Chapter 13 ~ Clochemerle-by-the-Sea
Mid-July is not a hot season in Ungava Bay. Fog is fairly common and the mists and drizzle soon wrapped themselves round our small camp by the sea shore.
I dressed going to bed in two woolen vests, an angora wool sweater, nylon tights, long woolen underpants under a pair of flannel pajamas, a balaclava helmet and round my middle I wrapped a small blanket carried all the way by Rosemary, who insisted the cotton flannelette sheet she had was just as warm. My pillow was the folded hood of my parka and my sleeping bag of quilted eider down was sheer pleasure to get into.
Once in, I buried my head and waited for some warmth to generate and send me to sleep, and though I wore a pair of Harris tweed socks my feet still felt cold. Fatigue always won, and I would drop off, still chilly and sleep surprisingly well.
Getting up was hard work. I was never as eager to greet the damp mornings as I was to surrender to the nights. In the morning, the cocoon of warmth sapped all initiative. I steeled myself to pull back the flap of my sleeping bag and peer round the tent, flooded with a light that glowed through the wet, white canvas, making the grey morning outside seem brilliant. Firm willed, I withdrew from my eiderdown chrysalis and went to collect washing water from a stream close by. The first days at George River were disappointingly grey. Grey sea, grey sky and grey mist shrouded the dome of visibility. The chill penetrated with clammy fingers, saturated the tent and laid a cold pall that I found inescapable despite wearing full regalia.
The local plumbing was done by Keith Crowe, Bachelor of Arts, who was able to turn his hand to any task. The stream was effectively dammed with a sheet of plastic material, so there was always enough deep water to dip a bucket for washing either fish or oneself. He had also built a splendid, sturdy communal lavatory from driftwood timbers and hessian – more a necessity than a luxury in treeless country and it earned George River freezer site the name of Clochemerle-by-the-Sea.
Monday, July 18, found us working, wearing every scrap of clothing we possessed, except for our waterproofs, My fingers were so numbed with damp cold that it was with the greatest discomfort I punched the keys of my typewriter. Unable to take photographs in the drizzle and fog, Rosemary sat fully dressed inside her sleeping bag writing up her journal when Mr. Crowe came into the office tent. He sniffed the air and insisted in rigging up a stove for us, improvised from a biscuit tin and a length of stove piping, A stove meant we had to gather driftwood from the shore – there being no other source of fuel on the unyielding land.
Pleased to have some purposeful physical activity, we donned our waterproofs, gathered two wet sacks and set off along the beach, gleaning driftwood sticks from high water mark. Stooping and searching for the meagre twigs, many of them only a few inches long, I felt basic and primitive and wondered if this was how my Ice Age forbearers felt when they went faggotting, and did they feel as joyful as I did when they came upon a branch of a tree, fully three feet long. I felt uncomfortable and cold, because it was tedious work in the rain, and I dreamed of a roaring fire in some farmhouse hearth at home in England, but even as I imagined the crackle of flames I knew I would not have changed places with anyone in the world, wet and soggy as I was.
Early in the afternoon, the light brightened through the white wall of our tent, where we were coaxing our wet twigs to smoulder in the biscuit tin stove, when Mr. Crowe called and asked us to join him and the young Eskimo boatmen in a trip to the fishing camps.
Warmly clad, we set off in two of the flat bottomed boats used for the fish collection – “not too good in rough weather, but handy for beaching,” according to Mr. Crowe.
The tide was rising as we left the bay. The little floeberg remained on shore, pert, blue and shrinking imperceptibly. Over the swishing of the waves in the sand and the sputtering of the outboard motors, the diesel engine of the freezer throbbed steadily, an audible assurance of George River’s prospects, its hope for the future.
The Eskimo boys were in their early teens, but they handled the boats with complete confidence and took us at full speed to the islands. Our wake curved, whitened then vanished into the swirling grey water as we headed into Ungava Bay.
We passed an island where Eskimo dog teams were marooned for the summer. As we neared them, they set up a high howling and raced to the edge of the rocks and into the water, thinking we had called for them. Mr. Crowe refused to have them at the freezer site, mainly because of the fish. He could risk no fouling or filching of the hard won catch. Also, the womenfolk who cleaned the fish had the youngest children and babies with them and hungry dogs would have been a hazard. (Three children were killed by huskies in Hudson Strait that summer, we learned later.)
After half an hour running at full speed, the boats reached a barren island of pink rock. Eskimo people ran down to meet us and asked Mr. Crowe to go at once to a tent where Elijah, one of the fishermen had pains in his stomach.
His white canvas tent was pitched in the hollow shelter of bare boulders. Smoke curled from a stove pipe and inside, Elijah sat on an old caribou skin, crouched near the fire. His arms ’were tight around his midriff and he tried to smile at us, but obviously he was in pain.
He talked to Mr. Crowe in Eskimo for a while, then the young Yorkshireman stood up and said, “It’s hard to know what it is. They eat so much raw fish here that they get infested with colonies of worms. He might have a mild rupture or colic.” He also feared the fisherman might have appendicitis, so he suggested the Eskimo go in to the freezer site for a while where an eye could be kept on him and where the radio transmitter could be useful immediately, if an emergency arose. The nearest doctor was hundreds of miles away, and a journey to hospital would need bringing in a seaplane from Fort Chimo, nearly a hundred and fifty miles distant.
We went back to the shore where Rosemary filmed the men taking char from their nets. Some men came in with driftwood roped athwart their canoes, gathered from rocky islets nearby. It would serve as their light and warmth at night on the fishing grounds, unless they should be lucky enough to get a seal for its blubber, but seals were not as plentiful in lower Ungava Bay as they used to be.
One of the men who arrived with a load of driftwood was Stan Annanak; the camp comic, who dashed about the rocks with a cod fish in one hand and a very dead Arctic hare in the other. He had chased and caught it on one of the islands and though it was lean and scraggy, it had back legs on it “like a kangaroo” and reminded me of a friend who served in the army on the Labrador Coast early in World War II, before the United States was attacked by Japan, and when northern camps were primitive indeed. Going across the snow one day, he found an Arctic hare half dead with cold. Being an animal lover, he put it inside his parka to take back to camp but as it warmed up it revived and nearly kicked his ribs in with its back legs, so he opened his coat and had to let it go.
Like many Ungava Bay Eskimos, Stan Annanak had grey eyes, inherited from some white man, probably a whaler who went to Hudson Strait generations ago, and who, like hundreds of white men in the North neither knew nor cared for the life he had conceived and left behind when he returned to some kinder, southern land.
The whalers begat some stout hearted souls in Ungava Bay, some of the most tenacious Eskimos in the Arctic, who have been alternately favoured and neglected by traders and missionaries and until recently seldom, if ever educated by an indifferent government. It was this few score of men who operated the char fishery under the direction of Keith Crowe.
They were divided into four camps, Kaeleroclik; Kaura; Katatu; and Kapeetata. Grey eyed Stan Annanak was in the outermost camp to the West of George River, probably the most barren of the four camps where the men lived almost entirely off fish, tea and tobacco.
Their lives followed the tide cycle; at low water they set their fifty yard long nets at right angles to the shore and when the tide had risen and fallen again (about thirty two feet in a spring tide) they disentangled the Arctic char from the meshes, took them ashore and gutted each fish. The entrails were fed to the dogs, thus serving two ends – keeping the campsites clean and satisfying the voracious appetites of the huskies .
The fish was put into boxes and ferried up to twenty miles to the freezer, where it received immaculate cleansing before being frozen. Strict watch was kept on the number taken for fear of over-fishing the waters and destroying the industry. Two French Canadian fishery scientists kept a survey of the size and weight of the catch and presuming we were ignorant of the French language they would jest in Gallic fashion about the fishes’ reproductive organs. Char grow very slowly in the cold Arctic waters – the increase in size occurring almost entirely in the brief summer. It takes them twenty years to reach full growth of about twenty-six inches, when they weigh about seven pounds and are one of the most sporting fish to be taken on a rod and line.
The George River char, Salvelinus Alpinus, were “sea run char” which spent the winters dormant in fresh water, lying in protective slime on the bottom of lakes up river. When the ice on the rivers broke up and was washed down to the sea, the char followed, except for those which were under six years. They remained in the lakes eating insects. The char in salt water would feed intensively for three months and then fight their way back up river to the fresh water spawning grounds – their bellies bright Vermillion red and their flesh bright salmon pink and excellent to eat.
It was early evening when we left the fishing grounds and returned to our tents at George River. The two flat bottomed boats swept inshore together, neared the beach and the helmsmen cut their engines. The silence was complete on the lonely northern shore.
“The freezer. The freezer’s stopped,” Keith Crowe shouted and ran hard up the sands.
In our absence, the motors had broken down. The fans no longer extracted air from the flash freezer. The fishery on which the Eskimos’ future depended was in jeopardy, and there was no engineer at George River. Fortunately, the regular evening radio link-up with Fort Chimo was due within an hour and Keith Crowe sent out an S.O.S. for a new pump and spare parts. The radio crackled violently through too much interference and the only message we could hear was to “try again at nine o’clock.” An hour later, a storm was blowing up. Rain spattered on the canvas roof and a gust of wind swirled in as Mr. Crowe came into the tent again to raise Fort Chimo on the transmitter. He made contact, but reception was hopeless and he could only repeat over and over his call for help, trusting to luck that reception at the other end was better. Then he returned to the freezer hut and he and seventeen-year-old Willie Annanak worked for hours in the streaming rain, sucking fuel through the feed pipes until they were sickened. From time to time the engine burst into life.
I put on my sou’wester and cape and went over to see how they were getting along. They were crouched round the oily pumps, black oilskins gleaming wet in the light of handlamps, their faces white and anxious and the temperature in the freezer growing warmer as each hour passed.
“I might lose the fish in the flash freezer, but I can hold the stock in the deep freeze for a day or two and that will give time for a plane to get in, if the weather isn’t too rough,” said Mr. Crowe. At one o’clock in the morning, he tried again to raise Fort Chimo on the radio. As the receiver crackled there was a sudden roar of the fans as the diesel engine shattered the quiet of the night outside. Willie had coaxed the motor into life and for the rest of the night he and Keith Crowe nursed the motors into sporadic outbursts. A strong wind blustered about the tent when I finally dozed off and it seemed unlikely a plane would be able to come in, even if Chimo had heard the message for help.
As I drifted between sleeping and waking, I became aware of the high powered revving of a seaplane engine. It was dawn. I leaped out of bed, pulled on my boots and dashed out. The Norseman was taxying into the bay and when the door swung open, Phil Lariviere the bush pilot emerged wearing his bright yellow gloves and a new variety of footwear – a pair of baseball boots. He had with him a maintenance engineer and spare parts for the engine.
I wondered how he had landed on the waves and he explained the bay had been far too rough to land on, so he put down five miles up George River and taxied all the way downstream into the bay.
Within half an hour the engineer had rigged up a new fuel pump and the freezer was purring again. The stock was saved, and provided there was no further catastrophe, Arctic char from Ungava Bay would be on menus in deluxe hotels in the following winter, to stimulate the appetites of an indifferent public, already well fed.
Later that day, we left George River. In the few days we spent amongst them we had grown to care deeply what happened to the people on the lonely shores and we prayed for their success. Tom Annanak arrived as we were about to leave and he offered to take me with some of the baggage out to the seaplane.
It had no shield against the weather and it was up to the gunwhales with heavy kit so that it looked ready to founder. Tom was scowling as the heavy swell threatened to pour over us, and Stan Annanak, the comic, got a bad ducking in the bow as we bucked a bad sea. As we came alongside the seaplane I leaped for the pontoon and the men handed up the kitbags. When everything was aboard the plane, Stan gave a cavalier wave and nearly toppled over the side. Tom Annanak held out his big, warm hand and shook mine, squinted into the light dancing on the waves and rewarded me with a broad, brown toothed smile that lightened up his countenance, and he said, “Aksuni, Nakomik,” which was Eskimo for Goodbye and Thank you.
Lariviere headed for the open sea and we thundered off, thudding over the wave tops and after a shuddering haul we took to the air as heavy as lead. Behind us, we left Keith Crowe, patient, unrested, waiting for the next tide and the next load of fish, I thought no finer person could serve the people of George River – unless he happened to be a diesel engineer.
As we flew on to Fort Chimo, the waters of Ungava Bay were a lame tapestry of blue, shimmering with light. The islands looked like mounds of boiling toffee in their desolation. Here and there was a mixture of rocks, moss, seaweed and sand. The process of rock disintegration was clear to see. Lichens began the cycle of plant life, moss found a bed of its organic matter in the rock clefts, low flowers and shrubs probed with tough roots to compound the work.
Further inland and south, the world began to appear green again and even small distorted trees emerged from the landscape where they found shelter in south-facing hollows. As we neared our landing place the windshield suddenly appeared to be shattered, cracks shifted and flowed across the Perspex.
“What’s that?” I croaked, rigid on the edge of my seat.
“Fractured oil line. Better have that mended when we get in,” grunted Lariviere, completely unruffled.
The apparent cracks were striations of oil streaking across the windshield in the plane’s speed of 120 miles an hour.
“When do you rest Phil?” I asked him.
“When it freezes up. We just keep going while the weather’s fine.”
I thought of the tide rips and the wind in George River where he had landed at five o’clock that morning and I wondered what he would call bad weather, and what would the George River people have done without him.
He put us down gently on the lake, peering through the stained windscreen and taxied to the dock. Sam Dodds was waiting to meet us, and invited us home for dinner. We were two ravenous and dirty visitors, and hospitality included the wonderful luxury of a hot bath. Replete, clean and happy, we went to bed and slept like tops.
