauce was less optimistic. “I do not believe that the fathers are alive,” he said. “In our work we must report frequently to our superiors and since the priests left we have had absolutely no news of them and this is the reason why I think that they are dead.”⁸

If even the vaguest tips about the priests’ whereabouts were difficult to come by, finding someone who could eventually elicit information from the Eskimos would prove far more so. Even as far north as Fort Norman, the nearest Eskimos were still perhaps four hundred miles away. Rather than take his chances scouring the thinly populated Barren Lands, LaNauze decided to reboard the Mackenzie River and head up to the Mackenzie delta to interview the coastal Eskimos. At least some of them had had contact with Stefansson’s expeditions. If there was an Eskimo who spoke English anywhere in the Arctic, the Mackenzie delta was likely to be the place to find him.

Sure enough, after a long steamer trip north and a difficult search once he arrived, LaNauze finally found Ilavinik, a Herschel Island Eskimo who had spent four years working for Stefansson during his first Arctic expedition. Ilavinik had not only served as an expert translator and diplomat but had an unerring sense of direction, on which Stefansson had come to rely. To someone as new to the Arctic as LaNauze, Ilavinik’s services would prove even more vaulable.

Ilavinik agreed to come south with LaNauze for forty dollars a month, provided he could travel with his wife, Mamayuk, and his daughter, Nangosoak. If the woman and the girl would hardly add to the speed of the team, they would contribute in other important ways, from cooking to sewing boots to balancing the group in ways that Eskimos cherished and white explorers, often at their peril, usually ignored. As important as any hunting skills the men might possess, the talent required to tailor and maintain the exquisitely effective clothing the Eskimos depended upon could make the difference between thriving in the Arctic and dying in it. LaNauze agreed. His first encounter with an Eskimo proved emblematic: unlike so many white men in the Arctic, he was willing to compromise. More important, he was willing to defer to native experience. He had not only read Stefansson, he had understood him. In the Arctic, LaNauze’s humility may have been his most valuable asset.

Back at Fort Norman on July 16, LaNauze immediately began interviewing local Indians to see if they had any news about the priests. There was no shortage of stories. Harry, a teenage Bear Lake Indian whose mother, Arimo, had befriended John Hornby and who had traveled to the coast with the Douglases, claimed to have been the last man to see Rouvière alive. Harry felt certain the priests “were frozen to death somewhere.”

Before setting out for the coast, LaNauze agreed to add two civilians to his team: Father Frapsauce, who though he spoke no Eskimo would at least be able to communicate with Bear Lake Indians, and D’Arcy Arden, the itinerant white explorer who had first reported the news of the missing priests to Fort Norman.

LaNauze arranged for the bulk of the team’s freight to be sent ahead up the Bear River with a group of Indians, who would tend it by the shore of Great Bear Lake until he and his men arrived. The patrol itself needed to get cracking, and not just to start the investigation. With nearly twenty-four hours of sunlight, daytime temperatures at Fort Norman had hit ninety degrees in the shade. The mile-wide Mackenzie River, LaNauze wrote, “was as calm as a mill pond,” and the mountains to the west were shrouded in haze. Ilavinik and his family, who had never been this far south, were suffering terribly from the heat.

LaNauze and his team set out on July 23. Their York boat was heavily loaded with personal gear. Dogs followed on the shore. The team proceeded a half mile down the Mackenzie to the mouth of the Bear River, where they got their tracking lines ready and started the ascent. In constant rain, the team had a hard time making progress. With swift, freezing water careering through countless horsehoe bends, the river made hauling the York boat upstream particularly onerous. The team was constantly scraping up against shallows, dragging the York to shore, transferring all the gear into canoes, and walking miles upstream with the dogs, then back again to retrieve the York. Portaging their gear four miles upriver took hours of unloading and loading and twelve miles of walking. One day LaNauze and his team were up to their waists in freezing water until ten P.M. At another stretch, it took the team four days to move a single mile upstream. The country to the north did not offer any respite. On July 29, an old white trapper named Stohe said he had been held up for fully sixty-three days by a relentless east wind. The ice had left the lake only a week before.⁹

By August 4, the team finally managed to paddle a few miles of open water into a southwestern bay of massive Great Bear Lake. The ninety upstream miles had taken the team two weeks; LaNauze remarked that the entire stretch could be paddled downstream in a single long day. After so many days on the river, the lake harbor was quiet, with few sounds save the splash of a grayling or the howl of an Indian dog. The water was so clear that the men could see the bottom forty feet below. All around them, crimson fireweed bloomed in the hills. Blueberries and red currants were profuse. The forests were primarily stunted spruce, with spots of birch and, more rarely, poplar.

As they had hoped, the gear they had entrusted to the Indians was fully intact. As the team set up camp and sorted through their equipment, they were approached by a number of Indians hoping to trade bales of Bear Lake herring for tea and tobacco. It turned out that the Indians had something LaNauze wanted more than fish: several of the families, he learned, had recently met some Eskimos. With Father Frapsauce translating, an Indian woman who may have been Hornby’s companion Arimo said Fathers Rouvière and LeRoux had been seen setting off for Lake Imaerinik, about fifty miles northeast of the top of Great Bear Lake. They had planned to travel to the Arctic coast with a pair of Eskimos named Kormik and Hupo, and apparently had no definite plans to return south. Their determination to move so far north had struck Arimo as a bit odd, since both priests were in visibly poor health.

The last thing the woman said seemed ominous. She told of an Eskimo named Illuga, whom the Indians greatly feared. Illuga was easily identified by two things: he had three wives, and he had a habit of wearing a black priest’s robe.¹⁰

LaNauze hired a few Indians for fifteen dollars each for the trip across the lake. Despite some ferocious gales, the patrol made it to the far end of the lake by early September. To LaNauze, it was immediately obvious why the northeast shore had made such a popular camp for Indians and white explorers alike. Good harbors were plentiful. Fishing nets hauled up endless loads of seven-pound lake trout. Most important, given the advancing season, was the shoreline’s position just south of the tree line. The considerable forests, which petered out a few days’ walk to the north, offered both protection from northerly winds and plenty of fuel and building material. LaNauze could already see huge flocks of seagulls winging their way south as the frost arrived. The long Arctic winter would arrive soon.

He had his men set up camp on Big Island, a mile’s paddle from the shoreline. Ashore on the mainland, they quickly discovered the cabin once used by the priests, and with Father Frapsauce’s blessing they decided to move in. There were no clues whatsoever that the cabin had been occupied since 1913, when the priests had last been seen. If Rouvière and LeRoux were still alive, where were they?¹¹

Back on the island, a group of Indians arrived “in great excitement.” A week before, they told Father Frapsauce, they had been camped over by the priests’ cabin when several volleys of stones had rained down on their tepees. The Indians had grabbed their rifles and rushed out to confront the aggressors, but had seen no one. The next morning, they found fresh Eskimo tracks in the mud. Distraught, they had left immediately for Big Island, putting a mile of water between them and the dreaded “Huskies.” The Indians told Father Frapsauce that they genuinely missed the priests, but warned him that the patrol “was only going to its death if it visited Husky country.”

LaNauze brushed the warning aside. He decided, as Hornby, the Douglases, and Father Rouvière had before him, that this was by far the best place in the region to spend the winter. It would also offer an excellent jumping-off point for the spring journey northward. There was no way the Indians’ fear of the Eskimos was going to push the patrol back south. LaNauze ordered the York boat hauled ashore before the lake froze over, and had Withers and Wight build a storehouse. This was where they would ride out the winter.

ON SEPTEMBER 19, LaNauze organized a team of himself, Father Frapsauce, D’Arcy Arden, Ilavinik, and two Indian guides, Harry and Ferdinand, for a seven-day reconnaissance trip to Lake Imaerinik. They hoped to find the cabin, fifty miles to the northeast, that the priests were rumored to have used as a base for their own excursions to Eskimo country. The team took camping gear and five sled dogs, but with the weather bitter and the ground only lightly covered with snow, sledding was impossible. The men shouldered their packs and walked. If the snowfall was not yet sufficient to accommodate a sled, it was perfect for tracking. With every step, they kept their eyes on the ground, searching for footprints. The country they crossed was pocked with small lakes and ponds, all of which, by mid-September, were frozen solid and bordered by stands of white spruce trees shaped like pipe cleaners.¹²

Hundreds of caribou had begun their migration south and east from the frozen Dease River; although the men did not see Eskimo camps, the scattered detritus of caribou bones clearly marked their route as bisecting native hunting grounds. To the north lay a range of bare, purple mountains. LaNauze found the landscape entrancing, especially the fingers of forest that followed the river corridors deep into the Barren Lands. This was an area, he knew, that had provided good campsites for Stefansson’s team back in 1910–11. When a couple of moose appeared near the camp one day, Ilavinik, who had never seen such a beast, went off on a hunt with the Indian guide Harry. Three hours later they returned with a giant moose rib. They cached the meat under some heavy stones. “It has been a glorious day,” LaNauze wrote. “The setting sun turned the brown of the barrens into a royal purple, and before darkness the pinched face of a great full moon rose over the hills to the East in a turquoise sky.”

A couple of days later, the men were treated to one of the Arctic’s true blessings: a grand display of the aurora borealis, a celestial light show that, astonishingly, was accompanied by “an elusive low rustling sound as the swishing of silk.” With darkness deepening with every step northward and every passing day, the northern lights this night were “singularly vivid,” LaNauze wrote. “Its rays appeared to range over every point in the heavens. Glorious rainbow colors grew and radiated as they danced across the moonlit sky. Marshalling in long silver threads, they appeared to hang for a moment as a heavenly candelabra, then suddenly disband and dart away in a maze of flickering, irridescent hues.”

When the sun came up, the patrol continued its search. Walking near one stand of trees, Ilavinik called out: he’d found a cache of food, and bootprints, probably ten days old. The Indians had been right; Eskimos had moved this way. You could tell they were Eskimo prints and not Indian, Ilavinik said, by the shape: Indian moccasins left slim prints shaped like a foot, with a recognizable arch. Sealskin tracks left by Eskimos were flat and round. Even if there were no people left, even if they might not see an Eskimo for six months, the patrol was on the right track. ¹³

LANAUZE AND his men crossed Lake Imaerinik on September 28. There, on the far northeastern shore, was the priests’ cabin. It was “a scene of ruin.”

“It was a wild and dreary spot for a Mission, situated as it was on the very edge of the far-flung barren grounds, and surrounded by high, rocky hills,” LaNauze wrote. “The main cabin appeared to have been ruthlessly destroyed, half the roof was burned away and the debris from it covered the floor. There was nothing movable left. The door was missing.”

Besides the physical damage, there was little to indicate the fate of the missing priests. Father Frapsauce searched through the debris, hoping to find a letter or a notebook that might indicate the priests’ plans. He found nothing. The only indications that the cabin had ever been inhabited were a few deer bones, a sealskin Eskimo slipper, an Eskimo copper-tipped arrow, and a single, spent .44 cartridge. Though these odds and ends seemed at least a year old, some fresh wood shavings seemed to indicate that Eskimos had used the shelter more recently.

Worse still, they could find no evidence whatsoever of the priests’ whereabouts. Exasperated, and worried about the advancing season and the scarcity of caribou in the area, LaNauze had to make a decision. So far, his journey had been fairly routine, with few anxieties and relatively temperate weather. Suddenly, though, he was faced with the same pressures everyone traveling late in the Arctic season must confront: shortening days, dropping temperatures, and diminishing sources of food. Pushing on toward the coast—even as far as the Dismal Lakes—seemed foolhardy, especially given the complete lack of clues at the priests’ cabin. Yet the idea of giving up the search for the winter was frustrating. Sitting inside a lonely cabin for four months was hardly the first choice of a man most comfortable out on the trail. Reluctantly, LaNauze decided to turn back. After a one-day trek of thirty miles, they were well into the trees, and a more leisurely couple of days had them back at Great Bear Lake, arriving in a full snowstorm.

By now, winter had begun to descend in earnest. With Father Frapsauce anxious to return to Fort Norman, D’Arcy Arden and the Indian Harry decided to accompany him back to the mission. Caribou were moving south in large numbers; LaNauze counted four hundred in a single day. The presence of so much game gave LaNauze confidence that his team could survive. No matter how ingenious he and his men might be with hunting and wilderness skills, everything depended on the flow of caribou. They set about stocking up enough meat to last them until spring. Ilavinik, proving to be as good a hunter as he was a translator, quickly filled the team’s winter coffers by killing ten caribou. LaNauze’s admiration grew daily for Ilavinik and his wife, who was always busy repairing the men’s clothes. LaNauze considered Ilavinik “scrupulously honest and conscientious” and always included him in discussions about the patrol’s plans. “We were now fast friends,” LaNauze wrote. “Eskimo cannot be treated on the footing of master and servant.” Ilavinik and LaNauze built a series of caches by digging deep holes, filling them with caribou meat, and covering them with piles of stones so large they were hard to lift. LaNauze seemed quite happy with the new arrangements; he reported himself to be thriving on a diet consisting of “straight meat and tea.” Within a month, however, Wight and Ilavinik would discover that every one of the caches had been destroyed by wolverines, who had dug in around the removable stones and dragged away the meat; all that would remain would be the caribou hide and a quarter of the moose.¹⁴

On October 4, they were blanketed by a heavy snowstorm. This was it. They were locked up until spring. By December, weak sunshine provided just enough light for three hours of scouting per day. Shortly after New Year’s, the temperature dropped to sixty below zero—the lowest the thermometer would register—and stayed there for two weeks.¹⁵

ON AUGUST 22, 1915, unbeknownst to Denny LaNauze, another corporal in the Royal North West Mounted Police, Wyndham Valentine Bruce, began moving eastward from Herschel Island with Stefansson’s Canadian Arctic Expedition. Stefansson had been working the Beaufort Sea and Arctic Archipelago region while Diamond Jenness and the zoologist Rudolph Martin Anderson were exploring the mainland and adjacent islands. With this expedition already well known to many Eskimo communities, Bruce figured he could learn a lot about the missing priests without revealing his intentions.

On Jenness’s recommendation, Bruce began looking for a man considered to be one of the region’s most powerful shamans. He was known by several names: Diamond Jenness had called him “Snowknife”; Indians and Eskimos called him Illuga, or Uluksuk Mayuk. But given his unusually large collection of material possessions, to say nothing of his three wives, he was mostly known as “the Rich Man.” He was rumored to have buried a cache of goods obtained from the priests, and Frits Johansen, the expedition’s naturalist, thought he could help Bruce locate it.

Johnson and Bruce found the cache on a rocky island near the expedition’s camp on September 9, 1915. Opening it up, they discovered ten deerskin bags and bundles, several boxes—one stenciled HODGSON but painted over in red with the name Arden—and an assortment of hides, pots, tins, and native sealing and hunting spears. Some of the items—the marked box, a Henry Disston ripsaw, and a Welland Vale lance-tooth crosscut saw—seemed to suggest that the Rich Man had been an active trader with white explorers. But a closer look was more haunting. In the cache, Bruce found a dark blue blanket capote with tartan pockets on the inside, two small rosettes at the back, and a trim of brown braid or tape. Unwrapping one of the bundles, he pulled out a piece of clothing that had clearly not been made locally. It was a black, full-length robe, instantly recognizable as a priest’s cassock. Spreading open the collar, Bruce saw a name printed with indelible ink: PÈRE ROUVIÈRE.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Like our distant ancestors, no doubt, these people fear most of all things the evil spirits that are likely to appear to them at any time in any guise, and next to that they fear strangers.

—VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON, My Life with the Eskimos

LEAVING THE BULK OF HIS DISCOVERY BEHIND, CORPORAL Bruce took the cassock and a brass plaque and started walking east in search of the Rich Man. Six weeks later, in late October, he came to a Copper Eskimo village on an island in Coronation Gulf, where he visited the snowhouse of an Eskimo introduced to him as Kormik. Kormik knew well the hunting grounds between Coronation Gulf and Great Bear Lake, and Bruce hoped that in the course of his hunting trips Kormik might have run into the priests. Apparently he had. Kormik had an entire box full of Catholic items, including a book entitled Psalterium Breviarii Romani and two cheap colored prints, one of the Savior and one of the Virgin Mary. Kormik also had several old, apparently discarded notebooks with little more than a few Eskimo words and their French equivalents, and a set of linen handkerchiefs, initialed with an H in the corner. He said he’d gotten the handkerchiefs from John Hornby. The other things had come from some “other white man.”

Two years ago, Kormik told Bruce, he had been hunting near Great Bear Lake with his wife, the Rich Man, and two of the Rich Man’s wives. “We met many white men and traded a lot of things from them, the things I have traded to you,” Kormik told Bruce. “In exchange, I gave them musk-ox skins, bearded seal rawhide rope, and caribou skins. There were three white men; two, I think but am not sure, wore long black coats and had beards, and were called Kuleavick and Ilogoak. These men had a house where the river flows into the lake. One of these men one day took us across a bay in the lake in a boat. I was afraid. These men went away hunting caribou in the summer, and I did not see them after this.”

Kormik said he had also met another man, named Arden, who had given him a rifle. “We stopped with him for a few days and were going with him to get more lead and ammunition but the journey was too far,” Kormik said. “The ice was nine inches thick when we left the lake.”

Despite the details of Kormik’s story, Bruce felt that the man appeared “confused.”

“I am convinced that he is lying,” Bruce wrote in his report. “Not only that, but I am sure he knows far more than he would say. These natives are in the possession of numerous articles which have not been obtained from the [Canadian] expedition and have no doubt been stolen from the priests cache at Great Bear Lake, and as yet I have only thought it necessary to recover what I believe to be the property of the Roman Catholic Church.”

If Kormik had things Bruce wanted, Bruce had more than enough bargaining power to get them. Though a number of the local Eskimos had rifles, which they had received in trades from Great Bear Lake Indians and men like Hornby, they rarely had enough rounds to fill them. In exchange for six boxes of .30-30 cartridges, Kormik gave Bruce a small package of things of far less practical value, which Bruce duly noted in his police report: “two white handkerchiefs, initialled G.R.; one breviary; one prayer book; one small crucifix; two tassels; one plain linen surplice; one lace-bound linen surplice; two linen mass aprons; one linen communion cloth; one linen altar cloth (cut and blood-stained); one mass server (carmine and gold); one altar cloth (carmine and gold); one mass vestment (carmine and gold); one stole (carmine and gold).” Bruce snapped a photograph of Kormik and added it to his growing cache of evidence.¹

NOT FAR FROM Kormik’s tent, Bruce found the Rich Man, living in a deerskin tent and in a jovial mood. Following a tradition that Bruce had become accustomed to, the Rich Man offered his guest the best food he had, in this case some pieces of frozen fish and, later, some “very appetizing” caribou-blood soup served in a musk-ox horn. Despite months of travel in the Arctic, and despite the ever-present seal-oil lamps, Bruce never seemed able to stay warm in Eskimo shelters. The Rich Man motioned for him to sit on the sleeping platform at his side.

After a few minutes, the Rich Man got up and hammered a few nails in the wooden supports above the seal-oil lamp hanging above his sleeping platform. He reached up and hung a long black silken cord around the nail. At the other end of the cord was a crucifix. Suspended over the arms of the cross were two rosaries, one of ebony and one of alabaster.

Bruce somehow managed to keep his thoughts to himself. Sometime later, though, he asked the Rich Man’s permission to take a closer look at the crucifix, and at the other “civilized articles” in his possession. His host “seemed quite pleased and showed me all that he had with him,” Bruce reported, and said he had two more caches, one near the Canadian Arctic Expedition’s camp and another somewhere inland. The Rich Man said the crucifix had been given to him by a white man near a big lake. Bruce put his hands together, inquisitively, as if he was praying. The Rich Man nodded.

By November 15, 1915, the Rich Man was back at the Canadian Arctic Expedition’s camp at Bernard Harbor, to the west of the mouth of the Coppermine. While there, he agreed to trade the crucifix and rosaries to Diamond Jenness for two boxes of .44 cartridges. Two weeks later, he handed over a Bible lesson book, illustrated with colored prints, entitled La Religion en Tableaux, along with a Latin breviary. On the breviary’s fly-leaf was inscribed the name of its previous owner: “G. LeRoux, Oblat de Marie Immacule.”²

With Jenness acting as interpreter, the Rich Man told Bruce how he had come into possession of the Catholic things. In the summer of 1914, he and two wives had been at Great Bear Lake with Kormik, his wife, and several others. While there, they had met three white people, along with a number of Indians living with them in the house and several Eskimos living outside. Other Eskimos, he said, had seen a different group of white men at the lake, and had traded them musk-ox and other skins for guns, saws, powder, traps, and cartridges. One of the white men the Rich Man met spoke the Eskimo language well. He had hung some necklaces and a metal crucifix around the Rich Man’s neck. He told him “to always keep it and to hang it up where I would see it the first thing in the morning, for it would protect me when I died; when I did die it should be placed under my head. He also told me that we were all bad people, but if we became good, when we died we would go up in the sky, and if not we would go down under the earth.”

That summer, one white man—presumably John Hornby—joined the Eskimos on a hunting trip. The Rich Man considered him a good hunter who “got plenty of caribou.” When the Rich Man invited him to live in his tent, the man “brought a stove with him so he could keep warm while writing.” The Rich Man and the others stayed down at Great Bear Lake “until the ice was three feet thick and the snow was deep.” When they left for the coast, one of the men gave the Rich Man some books and two black robes—one of which had since been stolen. If he still had the robe, the Rich Man said, he would gladly trade it for a box of cartridges. To the rest of the Eskimos, the man gave some tea and other small things. He said he would be going south the following summer, but would then travel up a big river “in a boat with a stove in it.”³

Even after hearing the Rich Man’s story, Bruce had a hard time figuring out what it all meant. The Eskimos’ possession of a breviary and a psalter “seems to me to be inexplicable,” Bruce wrote, “although this may be explained by someone more conversant with the ways of the Roman Catholic missions. The other articles, the rosaries, the crucifix, and cassock may well have been given away by the priests, seeing that the cassock is an old one and to my mind it would be impossible for the Eskimo (The Rich Man) to have invented the story that he told seeing that the Eskimos here know so little about the white race.”⁴

TWO WEEKS BEFORE Christmas 1915, Bruce organized a party consisting of himself, Diamond Jenness, and Jenness’s interpreter, Patsy Klengenberg, as well as a sled, five dogs, and two weeks’ worth of supplies for a trip to the Liston and Sutton Islands, sixteen miles offshore and halfway to Victoria Island. The Eskimos called the islands Okallit, for the arctic hare. Jenness had spent the previous summer among the village’s 140 people, and Bruce hoped that some of them might know more about the missing priests.

As soon as the patrol pitched their tent, it was constantly full of Eskimos, many of whom entered with gifts of fish, caribou, and seal meat. The white men were invariably made welcome in the Eskimos’ houses and at the many village dances. They were also invited to attend frequent rituals—Bruce called them “séances”—performed by the community’s seven shamans, who claimed the ability to communicate directly with invisible spirits from both the human and the animal worlds. Their entranced bodies twisting and contorting, their voices rising to a frenzied pitch, the shamans would whirl with such athletic intensity that they would convulse and collapse, utterly exhausted, upon the séance’s conclusion.

Bruce found the séances “amusing to watch,” he wrote, until the night he was included in one. In a trance, a shaman revealed that Bruce, Jenness, and Patsy would be taken by spirits, thrown over a cliff, and killed. The shaman offered no reason. Another night, some villagers asked a shaman to find out why the seal hunting had been so poor recently. After completing a séance, one shaman reported that the seals objected to the smell of the patrol’s tobacco smoke. It took some doing, but Jenness finally convinced the shaman that tobacco smoke actually attracted seals. The next day, luckily for Jenness, hunters killed six.

Bruce’s opinion about his hosts was gracious, if condescending. “These people were all well, happy, and contented, and did not try to molest us in any way,” he wrote. “I personally think that any white man who is at all discreet need fear no danger from them. They seem to be nothing more or less than overgrown children.”⁵

In late January 1916, Bruce decided to head south, in hopes of finding Denny LaNauze down at the old Fort Confidence site, near where the priests, John Hornby, and the Douglases had built their cabins on Great Bear Lake. Bruce and the zoologist Rudolph Anderson planned to hike the coastline to the mouth of the Coppermine, then follow the river south. But the weather was awful from the outset, and the dogs were strained under 125-pound backpacks. By the time they reached the mouth of the Coppermine, on February 4, Anderson had had enough. He told Bruce he would stay with the group only until they reached the timberline, then would return to his research. On February 15, they reached the woods. Wolves prowled around the camp all night. Bruce came across a wolf-killed caribou being scavenged by a pair of silver foxes. Four days later, he nailed up a large placard on a tree by the riverbank; to it he attached a tin box with a note inside for LaNauze. Be sure to find me, the note said. I have information about the missing priests.⁶

BY THE MIDDLE of March, down in their cabin at Great Bear Lake, Denny LaNauze and his team began loading up for the trip to the coast. The woods just to the north of Great Bear Lake were so thick that he and his men had to cut a trail just to get their eighteen-foot chestnut canoe through. The Dease River valley opened up to the west, and sent mirages radiating out in the brilliant morning sunlight. North of the woods, the snow on the Barren Lands was still packed hard and afforded excellent sledding, but the country was utterly devoid of game. Six months earlier, in October, the same country had been crowded with caribou. Now there was not even a track. The scarcity of caribou also meant that local scavengers were applying their skills to the caches left by the patrol. One food pit left by LaNauze’s assistant Corporal Withers was recovered just in time; wolverines had beaten a path around it and had begun gnawing through its wooden barrier.

Leaving Withers and the translator Ilavinik’s family back at Great Bear Lake, LaNauze, Arden, Wight, and Ilavinik began to move north on March 29 with two dog teams. Almost immediately, they left the comfort of the woods and entered the vast, forbidding, coverless reaches of the Barren Lands. “The north wind had driven the snow into hard, packed wavelets, bare and jagged masses of black rock forced their way clear of the enveloping snow,” LaNauze wrote. “It was a scene of infinite dreariness and magnitude.” On April 1, after a twelve-mile hunting trip, Ilavinik returned to camp with five caribou. He had seen more than two hundred. Just like that, the season had changed. Now, like Arctic hunters throughout time, the men could follow the migration north.

If it improved the men’s mood, the sudden glut of deer meat was hardly a guarantee of future plenty. A day after bringing the catch home, Ilavinik led LaNauze on a scouting trip several miles to the north; they returned to find two of the caribou carcasses stripped bare by wolverines. More troubling was the weather, which, now that the team had passed out of the forest cover, had turned considerably colder, the northeasterly winds stinging their cheeks as they hauled their sleds over the undulating hills. Sporadic blizzards made scanning the terrain especially difficult. Discovering a pile of stones marking Eskimo hunting country, the team figured they had reached the Dismal Lakes; five miles farther to the west, they climbed a hill and saw the lakes far off to the southwest. The “lakes” were in reality a single long lake with two distinct narrows, running thirty-five miles generally northwest from the mouth of the Kendall River. LaNauze estimated the distance between Lake Imaerinik and the Dismal Lakes to be twenty-one miles, a far cry from the distance indicated on their primitive maps.⁷

Since they had once again run out of fresh meat—a couple of arctic hare had provided a tasty but inadequate dinner—LaNauze and his team decided to set up camp and hunt and dry a load of caribou before pushing on to the Coppermine. With hundreds of caribou—most of them cows heading north to drop their young—moving along the Kendal River, Ilavinik led a hunt that netted thirteen. While Ilavinik retrieved and prepared the meat for smoke-drying and LaNauze fed the dog teams for the journey north, Arden and Wight hiked back to Lake Imaerinik to retrieve the rest of the team’s gear. By the time they returned, two days later, they were partially snowblind. Even though their eyes had been protected by snow goggles, they had been damaged by the long days of peering into the shocking glare of the Arctic spring.⁸

The team once again set off north on April 15. After a two-day hike, they at long last reached the Coppermine. By the riverbank, LaNauze saw a blaze on a tree: “Canadian Arctic Expedition. Mail party. Fort Norman. R. M. Anderson, Arnout Castel. February 24, 1915. Returned down river March 19, 1915.” Though more than a year had passed since the tree had been blazed, LaNauze felt encouraged. He did not know how close he had come to meeting Anderson and Bruce just a few weeks before, but he would soon find out.⁹

Thrilled to set up once again next to a good-sized river, LaNauze and his team decided to spend a few days hunting, not so much to provide for the trip north but to set up a safeguard cache for their return trip. If the men knew one thing about travel in the north, it was the wisdom of taking advantage of every opportunity of plenty to guard against the potential paucity of the future. With fully seventeen hours of daylight, they had plenty of time to track. For the next couple of days, the team shuttled its gear and dried meat over the ten miles from the Kendall River to the Coppermine. April 18 dawned clear and warm. LaNauze and Ilavinik headed north—downriver—to check out the quality of the Coppermine’s ice. They found the river flowing freely in its widest spots, and locked in snow and ice in the narrows. Fox and wolverine tracks were everywhere. Above the budding willow trees, LaNauze spotted the first hawk of the spring. About fifteen miles upriver from their previous camp, LaNauze and Ilavinik made camp in the snow. They awoke the next morning in the midst of a full-blown blizzard; a canoe strapped to the top of the sled swung around and knocked Ilavinik to the ground. With no more hospitable campsites in view, the two men and their dogs, wind at their backs, pushed hard. The river ice grew rougher. Finally, the blizzard abating, they set up a camp on the river’s west bank. On April 20, they turned around, followed their tracks, and made the trip back to their original campsite in just five hours.¹⁰

On Good Friday, with another blizzard blowing from the northwest, Wight and Arden started their own canoe journey north. The ice during their trip remained dangerouly unstable; at one point Wight, his sled, and his dogs fell into a snow-veiled ice crack. Wight could drag the tangled pile out only after hauling everything from the sled and heaving it back to the frozen surface of the river.

On Easter Sunday, the team set out on the trail created by Arden and Wight. En route, they passed a pair of seventy-foot-tall basalt cliffs on which were perched abandoned eagle’s nests at least four feet high and three feet in diameter. All along the riverbank, ice had heaved up in huge pressure ridges, making travel along the corridor impossible. On the plateau above the river, the going was easier, at least for most of the men. Arden had developed a serious case of snowblindness and was nearly incapacitated. At last, up ahead, Ilavinik pointed to a range of cliffs he guessed was the coastal range.

The combination of the snow cover and the early spring sunlight continued to be very hard on the men’s eyes, but they pushed on, following the river north. With even the few scrawny trees now having disappeared, LaNauze was forced to fire up his Primus stove for the first time on the trip. Setting up camp, the men pitched their tent by lashing it to the toboggans. Finally, on April 30, LaNauze climbed a low ridge and there, off in the distance, was the Arctic coast. “The blue haze over the ocean was unmistakable,” he wrote. At five P.M., after twelve months of travel, the team arrived at the delta where the Coppermine dumped into Coronation Gulf. It had taken the team, what with bad weather and constant double-tripping, a full month to cover the 190 miles from Great Bear Lake to the coast.

The river at its terminus was a mile wide; a small island, one of many out in the open water, lay a quarter mile out in the iced-over sea. Following old sled tracks out to the island, LaNauze and his men discovered a group of abandoned snowhouses, apparently built not by Eskimos but— judging by a cache of canned pemmican—by white men. The sled trail continued to the east, and the next day, May 1, LaNauze decided to follow it. With Coronation Gulf still covered by a smooth coat of snow over a deep sheath of ice, the toboggans moved easily, and for the first time in months the prospect of finding an Eskimo village began to seem imminent.¹¹

At eight P.M. that night, they came upon fresh sled tracks. A quarter mile later, they saw it: an Eskimo village. As soon as the villagers noticed the strangers approaching their camp, they began jumping up and down and holding their hands over their heads, a sign of welcome meant to demonstrate that they were carrying no weapons. They did not make the low moaning sounds that Stefansson had heard five years before. By this time, the people could distinguish a white man from a malevolent spirit. As soon as LaNauze and his men returned the gestures, the Eskimos appeared relieved, and began advancing toward them. Ilavinik moved off ahead of the others, and, after speaking with the Eskimos, motioned for the rest of the team to follow. The patrol’s dogs, apparently unaware of the delicacy of the moment, charged ahead, and soon the entire patrol found itself careening headlong into a group of laughing Eskimos, who instantly grabbed the reins of the sleds and helped the patrol drag their gear into the village. Every resident—fifteen souls—emerged from large caribou-skin tents to celebrate the arrival of total strangers. Once again, Ilavinik’s presence made the jovial encounter possible, and LaNauze realized afresh how his translator was perhaps his greatest asset.

The Eskimos had survived another winter, but they showed the ravages of the season. Their skin tents were in good repair, and they still had a full supply of dried caribou meat. Yet the appearance of all the natives LaNauze encountered that spring struck him as remarkable for the evidence of the conditions under which they had spent the previous six months. After the long winter, the Eskimo families seemed “unspeakably ragged looking in their summer dress, which consists of worn-out clothes of the previous year,” LaNauze wrote. “During the winter they often suffer privations on the ice during sealing operations, their dogs not being able to smell out the seal holes during the blizzards which often rage for a week on end.” Several men had become so hungry the previous winter that they had been forced to eat their sealskin bow cases.

What should LaNauze say to them? He and his men were outnumbered by the Eskimos, and nowhere near as comfortable on this terrain. Their mission was not to trade or to proselytize; it was to investigate the killing of two of their own people. The manner in which he planned to speak to the Eskimos might at some level resemble the way Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Diamond Jenness had spoken to them, but LaNauze was not here just to write down his impressions of the people. He was here, in all likelihood, to take Eskimos out of the country and put them in jail.

The Eskimos, of course, initially figured that the men had come to trade. So far none of these strange parties had treated them aggressively. Perhaps this was just the way white men were.

Through Ilavinik, LaNauze responded gingerly. His approach revealed much not only about his intuitive investigative skills but about his sensitivity to the strange relationship between his patrol team and the people he hoped to interrogate. Rather than speak aggressively—or even directly—about the search for the missing priests, he hoped to elicit information casually, patiently. He had arrived at a time when there were quite a few Eskimos gathered in one place—a fact he knew would work to his advantage. The spring season meant that there would be plenty of caribou, and because of that, together with the full provisions they had left over from their winter hunts, LaNauze hoped to remain long enough in the Eskimo company to gain their trust. He began by telling them he had been sent by the “Big White Chief,” that his patrol was part of a group that “looked after the people, and told them what was right and wrong, and that they must not steal or rob caches.”

With Ilavinik interpreting, LaNauze quickly learned that a pair of white men had taken up with an Eskimo family in a camp across the bay and that a big ship lay locked in ice four days to the west, its crew set up in a big house right next to it. The ship, LaNauze figured, must be the Alaska, back at the Bernard Harbor headquarters of the southern arm of the Canadian Arctic Expedition.

The Eskimos refused to let LaNauze and his men pitch their own tents, instead ushering them on their hands and knees through a ten-foot-long passageway into a roomy deerskin tent, where they were greeted by an elderly man and his wife.

“You have traveled far, no doubt; would you not like to change your footgear? Here is some of mine and my wife will dry yours over the lamp,” the man said to LaNauze. “You too must be hungry; everyone is cooking for you.” LaNauze was moved by the hospitality. “No civilized hosts could have been more thoughtful than this old couple,” he wrote. “They possessed the natural easy manners of travelled people, were genuinely glad to see us, nor were they as yet the least bit curious as to who we were or the object of our visit.”¹²

Women began cooking caribou meat in a large stone pot suspended over a seal-oil lamp, but the preparation took so long, and his men were so famished, that LaNauze trotted out his Primus stove. Throughout the meeting, other members of the comunity entered the tent, many of them bearing pieces of ground squirrel meat or caribou fat. At midnight, a large group gathered for a full meal. At last, after midnight, the entire group settled in for supper. Everyone in the village was clothed in caribou skins. Most had a few tin kettles apiece, which LaNauze guessed they had bartered from a previous Arctic expedition. A few carried rifles. Though LaNauze asked Ilavinik to hold off on any interviewing until the morning, the translater was nonetheless overwhelmed with conversation. The talk went on late into the night. When everyone finally began turning in, the hosts offered the patrol places on the sleeping bench built of snow and covered with musk-ox and caribou skins. As they did every night, the white men rolled themselves up in their robes. As they did every night, the Eskimos removed all their clothes. Soon, they were all fast asleep. Thus ended, LaNauze wrote, “our first experience with the Coronation Gulf Eskimos.”

The next morning, following Ilavinik’s advice to speak modestly to the Eskimos—and his urging that LaNauze not interrogate them directly— LaNauze began his questioning softly. “The big white chief that lives far to the South, where people are as thick as mosquitoes, had only just heard of the people living on the ice,” LaNauze said, speaking through Ilavinik. He explained that the team “had not come to trade, or to collect things, or to teach them of the land above the sky, but simply to visit them.” As a gesture of respect, the patrol traveled with “a mouth-piece, one of their own people, Ilavinik.” Given the dignity with which LaNauze treated Ilavinik, the Eskimos could tell that he meant what he said.

After this, LaNauze asked Ilavinik and Wight to remain in the village to learn what they could from their hosts. He, Arden, and a pair of volunteer guides set off to look for the white men’s camp. An eight-mile crossing brought them to a camp that had only recently been broken. Following the fresh sled tracks west to the Dolphin and Union Strait, they quickly caught up with K. G. Chipman, a topographer with the Canadian Arctic Expedition who was mapping the Arctic coastline as far west as Point Barrow. Traveling with Chipman, LaNauze was delighted to discover, was Corporal Bruce of the Royal North West Mounted Police. Two arms of the investigation, operating independently, came together at a tiny camp on an island off the coast. LaNauze had had no idea there were any other Mounties in the region; all along he’d been under the impression that he was working alone. Bruce, for his part, had heard that LaNauze had begun his investigation, but had figured, after two unsuccessful attempts to contact him, that the priests had somehow turned up safe at Great Bear Lake, and that LaNauze had gone home.¹³

THOUGH HE HAD collected plenty of stories and gathered odd pieces of clothing and religious articles that undoubtedly had belonged to the priests, Bruce had no news of the priests themselves. Perhaps they had returned to Great Bear Lake. Perhaps they had perished.

They aren’t at Great Bear Lake, LaNauze said. I just spent the winter down there.

LaNauze mentioned that he had heard of two brothers named Home and Hebo who had apparently accompanied the priests on their voyage to the coast. Bruce said he knew these men. “Hupo,” he said, correcting LaNauze’s version of the name, was in fact one of the men who had been seen with the priests’s articles. When LaNauze asked about the priests’ rifles, Bruce replied that he had no idea where they might be. The Eskimos, he said, had a number of .44-caliber rifles in their possession. Bruce told LaNauze about the Rich Man, who had taken possession of a priest’s cassock. The Rich Man had been quite happy to show off the priest’s things, but he had revealed little about how they had made their way into his tent. How well he knew the priests was still a mystery, largely because Bruce had not then been traveling with an interpreter and had been unable to question him in any depth.

To LaNauze, this was by far the biggest break in the case. He and Ilavinik immediately decided to scour the coastline in search of the Rich Man. LaNauze set up a base of operations at the southern headquarters of the Canadian Arctic Expedition at Bernard Harbor, in the Dolphin and Union Strait.

On May 3, an arctic blizzard blew in that was so severe, LaNauze wrote, that “one could not stand up.” The next day, anxious to continue explorations apart from the police investigation, D’Arcy Arden left the patrol and joined Chipman, who was heading east. Corporal Bruce took his place beside LaNauze, and the two Mounties set up a camp near Coronation Gulf. They pitched their own tent and “found it much more satisfactory than camping with the Eskimos, in spite of their hospitality.”

Ilavinik, it turned out, had spoken with a number of Eskimos and reported that each one, interviewed independently, had offered their opinions voluntarily. The only thing Ilavinik was unclear about were dates, of which, LaNauze wrote, the Eskimo mind seems to have “very little conception.”

For the next several days, which varied from warm and clear to brutally cold and windy, Corporal Bruce led the team off to the northwest, sledding across the gulf. Their course took them through a chain of low-lying, rocky islands, half of which were not described on any of LaNauze’s charts. At five P.M. one afternoon, the team pulled up at another Eskimo village on the ice between two small islands, six miles north of the mainland’s Locker Point.

Once again, the residents, upon seeing their visitors, jumped up and down and waved their arms. Once again, the meeting was entirely hospitable. A group of some forty Eskimos carried both seal meat and driftwood—an especially rare commodity at that time of year—on which to cook it. Some of the people had known Stefansson, they said. The Eskimos offered to trade LaNauze as much caribou meat as he could carry for a handful of matches. Shortly after the patrol’s arrival, several hunters returned to camp after a successful bearded seal hunt. Two had been speared that day. The meat was divided.

Once they had pitched their tent, LaNauze entered the dwelling in the village. Inside, he met Kormik, a taciturn man who, over sealskin soup served in musk-ox horns, said he had been with Stefansson when the explorer had brought Indians and Eskimos together. Kormik also claimed to have heard of D’Arcy Arden, but said he knew of no other men on Bear Lake, and certainly did not know any priests. Thankful for the meal, LaNauze nonetheless went to bed that night sure that Kormik knew more than he was telling. “I felt convinced that this man knew something about the priests, but I did not like to excite his suspicions,” LaNauze wrote. It would not be long before LaNauze discovered the truth.

ON THEIR WAY again on May 7, the patrol passed Locker Point, then three deserted snow villages, one with twenty-seven houses. At five P.M. LaNauze came to the mainland at Cape Krusenstern, where he organized a two-mile portage over the neck of the cape that saved his men a seven-mile detour around it. At eight P.M., they arrived at a pair of large Eskimo villages on the ice beneath Cape Lambert, in the Dolphin and Union Strait. More than three dozen people greeted them; more than a hundred lived in the village’s numerous caribou-skin tents. The village’s men were busy caching their seal meat before the villagers moved south for the caribou-hunting season.

Ilavinik learned that this group of Eskimos hunted near Great Bear Lake every year. The previous year, however, they had gone to look for white men “but could not find any.” By eleven P.M. Ilavinik had started getting acquainted with a man named Nachim and wife, Kanneak.

Even LaNauze could tell from watching Ilavinik’s excitement that the conversation was beginning to turn. Ilavinik learned that Nachim and his brother Ekkehuina had met Stefansson and an Eskimo interpreter named Natkusiak somewhere in the Dismal Lakes region back in 1910. Nachin and his wife had once nursed Natkusiak after he had suffered a bad powder burn while hunting near the Dismal Lakes. In passing, Natkusiak had told the brothers of a great friend of his named Ilavinik—and here he was!

Enjoying an intimacy they had not experienced at the previous village, Ilavinik and LaNauze continued their conversation with the villagers, and ended up with an invitation into one of the men’s snowhouses, in the middle of the village. Inside the surprisingly warm shelter, a seal-oil lamp burned off to one side, under the watchful eye of Nachin’s wife. LaNauze and Ilavinik took their places on the skin-covered sleeping platforms. LaNauze asked his hosts if any of them knew of any white man who had been to Lake Imaerinik. Oh yes, came the reply, they had met several.

Startled, LaNauze glanced at Ilavinik, then sat back and let his interpreter do the talking. Ilavinik turned to LaNauze.

“Inspector, I will talk straight now.”

Ilavinik leaned closer to the men in the icehouse, and his questions grew more intense.

“Did you ever see two white men who lived at Lake Imaerinik, who came here to live with you people?” Ilavinik asked the brothers. The Eskimos spoke long and carefully. When words failed, Ilavinik used sign language to explain the appearance of the priests, their long cassocks, their beards, and the cross they always wore.

Suddenly, the Eskimos started visibly trembling, and covering their faces with their hands and sobbing. LaNauze, oblivious to the content of the questions as well as the replies, checked his anxiety and remained silent. Finally Ekkehuina spoke.

Within minutes, Ilavinik leaned over to LaNauze and broke the case.

“I got him, Inspector,” Ilavinik said, the igloo now otherwise completely silent. “I got him now this time. The two fathers were killed all right. Husky kill them. These men very, very sorry. Now I am going to find out all about it.”

Stunned, LaNauze whispered to Ilavinik to continue talking to the men, while he went outside and collected Corporal Bruce. When the two men returned, Ilavinik told LaNauze to pull out a pencil and paper. “Now you write down these two names, Uluksuk and Sinnisiak, you got that? Now I find out some more.”

As Ilavinik turned back to the conversation, a number of other village men entered the igloo and began excitedly talking over one another. Over the din, Ilavinik asked a question of Ekkehuina: “Did anybody see two white men with beards? Long coat they wore. They had crosses hanging from neck.”

“Yes,” came the answer. “He come down mouth of Coppermine River, the two white men. Husky kill him.”

Before Ilavinik could translate this news to LaNauze, the cacophony hit a peak. The Eskimo named Hupo told of the day he had returned from fishing to find the village in a clamor with the news of the priests’ killing. Hupo had been so upset by the news that he was unable to sleep that night. He had disliked Sinnisiak since the summer when Sinnisiak had gotten into a fight with John Hornby over the sealskin fishing line. When he awoke the next morning, Hupo went to Sinnisiak’s tent. “Why did you kill the two white men?” Hupo demanded.

“They were going to kill me,” Sinnisiak had said. “Ilogoak had his hand on a knife all the time. I was afraid and I killed him.”

Hupo’s anger had continued to surge, and for a moment, while he was wrestling for the gun that had once belonged to the priests, he thought he would kill Sinnisiak. “I took it from him by my strength. I would have killed him if I had not got it from him,” he said. “Then I thought I would not kill him as someone would kill my brother. I did not like to see this man with the good white man’s stuff. I talked to him and I made him cry.”

As he was speaking, Hupo showed LaNauze a number of things he had taken from the priests’ cabin. Although he had waited until “after my heart felt better,” he had long since traded away the rifle, he said. Hupo added that he and other Eskimos had often seen the priests writing in small notebooks, but since their deaths he had not seen any sign of their diaries.¹⁴

Ilavinik asked that only one man speak at a time. As if on cue, a stout elderly man named Koeha shuffled into the igloo and raised his voice above all the others. Rather than try to shout him down, the others in the snowhouse yielded. They said that Koeha had better speak, “as he knew all.” Without a moment’s hesitation, and with his audience rapt, Koeha began to talk. He would not stop until four A.M.

Koeha spoke very slowly. Throughout the testimony, Ilavinik, LaNauze, and Bruce did their best to keep Koeha on track. This proved difficult. Koeha found the interrogation exhausting, especially when he was asked to recall the past. Such intense questioning, he said, made him sleepy. To break the tension and the monotony, Corporal Bruce—knowing the Eskimos’ taste for a joke—would croak and call like a raven, imitating its bell-like note to perfection. This invariably caused a great deal of laughter, and managed to keep the conversation going.¹⁵

The priests, Koeha said, had initially left their cabin at Lake Imaerinik to travel north to the mouth of the Coppermine with a group of Eskimos that included Kormik, Hupo, Uluksuk, Sinnisiak, Angebrunna, and Adjuna; all told, the group filled eight tents. They arrived at the coast, Koeha said, “when the sea ice was not strong” (probably late October, LaNauze figured). After seeing the coast, and with late-season food supplies so short, the priests decided they would return to their base camp near Great Bear Lake. Perhaps, they said, they would come back the following summer “in a big ship and build a big house on the coast.”

The priests stayed with the Eskimos at the mouth of the Coppermine for five nights, sleeping in Kormik’s tent. One day, Kormik took a rifle the priests had been carrying and hid it in the corner of the tent. When LeRoux discovered this, he exploded. “Ilogoak found the rifle and got very angry with Kormik,” Koeha said. “Kormik got very angry and I watched him, he wanted to kill the white man. I am speaking the truth and not talking foolish. I did not want to see the good white man killed, and I helped them to get away.”

In a flurry, Koeha grabbed Kormik as he tried to rush out and continue the argument. When Kormik’s mother appeared, Koeha demanded that she get control of her son. Koeha then rushed from the tent to help Rouvière and LeRoux load their sled. The priests were clearly unnerved by the sudden violence; they were talking rapidly to each other, Koeha said, and were very anxious to flee south.

The days were dark, the sun was low and nearly gone, and the snow was still soft when the priests left the Coppermine with a sled, some dogs, and no guide, for the two-hundred-mile journey south. They were exhausted and clearly in poor health. Father LeRoux had a bad cold, and Father Rouvière was still nursing an injury he’d sustained working on his Great Bear Lake cabin. They both suffered from inadequate nutrition. Certainly they were anxious about this violent turn of events with the Eskimos. Certainly they also feared what the coming winter would mean to their frail bodies, especially now that they had essentially been kicked out of the only community of people they knew for hundreds of miles around. They had no idea how to build an igloo, and they carried no tents. How they planned to make camp was unclear. They had a pair of rifles, but neither was an expert hunter.

Perhaps because he sensed the difficulties the priests were sure to encounter on their way, Koeha gave them a pair of dogs to add to their own two, and personally helped haul the sled over the first few miles back up the Coppermine. Koeha went with them “as far as I could see the tops of the tents behind.” He then turned to them and spoke his final words before leaving them on their own. “There are no trees here and you go as far as you can. After that you can travel easy,” he said. “I like you and I do not want anyone to hurt you.” Rouvière was driving the sled, Koeha said; LeRoux was running up ahead. Rouvière stopped to shake hands with Koeha. “The sun was very low when the white men left, and there was not much daylight at that time.”

Two nights after the priests left, Sinnisiak and a man named Uluksuk started off in the same direction. They told their fellow villagers they were hoping to rendezvous with a group of Eskimos moving north from the Dismal Lakes. Beginning their trip in the evening, they traveled fast and light, taking dogs but no sled.

SEVERAL DAYS after they had left the coast, Sinnisiak and Uluksuk returned, alone. They were not accompanied by the group of Eskimos they said they had hoped to help move north. However, in addition to the few things they had set off with, they were now carrying two things they had not had before: the priests’ rifles.

They told the villagers they had killed the priests near Bloody Falls. Uluksuk did most of the talking. After he and Sinnisiak had stumbled upon the priests’ cache, LeRoux had exploded in anger. He kept putting his hand over Uluksuk’s mouth. Rouvière had handed LeRoux a rifle, and LeRoux had brandished it. LeRoux and Sinnisiak had scuffled. Sinnisiak stabbed Father LeRoux in the back. When the priest was found still breathing, Sinnisiak demanded that Uluksuk finish him off. Seeing this, Father Rouvière began to run. Was he lurching for his sled, where there was another gun? Or was he running because he didn’t want to fight? Rouvière had never been as aggressive or unpredictable as LeRoux, but nothing, at that moment, seemed predictable. Uluksuk grabbed the gun himself, and gave it to Sinnisiak. Rouvière kept running, Sinnisiak shot him in the back. On Sinnisiak’s command, Uluksuk stabbed Rouvière in the side. Sinnisiak smashed his neck with an axe. They cut both priests open, and ate a small part of their livers to protect themselves from being haunted by the priests’ spirits.

“Sinnisiak and Uluksuk each took a rifle and came back to the mouth of the Coppermine; I saw them with the rifles,” Koeha said. “I asked Uluksuk ‘what did you kill the white men for?’ and he said ‘I did not want to kill them; Sinnisiak told me to kill them.’ I asked him if he eat any part of the man, the same as he would do if he killed a caribou, and he said ‘I eat some of his guts.’ ”

In telling his story, Koeha once again recalled the complex emotions he had felt at the time of the killings. He also showed a remarkable knowledge of the history of the one thing the priests had that the Eskimos needed most: their rifles. “After this the people did not like to see Uluksuk and Sinnisiak with the good white men’s stuff,” he said. “Kormik took the rifle away from Uluksuk. The rifle was traded many times. I do not know where the rifle is now.

“I look for a long time to tell this to some one, for some one to speak for me, and now I speak,” he said. “The two men that killed the good white men do not belong to my people. All the Coppermine River people are very, very sorry.”

Koeha’s wife, whom LaNauze considered highly intelligent, confirmed her husband’s testimony. She had helped her husband stop Kormik from killing the two priests, she said, and had watched as the two white men had loaded up their sled and fled south.¹⁶

Even after hearing Sinnisiak’s tale, Koeha had had a hard time believing that the priests were dead. Despite a taboo about visiting places where men have died violently—Eskimos feared they would be cursed by the dead men’s shades—Koeha, Kormik, Toopek, and Angebrunna decided to travel upriver to see the bodies for themselves. They covered the ground quickly, arriving at the spot Sinnisiak had described in a single long day of walking. “I was very very sorry that the two white men had been killed, and I wanted to go and see them,” Koeha said. “I wanted to go and get my dogs which the two men who had killed the priests had left behind.”

When they arrived at the spot to the south of Bloody Falls, on the west bank of the river, they saw, next to a sled, a body lying on its back, its face covered in snow except for the nose. As they got closer, then removed the snow, they recognized the body as LeRoux’s. Koeha started to cry. The body had been eviscerated. “The man that had killed him had cut up his breast and all inside was cut up with a knife,” Koeha reported.

“I saw the dead man Ilogoak lying by the sled,” Angebrunna said. “There was blood on his body. I did not look very close. There was snow on his body.”

Rouvière’s body was nowhere in sight. Uluksuk had said Rouvière had run away before he had been shot, then dismemberd, by Sinnisiak, but which way he had run they were unable to tell. Inspecting the sled and the gear around it, Koeha and his companions discovered some of the priests’ food and ate it. None of the priests’ gear had been removed, Koeha saw, except for the guns and ammunition. Sinnisiak and Uluksuk had even left the dogs harnessed to the sled. Koeha unstrapped the dogs and helped himself to a small pot about five inches high, a pair of “white man’s boots,” and a short fishing line, which he put inside the pot. Angebrunna took two small pots and some matches from the sled. They also grabbed what shirts and pants they could find. “Kormik told me I had better take some more stuff, [but] I was afraid,” Koeha said. “I liked [Rouvière] very much. I was afraid of the white men finding this out. The white men were very good to us and gave us ammunition, cod line, and gilling twine.” The priests were dead now, and had no need of these things. A year after the killings, Koeha told LaNauze, he had returned to the site and come across not only the sled but scattered bones. He had taken Rouvière’s lower jaw and placed it near a rock.

Koeha told LaNauze that he could take the investigator back to the spot where they had left the sled. “I do not think the bodies would be there—some animals might have taken them—but I know the place well and I will take you there.”

LaNauze, Koeha warned, should be wary of Kormik—not just because of his well-known temper but because of his tendency to distort stories. “Kormik has two tongues,” Koeha said. “I will go with you when you go to see him, and listen if he speaks the truth. He speaks lies.” ¹⁷

Even with thirty months gone by since the priests’ disappearance, the men in the village were still aghast at what had happened. “The lapse of two and a half years had not weakened their horror,” LaNauze wrote. “The acts were evidently greatly deplored by all, and in their simple words they paid tribute to the dead priests. ‘We have carried this in our heads a long time.’ ”

When LaNauze asked why Koeha and the others hadn’t spoken of the killings in all the time that had passed since the priests had been killed, Koeha said the villagers had been afraid. They had wanted to tell Arden, but there had not been a translator present. Also, John Hornby, who had had a run-in with Sinnisiak himself, had said that if an Eskimo killed a white man, white men would come north and kill them all.¹⁸

As far as LaNauze could tell, the Eskimos had not punished Sinnisiak and Uluksuk for their crimes. They had no courts, judges, or chiefs. Indeed, they did not seem to have any formal laws at all, save their time-honored customs of shame and excommunication. Crimes in Eskimo communities were typically punished only if a majority of the people decided that the act had been a threat to the community as a whole. Such direct disciplinary actions were rarely taken, Diamond Jenness had discovered, since Eskimos had neither judicial councils nor official leaders to translate judgments into action. In fact, in contrast to the emphasis in European-based justice on protecting individuals and punishing deviants, Eskimos were far more concerned with maintaining communal peace and stability. In European cultures, murder was a crime against the state. For Eskimos, murder was a private wrong, typically resolved by the victim’s family. Blood feuds among families were commonplace, but they were never allowed to endanger a community as a whole.¹⁹

Rouvière and LeRoux, of course, had been traveling on their own. Their families were thousands of miles away, in France. Denny LaNauze considered finding their killers his job. If he was successful, it would be the first time in history that an Eskimo would face European justice.

Koeha said he would help LaNauze with the investigation, but only after he returned from a seal hunt. He would take the patrol to the site of the killings, he promised, “when the sea-ice could no longer be lived upon.”

Writing some years later, LaNauze could not help but wax operatic about his mood at learning of the priests’ deaths. Their deaths had not been marked by organs in a cathedral, or choirs, or solemn recitations. Their bodies, for a time, had lain beneath the northern lights. “Then come the great white wolves of the Barren Lands, and the voracious wolverines, hungry for the feast, to snarl and fight over the spoil; and before the sun disappears entirely and the long Arctic winter sets in, there is little left to show that another tragedy has been enacted on this far away Coppermine River.”²⁰

CHAPTER NINE

Although shamans and missionaries alike attempted to cure the ill, shamans were at a disadvantage, especially as epidemics of exotic diseases such as smallpox struck. Shamans were unsuccessful in their attempts to cure patients of these new diseases, and they lost the confidence of the people as curers, especially when shamans themselves died in epidemics.

—WENDELL H. OSWALT, Eskimos and Explorers

ON MAY 9, THE PATROL CAME TO A GROUP OF FORTY ESKIMOS living near the Dolphin and Union Strait. That night, the people gathered in a huge tent, with a dancer and a man beating on a drum that was ten feet around. People crowded around the dancer and began singing in chorus. Among the people in the tent was the Rich Man. LaNauze asked Ilavinik to take him aside. ¹

The Rich Man said he had heard of the patrol’s movements months ago, from members of the Canadian Arctic Expedition. He had tried to tell his story to Corporal Bruce the previous fall, but he had been unable to make himself understood. This time, with Ilavinik present, he would tell all he could.

The Rich Man said he had known the priests quite well. During the year before they were killed, they had asked him to go east and bring back some musk-ox skins for them. When he returned that winter, with a load of skins, he learned that the priests had been killed. The following spring, “when the sun was high up and the snow was a little wet,” he, his wives, and his father had traveled south to the priests’ cabin near Great Bear Lake. The Rich Man knew the priests had been traveling with two .44 rifles—one with an octagonal barrel, since stolen by Sinnisiak, and one with a round barrel, which had not turned up. Since the Rich Man had traded his own rifle some time ago while on a trip to the east, he decided to see if the round-barreled Mauser might be somewhere in the priests’ cabin. It was. The Rich Man found it with a broken bolt—probably the reason it hadn’t been looted before—but managed to fix it. He also found some loose cartridges, quite a bit of clothing, and a few boxes of matches. For an Eskimo, in other words, a gold mine. His decision about whether to take the things was easy. “I thought that if I did not take it some other Eskimos or Indians would take it,” he explained. He still had the rifle, and said he would give it to LaNauze.

Later in the season, “when the hair of the caribou falls out,” the Rich Man and his family went back to the Dismal Lakes, where he met Kormik, who had a kayak, and then returned once again to Great Bear Lake, where he had met D’Arcy Arden.

The Rich Man had wanted to tell Arden about the priests. Later, he had wanted to tell R. M. Anderson, the zoologist with the Canadian Arctic Expedition. He could not make them understand. Arden said he wanted to travel to the coast, but, the Rich Man related, “I did not want him to go as I was afraid he might be killed too.

“I never told anyone about this before, although I was asked,” the Rich Man said. “I was afraid. I am not afraid of Anderson, but I was afraid if I told him he would tell the other white men and they would kill us all. Hornby had told me once that if the Eskimos killed one white man, the white men would come and kill every one of the Eskimos.” ²

On their way back to the coast, the Rich Man and his family spent a long time looking for the place where the priests had been killed. When at last they stumbled upon the priests’ sled, they were startled to find, lying close by, a human jawbone. “My father was very sorry and put it away in a high place,” the Rich Man said. Not far from the sled, they discovered Rouvière’s body, still covered in tattered, muddy clothing, lying in a creek.

The Rich Man not only knew Sinnisiak, he disliked him. Sinnisiak had once threatened to kill him. The Rich Man said he would happily take LaNauze to find him. He had recently seen Sinnisiak, far out on the ice, through a telescope he had obtained from the Canadian Arctic Expedition. He also knew Uluksuk, and could help find him as well.

LaNauze was overwhelmed. The Rich Man’s testimony “entirely clears up the theft of priests’ effects at Great Bear Lake,” he would write. The Rich Man “is about the smartest of the Eskimo. This man is useful and will speak when he knows it will pay him, as his business instincts are more strongly developed than the other Eskimos.”³

Armed with the Rich Man’s testimony, LaNauze and his patrol arrived on May 10 at Bernard Harbor, twenty-five miles west of Cape Lambert, opposite Liston and Sutton Islands. The Canadian Arctic Expedition’s ship Alaska was wintering there, its members living in a small house made of sod and lumber. LaNauze and his men were greeted by Frits Johansen, a naturalist, and Captain Sweeney, who had taken charge of the expedition in the absence of R. M. Anderson, who was on a surveying trip to Bathurst Inlet. The Canadian Arctic Expedition still had plenty of seal meat to feed the patrol’s big Mackenzie River dogs, but LaNauze, fearing they needed more sustenance for the coming journey, fed them caribou meat instead. With small herds of caribou migrating north, Ilavinik and the Rich Man had little trouble killing a half dozen.

In this tiny outpost of Canadian civilization, Corporal Bruce formally laid out the charges against the suspects. Sinnisiak, he wrote, “did on or about November, 1913 A.D. at or near the Coppermine River, willfully murder one, The Rev. Rouvière, a Roman Catholic Missionary of Fort Norman, NWT, by shooting him with a rifle.” A similar charge was laid against Uluksuk, and then a second charge against Sinnisiak for killing Father LeRoux “by stabbing him with a knife.”

The following day, with the Rich Man serving as guide, the team went northeast across the gulf to Liston and Sutton Islands. The Rich Man wanted to find a deserted snow village where he had seen Sinnisiak during the winter. The patrol would try to pick up some tracks and take it from there.⁴

As always, the weather proved relentlessly unpredictable. Clear days were followed by such heavy snow and fog that a man couldn’t see the dogs pulling his own sleds. With little chance of reaching landfall, LaNauze ordered the patrol to pitch its tents in the middle of the Dolphin and Union Strait. Tense with the prospect of an imminent solution to their investigation, LaNauze and his men were beginning to lose patience. Where was Sinnisiak? Was he fleeing? Perhaps word had leaked out about the investigation. Rumors had a way of traveling around in the Arctic, despite the vast distances and the few messengers.

At last, though, the fog lifted. Ilavinik, always adept at discerning the subtleties of the infinite swaths of white arctic space, discovered old sled tracks leading north. Following these, the patrol found two clusters of abandoned snowhouses, then a third. To LaNauze, it seemed that, for the first time since they had encountered Eskimos, people were fleeing their approach.

The next day, their luck changed. A few miles north of their camp, the giant landmass of Victoria Island came into view, and by one P.M. the trail took them to a series of caribou-skin tents just off the island’s shore. To LaNauze, the coastline looked woefully bare and stony, with rocky hills rolling inland and expanses of deep, hard-packed snow. Spring, this far north, was still a long way off.

As they approached, they saw the village’s men and women quickly separate into two groups, the men gathering up whatever weapons they could find. There was none of the ritual signs of peace, even after LaNauze and his men offered them first. No one ran out to meet them. Perhaps word had reached Sinnisiak and his people. Perhaps they were arming themselves for a fight. If so, LaNauze and his men would not fare well. True, they had rifles, but so, most likely, did a few of the Eskimos. The patrol was outnumbered and could hardly expect to survive even a modest assault. Their only hope was diplomacy. LaNauze ordered his men to pack their rifles in their sleds, out of sight.

With the team’s sleds practically pulled up on shore, a group of forty Eskimos approached. This was it, LaNauze could tell: the moment when the investigation would prove either a success or another chapter in an ongoing tragedy. Once again, and in a way he might not have predicted, LaNauze’s foresight and demeanor paid off. The Eskimos instantly recognized the Rich Man, who in his own way and for his own reasons had come to trust the white men. The tenor of the moment changed in an instant. LaNauze and his men were welcomed as friends. Once again, LaNauze’s deference to his well-chosen Eskimo guides probably saved his life.

After offering their greetings, the people inspected the strangers’ gear. They seemed most taken with the design of the team’s toboggans and the size of their dogs. Many of them had never seen a white man. Among this group, LaNauze could not help but notice, were some of the strongest and healthiest Eskimos he had yet seen. The men were preparing to set off to hunt and fish on the island’s interior, but they could not leave until they had cached enough seal blubber. A few of them had rifles; the others offered “everything they possessed” in exchange for one of LaNauze’s.

The Rich Man asked if one of the villagers had seen the man called Sinnisiak.

“No, but I have seen his wife,” the man replied.

Ilavinik shot LaNauze a glance, and said that he and the Rich Man would take a look around the village. If they could find Sinnisiak’s wife, the man himself could not be far away. A few minutes later, they motioned for LaNauze to follow.⁵

While Corporal Wight engaged the villagers with talk about sleds and dogs, LaNauze and Bruce followed Ilavinik and the Rich Man to a large tent at the far edge of the village. A man and a woman were seated inside. The man was carving a bow. The Rich Man turned to LaNauze.

“This is Sinnisiak.”⁶

IF THERE IS something ritualistic about the confrontation between a police officer and a suspected murderer, the encounter between the Royal North West Mounted Police patrol and the Eskimo hunter showed just how different rituals can be. At first, Sinnisiak was “absolutely paralyzed with fear,” LaNauze reported; he was convinced that the police had come to kill him on the spot. It had been fully thirty months since the killing. Were these visitors spirits, come back to torment a killer? Sinnisiak’s tent instantly filled with other villagers, all of them speaking at once. With so many other villagers in and around the tent, LaNauze worried for a moment that his investigation might suddenly spin out of control. Showing considerable confidence, given his distance from home and his surroundings, LaNauze managed to keep his cool. He told Sinnisiak he would not be killed; he had “nothing to be afraid of,” but he must “come quietly.”

Ilavinik, again serving as a mediator, quieted the people. He told them the patrol had not come to make trouble. He related what the patrol had learned—from other Eskimos—about the hunter Sinnisiak.

“My mouth is that of the white men who stand beside me, my tongue speaks for them,” Ilavinik said. “We have learned of Sinnisiak’s killing the two priests from our own people, your own flesh and blood, who live across the straits. For a year we have followed this, and now we know that Sinnisiak must come with us before the Big White Chief, for we are not going to leave this camp until he does.”

The people in the tent were silent.

“I will not go,” Sinnisiak said, never getting up from his seat. He turned to his villagers for support. Again they began to chatter. An elderly man who had been silent till now spoke up.

“What Ilavinik says for the white men is right. We have not seen many white men, but we have always heard that the white man speaks straight, and not with two tongues. What our people told you of Sinnisiak is true, and when the white men say he must go with them, he will have to go and none of us will put out our hand to stop him.”

Sinnisiak darkened. “I will come with you next month,” he offered, his eyes flashing from one member of the patrol to the next. Still he refused to stand up. His tone grew more desperate. He threatened the patrol in the most intimidating way he could conjure.

“If the white men kill me, I will make magic,” he said. “Their ship will go down in the ice, and they will be covered up.”

Once again, LaNauze assured Sinnisiak and the villagers gathered around him that the patrol had not come to kill him. Once again, the other Eskimos inside the tent told Sinnisiak to go with the white men. Perhaps this was because Sinnisiak was not part of their village; perhaps they feared stirring the ire of an armed white man; or perhaps they felt that Sinnisiak’s arrest was long ovderdue and important to resetting the balance of justice.

Bruce leaned over Sinnisiak and formally arrested him. With LaNauze’s help, Bruce lifted Sinnisiak from his seat. Beneath him, hidden under a set of deerskins, were two large knives and Father Rouvière’s .22-caliber rifle.

LANAUZE AND his men did their best to lead Sinnisiak away from the village as quietly as possible. Sinnisiak said he wished to take his wife, a sled, and his few possessions along with him. LaNauze agreed to the request and asked Bruce and the Rich Man to help him get ready. The patrol, with their prisoner in tow, finally left the village at five P.M. At first, they were accompanied by another Eskimo couple who also wanted to cross back to the mainland, but this proved such a drag on the team’s progress that LaNauze ordered Sinnisiak to separate from his wife and possessions and push along faster. This made Sinnisiak furious.

“This was not to his liking, but we were masters then,” LaNauze reported. The two groups traveled all night, the patrol in front and the slower Eskimos to the rear. Especially after being separated from his wife, Sinnisiak was very nervous. He stopped the sleds several times and, perhaps to emphasize his own harmlessness, asked to shake hands all around. He repeatedly asked Ilavinik to assure him that he would not be killed on the ice.

Leaving the village, the patrol continued to follow the lead of the Rich Man, who said he had a hunch about where to find another piece of the puzzle: the .44-caliber rifle that had been taken from Rouvière and used to kill him. The Rich Man said the rifle had been traded around among a group of hunters since the killings, and that it almost certainly had landed, for the moment, among a group of people living on the ice south of Victoria Island. A quick series of questions turned it up, in the possession of an Eskimo named Kirkpuk. The short-barreled, .44-caliber octagonal-barreled rifle, serial number 42551, exactly matched the description given months ago by the Indian guide Harry. The Rich Man said he had no doubt it was the right weapon; he even knew its recent history. “It was traded for by the Eskimo Ikpukkuak on behalf of Kirkpuk, his adopted son, to the Eskimo Kormik for a telescope that came from the east,” he said.

Grabbing a shotgun he had picked up from the Canadian Arctic Expedition, LaNauze exchanged the weapons, one for one. It was a good trade. The shotgun was a superior hunting tool, and LaNauze was now certain the rifle was the gun Sinnisiak had used to kill Rouvière.

The matter-of-fact manner in which the Eskimos traded things they knew had been taken from the hands of murdered men unsettled LaNauze. The Eskimos “made no secret about taking the stuff either from the unfortunate priests’ sled or from the houses on Bear Lake,” he wrote. “They produced the stuff they had left and showed it to me; they simply said, ‘The men were dead, we took their stuff before someone else would get it.’ ”

In the Barren Lands, people routinely starved to death because hunters were unable to provide for their families. Leaving a gun in the snow, regardless of how it got there, would not just be foolish, it would be immoral. Although he spoke firmly to Sinnisiak, LaNauze shied from admonishing the other Eskimos; rather, he offered oblique warnings about future infractions, telling them that “this would not be tolerated in the future.” The Eskimo response—“We know now that we must not steal any white man’s stuff”—seemed as tepid as LaNauze’s reprimand. Once this moment passed, they all seemed to say, the true law of the land would return.

Whether or not any lessons had been learned, LaNauze had, in fact, accomplished a great deal. In less than twenty-four hours, he had both apprehended a suspect and secured a murder weapon. All he lacked was Sinnisiak’s accomplice. And a motive. The evidence he had gathered told him only the barest outline of the priests’ final days. Clearly, once they had decided to leave Coronation Gulf, they had left quickly. Was this because they were afraid for their lives? That seemed possible. Although they had apparently made a number of warm acquaintances among the Eskimos over the months they had spent with them, they had run dangerously afoul of at least one man, Kormik. And Sinnisiak was considered by many people to have been an unpredictable and even a dangerous man. Or, on the other hand, were the priests in a hurry simply because the season was getting very far along, and the days left to travel in daylight were growing fewer and fewer? It appeared clear that Father LeRoux had quarreled over a rifle with the Eskimo Kormik; a half dozen people had described an enraged Kormik bent on killing him for it, and it was Kormik who’d taken the rifle away from Uluksuk once he had returned from Bloody Falls. Since Kormik had developed a reputation for aggression among his own people—and since Bruce had discovered most of the missing church property in his possession—LaNauze seemed inclined to believe this part of the story. If Sinnisiak and Uluksuk had committed the murders, the aggressiveness of the act had started in Kormik’s house.⁷

LANAUZE AND his men led their prisoner through the night and got back to Bernard Harbor at seven A.M. on May 16. They were greeted by Diamond Jenness and his sixteen-year-old interpreter Patsy Klengenberg. Patsy spoke conversational English and from the beginning had impressed Jenness. Patsy was “strong and hardy, an excellent traveller and a skilful and fearless hunter,” Jenness wrote. “Probably no better interpreter could have been found anywhere along the Arctic Coast.” Even better, for LaNauze’s purposes, Patsy claimed to know Uluksuk well enough to identify him.⁸

Sinnisiak and his wife were given bunks in the camp kitchen. The camp cook said he would watch them for an hour while LaNauze and his men got cleaned up. A short time later, LaNauze heard a commotion and ran to investigate. The cook’s four butcher knives had disappeared.

LaNauze confronted Sinnisiak, retrieved the knives, and relieved the cook of his guard duty.

That night, Sinnisiak, fearing he would be killed in his sleep, refused even to lie down. He and his wife “sat up in their bunk and licked each other’s faces in their affection,” LaNauze reported. At last, exhausted, they both fell asleep.

The next morning, LaNauze opened a formal hearing. He swore in Ilavinik as official interpreter in the proceedings, and Corporal Bruce as the reporting officer. “Since coming into Coronation Gulf, I have found numerous articles in the possession of the Copper Eskimos, and the property of the Church of Rome,” Bruce said. “They were the mass regalia of the priests, obtained from one Kormik on March 24, 1916; two brevaries from one Hupo on March 27, 1916; one large crucifix from one Uluksuk in December 1915; and numerous other articles.”

Bruce went on to detail his meeting, two weeks previously, with LaNauze, Wight, and Ilavinik near Coronation Gulf, and their subsequent trip to Cape Lambert, where they heard Koeha’s description of the killings. The hearing lasted for over three hours. When it had been completed, Sinnisiak and the absent Uluksuk were formally committed for trial on two charges of murder.

Throughout the proceeding, LaNauze followed the traditional legal script. “And the said charge being read to the said Sinnisiak, ‘Copper’ Eskimo of Coronation Gulf, is now addressed by me as follows: ‘Having heard the evidence, do you wish to say anything in answer to the charge? You are not obliged to say anything unless you desire to do so; but whatever you say will be taken down in writing, and may be given in evidence against you at your trial. You must clearly understand that you have nothing to hope from any promise of favor, and nothing to fear from any threat which may have been held out to you to make any admission or confession of guilt, but what ever you now say may be given in evidence against you upon your trial, notwithstanding such promise or threat.”

Considering their surroundings, these formal legal rituals must have seemed odd even to Denny LaNauze. To Sinnisiak, they must have been unfathomable. What was going on here? How had these white men found him? What were they going to do to him? Sinnisiak motioned to LaNauze, indicating, “I want to speak.”

LaNauze asked Ilavinik, once again, to act as an intermediary. He needed to get Sinnisiak’s statement down as accurately as possible. One day, it would provide the most credible evidence in a trial, when the Western legal rituals would take over in earnest. If Sinnisiak thought this was strange, wait until he saw all the men in court. Once again, he would face the scrutiny of men wearing black robes.

Sinnisiak spoke at length. Ilavinik translated. LaNauze wrote. The un-embroidered testimony left LaNauze transfixed. It came out in a rush, with no prodding, and seemed utterly without guile. Sinnisiak said that he and Uluksuk had felt threatened. They had been held at gunpoint by a man who was plainly angry and desperate. They had killed the men they feared. To Denny LaNauze, Sinnisiak’s confession made the killings seem a clear and necessary action. It had been winter. The priests were clearly desperate. A crisis had arisen, and the Eskimos had decided to act before they were acted upon.⁹

LaNauze was torn. Was what he heard the truth? Every word had come through a translator. What subtleties, what prejudices had been lost? It was not up to him to debate the merits of a suspect’s arguments. In a way, his position was not unlike that of the priests. The priests had been religious pioneers, leading the way into uncharted territory for a church whose tentacles reached all over the world. LaNauze’s job, as the point man atop a vast pyramid of British justice, was to bring the suspects into the system. Their fate would be up to lawyers and judges, sitting comfortably in a warm and secure place where there was time to negotiate, to argue, to persuade.

WITH ONE SUSPECT in custody, LaNauze left Corporal Bruce and Ilavinik in charge of Sinnisiak and set off with Corporal Wight and Patsy Klengenberg to find Uluksuk, whom Patsy thought would be hunting near the mouth of the Coppermine. If things went according to plan, the patrol would return with the second suspect and ship both men out on the Alaska, first to Herschel Island, then to Nome, Alaska. From there, the Eskimos, presumably, would be taken south for trial.¹⁰

LaNauze and his team left Bernard Harbor on May 18 and camped at Cape Lambert, where they managed to kill a caribou but then got caught in a blizzard. The weather, as the season began to change, was mercurial: the very next evening, the temperature stayed high and the sun did not set. The arriving spring meant that the patrol would need to travel quickly to find Uluksuk, since the Eskimos had already starting moving off the ice. Soon they would cache their winter clothes and seal-hunting gear along the northern islands and begin their annual migration south, back toward the hunting grounds near Great Bear Lake. If the patrol missed them, the search for Uluksuk could stretch out for months. Another entire season— complete with the acute challenges of hunting for food just to keep the patrol alive—could be spent looking for him.

The warming temperatures also made the patrol’s movements more laborious. The snow was turning to slush, which made hauling the sled that much more difficult. Gear, and particularly boots, got wet in the morning and rarely dried out. Tents were packed—and, at the end of the day, set up—still soggy. Finally, at ten P.M. on May 21, the team arrived at the same island at the mouth of the Coppermine where the priests had started their final journey south. There were no Eskimos camped on the island, and none visible anywhere out on the ice. For a time the team wondered if they were too late. Perhaps the Eskimos had already left. Perplexed, LaNauze found a patch of dry ground, set up camp, and hung his sopping clothes out to dry. With the ice melting along the fringes of Coronation Gulf, and the water flowing hard from the Coppermine, the sound of running water was everywhere. Overhead, geese were flying north; their calls were matched by those of seagulls and hawks. Little snow buntings twittered. Spring had come to Coronation Gulf in a rush.

With the sun still high in the sky late into the evening, LaNauze and Patsy decided to hike around the island in search of a high vantage point from which to look for any Eskimo camps far out on the ice. Pulling out a pair of binoculars at eleven P.M., Patsy scanned the ice to the north of the island, stretching out toward the mass of Victoria Island. Sure enough, he managed to pick out six dogsleds in the distance, slowly traveling toward them. Whether Uluksuk would be among this group was anyone’s guess, but surely this group would know where he was, or where he was heading.

For six hours, the men stood watch. The Eskimos moved agonizingly slowly over the softening ice. At five A.M. they disappeared behind a large island some ten miles to the northeast, just as another sled appeared in the east. After a long night, LaNauze and Patsy turned in, serenaded by the sound of brant geese flying overhead.

Finally, at five P.M., twelve hours after they had vanished behind the island, the Eskimo Angebrunna and his wife arrived with their two dogs pulling a sealskin sled. Angebrunna, one of the men who had gone with Koeha to see the murder site after learning of the killing, said six sleds were camped out on the island. One of the men, he said, was Uluksuk.

Once again, LaNauze had caught a break. At nine P.M. on May 22 he and his men loaded up their sleds and set out for the island out on the ice. Long before they arrived, they could see, high on the rocky edge of the island, a group of two dozen Eskimos dramatically raising their arms in a gesture of peaceful greeting.

As the patrol got closer, it seemed that every one of the Eskimos was jumping up and down and making the peace sign. Plainly, the arrival of this strange group of white men had caused them considerable anxiety. What could the white men want this time? Their anxiety did not abate until LaNauze and his men returned the greeting in kind. Relieved, the Eskimos ran down from their perch on the high rocks and greeted the patrol; many in the group had met LaNauze’s group on their way out to arrest Sinnisiak. As the Eskimos approached LaNauze and his men, only one man remained behind. Patsy immediately identified him as Uluksuk.

As LaNauze and Corporal Wight walked past the group, Uluksuk suddenly sprinted toward them. Rather than acting aggressively, however, he held up his hands and repeated two words: “Goanna! Goanna!” Patsy Klengenberg translated his statement: “Thank you, thank you, white men. I am Uluksuk. I will do whatever you want. Are you going to kill me now, as I am ready? I have carried this in my head a long time. I am glad you have come.”

Taken aback by the greeting, LaNauze, through Patsy, asked if Uluksuk had any idea why the patrol was there. Oh, yes, Uluksuk said, he knew very well. Did they intend to kill him? The other two white men had hit him over the head—did LaNauze intend to do the same?

In his usual calm voice, LaNauze replied that Uluksuk had nothing to fear. He sensed that Uluksuk was a very different character from Sinnisiak, gentle, less suspicious, and far less confrontational. Indeed, compared to some of the more aggressive men, like Sinnisiak and Kormik, Uluksuk seemed almost passive. His entire set of material possessions consisted of a polar bear–skin sled, a small caribou-skin tent, and his bow and arrows. The rifle he had taken from the priests had been appropriated by Kormik almost as soon as Uluksuk had returned from the scene of the killings.

LaNauze felt certain that this suspect would be far easier to handle than the first. Relieved, almost congenial, Uluksuk agreed to go wherever LaNauze planned to take him. He had one request: his wife was in the middle of making him a new pair of boots. Before setting out on a long walk, would the patrol mind waiting until the boots were finished?

The presence of Uluksuk’s wife—who was visibly pregnant, and extremely upset at the prospect of losing her husband—troubled LaNauze. He did his best to calm her down with gifts. He spoke to others in her group, promising that they would be rewarded someday if they helped her. To the woman herself, he gave a small silk tent, a cup, and a box of matches. Later LaNauze would learn that Uluksuk’s wife found a new husband just two weeks after Uluksuk’s departure.

Wight formally placed Uluksuk under arrest, and LaNauze committed him for trial. He read the charges against him. “Having heard the evidence against you, do you wish to say anything in answer to the charge?” LaNauze asked.¹¹

Like Sinnisiak, Uluksuk offered a vivid and detailed description of the killings. The details he provided were for all practical purposes identical to those offered by Sinnisiak. He and Sinnisiak had set out from the mouth of the Coppermine to rendezvous with their people. They had not set out to kill the priests. They had not followed them in order to steal their guns. They had simply crossed their path and become tangled up in a drama that was already well under way by the time they arrived. As he unwound his tale, Uluksuk seemed “very nervous and was shivering and shaking,” LaNauze reported. He wrote down every word.¹²

A year after beginning his investigation, Denny LaNauze finally allowed himself to feel pleased. Within three weeks of arriving at Coronation Gulf, he had not only solved the mystery of the missing priests but had captured both of the men suspected of killing them. His efficiency in carrying out the investigation, under the most trying conditions, was extraordinary.

HIS SLEUTHING WORK done, LaNauze still had to figure out how to get his prisoners home. He was six hundred miles from the coastal police station at Herschel Island, and nearly two thousand miles from any semblance of an actual judicial system. Getting back to civilization meant either a return trip over the Barren Lands or a long sea voyage around the Alaskan coast. The overland route would allow the patrol to look for the spot upriver from Bloody Falls where the killings had taken place. Perhaps, even two and a half years later, they would find some physical evidence to support the testimony they had collected from their prisoners and others.

But the overland route also presented a number of problems, beyond the simple exhaustion and unpredictability of food supplies any long journey would present. Given the distance and the terrain, transporting the prisoners overland would not be a simple matter of putting them in leg irons and forcing them to march. Also, were they to take the inland route, they would surely attract—as explorers always did—the interest of any groups of Eskimos along the way. Who could say how they might respond to seeing two of their own being forcibly removed from the homeland by strangers? There was also the problem of Indians. Like most Eskimos, Uluksuk and Sinnisiak dreaded their neighbors to the south; the blood feuds that had been boiling for years spooked them sufficiently that LaNauze considered it an unnecessary strain even on his own men.

Given the unprecedented circumstance of the arrest—the incredible distances over which all the witnesses were spread and the distance between the Arctic coast and Edmonton—LaNauze had to assume that the government would decide to complete the proceedings against Sinnisiak and Uluksuk by somehow sending a judge north. What kind of judge would be willing to take on this assignment he did not bother to conjecture.

THE PATROL and Uluksuk walked west all night. The breaking ice created a number of difficult moments for the team, as deep-water fractures began to open up along the coast. After shooting a seal, the patrol portaged over Cape Krusenstern, which by now was almost completely bare of snow. As the weather continued to warm, migrating waterfowl— swans, geese, cranes—flew continuously overhead. On May 25, they camped once again at Cape Lambert, where they saw hundreds of eider ducks floating out on the open water and countless caribou—mainly bulls, their antlers already starting to grow—crossing the straits from the mainland. “This was indeed a land of plenty at this season of the year,” LaNauze wrote. How Uluksuk must have felt, leaving the country at the easiest time of the year, he did not say.

As the patrol approached Bernard Harbor, the going got particularly rough. The patrol spent the last five miles wading through the knee-deep water of opening creeks. They finally arrived at seven-thirty P.M. on the May 26, and were greeted by members of the Canadian Arctic Expedition and some twenty Eskimos, who, their sealing season at an end, were beginning to move back to the mouth of the Coppermine, where they would join some one hundred others on their journey south. One Eskimo LaNauze expected to see was not there. Corporal Bruce and Diamond Jenness, LaNauze learned, had “tactfully shipped Sinnisiak’s wife back to Victoria Land with a few small presents.”

For the patrol, getting back to Bernard Harbor with their second prisoner offered considerable relief. Once again, they were in the company of their own countrymen, which must surely have relieved them of the anxiety of traveling through a land inhabited by people who greatly outnumbered them and whose language they could understand only through the good graces of their hired interpreters. Yet their experiences with the Eskimos they had met, LaNauze would later write, had been consistently and almost unfailingly pleasant. At every turn, the natives had treated him and his men with courtesy and grace. In fact, without fail, as soon as one person began to tell a story about the killings, others would crowd around the teller and add their own details. The tale of the missing priests became a tale told by a community, rather than by a single storyteller. Sometimes this was frustrating—as it was before Koeha was granted the floor in the snowhouse—but more often than not it led to a fuller picture of the whole. “Amongst these people, what one knows is known by all,” LaNauze wrote. “Once we got the story of the murder everyone seemed to know about it. In getting information they all crowd around and listen attentively and help the speaker along with his story.”

As it turned out, public opinion seemed to weigh heavily against Sinnisiak in particular; the willingness of the Eskimos to speak about his role in the killings, LaNauze began to think, seemed designed to purge him from their community. “As I have only been a month among the Eskimos of Coronation gulf I cannot give an expert opinion of them,” LaNauze wrote, “but I find them intelligent, straightforward, and hospitable, and I went about my business in the usual manner and did not try to deceive them as to our motives. I believe, and it is the belief of others that know the Eskimos better than I do, that the murderers fully expected to be killed by us on the spot and that the others would not have raised a hand to stop us. Public opinion in Coronation gulf is against the murderer Sinnisiak; all say he is a bad man, and that the other man Uluksuk was led by him.”

In the end, the Eskimos’ cooperation made the investigation infinitely easier. Indeed, it made it possible. Absent the help of his two interpreters, LaNauze would almost certainly have returned home empty-handed. In addition to his invalubale interpreting, Patsy Klegenberg had managed to identify a suspect. Ilavinik had proved an exceptional hunter and navigator. Diamond Jenness, who had spent all of the previous summer living with the Eskimos on Victoria Island, told LaNauze he was very lucky to have found Sinnisiak, since typically he would have been hunting a long way inland. Uluksuk, who was from Bathurst Inlet and had been living far to the east since the killings, might just as well have been on the Kent Peninsula, a hundred miles to the east, as along the Coronation Gulf coastline. Perhaps most critically, Ilavinik had virtually eliminated the tension implict in every encounter the white men had had with the natives. Writing to his superior officers sometime later, LaNauze made his admiration for Ilavinik clear. “Ilavinik’s work on this case is worthy of the highest praise,” he wrote. “We have secured one Eskimo out of a hundred in him. I give him all credit for his painstaking and straightforward interpreting.”

Back at Bernard Harbor, LaNauze, once again, got a lucky break. The leaders of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, who had always been helpful, offered to help transport Sinnisiak and Uluksuk south aboard their ship. LaNauze gratefully accepted. Now he would not have to worry about conveying the prisoners thousands of miles across their own country. They’d be packed safely away on the Alaska.

LaNauze also decided to split his team up. He would send a brief report on the investigation south with Wight and Ilavinik via Bloody Falls— where they would look for the site of the killings—and, from there, by York boat to Great Bear Lake, Fort Norman, and south on the Mackenzie River. Ilavinik and his family would split from the group at Fort Norman and return to their community at Herschel Island by heading north on the Mackenzie.

LaNauze and Patsy would help load the prisoners onto the Alaska and take them to the police outpost at Herschel Island to await trial either there or, perhaps, at a makeshift courthouse near the mouth of the Coppermine. The latter possibility seemed difficult in the extreme. True, holding a trial at Coronation Gulf would make it easier to gather witnesses, but it would also almost certainly require getting a judge on board a ship and having him spend a winter on the Arctic coast. Almost as an afterthought, LaNauze wrote, “If on the other hand the case could be tried without witnesses the matter would be simple.”

This suggestion must have seemed somewhat absurd to LaNauze, given his by-the-book approach to every other aspect of the investigation. A trial without witnesses would have flown in the face of every bit of legal training he had ever had. But convincing a judge to take a steamer down the Mackenzie River for a trial at Herschel Island seemed a lot easier to imagine than risking his spending a winter in a snowhouse on Coronation Gulf.

LaNauze also allowed himself a moment to comment on the next stage of the prosecution. “The depositions show that both of the prisoners plead ‘guilty’ and I have absolutely no doubt that they will ever change their plea,” he wrote. “Their own defense of being ill-treated is their strongest point, and the prosecution has no witnesses that will deny this.” This was as close as LaNauze would come to offering an opinion on the passions involved in the crime. His tone was neutral, professional, cool. Months down the road, in court, these words would come to carry surprising weight.

NOW ALL THAT remained was waiting for the ice to thin out enough for the Alaska to leave Bernard Harbor. Though LaNauze never felt the need to put his prisoners in handcuffs or leg irons, the Eskimos nonetheless grew increasingly agitated by their confinement. Sinnisiak particularly became “very nervous” when LaNauze tried to take the edge off by allowing them to move around the camp and perform chores. While they waited, Uluksuk was given his own formal preliminary hearing. As he had with Sinnisiak, LaNauze laid out the charges against Uluksuk in the clearest way he could. Over and over, he reported, he made every effort to explain what was happening to the two prisoners. Reading the transcripts of the proceedings, one cannot help but sense LaNauze’s awareness of the strangeness of his, and the Eskimos’, predicament. Even seen strictly from his own perspective, that of a man trying to walk through a rigidly proscribed series of investigative and legal steps—gathering evidence, hearing testimony from witnesses, laying out charges—the case was full of practical problems. Even without the confessions, LaNauze had come to feel he had compiled a strong case. Yet since the Eskimos had no tradition of writing, he was, of course, unable to get any testimony from witnesses— let alone the actual confessions—down in their own hand. “As these people have no conception of writing, I did not get them to make their marks on papers,” he wrote. “What they told me was the truth, and they all told me the same story and said ‘We will always speak the same.’ ”

Such evidence, gathered in a typical murder case, might not stand up in court; anything reported to the judge would simply be the word of the police officer. Here again, LaNauze was faced with a dilemma. He was forced to depend on the honesty and accuracy of the very people he was investigating. What if Uluksuk and Sinnisiak arrived in court and, called to the stand, completely changed their story? Wouldn’t it be simple for them to claim they had been wrongfully hauled out of their snowhouses, that they were not only innocent but completely unaware of the charges against them? If it came to their word against that of a courageous and honest police officer, surely a jury would side with the police officer. But it would be embarrassing to have to convict men who, once they were pulled wholly out of their native context, would appear utterly alien to the system of justice trying to convict them of murder.

For LaNauze, then, the only solution was to play his role as straight as he could. Even his references to his legal superiors seem to have been imparted to reassure himself that he was acting within a framework that made sense. And for someone who claimed to have so little knowledge of the subtleties of Eskimo life, he was at least conscious of some fundamental differences in their social structures.

“I have not deceived the murderers in any way,” he wrote. “I have had it carefully explained to them that it is not for me to judge them but that the Big White Chief must decide what he will do with them. But it is hard for them to grasp the meaning of this. In their life they have no chief. Everyone is equal, and their word ‘Ishumatak,’ for chief, literally translated means ‘the thinker’—the man who does the deciding or thinking for the party.”¹³

As he finished writing up his report on the investigation, LaNauze allowed himself some space to think about what might have happened back there near Bloody Falls. Even at this moment, having just completed his remarkable arrests, LaNauze seemed fully open to two very different scenarios. As he had from the beginning, he did his best to suspend his own judgments in the case. Even when they had completed collecting evidence, indeed, even when they had “solved” a crime, he knew that police officers rarely had the bird’s-eye advantage of full context. LaNauze and Bruce had collected a great deal of raw data—testimony, material evidence—that would hopefully one day help prosecutors compile a case. But the circumstances were so strange, so unprecedented, that LaNauze felt humility was the best approach to the evidence. Who could really say what had happened out there on the snow on the terrible day in October 1913?

“The priests may have been the victims of a premeditated murder for the possession of their rifles and ammunition, or may have brought on the crime by their own untactfulness,” LaNauze wrote. “We have only the murderers’ own statements as to the latter, and the unfortunate victims will never tell on this earth of the former.”

THE REPORT COMPLETED, Corporal Wight and Ilavinik returned to the mouth of the Coppermine to join Koeha, who would guide them to the crime scene near Bloody Falls. Once there, they would walk overland to the patrol’s base at Great Bear Lake, then travel from there to Fort Norman by York boat. A steamer would be waiting at Fort Norman to bring Ilavinik and his family north on the Mackenzie River, back to Herschel Island.¹⁴

On the coast, the snow did not leave until the middle of June. Wild-flowers bloomed all over the rolling hills. As the ice in Bernard Harbor at last began to crack apart, thousands of eider ducks sat out near the open water. Bearded seals basked in the sun. At midnight, the sun hung on the horizon for three hours, a cool breeze blowing in from the northwest. With winter conditions finally on their way out, members of the Canadian Arctic Expedition began returning from their travels. By the end of June, Eskimos started arriving in larger numbers to fish a nearby creek for the massive spring salmon run. Using stone fish traps and spears, they managed in short order to land several thousand fish averaging eight pounds each.¹⁵

The last of the ice did not leave Bernard Harbor until the first week of July. At last, the crew of the Alaska began preparing for its trip out west. The ship had a full load of zoological, ethnological, and geological specimens, along with a year’s worth of food and supplies. On the calm evening of July 13, the Alaska set out, pushing through ice cakes in the harbor’s mouth, and began steaming west through a lead close to shore. Three miles later, the ship’s progress was halted by pack ice. A strong overnight wind opened up another lead, and the ship once again pushed forward. “It was a fine sight to see the huge masses move slowly past, leaving the open ocean behind them,” LaNauze wrote. Sure enough, behind the ship, huge ice floes began clogging the entrance to the harbor almost as soon as the Alaska left. At last, the ship entered the open ocean.

Now they had other challenges. Given the expedition’s proximity to the magnetic pole, the ship’s compass became increasingly unreliable. Visual navigation, using either landmarks or the sun, became the navigator’s only options. With the weather still shifting violently, this was hardly optimal. Sure enough, one night a thick fog rolled in and stuck for several days. Neither the coastline nor the sun was visible. Captain Sweeney had no choice but to read his compass heading and hope it stayed at least moderately accurate. When the sun came out for a few moments the morning after the fog first set in, Sweeney discovered he had gotten turned completely around. He was off the coast of Victoria Island and heading east, back into Coronation Gulf. The ship had spun around 180 degrees. Perhaps Sinnisiak’s curse—that the white man’s ship would disappear under the ice—was coming true.

The Alaska finally pulled into harbor at Herschel Island on July 28. “It was a great relief to have our prisoners at last at a police post,” LaNauze wrote. “Their conduct had been excellent, and it was indeed surprising how quickly these primitive people have adapted themselves to our ways.” LaNauze briefed the station constable on the investigation, and also spoke to a surgeon who had just arrived with the mail—none of it for LaNauze— from Fort McPherson.¹⁶

LaNauze’s good humor did not last. To begin with, the Eskimos at Herschel Island, who had been interacting with white people for years, were in the throes of a terrible influenza epidemic. “We had left behind us a strong and healthy race of people who lived a strenuous though independent life in the hitherto unexploited Arctic regions,” LaNauze wrote. “At Herschel Island we were confronted with a people both physically inferior and entirely dependent on the supplies of civilization. Dr. Doyle had many patients on his hands.”

Far more personally depressing was an order from headquarters. LaNauze had been reassigned. Rather than return home triumphantly with his prisoners, he would stay up north and take over the Mackenzie River subdistrict. LaNauze could barely contain his disappointment. He had already been away from home for sixteen months. The new assignment, while perhaps a vote of confidence from his superiors, nonetheless meant an extension of an already extremely trying tour of duty. The language he used in a note to his commanding officer revealed, albeit with professional tact, his frustration.

“I was of course greatly surprised, not to mention disappointed as well,” he wrote to his commanding officer, but I would not feel justified in continuing my journey, as I am confident it is your wish for me to remain here. I fully expect to be able to tell the story of the country and its strange inhabitants to you personally. I now possess a thorough knowledge of the conditions of those parts, and if by any chance headquarters would wish to question me upon the many important points I must have omitted to mention I will only be too willing to return in February by the Dawson patrol. I was very anxious to apply for leave this coming Christmas, as my family affairs, owing to the war, are very sorrowful. However, in these stirring times duty is always first, and you may rely upon me for any duty, as I presume you are shorthanded.

LaNauze asked Anderson, the zoologist, to send a wireless message from Nome, Alaska, reporting the results of the patrol. He also put together all the documents he had written about the investigation and sent them off with Anderson as well. “I trust it will reach you safely,” LaNauze wrote in a covering letter. “I have endeavored to make my reports as clear as possible regarding this important case. I will make the usual patrol to Fort McPherson in January to meet the patrol, and will wait there for more orders.”

He ended on a note that was both professional and plaintive. “The case of the missing priests is now practically out of my hands, and I have a competent staff here to guard the murderers.” Since leaving Great Bear Lake, LaNauze noted, his patrol had covered, on foot, dogsled, and ship, approximately fourteen hundred miles.¹⁷

On September 4, a few short weeks after LaNauze had arrived, Ilavinik and his family pulled up in the whaling boat, completing the last leg of a long journey that had taken them across the Barren Lands and north via the Mackenzie River. Ilavinik had left the two corporals, Withers and Wight, at Fort Norman. As it had from the beginning, the patrol had worked like a clock. It had taken a while, but they had come across the scene of the killings.

The corporals and Ilavinik had left for the mouth of the Coppermine in late May to await the arrival of Kormik and the Rich Man, who were returning from hunting on the ice. A week later, their Eskimo guides arrived, and they quickly covered the long day’s walk up the Coppermine River. As it had throughout the expediton, the volatile Arctic weather— this time in the form of a heavy rainstorm—initially prevented them from exploring the murder site. When they finally arrived, the patrol found the spot just a hundred yards from the banks of the swollen river—and fully three miles from the trail the priests should have been on in their hike to the Barren Lands. The snowstorm the day of the killings had gotten the priests and the Eskimos seriously off course.

The rising water forced the patrol to camp half a mile west. They returned the next day and quickly discovered two five-foot-long heavy timber sleds that Kormik said had belonged to the priests. Three feet from these lay part of a human jaw. The Rich Man told Wight that the jaw and the sled had been placed there by his father, who had found them closer to the river. The jaw belonged to Father LeRoux, he said.

The Rich Man then took the corporals twenty yards closer to the river. This, he said, was where Father LeRoux had died. The spot, Wight noted, “was easily recognizable as a place where some body had been chewed by animals, as there were numerous very fine bone splinters strewn about.”

As he examined the area, Wight stooped over and collected a buckle with part of a canvas belt and pieces of what appeared to have been a blanket, three pairs of pants, and a sweater. He also found a weather-worn diary, its last entry made in mid-October 1913, some French literature, and three empty rifle shells from a .44 Winchester. In all, a substantial cache of evidence.

The corporals and their guides tried, and failed, to dig a grave. The ground was still frozen solid, and they had no shovels. Instead, they marked the spot with a two-foot-high cross, a heavy sled runner stabilizing it at the base. Wight took a picture of the grave, then asked to be shown where Father Rouvière had been killed.

The Rich Man took him a hundred yards up the river to a large clay hole and said Rouvière had been laid in the bottom of it. The body was still covered in six feet of snow. Wight marked the place with another cross, snapped another photograph, and led his team south.¹⁸

WITH THE SEPTEMBER sunlight rapidly slipping away, it became clear to Denny LaNauze that there would be no conclusion to the case before spring. Once again, the little wheels of justice were being turned by the big wheels of Arctic weather. LaNauze and his charges settled in for another long Arctic winter.

With so many months of travel under their belts, and so few weeks of good weather ahead, waiting at Herschel Island proved exceedingly dull. Sinnisiak and Uluksak grew especially restless; they hated idleness and viewed the “Christianized” Eskimos around them with deep suspicion. As the weeks went by, LaNauze gave them plenty of work to do around the settlement, and found that physical work immeasurably improved their demeanor. As the weeks at Herschel Island turned to months, news from other parts of the world began to trickle in. LaNauze, who had been loath to forgo frontline military service in Europe, chafed at hearing of the Battle of Jutland, the evacuation of the Dardanelles, and the Irish Rebellion.

But as it had many times before, LaNauze’s luck changed. In February 1917, mail arrived by police patrol from Dawson, five hundred miles away in the Yukon Territory. Among the letters was a note asking LaNauze to bring his prisoners south for trial as soon as weather permitted. Although the murder had occurred more than two thousand miles from Edmonton, the Canadian criminal code stated that crimes committed outside a province could be tried wherever it was considered convenient. LaNauze would get to see the investigation through to trial after all.

The journey to Edmonton took five months. LaNauze, Ilavinik, and the patrol packed up and headed south on the Mackenzie River. The watershed, he wrote, was “athrill” with bird life. By July 7, the patrol had left Fort MacPherson by steamer. At Fort Norman, they were greeted by Corporal Wight, Koeha, and Patsy; Koeha and Patsy had traveled overland, accompanied by D’Arcy Arden, from Coronation Gulf. Both interpreters said they would be willing to make the trip “outside.”

The presence of so many Eskimos on board a white man’s ship caused a minor sensation among the steamer’s traditional passengers. White travelers were delighted to hear the Eskimos referring to the steamer lights as “moonlight.” Koeha asked if the ship’s auxiliary pump was a “pup” of the main engine. But there was also discomfort. When some passengers asked Koeha to show how he would kill a caribou, Koeha cheerfully grabbed his rifle. The white audience scattered in a panic, convinced they “were about to share the priests’ fate.”

As word of the patrol’s impending approach reached Peace River Crossing, people turned out in droves to see the Eskimos for themselves. As the steamer D. A. Thomas pulled into port, a crowd strained to see LaNauze and his men, wearing their scarlet tunics, and the Eskimos, who arrived “without handcuff or chain.”

“The whistle of the D. A. Thomas, long and loud, resounded through the valley and announced to the expectant waiting inhabitants at the village who, armed with a battery of cameras, flocking from every direction to the landing that she had at last arrived,” one newspaper reported. Another article quoted a well-known local Arctic traveler, who praised LaNauze’s team. “No other force of police could have done it,” the man said. “Had they sent three American detectives after these men there would have been three graves up north.”

If LaNauze and his men had proved remarkably adaptable in the Far North, no one could guess how the Eskimos would respond to their impending plunge into white civilization. For a people who counted on a remarkably subtle language to navigate their environment, the Eskimos had no words for what now lay before their eyes. They called the train for Edmonton “a ship that runs on dry land.” Peering out the windows on the way south, they dubbed a horse a “big dog,” cattle “big caribou,” and an automobile a “sled that runs without dogs.” On the train, the prisoners and members of the patrol dined apart from the other passengers. LaNauze noted that the Eskimos’ table manners “were perfect and they quietly watched and copied our use of serviettes.”¹⁹

As word of the Eskimos’ arrest trickled back to western Canada’s population centers, local newspapers quickly recognized a story with plenty of eccentric drama. At first, the coverage focused on the heroics of LaNauze’s investigation. “After Journey of Two Years Police Come from Far North with Their Eskimo Captives,” trumpeted a headline in the Edmonton Morning Bulletin on August 8, 1917. “Great Interest Taken by People of Hinterland in Famous Trip of Red-Coated Guardians of the Law—Prisoners Trust Their Captors and Follow Them Anywhere—Expected Here Thursday Night.”

Initial descriptions of the prisoners and the Eskimo interpreters varied from smug to bewildered. The Eskimos were “fat, smiling, and as happy as children on a holiday,” the Morning Bulletin reported. “The prisoners were dressed in brown overalls, grey shirts and common caps and not in their picturesque fur costumes of the north. In fact, the only evidence that they had come from a cold climate was the fact that they had their mittens on.”

Sinnisiak and Uluksuk, a reporter noted, were already beginning to suffer from the heat of the south, which they complained about with “course grunts.” He added, “The well-known fact that Eskimos quickly droop and die when brought within the bounds of civilization was one of the topics under discussion at the barracks following the arrival of the prisoners.” To help them cope with the heat, the prisoners were given electric fans, and they were frequently seen “cooling themselves in the breeze from the machine.”

Arriving in Edmonton on August 8, the prisoners followed LaNauze around “like faithful dogs, and would no more leave them than a child would leave its parents or protectors. All who have come in contact with the Eskimos as a race speak very highly of them. They say they are industrious, thrifty, hospitable, happy, clean and not envious, and in every way they are superior to the Indians.”²⁰

The nature of the crime, and of the men accused of committing it, also quickly became a central preoccupation. “They are governed by the same natural laws as the animals and to kill is not a crime,” the Edmonton Morning Bulletin reported. “It is all part of that great natural law, the survival of the fittest. It is not known whether they will have any defense.”

The article then cobbled together a collection of rumors and received wisdom about Eskimo culture, including their “custom” of abandoning newborn babies and leaving the elderly to die in the snow. “These Eskimos are brought down to civilization and are being tried for the crime of murdering two priests. The Eskimos, it is said, after they had cut open their victims and each had taken a bite of the liver of each of the dead men, decamped with their possessions and left the bodies to the mercy of the wolves.”

This selection of ethnographic facts about the Eskimos—as a people who routinely abandoned defenseless members of their own families on one hand and killed and cannibalized holy men on the other—seemed an ominous overture to the upcoming trial, which would, after all, draw its jury from the newspaper’s readers. The article predicted that the trial was “bound to attract world-wide interest—the trial of uncivilized aborigines, living in an unexplored part of the North American continent, by a jury of their ‘peers’—city dwellers of Edmonton.”²¹

Despite the drama of the case, newspaper editors had far more pressing news to transmit, and the story of the Eskimo killings quickly fell back into the inside of the papers. Day after day, the Great War in Europe dominated the news, with as many as a half dozen articles a day spread across the front pages alone. Indeed, had the Eskimos been able to read the papers, they would have gotten a vivid impression of the news dominating the minds of their new hosts. “Ground Heaped with German Dead Around Glencorse,” screamed a headline in the Calgary Daily Herald. “Enemy Is Absolutely Reckless of Losses and Is Striving Vainly to Retain a Hold on Westhoek Ridge.” Fighting units from Edmonton were suffering heavily. The Eskimos could be forgiven for failing to comprehend the stories. They did not have a word for war.²²