The Snow Walker (17 page)

Every effort was made to bring the Creswell Bay people back into the fold, and the temptations offered by the glittering array of trade goods available at Fort Ross had their effect. Although Soosie fought fiercely to prevent it, individual families began to drift away to Levesque Harbour where they reverted to the trappers’ way of life.

By the spring of 1947 only two families remained at Creswell Bay, and now Napachee-Kadlak insisted that he and Soosie and their children move south too. Dispirited by the weakness of her fellow exiles in allowing themselves to again be seduced into serving the white men and contemptuous of them because they would not see what she could see, Soosie reluctantly gave in.

“Very hard to make her go,” Napachee-Kadlak remembered. “She say if we go only bad things happen.”

Soosie was soon vindicated. In August the
Nascopie,
northbound on her annual supply run, struck a rock and sank… at Cape Dorset. Her loss, combined with the relatively small output of fur Fort Ross was producing, determined the Company to close that post for good. Early in 1948 the manager and his clerk, accompanied this time by Ernie Lyall, locked up the empty buildings and set off by dog sled to Gjoa Haven.

In the face of this final abandonment, Soosie tried vigorously to persuade her people to move back to Creswell Bay where they could still live off the land. At first she had little success because the people believed the Company either intended to build a new post south of Levesque Harbour or at long last repatriate them to Cape Dorset.

Soosie proclaimed these to be false promises, and such was her vehemence that even Takolik could not outface her. Her violent rejection of all that the white men stood for began to make people uneasy and when six families finally agreed to do as she demanded it was as much because of the desire to placate her as because they believed that she was right.

Shortly after the six families had reestablished themselves at Creswell Bay and soon after the first gulls had returned to the land to proclaim the coming of spring, people began to sicken of an unknown and terrifying ailment. Some were asphyxiated when their muscles contracted around throats and chests. Some sank into comas from which, if they roused at all, they found themselves with crippled and useless limbs.

Unknown to himself or anyone else, it was a Netchilingmio come north to see if Fort Ross was really abandoned who had fulfilled the old shaman’s prophecy by bringing the savage plague of polio-myelitis upon the Dorset people.

Soosie was several months pregnant when she was stricken, and again she lost her baby. Although the disease did not permanently cripple her in the flesh, it struck deep into her mind and spirit. During the rest of that year she was lost in a bottomless pit of black depression.

the outside world
knew nothing of the new tragedy at Creswell Bay (and at Levesque Harbour where conditions were equally frightful) until mid-January of 1949 when Takolik was brought into Gjoa Haven by a party of Netchilingmiut who had found him wandering half-conscious on the ice of Rae Strait after his dogs died of starvation. Takolik had made his way across several hundred miles of unknown country to carry a message of distress, and it had taken him two months to make the journey.

In early February the R.C.A.F. dispatched a ski-equipped DC-3 to take a doctor of the Indian Health Service to the stricken camps. At Creswell Bay the doctor found several babies and eight older children and adults dead and the remainder so crippled or weakened from starvation that they could not hunt.

The DC-3 made several trips to ferry the worst cases out to hospital, shift the Creswell Bay survivors to Levesque Harbour (to which place Ernie Lyall had temporarily returned), and to bring in food and clothing. It was the first assistance proffered to the Baffin Island people during all the long years of their exile.

Early in that fatal winter of 1948-1949 an ironic coincidence had brought Lorenzo Learmont back to Fort Ross, for whose establishment he, more than any other, had been responsible. He came in a new guise—as an archaeologist employed by a museum to dig into the past history of the Eskimos… but found himself observing the actual dissolution of a people. It was he who sent the message describing the Cape Dorsets’ plight which Takolik carried to Gjoa Haven. One wonders what his thoughts were as he looked upon the wreckage of the dream that he had fathered.

early in the
summer of 1949, Lyall and his family moved south to Spence Bay where the Company had just established a new post serviced from Tuktoyaktuk in the western arctic. Spence Bay was on the west side of Boothia in the middle of the Netchilingmiut country and distant six or more days hard driving by dog team from Fort Ross. During the months between spring thaw and autumn freeze-up, it was virtually inaccessible to the Cape Dorset people, who had remained at Levesque Harbour not because it was a good place but because they were so distressed in mind and body, so unmanned by apprehensions, that they were unable to muster the will to leave. They could not face another dislocation to a new place of exile such as Spence Bay represented; nor could they go home to Cape Dorset. Permission to do so was refused by the authorities who thereafter turned their backs on the Levesque Harbour people, effectively ignoring their existence through the whole of the ensuing decade.

Although the bottom dropped out of the white fox trade again in 1949 so that the people could obtain very little from the post at Spence Bay even when they could make the long journey, they clung to life and even made some progress toward their own regeneration.

In 1953 a scientific expedition happened their way and one of its members spent a few hours with Napachee-Kadlak and Soosie.

“She was a formidable woman. Good looking, the biggest Eskimo I ever saw. Getting stout but active and energetic. She had three or four kids and kept them in great form even though the whole bunch was in tough shape when we arrived. They were out of ammunition and had had poor luck in the spring sealing. Soosie made me nervous though. She had a way of looking past you, as if she could see things you didn’t know were there.”

The following year Takolik and two other families moved to Spence Bay to live on the welfare and family allowance benefits which more and more Canadian Eskimos were coming to rely upon.

Soosie, who had regained some of her lost influence, fiercely opposed the idea of moving. During the tragic events of 1948-1949 her behaviour had sometimes been so erratic as to frighten those around her but these moods had gradually become less frequent and she seemed to be returning to her own indomitable self… until the spring of 1958 when an epidemic of what may have been measles killed three children, one of whom was hers.

“She go crazy then,” Napachee-Kadlak remembered. “She say white man trying to kill all babies so there going to be no more Innuit. When someone say now maybe we should go to Spence Bay, she say she going to kill herself and me and the children before she do that.”

It was then that authority intervened for the second time in the lives of the people at Levesque Harbour. One summer day an Otter float plane arrived carrying an R.C.M.P. constable and an official of the Department of Northern Affairs. The people were gathered together and told that all children of school age were to be taken away; that they must go to a boarding school somewhere in the south and would not be returned to their parents until the summer of the following year.

“This was worse thing for us,” recalled Napachee-Kadlak. “Worse thing than hunger or T.B. We love our children. Now we not have them anymore.”

A month after the children were removed, the Otter returned and flew the Levesque Harbour people, eight at a time, to Spence Bay where they underwent their first examination for tuberculosis. Those most badly afflicted were shipped south for treatment. Some did not return for years… others died in ultimate exile.

Midway into her seventh pregnancy, Soosie had reacted to the removal of her older children by suffering a complete breakdown. The doctor who saw her at Spence Bay ordered her evacuated to a mental hospital in Alberta… and it is at this point that we pass through the door at the end of the long, dark corridor that is the fateful past of Soosie and her people, to emerge abruptly into the harsh glare of the classroom at Spence Bay. It is here, at the beginning of the end, that we who were the intruders in that land first looked upon that which we had wrought.

in the crowded
room an eminent psychiatrist testified before the silent people:

“… her symptoms were those of an anxiety neurosis… she was exceedingly disturbed… recovery was slow, but after the birth of her child she seemed to make some progress…”

Soosie was returned to Levesque Harbour after several months in hospital, but in 1964 she again retreated from her broken world… this time in a strait jacket. Six months later, after enduring shock treatments, she was pronounced cured and sent home again… home to a pocket of humanity that had shrunk to three women, five men and eleven children. What had been done to Soosie could not be cured so easily.

On July 6, 1965, she vanished out of time, and in her place appeared a visitation spawned by the winds of madness.

The woman who had struggled so fiercely to preserve her people now threatened to become their nemesis. Raging through the camp, tearing her hair out in handfuls, screaming threats at those she met, she brought a new dimension of terror to a people who were at the end of their tether. Picking up her baby daughter, she flung the child to the ground. She pursued other children, pelting them with rocks. She struck against the very stuff of life by destroying the hunting and fishing gear. Sanity was tottering at Levesque Harbour. Reality was drifting away…

In the school room we listened to the testimony of Kadluk, father of Shooyuk.

“She tell everybody now she have to kill them. She go around trying to blow her breath on everybody to make them crazy too. We had to keep her off. We couldn’t help it because she was after the people. Three men caught her and she fought them very hard but they tied her up. But she always got loose. Three times she got loose… ”

There was one brief and pitiful respite. Desperately trying to calm his wife, Napachee-Kadlak played Soosie a tape sent to them by some of their relatives at Cape Dorset.

“It brought back memories of the times we are children in Cape Dorset and we are real happy. Soosie was good then, not mad at all. She was real happy then…”

It was a final, dying gleam.

A few hours later she was again running through the camp, screaming that God had told her to kill everyone so that all would at last be free. But the two women, five men and eleven children fought with desperation to retain their hold on life.

They could neither escape nor send for help because the sea ice was breaking up, and it was impossible to travel over it or across the swollen rivers on the sodden land. But they dared not stay near Soosie who even in ordinary times was a match for any of them and who now was armed with a madwoman’s fearsome strength.

Kadluk told us of their hard dilemma:

“One morning she jump on Napachee-Kadlak and try to kill him and we just get her away, then she go to the dogs and kill some dogs. Then we know we got to go somewhere.”

On July 12 they fled across the shifting ice to a barren islet lying half a mile offshore. They could take only what little gear they could carry on their backs. On that bleak reef, beleaguered by dread, they waited, hoping for a miraculous deliverance—praying, in their extremity, to
our
God for help. Hour by hour through the circle of almost perpetual daylight they watched the shore through Kadluk’s old brass telescope.

“We very scared she take a knife and come out to kill the people. We very hungry because too scared if we go away hunting she might come to the women and children. Now we see her throwing our things into the water. She is looking as if she is watching things where there is nothing. She takes everything and shakes it, shaking the devil out of it. She has all the tents torn down and smashing the poles. We are watching her breaking up our gear. She want to kill us because she want us to be saved. The devil is telling her what to do…”

For three sleepless days and nights they waited and watched, then could wait no longer. The women and children were in terror. There was no food, and unless she was stopped, Soosie would destroy everything in the camp.

On the morning of July 15 Napachee-Kadlak and Kadluk spoke to Shooyuk and to Soosie’s son, Aiyaoot. They were young and strong, and there was a task ahead that would require strength.

“I tell them they have to go back. She have to stop smashing everything. Someone have to stop her. I tell them to get the knives away from there but if she don’t come after you, don’t do anything to her. I love my wife and don’t want her to be hurt. But if she come after them, they better shoot…”

Fearfully the two young men approached the shore. When Soosie saw them she came running, screaming imprecations. They fired to one side, hoping to frighten her away, hoping even then to stave off the inevitable. But still she ran toward them, swaying and swerving and waving her arms. The rifles crashed again. Soosie E5-20, who had spent twenty-nine of her thirty-nine years as an exile, had been given her release.

Those who remained were not so fortunate.

In late August when the police plane came to take the children away to school, Napachee-Kadlak handed the constable a sheaf of wrapping paper covered with the syllabic script which he had been taught by the missionary at Cape Dorset so many years before. It was a complete and detailed account of everything that had taken place at Levesque Harbour between July 5 and July 15.

The subsequent R.C.M.P. investigation took a long time to complete. Meanwhile, the people at Levesque Harbour, believing that their explanation of why they had to kill Soosie had been accepted, were trying to put the hideous days of July behind them and repair what little was left of the tattered fabric of their lives.