Chapter 15 ~ God’s Pocket
The two boats which arrived in Fort Chimo on the night of July 21st, were in the charge of Max Budgell, a man born and bred on Labrador. He was the first skipper North that season, navigating the dangerous coast by day and anchoring in the sanctuary of its harbours each night, in the Eskimo way of travel. The ice was still lying thickly about the coast and could have foundered either of the small boats, barely forty feet long with a beam of twelve feet. They weighed just over thirteen tons apiece and were stoutly built in Newfoundland by shipwrights who well knew how to combat the storms of the North West Atlantic fishing grounds.
The journey down the Labrador Coast had not been without incident. One crew member, who had fallen overboard twice and survived immersion in the ice-cold water, described the trip as “a hairy voyage.” Max Budgell was nonchalant and minimised the hazards of navigating a small boat through ice fields with a wave of his pungent pipe and the comment “it’s fine, as long as you know where to anchor at night.” He was a calmly energetic man, who first demonstrated his singular resolution shortly after the outbreak of World War II.
He was living in Davis Inlet, Labrador – home of the Naskapi Indians – when he made up his mind to join the army. It was winter, and there was no hope before summer of transport to a recruiting office, so instead of waiting for the ice to break up, he set off overland with a band of Naskapi Indians, to Seven Islands on the shore of the St. Lawrence River.
Their supply of flour lasted for about a month, and from then until the end of their journey three months later, they lived off the land, fishing for suckers and Whitefish in lakes and rivers, eating berries and hunting for bear in the forests.
They travelled over the watershed of Labrador’s coast, crossed the mountain divide and by the time they reached Seven Islands, they had walked and paddled canoes more than twelve hundred miles. There were days when they had nothing to eat. At one time, five days passed with only water to drink and their fast was broken only when they killed a black bear.
Living off the land meant they had to build shelter where they could find it. The worst part of the journey, according to Max, was crossing wide lakes in open canoes, kneeling in the bottom of the boat, soaked to the skin, stiff with cold and knowing you were unlikely to get dry for days in the swampy forests.
When the bedraggled party reached Seven Islands, Max was honoured by the Indians in a way seldom afforded a white man. The Chief of the Naskapis adopted him as a son of the tribe, but the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had different ideas.
They treated him as an alien and clapped Max into jail.
As Max explained to me: “Labrador was part of Newfoundland which was still a Crown Colony in 1940, and not a part of Canada. Newfoundland was a ‘foreign country’ but an ally, I hope.” And because he had entered Quebec illegally, through the backwoods, he was arrested. The RCMP were apologetic to Max about his imprisonment and softened the seeming Canadian hostility when they said, “A hotel would cost you a lot of money. We can feed you free.”
Any jail with regular mealtimes would have suited Max, so he accepted their apologies and his spell in jail philosophically. Facilities did not include a kitchen on the prison premises, so three times a day he was escorted to the home of a genial French Canadian woman, who was an excellent cook.
“She‘d put the plate on the table, and then stand back amazed to watch me eat,” said Max. “I just wolfed my food you see. I’d been in hungry country. Very hungry country.”
When formalities were over and his Newfoundland identity established, Max was released from jail and allowed to join the Canadian Army. Few men could have gone through more discomfort to join up. Max soon went overseas to the United Kingdom, served to the end of the war and married an English girl from a quiet country town and took her home to Labrador.
After thirteen years on the coast, working as a fisheries officer, he moved to the federal government’s Department of Northern Affairs and began one of the most vigorous careers anyone followed giving practical help to Eskimos in the Eastern Arctic.
He helped them to organise whale hunts in Hudson Bay, and taught them how to can the surplus meat to see them through hungry winters; he made nets to help aging Eskimos catch seals in the dangerous waters round Port Burwell; he set up a cod salting industry for times of hunger in Ungava; and he was a prime helper in forming the first Eskimo co-operative in Ungava Bay, teaching the people to trade amongst themselves, to operate a char fishery, a sewing industry and to manage their own trading post at Port Burwell – the first store of their own the Eastern Arctic Eskimos had ever known.
He helped cut and float logs from high up George River and established a little sawmill in barren Northern Quebec and above all he helped the Eskimos to market sealskins through their own co-operative instead of through the Hudson’s Bay Company which in bad years had paid the impoverished people as little as fifty cents for a seal skin. (I learned later that the Eskimo co-operative fur marketing coincided with a resurgence in the popularity of sealskin coats and the different types of skins began to fetch unbelievably high prices – seven dollars, fourteen dollars, twenty dollars and even up to thirty-three dollars for one top quality skin.
When I met Max, he was helping to found the first Eskimo co-operative in Ungava Bay.
We saw little of him during the days following his arrival in Fort Chimo. The planes were kept busy and fully loaded and Rosemary and I gave up hope of ever reaching Port Burwell and resigned ourselves to returning to Frobisher Bay where we would wait for a flight to Cape Dorset. Instead, with a fast developing flexibility, we changed plans one night at almost midnight.
We were preparing for bed when Mrs. Dodds rushed in to our sleeping place to ask if we wanted to join Max Budgell’s boat when he went to Port Burwell. He was leaving in the morning and was willing to take us with him.
The prospect was almost too good to be true. It meant we would be able to cover the stories we had hoped to get – the women sewers of Port Burwell; the first Eskimo Co-operative; and we would see Bill Larmour again, the handcraft development officer, taking the Arts to the tundra, and added to all that was the prospect of spending more time with Max Budgell who seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of humour and Arctic legends.
We rolled out of our sleeping bags and went with Mrs. Dodds to her house where she was still baking bread, ready for Max to take with him on the boat trip to Port Burwell. When the supply of loaves ran out, Max would have to return to the northerners staple diet – bannock. He said he wanted to postpone the moment as long as possible.
While waiting for the bread to cook, Mrs. Dodds showed us some artifacts given to her by an old Eskimo lady in Baker Lake. There was a caribou leather bag, full of very white caribou teeth, boiled as clean as pebbles. They clicked together like the balls on a roulette wheel as she shook them from the bag on to the coffee table. The teeth had three fanged roots; two roots and there was one baby tooth. A game was played by picking up two or three teeth at a time without looking. The one who picked up most three rooted teeth won; or you could scramble and search for the baby teeth and the finder was winner.
Of the caribou, from which the teeth came, nothing had gone to waste. The dogs had been fed with the lungs, liver, and inferior portions of meat, such as the tenderloin, which the Eskimos rejected when there was plenty of game. The heart and kidneys, marrow bones and bulk of the meat and fat were used for food; in winter, caribou tallow was used for lighting the houses of caribou eating Eskimos; the sinews were used for sewing; the skins for sleeping robes and the bones and antlers were used, as they still are in some communities, for tools or tool handles.
Among the old tools Mrs. Dodds showed us was a skin scraper made from a shoulder blade and a snow knife carved from bone. It had been used to cut snow blocks for generations of Eskimos. Now it was a curio to show visitors, its span of usefulness ended and the snow houses it had been used to make were a rarity. The Padliermuit people from whom it came had been dispersed and the caribou herds had gone. The woman who gave the treasures to Mrs. Dodds also gave her a pair of Eskimo sun goggles. They had belonged to her grandmother when she was a child.
They were made from a piece of wood, about eight inches long, hollowed out like a canoe, then shaped to fit over the bridge of the nose and cheekbones. Two slits pierced the wood to correspond with the spacing of the wearer’s eyes. The wood had to be at least a quarter of an inch thick at the eye slits to effectively protect the wearer from snow blindness, and the inner surface was blackened with soot from an oil lamp. The goggles served to subdue the glare of brilliant sunlight on the unshadowed Arctic snows.
At Mrs. Dodds. request, I left behind my white snow smock that night. She wished to use it as a pattern for the women sewers of Chimo while I was in Port Burwell. The garment was basically an ordinary parka, pulled on over the head like a sweater, but it had an unusually comfortable hood and four commodious pockets, the envy of fellow travelers, but a bit of a bane to me because I constantly was asked to carry other people’s odds and ends and I could seldom find my own things without turning out all four pockets.
For some reason I did not properly understand, Eskimo parkas had no pockets. Perhaps it was because they had few extraneous possessions. Tools would be carried on their sleds or in their boats, and necessary items were often carried in either the hood of their parkas or in the legs of their sealskin boots. Pocket handkerchiefs, of course, were an unnecessary refinement. Noses were blown straight on to the ground with a finger on first one nostril and then on the other.
When I returned to Chimo after the Port Burwell trip, I had to examine my parka minutely before I could tell the garment had been taken completely apart and sewn together again by the Eskimos.
They had used the pieces for a pattern and my war-surplus snow smock had set a new fashion. Parkas were growing pockets in Fort Chimo. As we left Mrs. Dodds to return to our bedrolls, she gave me two caribou teeth for luck on the boat trip with Max. Ungava Bay had a bad reputation and the entrance to Hudson Strait where our destination lay had a worse one, and though I am not very superstitious, I slept with the teeth under my sleeping bag, just in case.
We started the two-hundred-mile journey to Port Burwell in Max Budgell’s long liner on Sunday morning, July 24. It was a fine day with a high blue sky, full of flies extracting their own blood transfusions from every exposed section of skin as we helped to load up supplies. At last, everything was stowed aboard, the barrel of salt pork was to starboard and the salt beef was to port. The deck was a litter of oil drums, coils of rope, tea kettles, water keg, lanterns, fishing nets. rucksacks, pans, oars, floats and a red fire bucket brightening up the roof of the wheelhouse.
By some trick of light, the whole paraphernalia contrived to look shipshape. As Max described it: “She’s packed like a small suitcase for a long trip.”
Rosemary and I were given the stateroom, which was the tiny fo’c’sle, and we stowed our cameras and recording equipment inside our bedroll and settled down into shipboard routine for the journey, which was likely to last at least two full days.
We made a brief call at the HBC store on the East Bank, where Max bought tobacco, his patent tranquillizer, and Rosemary and I bought chocolate and yo-yos for the Eskimo children at Port Burwell, and cheese and sunglasses for ourselves. Then on a receding tide and a strong current we sped down the Koksoak River towards Ungava Bay. Not a trace of cloud shadowed the sky, and Rosemary looked up and said, “I bet we’re the luckiest girls in Canada today.”
Apart from ourselves, the other people on board were Max Budgell; Joseph and Bobby Annanak, the two Eskimo pilots; an Eskimo family of six with their dog team of eight huskies; and a new member of the expedition, Paul Dubois, a shy French Canadian diesel engineer from Montreal. He had come in by plane to Fort Chimo and he was to install the engine of the refrigerator at Port Burwell, the basis of Ungava’s second char fishery. His job was to rig the motors, stay with them until they had run for twenty-four hours without trouble and then return to Montreal.
He was said to cost the co-operative fifty dollars a day, which explained why there was no resident diesel engineer to service the char fisheries’ refrigerators in Ungava. Paul, of course, did not receive fifty dollars daily.
Even with Paul Dubois to attend the engines, the success of Port Burwell as a fishing station was not a certainty by any means. Max explained to me the people were growing old at Burwell, the waters were dangerous. Young men were needed for the fishing. On the way down Ungava Bay to Fort Chimo, before we had met him, he had spread the word among a few Eskimos he had met, telling them he would return in several days time and he wanted people for the fishing- grounds. He would take anyone who wanted to go, including their dogs. For Max, taking dogs was an enormous concession. But for the success of the new co-operative, he said he was prepared to make some sacrifices. His sacrifice proved to be on a far larger scale than he had feared. We followed the tide down river, high water mark showing like a yellow fringe on the wet rocks, until we neared the pincer-tip headlands at the river mouth.
Just before we entered Ungava Bay, the pilots sighted a whaleboat and Max told them to change direction towards it. “We need people at Burwell and if they’ve got a boat, all the better,” he said. The pilots followed the whaleboat beyond a reef into a small harbor. Two Peterheads bobbed at anchor and several canoes lay on the shore but there was no sign of any tents.
Suddenly, over the bare headland and down the cliff a tribe of Eskimo people poured, stark against the skyline, their parka hoods in sharp relief against the light.
They carried babies and tea kettles, rolled tents and caribou skins. The women had bannocks for the trip and rolls of sealskin to make boots for the fishermen. They surged to the shore. Men carried rifles and ammunition to hunt seal again; children carried driftwood to light fires and they clambered into the canoes and streamed towards us as the Israelites must have entered the promised land.
Five men packed into a reckless looking outboard motor boat, crouched forward like Indians in a war canoe, with their rifles tucked under the right armpits, and advanced on an old whaleboat which looked decrepit enough to sink. They climbed aboard it and maneuvered alongside our longliner. Canoes pressed round us and we helped to haul aboard a score of yelping dogs that howled and squealed as they fought for deck space. About thirty men, women and children climbed up and laid claim to the hold. Max said, “If the department of transport could see us now, they’d never let us go to sea.”
The men in the whaleboat said they would go to Port Burwell too, and it fell in behind us and hoisted a thin, brown sail. They would never have kept up with the stout longliner, so Max flung them a rope end took them in tow. Our diesel engine spurted and settled into a steady chug, bound for Burwell and the fishing grounds.
As we picked our way through the reef, Max saw the expression on my face and said “Don’t worry. You’re as safe on board this, as if you were in God’s pocket.”
With the Eskimo families in the hold, the dogs on deck and the fo’c’sle given over to Rosemary and me, Max and the diesel enginer, Paul Dubois, shared the bowels of the ship and slept alongside the propellor shaft. It was a tight fit as the headroom could not have been more than eighteen inches high and they had to worm their way along the boards to stretch out. Rosemary and I slept on the wooden seat-cupboards that ran the length of the fo’c’sle; and the Eskimos bundled together snugly in caribou skins. “They’re very sociable people and they like to get together,” said Max, “Some of them sleep twenty to a house.” We were very crowded with more than thirty people on board and there was only one barrel of fresh water, so tea was rationed, and so was washing.
Max lit fires in the wooden ship with an abandon that would have scared a fire marshal out of his wits. Some Eskimos in the hold had a two burner camp stove and we had a small coal-burning stove in the corner of the fo’c’sle. Because it had room for only one pan on top, meals consisted of monster stews or giant fry ups. One family shared our stove to make tea, but for the two days at sea, they subsisted on their own food which was a miserable, inadequate diet of bannock made from white flour. The two Eskimo pilots shared our meals and though we wanted to do something for the other people, the ship’s stores would have lasted for no more than a couple of days if we had supplied them too.
The dogs did not get fed on board ship and one poor brute discovered the salt pork barrel. His howls of delight brought the pack of dogs upon it like vultures to a carcass. Yelping and shrieking, they hurled themselves on to the food.
“My salt pork,” Max shouted, every inch a Newfoundlander who loved pork scraps with his salt cod.
The Eskimos on deck laid into the dogs with fists and feet. Under the hail of blows the dogs withdrew, except for one starved animal whose shrunken sides became wedged between the ship’s dory and the pork barrel, unable to escape.
Two men hoisted the barrel of pork on to the fo’c’sle roof and one of the women hauled on the dog’s harness and shook it. There was one final grunt and the dog lay still beneath the shadow of the dory. The big pads were seamed with old cracks, its claws blunted by its work in the recent spring. His dog’s life was over. The suddenness of the animal’s death and the pathetic condition of its feet were disturbing. I said as much to Max, and he explained, “When the snow melts in spring, the dogs still keep going all day, although their feet nearly soak apart. They have little sealskin boots made for them, with holes cut through for their claws so they can still get a grip on the snow and ice, but it’s impossible for the most careful owner to stop their feet from splitting.” Although the Eskimos depended almost entirely on their dog teams for winter transport, we saw no tinge of kindness or sentiment in their treatment of them in summer. With the warmer weather, the dogs looked anything but noble beasts.
Their coats thinned out and hung about them like matted wool. They cringed at the approach of human beings and if you stooped to tie a bootlace they ran away because they were so used to being stoned. They were fed occasionally and ate human excrement in lieu of starvation, so camp sites were kept quite tidy in that respect when dogs were about.
Max professed to dislike dogs but admitted in the intimacy induced by an Irish stew dinner, in the fo’c’sle, that he had once owned a husky. It was such a sorry spectacle when he first saw it that he traded a tea kettle for it, put it in a shed full of seal meat and left it alone for three days. When it staggered out, round and full, it was a dog of the finest kind and never looked back. Then, after a compliment about the dinner, Max picked his way distastefully through the dogs on deck and returned to the wheelhouse.
To the north, where the edge of the sky met the sea, the horizon was lightened by a pale stripe of light. It was “ice-blink” caused through the reflection of light on the ice still lying up the bay towards Hudson Strait.
Astern, the whaleboat with its brown sail filled by the breeze, carved two white ostrich plumes with her bow from the sea. Her rakish lines and canvas were crisp against a glorious sunset that stained the sea and sky flame, yellow and dusky purple. To the south, a lone star poised over the darkening land and traced a faint pathway across the water. Ahead, the sky and sea was cleft by a line of white ice floes and as we neared the approach to our anchorage, the Eskimo pilots, Josephee and Bobby Annanak changed places at the wheel.
Rosemary and I bedded down for the night in the fo’c’sle. There was no room for inflated air mattresses, so we stretched out on the wooden seats with our heads to the prow. Through the hatch, I watched a star weave to and from above the masthead as we altered course constantly passing through the ice floes. The pilots cast off the whaleboat and left her to make her own way to the anchorage. Her weight would have made the longliner’s steering too heavy. Lying against the planking, I could feel the boat shudder as she struck and scraped small pieces of ice. With every alteration of speed my mind jerked awake with little twinges of apprehension. Ice chunks rolled and rattled from my head to my toes on the other side of the planking, I could feel them through the ship’s timbers.
At about midnight, the engine stopped and I heard soft footsteps across the deck, then a great splash as Max found bottom with his anchor. The night fell quiet and I nestled down into my sleeping bag and swung out to sleep, at peace for the night.
