skin-wrapped packages of dress goods, food and tobacco down from Lushman’s trading shack. Then the squat, heavy-bodied Eskimo, with his dreadfully scarred face, lashed the cargo to the afterdeck and departed. I watched him until the bright flashing of his double-bladed paddle was only a white flicker against the humped outlines of a group of rocky reefs lying three miles offshore.
This was the third time I had seen Anoteelik make his way out of the estuary to the farthest islet on the sombre rim of the sea but it was the first time I understood the real reason behind his yearly solitary voyage.
Gene Lushman, barrenland trapper and trader, had first drawn my attention to him three years earlier.
“See that old Husky there? Old Ano… tough old bugger … one of the inland people and queer like all of them. Twenty years now, every spring soon as the ice clears, Ano, he heads off out to the farthest rock, and every year he takes a hundred dollars of my best trade goods along. For why? Well, me son, that crazy old bastard is taking the stuff out there to his dead wife! That’s true, so help me God! He buried her there… far out to sea as there was a rock sticking up high enough to hold a grave!
“Father Debrie, he’s tried maybe a half dozen times to make the old fellow quit his nonsense. It has a bad influence on the rest of the Huskies—they’re supposed to be Christians, you know—but Ano, he just smiles and says: ‘Yes, Father,’ and every spring he turns in his fox skins to me and I sell him the same bill of goods, and he takes it and dumps it on that rock in the Bay.”
It was the waste that bothered and puzzled Gene. Himself the product of a Newfoundland outport, he could not abide the waste… a hundred dollars every spring as good as dumped into the sea.
“Crazy old bastard!” he said, shaking his head in bewilderment.
Although he had traded with the Big River people for a good many years, Gene had never really bridged the gap between them and himself. He had learned only enough of their language for trade purposes and while he admired their ability to survive in their harsh land he had little interest in their inner lives, perhaps because he had never been able to stop thinking of them as a “lesser breed.” Consequently, he never discovered the reason for Anoteelik’s strange behaviour.
During my second year in the country, I became friendly with Itkut, old Anoteelik’s son—indeed his only offspring. Itkut was a big, stocky man still in the full vigour of young manhood; a man who laughed a lot and liked making jokes. It was he who gave me my Eskimo name, Kipmetna, which translates as “noisy little dog.” Itkut and I spent a lot of time together that summer, including making a long boat trip north to Marble Island after walrus. A few days after our return, old Ano happened into Itkut’s tent to find me struggling to learn the language under his son’s somewhat less-than-patient guidance. For a while Ano listened to the garbled sounds I was making, then he chuckled. Until that moment the old man, with his hideously disfigured face, had seemed aloof and unapproachable, but now the warmth that lay hidden behind the mass of scar tissue was revealed.
“Itkut gave you a good name,” he said smiling. “Indeed, the dog-spirit must live in your tongue. Ayorama —it doesn’t matter. Let us see if we can drive it out.”
With that he took over the task of instructing me, and by the time summer was over we had become friends.
One August night when the ice fog over the Bay was burning coldly in the long light of the late-setting sun, I went to a drum dance at Ano’s tent. This was forbidden by the priest at Eskimo Point, who would send the R.C.M.P. constable down to Big River to smash the drums if he heard a dance was being held. The priest was a great believer in an ever-present Devil, and he was convinced the drums were the work of that Devil. In truth, these gatherings were song-feasts at
This was the third time I had seen Anoteelik make his way out of the estuary to the farthest islet on the sombre rim of the sea but it was the first time I understood the real reason behind his yearly solitary voyage.
Gene Lushman, barrenland trapper and trader, had first drawn my attention to him three years earlier.
“See that old Husky there? Old Ano… tough old bugger … one of the inland people and queer like all of them. Twenty years now, every spring soon as the ice clears, Ano, he heads off out to the farthest rock, and every year he takes a hundred dollars of my best trade goods along. For why? Well, me son, that crazy old bastard is taking the stuff out there to his dead wife! That’s true, so help me God! He buried her there… far out to sea as there was a rock sticking up high enough to hold a grave!
“Father Debrie, he’s tried maybe a half dozen times to make the old fellow quit his nonsense. It has a bad influence on the rest of the Huskies—they’re supposed to be Christians, you know—but Ano, he just smiles and says: ‘Yes, Father,’ and every spring he turns in his fox skins to me and I sell him the same bill of goods, and he takes it and dumps it on that rock in the Bay.”
It was the waste that bothered and puzzled Gene. Himself the product of a Newfoundland outport, he could not abide the waste… a hundred dollars every spring as good as dumped into the sea.
“Crazy old bastard!” he said, shaking his head in bewilderment.
Although he had traded with the Big River people for a good many years, Gene had never really bridged the gap between them and himself. He had learned only enough of their language for trade purposes and while he admired their ability to survive in their harsh land he had little interest in their inner lives, perhaps because he had never been able to stop thinking of them as a “lesser breed.” Consequently, he never discovered the reason for Anoteelik’s strange behaviour.
During my second year in the country, I became friendly with Itkut, old Anoteelik’s son—indeed his only offspring. Itkut was a big, stocky man still in the full vigour of young manhood; a man who laughed a lot and liked making jokes. It was he who gave me my Eskimo name, Kipmetna, which translates as “noisy little dog.” Itkut and I spent a lot of time together that summer, including making a long boat trip north to Marble Island after walrus. A few days after our return, old Ano happened into Itkut’s tent to find me struggling to learn the language under his son’s somewhat less-than-patient guidance. For a while Ano listened to the garbled sounds I was making, then he chuckled. Until that moment the old man, with his hideously disfigured face, had seemed aloof and unapproachable, but now the warmth that lay hidden behind the mass of scar tissue was revealed.
“Itkut gave you a good name,” he said smiling. “Indeed, the dog-spirit must live in your tongue. Ayorama —it doesn’t matter. Let us see if we can drive it out.”
With that he took over the task of instructing me, and by the time summer was over we had become friends.
One August night when the ice fog over the Bay was burning coldly in the long light of the late-setting sun, I went to a drum dance at Ano’s tent. This was forbidden by the priest at Eskimo Point, who would send the R.C.M.P. constable down to Big River to smash the drums if he heard a dance was being held. The priest was a great believer in an ever-present Devil, and he was convinced the drums were the work of that Devil. In truth, these gatherings were song-feasts at
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