Authors: Melanie McGrath
B
Y
1958, what had begun five years before as a makeshift camp on a lonely outcrop on Ellesmere Island had grown into a more permanent-looking settlement of wooden-framed huts neatly positioned along the beach beside Grise Fiord. The settlement could almost have been any one of the many remote hamlets dotted about Arctic Canada, though no other hamlet in Canada had a backdrop as fearsome as this, no other was more isolated or more northerly, there was no other where survival came at such a high price. Grise Fiord was as far from anywhere as anywhere could be. No one came to the tiny settlement and no one left it. It was a staging post to nowhere, its inhabitants a group of obscure flags fluttering in a forlorn breeze.
It was midsummer, the sun had stirred the damp inside the huts, and most families had moved into canvas tents. The Flahertys were living next door to the Aqiatusuks and losephie Flaherty was back making his living on the land. He had his own dog team now and a
komatik
made from scrap lumber. Otherwise, things were much the same. All the hardships of the earlier years remained: the harshness of the climate, the struggle to hunt and trap, the numbing dark and isolation and the persistent failure of supplies. What
had
changed was that losephie had given up on the promise of a good life and had learned to adapt to what was before him, so that the situation no longer felt like a game he was bound to lose. He could tolerate his
new life only by giving up any dreams he might have had for it. He longed, now, only to be reunited with Mary, and to go home. He and Rynee rarely spoke about Inukjuak and the families they had left behind, nor about Mary or Paddy Aqiatusuk whose absences were acknowledged only in so far as they were understood to be too painful to be named. He and Rynee were talking less and less now about everything. Mostly, Rynee left Josephie alone. His moods had become frightening. Day after day he waited for news from the detachment that they would be returning to Inukjuak, but so far no such news had come. He still had not asked after Mary, too fearful of the response he might get. Instead he brooded, drifting out across the seas of his imagination, where no one else could reach him.
Nineteen fifty-eight became a turning point for the inhabitants of Grise Fiord. On 27 luly of that year, only a few days before ship time, Thomasie Amagoalik rose early from his tent to go out hunting. His two sons, Allie, aged twelve, and Salluviniq, aged nine, were keen to accompany their father but Thomasie did not want his sons holding him up and told the boys to stay in camp. Sometime later that morning, after their father had left, Allie and Salluviniq spotted their cousins, Elisapee Novalinga and Larry Audlaluk, carrying their sculpin lines and hooks. In any ordinary situation the boys might not have bothered with sculpin fish which were as wiry as bunch grass, but luly was a thin month for hunting on Ellesmere and the Amagoaliks were hungry and the children reasoned that if their father returned from his hunt empty-handed, they might at least have some fish soup to eat and so they begged their mother to let them go along with Elisapee and Larry to try their luck.
The Amagoalik boys were not dressed for a day out so Elisapee and Larry agreed to wait while they put on their outdoor clothes. It was a long wait. The boys' mother, Mary Amagoalik, had made her children a new set of caribou trousers and parkas but, at the request of the detachment who liked their “natives” to look their best for the benefit of the visiting Department officials and police officers, she was saving these for ship time. Until the arrival of the C.
D. Howe
,
the two boys would have to manage with their rags, arranging the torn layers in such a way that the holes did not leave parts of their bodies exposed because, even in July, the weather at Grise Fiord was unpredictable. Before they left, their mother reminded them to stay close to the others and come home the moment they felt cold.
The four children made their way across the plateau and along the folds of the cliffs into the fiord. As a precaution, they kept to the ice foot under the rocks, where the ice was ancient and never melted. The plan was to walk to the spot where a little stream emptied out on to the scree. It would lead them to a brackish inlet where sculpin sometimes gathered and where they could cut a hole through the ice and sink their lines. Elisapee and Larry had been to the place many times and knew it well. The weather on this day was fair and the way was unobstructed by meltwater or rockfall, and by mid-morning the children had reached the inlet. There they stayed for a few hours, playing games with bones they found and waiting for the fish to appear, but by the afternoon when they had caught very little and were all beginning to feel hungry and cold, Elisapee suggested they go home. The two Amagoalik boys were not content to return without bringing some fish, however, and made up their minds to go looking elsewhere, so Larry and Elisapee turned back to camp, leaving Allie and Salluviniq to work their way deeper into the fiord.
There was no particular reason to worry. The weather was clear, the children knew the path and polar bears kept away from the fiord during the summer. They often went out for a day at a time collecting heather or hunting for eggs or ptarmigan, so no one in camp thought anything much of it when the two Amagoalik boys failed to return home at the end of the afternoon. It was only as evening set in, with the sun still ablaze, that the children's mother began to get worried and went down to the beach with a telescope to scan the area round the fiord and see if she could see the boys or their tracks. Sometime later a handful of the men in the camp set out to look for the boys while someone else went to alert the police detachment.
The women stayed behind to look after the boys' mother. For what seemed an eternity, they sat and waited. Every so often they thought they heard the yap of a dog coming from inside the fiord, but the sounds became muddled with their thoughts. Time slid by. Suddenly, a lone figure appeared from the direction of the fiord and began trudging along the shale towards them and they hurried out to meet him, their feet bringing up little fountains of stones behind. The news was as bad as they had feared. The body of one of the boys had been found in the water and it looked as though he had fallen through a soft patch in the ice and drowned. He had been dead a while. His brother was still missing.
By the next morning there was still no sign of the missing boy and the men were forced to give up their search so they could hunt for food for their families. In keeping with Inuit custom, Mary Aqia-tusuk burned the clothes which the boys' mother had been saving for the arrival of the C.
D. Howe.
The women cried at the waste of new clothes. It was easier than crying for the boys when the tears shed might never have ended. There it was: Allie and Salluviniq Amagoalik would never see another ship time.
The report of the Grise Fiord police detachment to Henry Larsen in Ottawa in September of that year noted, with regret, that the Amagoalik boys had died “while out playing.” But, like Aqia-tusuk's obituary in
Time
magazine, this was not true. The boys had died while out looking for fish to feed their family.
The deaths of the two boys brought to mind a story the camp had been told by a party of Greenlandic hunters and their families who had passed by Grise Fiord the year before. One of them was an old woman called Padloo. Padloo's father had been among the travellers who had made their way from Baffin Island to Etah in northern Greenland under the leadership of Qillaq. It was a story familiar to most Baffin Islanders but to the Inukjuamiut it was new. After several years' travelling, and just before the party reached Greenland, Qillaq's friend Oqe became disillusioned with the search and decided to return to Baffin, taking twenty-four of his supporters
with him. It was summer, but there was enough ice to sledge and the group turned back at Makinson Inlet on the east coast of Ellesmere Island and began heading south, stopping at Goose and Fram fiords on the southern coast to set up hunting camps to gather a cache for the winter. But high winds followed by bad autumn weather made hunting hard and the people began to go hungry. When the dark period and the cold set in, their meat stores were empty and by the end of the year they had eaten their dogs and their surplus skins and were starving. One by one they began to die.
Of all the travellers, a man called Qimmingajak was the most determined to save himself. Under cover of the perpetual dark he went out collecting the corpses of those who had died. When he and his family had eaten all the dead, Qimmingajak looked about to see whom he could eat next. His first victim was his young brother-in-law, Qallutsiaq. The boy had already eaten all his clothes with the exception of the sealskin boots and trousers his grandmother had given him, and he was in a pitiful state. After Qallutsiaq, killing came easier to Qimmingajak, and before too long, he had murdered everyone in the camp except his wife, Angiliq, and their two sons.
For a while the family lived off the frozen corpses of Qimmin-gajak's victims, but hunger eventually returned. Stringing a cord through the roof of his
qarnaq
and fashioning the loose end into a noose, one day Qimmingajak instructed Angiliq to fix the noose round their elder son's neck. The boy and his mother both protested, but Qimmingajak threatened to kill Angiliq if she refused to do as he commanded and so, after a great deal of crying and shaking Angiliq pushed the rope over her son's head and Qimmingajak tightened it. Then he cut up the body of his son and gave the hands to his wife just as, in happier days, he had presented her with the flippers of a seal.
Now only Angiliq and Qimmingajak and their younger son were left alive. In the hope of saving her remaining child, Angiliq took off hunting. Till then she had never hunted anything much except sea birds, hares and lemmings and there seemed very few of any of these
on Ellesmere Island, but she took off across the sea ice in Jones Sound, checking the
agluit
and begging Sedna, the sea spirit, to send her a fat harp seal. All night she walked and waited and towards dawn she put her testing feather in one last
aglu.
Within minutes, the feather moved with the breath of the creature beneath it, and Angiliq raised her harpoon and brought up a small struggling seal. Angiliq whooped for joy and, half running, half stumbling, dragged the animal behind her to camp. When she reached the
qarnaq
she crushed a little of the seal's fat to light a fire and in the low flame of the
qulliq
she suddenly saw Qimmingajak sitting in a corner watching her. It was then she knew it was too late. Her younger boy was dead and his father had already begun to eat his body.
Spring came and the sea melted into blue, Padloo said, but a
tuurngaaluk
, an evil spirit, had taken over Qimmingajak and he no longer even tried to hunt. Knowing who her husband's next victim would be, Angiliq went out to sea in Qimmingajak's
kayak
looking for walrus. She knew what she was doing was dangerous but she had nothing to lose, so she paddled round the sound, searching for signs of life. After many hours, she saw a ship in the distance, and, racing back to camp, she began to pile the clothing of the dead into a huge mound before setting it on fire to make a beacon. Spotting the smoke, the captain of the whaler sent his ship's skiff to investigate. He picked up the survivors and dropped the pair at Pond Inlet on Baffin Island from where they wandered into a nearby camp at Igar-juaq. The people there offered them
muktuk
and polar bear meat. Angiliq ate the meat but Qimmingajak refused and was later seen inspecting an area of graves. He did not live long in Igarjuaq. Some said Angiliq killed him, others said it was a relative of one of the bodies he had scavenged. No one knew what had become of the
tuurngaaluk
which had occupied Qimmingajak and given him his terrible taste for human blood, but it was possible, Padloo said, that the
tuurngaaluk
of Fram Fiord remained there, waiting for its next victim.
A rumour began that the spirits did not want the Inuit on Ellesmere
Island. Something bad had happened to every group of Inuit who had ever camped there. The deaths of the Amagoalik boys were just two in a series which stretched back past Paddy Aqiatusuk and Special Constable Kakto and his wife, Ooarloo's two children, to Oqe's followers and the Thule themselves. The Inuit did not want to be in a place which so manifestly did not welcome them. They needed to get back home. But how?
Lust over a month after the boys' death, a faint pucker appeared on the horizon, as if someone had pinched two clouds together. The lookout let off two rifle shots to warn the camp that the C.
D. Howe
was on her way towards them and the camp Inuit changed into their best clothes and came down on to the beach to wait, speaking excitedly, as they always did, about who and what the ship might bring, and for a moment they forgot their sadness.
The detachment store had run out of most of the things they needed. For a few heady weeks after the ship's departure those who had the credits would be able to get their hands on all the staples plus such wonderful luxuries as currants, tobacco, sugar and even cookies. After months of living on nothing but polar bear and seal meat, and little enough of that, families looked foward to enjoying some currant bannock and sweet tea. The ship was also bringing the previous year's special orders for those families who had had particular luck in trapping and had managed to tuck away enough credits for a sewing machine, a gramophone or a set of new needles. There were not many special orders at Grise Fiord but the few there were had been eagerly anticipated and when they finally arrived it felt like a sudden fall of rain in the midst of drought.
This year, as usual, there was also the hope that the C.
D. Howe
would be returning relatives from southern sanatoria, newly cured and brimful of tales about the crowds and mayhem south of the tree line. The families were not told whether or not their relatives were on board ship, so the first they would know about it would be when their missing son or mother appeared on deck. By 1958, the Flaher-tys were not the only family who had lost a relative to the south and
for all those who had, the interval between the ship's announcement and the opening of the passenger quarters seemed interminable, as full of anxiety as anticipation. For three long years the Flahertys had clung to the hope that Mary would be on the next supply ship. But she never had been and they had had no word from her.