I left Martha's and made my way north along the seashore, past the community center, the Co op, the nursing station, and the Hudson Bay Store, to Father Van der Hoven's church. The Father's house didn't look like a church – the only indication of its religious function was the hand crafted crucifix over the front door – that and the fact that everything around the house was kept spotlessly clean and free of trash. The Church was one of the few “houses” in the settlement two stories high. The lower floor served as the chapel, and the upper floor was the Father's living quarters.
I left my coat and boots in the foyer of the church, and rang the small brass bell at the foot of the steep row of stairs to let the Father know he had a visitor. A few moments later, in heavily accented English, he called to me to come up to the sitting room.
Peter Van der Hoven was a man of the North but he made no unnecessary concessions to the North in that room. His sitting room was a little piece of Holland transported into the Arctic.
The focal point of the room was a mock fireplace – this in a world where whale oil is probably the only natural fuel. On the mantle were photographs of the Father's family, and the walls were papered with pictures of people and places thousands of miles away from Inungilak. The room was full of old comfortable furniture, embroidered doilies, and very conventional southern house plants. It was a warm reflection of the Father himself. In contrast to the Father's home, the DEW Line, the nursing station, the government Lab, and all those other southern implants, were reflections of no one person and no particular place. Like the man himself, the Father's sitting room was unabashedly Dutch and dated.
Peter Van der Hoven had been a very young priest when the Oblate Fathers sent him to its mission on Inungilak Island. He had come to the North knowing only the barest rudiments about life in the Arctic – his formal education, such as it was, had been restricted to theology. That had been in 1936. Almost fifty years later the father had acquired a reputation for being an expert archaeologist, an authority on polar bear, and the closest thing to deity in the eastern Arctic. In those intervening years he had also become an institution. To the faithful, he was the protector of the faith; to those bright young radical reformers from the South, he was the decadent relic of the Church; to the generation of young archaeologists he was the recognized authority who existed only to be vaulted over in the almost universal effort to produce major papers from minor criticisms of great men.
The Father didn't have to prove himself to anyone – not in Inungilak. Everyone in the hamlet knew he could hunt, he could fish, he could run a dog team, and he could speak several dialects of Inuktitut with ease. Everyone also knew he had learned to do those things by the winter of 1939 – less than three years after he had arrived in Inungilak. Had he not learned to do those things, he would have been forced to return home an admitted failure. That, of course was inconceivable. Not only was there a world war in progress, but neither the Missionary Oblate Fathers of Mary the Immaculate nor Peter Van der Hoven ever indulged themselves in failure.
The Father was a survivor. Those earlier Kabloona – the Hudson Bay Company managers, the Mounties, and the clergy – had had that much in common. They may, as a group, have been many things, some of them less than admirable, but they had all been survivors.
The Father was so much a part of the North that he could afford to recreate in his home a part of that other world – the world of books and music and doilies. The world of Van Dyke, of Rembrandt, and even, if you walked inside the greenhouse the Father had built behind the church, the wildly verdant world of Van Gogh.
When I arrived that afternoon, Peter Van der Hoven was just finishing his lunch and he offered me some tea. Taking the tea cup in my hand, I made myself comfortable in one of the big overstuffed chairs.
After nearly half a century in the Arctic, Peter Van der Hoven looked like an old man, although, he may have looked old at thirty. He was that kind of man. He looked small and defenseless – the kind of man who would blow away in the breeze. It was only on closer examination that you realized that he was not so very small. The appearance of fragility suggested by his slight stature, wispy beard, and longish white hair was clearly contradicted by his eyes. His eyes were his outstanding feature – bright blue, and alive with a curious combination of godly zeal, human perversity, and the merest hint of deviltry.
The Father had strong opinions on almost everything, and he expressed his opinions freely. There were all sorts of evils in the Father’s universe – the list included television, prohibition, syllabics, government schools, most archaeologists, and all anthropologists. In the South, Peter Van der Hoven would have been identified immediately as an eccentric old man. It was true. He was an eccentric. Any southerner who manages to survive alone in the Arctic was either born an eccentric or acquired eccentricity as a survival mechanism. Very few southerners last more than a year or two in the North. The Father's eccentricity was a necessary concomitant of his calling.
Fortunately, although the Father had become an institution, he had remained throughout the years intransigently human as well. I liked him. I liked the fact that his views on most things hadn't been sanitized to meet the requirements of the Vatican Council, the Inuit, or the government. The Father bowed to no man except perhaps the bishop in Churchill. And that was as it should be because the bishop in Churchill was a man very much like Father van der Hoven himself. The bishop had spent the first fifteen years of his tenure as bishop covering the two million square miles of his diocese by dog sled.
With very good reason, both the Bishop and Father Van der Hoven heartily detested both dogs and dog sleds.
With the cup of tea in my hand and a plate of oatmeal cookies by my side, the Father and I sat down to talk. It was always easy to talk to the Father. The two of us could talk together for hours on end. It seemed strange that, separated as we were by religion, by gender, and by age, we had so much in common. I felt more at ease with Peter Van der Hoven than I did with Welche or even with Phyll. Unlike Phyll, the Father didn't try to improve me. He saw himself as a missionary to the people of Inungilak rather than as a missionary to the people of Brooklyn. And then, too, the Father and I more or less shared a moral perspective. The two of us lived in a world that included God, and Duty, and the Ten Commandments. We lived in a world where things like that were taken very seriously. And we were honest enough to realize who and what we were. Each of us had come to an understanding of our own very real limitations in the North.
Sipping tea, we talked about child rearing patterns among the Inuit. The Father, with rather more relish than was called for, did a hatchet job on Jean Briggs' last paper on the subject. I, out of sheer perversity, praised Jean Briggs to the skies.
There is nothing like a little academic free for all to brighten up one’s day.
Relaxed and enjoying myself, I was almost totally unprepared for the Father's change of tack. “And so, Naomi, why have you come to visit an old man?”
“Do I need a reason, Father Van der Hoven?”
He smiled the benign priestly smile I imagined he reserved for poor liars at confession. “Today is different. There is something on your mind today? Have you come because of the council meeting your colleague has called for tomorrow evening?”
I poked up my eyeglasses. “Partly because of the meeting. And partly because Phyll has decided that it will be necessary to ship the material from the site to Yellowknife – as soon as possible. I wanted you to see the Dorset camp site before the packing starts.”
“Does Miss Allyngham believe the danger to the site is so great?”
I nodded. “The danger is real enough. Someone has been hacking away at one or two of the pits.”
“Perhaps your appeal to the council will help to stop the vandalism.”
I stood up and jammed my hands into my pockets. “On the other hand, we may succeed in alienating the council members even further. The citizens of Inungilak don't have a great deal of use for Kabloona archaeologists.”
“True, but surely there is no need for despair, Naomi. Archaeological sites have been vandalized since the beginning of time. The Pharaohs were scarcely sealed into the pyramids before the grave robbers went to work. And those grave robbers and vandals were the very fathers of our profession.”
“The axe murderer – that's what Phyll calls him – is not in that class.”
“How do you know what those original grave robbers were like? History has given them a patina of romance, but they were probably not a very attractive lot. If a handful of our young people are hacking away at one or two of the sites in search of some ivory or whalebone, I prefer to think of them as budding archaeologists rather than as axe murderers. Clearly, they are displaying rather more initiative than many of their brethren, and initiative is something that is sadly lacking in this hamlet.”
“Maybe so, Father, but surely there are more constructive ways of encouraging initiative. Could you help us at the meeting?”
He shrugged. “I can certainly speak to the council. I don't know how much help I will be to you. If the perpetrators are Catholics, then perhaps my intervention will be for the good. But,” he added with a grin, “There is at least an equal probability that they are Anglicans. In fact, I rather hope that they are Anglicans, in which case my intervention will be quite counter productive.”
I grinned. “Still, you might try instilling a little of the fear of God into the population. After all it seemed to have worked with Mosesie Issaluq.”
“You mean his vision?”
“Yes, Father. The vision which seems to have been pilfered straight from the opening chapters of the Prophet Ezekiel. You must have preached a very rousing sermon that week.”
“You can have no idea, Naomi Solomon, how pleasant it is to have a fellow archaeologist who has actually taken the time to read Scripture. And the Prophet Ezekiel has always been one of Mosesie's favorites.”
I nodded.
“But simply because Mosesie knows the Prophet Ezekiel is no reason to believe that Mosesie's experience was an hallucination. It might have been a genuine divine visitation. Have you considered that possibility?”
“It might. But I think the odds are very much against God having sent an angel to Mosesie Issaluq, and very much more in favor of Mosesie, dead drunk, having hallucinated the whole thing.”
“But again, Naomi, you leap to conclusions. A really rather regrettable habit of the young. Because a man shapes his perceptions of this world into images from the Bible, does not mean that his perceptions are an illusion.”
I smiled. “Of course not. And the current theory among some modern scholars is that the prophet Ezekiel, himself, who thought he was seeing angels, may have been a witness to the landing of a space ship – a talking space ship. Arthur Clark used the same literary device in 2001.”
“You may be right, Naomi. Who knows” The Father shrugged casually – entirely too casually.
“Perhaps Mosesie saw a space ship as well.” I volunteered. “Or maybe Mosesie was just suffering from a very fevered imagination – the fever being the product of the alcohol in his blood. It's a wonder then that he didn't claim to have seen Ezekiel's four living creatures each of them with four faces and four wings of burnished brass.”
The Father sat back in his chair – a look of unholy mischief in his eyes. “The Lord works in strange ways, Naomi Solomon. It is true that poor Mosesie was quite alone when he claimed to have seen the fiery ball dropping from the heavens. We have no confirmation that he saw anything. But Thomas Awa's cousin, and his family, who were passing the same place an hour later, reported seeing four army helicopters dropping divers into the very waters into which the product of Mosesie's imagination is said to have disappeared. Not being partial to the Prophet Ezekiel, Thomas Awa's cousins told me of seeing helicopters and not visions, but somehow I don't think that they would have invented the helicopters or that the men directing the helicopters were themselves the victims of delusions. Thomas Awa's whole family is known for its sobriety.”
Oh ye of little faith.
“What did the divers come up with?” I asked the Father.
“No one knows. Thomasie Awa's people thought it prudent to vacate the area. Generally speaking, the Inuit are a prudent people. In this instance, Mosesie was of course an exception to the rule. But, as I said, God works his wonders in strange ways.”
“Exceedingly strange.”
“Quite so, Naomi.” The Father offered me another oatmeal cookie.
What had the divers come up with? Where had the divers come from? Had Mosesie witnessed a test of ARTHUR? Had he seen ARTHUR itself? Too many questions.
“Speaking of vacating the area, Naomi, I think we must assume that your Miss Allyngham will be very eager to begin crating the Dorset artifacts, and I would like to see the site before it is totally dismantled.”
Kiniktok was not a part of my plans for the immediate future, but I deferred to the Father. “Do you want to go now?”
He checked his watch. “No, it is too late and the light will not be good. Tomorrow early morning would be better.”
I nodded.
“How do you propose we transport ourselves to Kiniktok, Naomi?”
I smiled at him, “I have the trike.”
“Yes, but I am a very old man and my bones are fragile. I prefer either to canoe or to walk. Ten years ago when I began the work at Kiniktok, I was accustomed to walk. The trike, I am convinced, is an invention of the devil – or perhaps even the Anglicans. I have the old church pick-up, but the ride would be bone jarring. So, if you have no objections, I will telephone my friend John Idlout who owns a canoe with a very good, very dependable, motor.”
Wednesday Morning: July 9th
As we rounded the coastline to Kiniktok, Phyll saw the canoe, raised her arm in acknowledgement, and disappeared into the tent. By Inungilak standards, it was a hot summer day and Phyll hadn't been dressed for visiting with priests.
Ten minutes later John Idlout had docked the canoe. John walked off in search of caribou, and the Father, and I started slowly up the beach.
Almost as a matter of routine, I took out my camera and work book, and, as I showed the Father around the Thule sites closest to the water, I started a new roll of film. Nothing significant seemed to have changed except perhaps that some of the debris in one of the Thule sites behind our tent had been shifted. No one had worked that pit in years. I took a shot or two and noted the change in my book.
As I started to lead the Father toward the Thule pit which had been vandalized, Phyll came out to greet us.
Peter Van der Hoven examined the vandalized pit carefully and shook his head with the age old wisdom of the Church. “But why, why would they do it? I suppose there is no accounting for the whims of the young, but surely this is unnecessary.”
“Maybe they think there's ivory,” I suggested tentatively.
Father Van der Hoven disagreed, “If it were the ivory they were after, they would have stolen the artifacts you have already uncovered.”
Phyll nodded. “And that will undoubtedly be their next undertaking, Father Van der Hoven. Yellowknife suggested that we talk to the Hamlet Council tomorrow night. It is probably a purely quixotic gesture, but it may help.”
“What will you say to the council, Miss Allyngham?”
She shrugged, “That Kiniktok represents their own heritage, and that Naomi and I are here to preserve the very pith and essence of Inuit culture.”
The Father smiled. “Just the sort of thing that Lord Elgin said before he carried off the Acropolis to London.”
Phyll swept her hair back and looked directly at the Father, “Had Lord Elgin not taken the marbles to London, the Greeks and Turks would have continued to reduce the greatest art of history to lime for cement. At best, a few enterprising souls would have sold off the Parthenon sculptures, limb by limb – to passing tourists. Lord Elgin has been much maligned.”
“True enough, Miss Allyngham. But he's not very well liked in Greece.”
“No, he isn't. Is that meant as an original observation, Father?”
“Not really. I am too old for original observations, Miss Allyngham. I content myself with traditional wisdom. And you, Miss Allyngham – you who are so much more avant garde than an old priest – will not be very well liked in Inungilak. You may be protecting their heritage, but all they will see is a white woman, of great beauty and of little apparent natural sympathy, who is robbing the graves of their ancestors and carting the remains off to Ottawa.”
She nodded. “It's probably unavoidable, but I have to try, don't I? Perhaps Naomi would be the better choice to speak. She has been working in the community. But, Father, the artifacts are not actually leaving the Territory. They are not going to Ottawa but to Yellowknife. Yellowknife has the museum now, and Yellowknife is still in the Northwest Territories. I thought that is why the government of Canada spent millions on that museum so that Ottawa would not be accused of archaeological piracy.”
“To the people of Inungilak, Yellowknife is no less distant than Ottawa. And remember while Ottawa is a Kabloona town, Yellowknife is an Indian town. The Inuit tolerate the Kabloona. The Indians they detest.”
“Surely that sort of racial conflict has been superseded now that we are the enemy. And we are the enemy, aren't we? First, we came to take their whales, then we came to take their furs, and now we've come to take their oil and mineral resources. What of the newly professed unity of indigenous peoples?” Phyll said. “As I understand it, they dote on each other now – and detest us.”
“Hatred doesn't date that quickly – even among indigenous peoples, Miss Allyngham. The noble savage is found nowhere but in the pages of Rousseau. You know, of course, that every time the Inuit crossed the tree line they were hunted by the Indians and killed. That reservoir of bitterness has not been dissipated.”
“But, Naomi and I are not trying to steal anything from them, and we are not trying to exploit them. At the worst, what leaves Kiniktok will be in a museum where everyone will be able to study it. Meanwhile, there is a vandal doing real damage here. And, bitterness or no bitterness, Naomi and I will do everything we can to protect this site, and that means we will ship the artifacts and bones to Yellowknife. And so, if you don't mind I'll finish packing a crate of Thule artifacts for Yellowknife and meet you at the Dorset site later,” Phyll said as she turned away from us to walk back towards our own campsite.
And the Father and I started to walk slowly up the hill toward the Dorset site, carefully skirting other areas of excavation.
“You know, Naomi,” The Father said, “It is not so easy to offend me. It is, however, very easy to offend my flock. Miss Allyngham is correct. She is not the person who should address the Council – and certainly not in English. Are you able to speak to them in Inuktitut?”
I shook my head. “This is Phyllida's dig not mine. And while I've picked up enough words to be able to know roughly what someone is talking about, I have no real facility with the language.”
We had come to a stop and I bent down to sift through a handful of shale. “Speaking of Inuktitut, Father, have you ever heard the word sitamat used? I couldn't find it in the Mallen dictionary. What does it mean?”
“It means the same as tisamat. It means “four.” It's not in the Mallen dictionary because it's not Inuktitut – it's an Inupiaq usage.”
“It comes from the West?”
He nodded. “Who uses it in Inungilak?”
“I heard Michael Sagvik use it the other night.” I came to my feet brushing off my hands.
“Sagvik? He is said to be from Resolute?”
“Ruthie Ussaq, who should know, says he's from Griese Fiord, and that he attended school in Whale Cove at the Catholic mission school.”
The Father put his hands behind his back, and looked down at the ground. “Ruthie Ussaq believes what she wishes to believe. Michael Sagvik is no Catholic. He came to services once with Ruthie, and he doesn't know the liturgy.”
“It is strange, isn't it Father, for a man to look so very Inuit in his features and be a Kabloonamiutaq?”
He studied me for a moment in his calm unhurried way. “The man is an Inuk. You can tell by the way he walks. It's by the walk that the Inuk and the Indian can recognize each other from hundreds of yards apart. And there are so many Kabloonamiutaq these days, Naomi, that they no longer follow a pattern. But Michael Sagvik is not a good man. He is a corrupting influence in this community.”
I turned to face the Father, “Whom is he corrupting? The Inuit?”
“Not only the Inuit – although the Inuit have as much right to be corrupted as anyone else. Sagvik panders to the DEW Line personnel as well. He brings them into the settlement to sample the flesh pots of Inungilak.”
“Inungilak has fleshpots?”
“To be sure.” And we began walking again. “We are Christians here, but we are not saints, Miss Solomon. And it is not as though Michael Sagvik seduces only the sinners. I have seen him more than once with Dr. William Schmidt who is doing important work on our problem with the Botulinus bacterium. One wonders what such a man can have in common with a Sagvik. Then there are others – younger men. To all appearances respectable young men with vices. But enough of this – I am gossiping like an old woman . Oh my goodness!
We had just arrived at the edge of the pit filled with skeletons.
Stunned, the Father rapidly made the sign of the cross. Almost as automatically I made the sign to ward off the evil eye, and then I took out my camera and work book. Photography had become another way of distancing myself from the bones.
“Is this part of a Dorset site?” The Father asked.
“We think it is. We aren’t certain.”
Phyll rejoined us as I was finishing the role of film.
She watched as the Father bent to pick up and examine one of the skulls. “Do you ask yourself how they died, Father?”
“That and even more what they were like in life, Miss Allyngham.”
She shrugged. “In life I suppose they were only men and women. No more and no less. Subject to all the temptations that flesh is heir to.”
I returned my camera to my back pack. “No,” I said, “These men and women couldn't have been subject to all that many temptations. They were too busy just staying alive. Temptations are something of a luxury.”
“Perhaps, Naomi.” Phyll persisted. “But the question remains – how did they die, and why were so many of them buried in this one place? And so haphazardly?”
The Father's face was set in grim lines. “It is certainly a question that any archaeologist must ask.”
“It could have been a burial ground?” I suggested half heartedly. There is something safe and secure about burial grounds. A grave marks the end of a well ordered life. Archaeologists love graves – their best finds are in graves. But these people hadn't been buried – except perhaps to have been shoveled into the same general area.
Phyll shook her head contemptuously, “It's not a burial ground, Naomi. Surely you realize that much. In any legitimate burial ground all these bones would have been nicely arranged.”
Phyll was right. Not a great deal was known about Dorset burial practices, but archaeologists had turned up some signs of stone vault graves, stone lined pit graves, and small gravel mound graves. This site was not a grave.
Phyll straightened one of the skulls in her hands. “The bones were probably picked clean by the predators before they were even covered. . . All this death could, I suppose, have been the result of some epidemic disease.”
That was almost as unlikely as the burial ground theory. Before the arrival of southerners, there appeared to be very little contagious disease in the Arctic. As a rule, epidemic diseases require relatively high concentrations of people. And like most living things, ordinary disease carrying organisms don't do well in the Arctic. There are some microorganisms like Botulinus that have found an environmental niche in the North, but, for the most part, the microorganisms that attack human beings don't thrive in the Arctic environment. Disease was almost certainly out of the question. It was far more likely that these people had died of starvation and that their bodies had been gathered together by brethren too weak from hunger to attend to proper burials.
It's difficult to imagine a world as naturally harsh as the world inhabited by the Dorset. They starved if the caribou chose that winter to alter course. They starved if the weather warmed up and transportation became impossible. They starved if any of the multitude of animals on which they depended starved. Even at the best of times, life was a very chancy endeavor. Taking a caribou with a spear head was a chancy endeavor. Taking a walrus with a flint harpoon was so chancy as to be near suicidal. But, despite the terrible dangers, the Dorset economy had been based, to a considerable extent, on large sea mammals. It was better to die hunting for food than to wait and starve to death.
Starvation was real. Starvation was the one underlying reality of Arctic life.
The Dorset starved.
The Thule starved.
And, even as late as the nineteen sixties, people near Inungilak died of starvation, and women were known to kill their own children to spare them death by starvation when there was no longer any hope of food.
“But these Dorset didn't just starve,” Phyll explained, lifting one of the skulls and admiring it in the sunlight.
“Look at that, Father.” She said pointing to the cranium. This skull has been crushed in. And so have many of the others and there are any number of broken limbs.”
The Father nodded, “It could have been cannibalism induced by starvation.”
Phyll smiled again. “More likely they were attacked. But by whom? Now that is an interesting question. They could have been victims of aggression – human aggression. This community could have been killed off by a group of Thule? Or there could have been one of those the periodic struggles over women necessitated by the practice of female infanticide?”
The priest looked off in the middle distance. “With the information we have at the moment, there is no way of knowing – is there, Miss Allyngham?”
He was right of course. Archaeology is the piecemeal reconstruction of a puzzle and the archaeologist can never be confident of his reconstruction. No one is alive who can confirm the facts. An archaeologist is expected to reconstruct a culture from a little knowledge of anthropology, and a few fragments – and there were very few fragments to be found near our Dorset site.
“Nevertheless, Miss Allyngham,” the Father persisted, “It is the mystery of their life, not their death, which is important.”
“Not,” she answered, “If we are trying to discover why the whole culture was superseded by the Thule. And, in any case, what will we ever really know about their lives? These people didn't leave much of a record for us, did they?”
The Dorset had, in fact, left us very few artifacts. At Kiniktok, we had uncovered three small carvings, a sled runner, and an iron tool. The small iron burin like tool only tended to confuse the issue. Metallic iron does not normally occur in nature. Iron doesn't belong in the Stone Age, but iron tools do occur in Stone Age cultures. Either the tool had been acquired from a more technologically advanced culture or the tool was made out of meteoric iron that the Dorset had found.
To date no one had discovered great caches of artifacts at any Dorset site. Dorset sculpture is powerful and distinctive but there are very few pieces and they are all small. The Dorset did not produce large artifacts. Even the later Thule culture, from which the modern Inuit evolved, hadn't been much of an artifact creating culture. Inuit art, as we think of it today, is a southern induced phenomenon. In a nomadic culture where all the possessions of the family must be made to fit on a light sled, and where the family is in constant movement, no one is going to haul around heavy soapstone carvings.
Culture is largely a product of life style. And in a culture where basic survival required a people to be constantly nomadic, and where everything one owns and uses must be carried, it would be senseless to haul around soapstone sculptures. These people when they made any artifacts, beyond the most rudimentary of tools, made only very small carvings out of ivory. Dorset art was weighed in grams, and not in kilos.
We had uncovered several such carvings. Phyll brought the Father the best of the them – a three inch high ivory polar bear. The bear was perhaps the most significant single find of the summer thus far – an ivory polar bear with the distinctive geometrical striped patterns of Dorset art.
The Father handed it to me reverently.
It was small, but in my hands it seemed to swell and to grow until it was almost life size. As sculpture, it was extraordinary powerful. The Dorset bear, in the upright position, resembled a human form, but there was nothing human about the spirit of the thing. There was only the suggestion of brute force, of an essentially alien uncompromising essence.
The bear in my hand was silent. Had this bear been a god? An enemy? A totem? Or all three? There was no way of knowing.
With the bear still cupped in my hands, I looked up at the others. “God must have seemed very much like this to the Dorset. Cruel, alien, casually omnipotent, and, still, almost human.”
Phyll lifted an eyebrow. “Is our conception of god really all that different, Naomi? My apologies to the Father, but surely his beneficent and understanding god is as much a luxury as is our western art and philosophy. Either god is cruel and casually omnipotent, or he's merely the opiate of the masses.”
The Father smiled, “Do I hear the voice of Karl Marx, Miss Allyngham?”
Phyll returned the smile, “Most assuredly, Father. Didn't you know that all of us young upper class Englishmen are Marxists – it's the fashion. Although, for myself, I think I prefer the late medieval Catholic god to Marx' opium of the masses. My taste runs more toward the god of Hieronymus Bosch.”
“But that one is notably lacking in reason, Miss Allyngham.”
“True, Father, but so are the vast majority of his human creations. And what Bosch’s god lacks in rationality, he compensates for with that other far more powerful engine of human endeavor – fear. Like that bear, Bosch’s god terrifies mankind into some semblance of civility. Without such an external stimulus to civil conduct, I very much doubt that humanity would have survived as a species.”
“Then, unlike your fellow socialists, you do not believe in the evolution of mankind toward ever higher forms?”
“But I do, Father, I do. I see mankind evolving naturally into ever higher forms of predators, higher forms of murderers, and, quite coincidentally, higher forms of artists and scientists.”
“But not into higher forms of saintliness, Miss Allyngham?”
Phyll turned to me. “Do you believe that we are becoming more saintly, Naomi? Is that what the War meant to your parents in the death camps – an exercise in saintliness?”
The War wasn't something I was willing to discuss with either the Father or with Phyll. I shrugged my shoulders. “I don't know what saintliness is, Phyll.”
“You don't want to be a saint, Naomi?”
“No. It's not one of my ambitions.” I did, however, want to change the subject. “Do you think, Father, that a polar bear or a group of polar bears could have destroyed this community?”
“Perhaps. There are mythic accounts of a single polar bear destroying whole communities of Eskimo. It's not at all implausible. Polar bear, unlike black bear, are not omnivores. Polar bear, like the Inuit themselves, are carnivorous animals. They kill to eat, and they are always attracted to human settlements.”
Phyll nodded. “I came north through Churchill, and in Churchill there were polar bear wandering the streets like tourists at St. Paul's.”
The Father ran a hand slowly through his beard. “Fortunately, today's polar bear prefer to ravage garbage dumps. Unfortunately, these Dorset men and women could not have produced much in the way of garbage, and so the Dorset's polar bear, having a good deal less to choose from and a far more helpless opponent in man, may have preferred to eat the Homo sapien itself rather than its spoor. Remember also that the Dorset must have been totally vulnerable to a bear attack. Every animal in the Arctic, except perhaps for the male walrus and the whale, is virtually defenseless against a polar bear attack.”
Had a polar bear killed these people? Had the survivors of the polar bear attack buried their dead? Were these skeletons even Dorset?
Too many questions.
Half an hour later, the Father and I walked back down to our camp, and I went into the tent to pick up some more film and to pack some clothes. The tent was a square wood frame structure musty with age and simply furnished. Two narrow bunks at the far end – some wooden boxes – books and supplies stacked high near the flap. An invisible line down the middle divided my half from Phyll's. Her books and papers were in perfect order, her bed neatly made, her clothing folded in the closed trunk that served as a work surface. In contrast, my half of the tent was in chaos – there was no order to my papers, books, and clothes. Only the bed seemed to be free of books and papers. I rifled through the boxes and found some clothes and papers which I stuffed into my backpack rather haphazardly.
The Father had waited for me, and together we joined Phyll where she was hammering away at one of her crates.
When John Idlout returned burdened down by the better half of a caribou, the Father asked Phyll if she would like to come into town with us. Somewhat to my surprise she accepted, but asked that we wait while she finished packing the crate. And so the Father and I slowly made our way to the boat where John Idlout was dressing out the game. Phyll joined us within a few minutes, and, together, we returned to Inungilak.