At the End of the World Read online

  In 1828, Danish explorer Wilhelm August Graah read from a book of stories to a group of East Greenlanders, who bent down to listen to the book because, Graah wrote, “they thought that every word I read aloud to them … was communicated to me [from the book] in a whisper.”

  Just as plants, rocks, and animals had souls, they can talk, too. If you listen hard enough, you can hear them. Or so the Inuit used to think …

  … just as they used to think that talking spirits inhabited record players.

  I bent down to listen to the Umbilicaria lichens (otherwise known as tripe-de-roche or rock tripe) that decorated a boulder near my tent.

  Was it my imagination or did I hear the lichens whisper, Mercifully, there isn’t any pollution in these parts?

  The more urbanized the place, the fewer the lichens. For they cannot tolerate the soluble particles from industrial pollution and automotive emissions that end up trapped in their thalli (vegetative tissue).

  A few lichens seem to have triumphed over urban life. Recently, in Boston, I was studying a bright yellow Candelaria species on a tree when a little girl walked over and asked me what I was doing. Before I could tell her, her mother yanked her away, and then continued talking on her cell phone.

  In 1941, there weren’t any telephones in the Belchers, only a single highly erratic radio telegraph.

  “Until ten years ago, I didn’t own a telephone,” a local Inuk named Taliriktuk told me, “so when I wanted to talk with someone, I would walk over to his house and talk with him.”

  Inuit names can be highly descriptive. For instance, Taliriktuk means “Strong Arm.” The Qiqiqtarmiut called Robert Flaherty Soumik, which means “Tall, Left-Handed One.”

  My name was Allaut (pencil) because I was always writing in my notebook with a pencil.

  A few years ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop in New York and writing in my notebook, and the man seated at the table next to me pierced the silence by barking into his cell phone, “So how’d the colonoscopy go?”

  I asked the man not to talk so loudly. “My dad’s hard of hearing, asshole,” the barker said while gazing at his cell phone.

  “The technology of human communication has advanced at blinding speed, but what people have to say to each other shows no comparable development,” wrote Theodore Roszak in The Cult of Information.

  “Just a guy staring at some weird yellow stuff on a tree,” the woman with the young girl said to her cell phone.

  7

  From my notebook: An archetypal Hudson Bay gale, with the wind whistling at 50–60 mph. All planes are grounded. Likewise all birds … except a solitary raven performing playful maneuvers in the air above my tent.

  Such windstorms, blowing west to east, can last for days, occasionally even weeks in Hudson Bay. “I am so used to the wind that when it stops, I fall over,” a grinning Taliriktuk told me.

  Once upon a time the Inuit believed that a strong wind was the voice of the weather spirit Sila telling them not to fear the natural world.

  Message to Sila: Please get in touch with the twenty-first century’s climate-controlled citizens and tell them not to fear the natural world.

  Consider this paradox—the more climate-controlled the person, the more he or she complains about the weather.

  In the words of a fellow Arctic aficionado, “If officials declare a state of emergency every time there’s some snow, then the word emergency will lose all its pizzazz.”

  One evening I returned to my tent and found it blown almost flat against the ground, where it was vibrating like an accordion. A reminder that, in a place like the Belchers, Nature (permit me to capitalize it) invariably triumphs over human inventions.

  A wolf spider (Pardosa glacialis) skittering around just outside my tent was quite pleased with the persistent winds. After all, those winds grounded flying insects and allowed it to suck out their delicious juices.

  “Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden.

  Doubtless Thoreau would have followed that will-o’-the-wisp through winds unimaginable, too.

  After I resurrected my tent, I did not re-inhabit it, but sat down outside and read Edward Abbey’s A Voice Crying in the Wilderness, one of whose aphorisms I’ll quote it here: “Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet.”

  I was sitting on a similarly incontestable rock until a freezing rain began falling. It felt like a fistful of nettles on my exposed skin, so I retreated to my tent and listened to an obligato of the various elements playing on the tent’s polypropylene.

  One evening Markassie dropped by my tent and told me about an Inuk from the Belchers who’d lived his entire life in dwellings lit by seal-oil lamps. When he saw his first electric light at the Hudson’s Bay Company post in Great Whale River in the 1950s, he cried, “Oh let it out, please let it out … poor light!”

  During the long winter, light would have been such a precious commodity in the Belcher Islands that when a meteor shower flashed for an unusually long time across the night sky, it might have seemed like something other than a meteor shower to the Qiqiqtarmiut.

  “Get ready for the future: / it is murder,” sang Leonard Cohen.

  8

  “The most dangerous book on earth,” George Bernard Shaw called the Bible.

  In the late nineteenth century, an English missionary, the Rev. E. J. Peck, translated the New Testament into Inuit syllabics in order to bring the Inuit, he declared, “the glad tidings of Jesus” and “give them a burning zeal for their salvation.”

  One of the Rev. Peck’s Bibles somehow found its way to the Belcher Islands in the 1930s. The person who interpreted it to the other Qiqiqtarmiut was a man named Keytowieack. Over and over again, he emphasized the fact that Jesus was a very good person, and Satan was a very nasty one.

  Keytowieack also quoted Matthew 24 from the Rev. Peck’s Bible: “the stars will fall from the sky … and they [you] will see the Son of Man coming.”

  “I saw the pages of the Bible moving all by themselves, and then they stopped moving,” the old woman told me. I asked her where they stopped. Perhaps the Book of Revelation? She looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “I’m so old, I don’t remember.”

  The Bible in question ended up being burned. For Jesus would provide each snowhouse with its own Bible when he arrived in the Belchers. Or so the Qiqiqtarmiut thought.

  Nowadays, in Sanikiluaq, there isn’t a resident clergyman. I asked the visiting clergyman about the events of 1941. “Past history,” he said, then offered me a cup of tea.

  Only elders were willing to talk to me, and then only certain elders. Others felt that what happened sixty years earlier made them seem embarrassingly primitive or, as one man told me, isumairutivuq [completely crazy].

  “Those murders are like someone raping your daughter,” a local Inuk told me. “You wouldn’t go around talking about that rape, would you?”

  The old woman asked me not to use her name if these notes were published. Markassie and Simeonie also told me not to use their actual names. But Taliriktut told me that he liked his name, and it didn’t matter to him if I used it or not.

  At present there’s no actual mention of the tragic events of 1941 on the Belcher Islands website. All that website says is this: “RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] investigates incidents of violence.”

  “If you can’t find it on the Internet, it’s not worth knowing,” an IT person recently told me.

  The IT person in question was an inhabitant of Cyberia, one of the most highly populated realms on our planet. While Siberia possesses either endless taiga or endless tundra, Cyberia has no landscape, only endless screens.

  Like Siberia, Cyberia has gulags, but the prisoners in those gulags can’t hope for freedom because they don’t realize they’re in prison.…

  Some of the activities commonly pursued in Cyberian gulags ar
e cyberbullying, cybertheft, cybersquatting, cyberhacking, cyberstalking, cyberpiracy, cyberterrorism, downloading, and upgrading.

  There is neither a past or a future in Cyberia, only the eternal present as purveyed by a screen.

  Simeonie disagreed with the visiting clergyman. “Try to kill the past, and it will get stronger and more angry … like a polar bear you’ve shot and only wounded,” he told me.

  9

  Once upon a time the Inuit believed that three sky-dwelling sisters made thunder, lightning, and rain. The thunder-maker was called Kadlu (Big Noise), the lightning-maker was called Kweetoo (She Who Strikes Fire), and the rain-maker was called Ignirtoq (She Who Pisses a Lot).

  There was no sister who made meteor showers, but in an Inuit story collected by explorer Knud Rasmussen, a meteor shower descends from the sky and enters the vagina of a woman just as she was answering nature’s call. At that exact moment, the woman became a powerful angakok (shaman).

  During the winter of 1940–41, the hunting was very poor. There seemed to be no seals in the ocean and no freshwater seals in Kasagaluk Lake on Flaherty Island. No walrus or arctic hares, either.

  Nor any caribou. They’d been gone since the 1880s, when a strange winter rain fell, then froze. The caribou could not scratch through the ice to reach the Cladonia lichens that were their winter food, and they starved.

  “A girl in our camp had almost no food that winter, and she was nursing her baby,” the old woman told me. “Her breast milk turned green, then dried up.”

  One night the sky above the Belchers was lit up by an especially long meteor shower, and the Qiqiqtarmiut took it as a sign.…

  A twenty-seven-year-old man named Ouyerack regarded himself an angakok. He’d recently heard from Keytowieack about Jesus Christ, the white man’s angakok, and he was envious of his, Jesus’s, shamanic powers.

  Like Jesus, Inuit angakut had the ability to raise the dead, but by Ouyerack’s time, most of them seemed to have lost this ability. All the more reason to envy Jesus.

  “Ouyerack was very short even for an Inuk,” the old woman told me. She put her hand just below my shoulder to indicate that he was probably no more than five feet tall.

  Shortly after the meteor shower trailed fire across the sky, Ouyerack shouted: “I am Jesus Christ! I am Jesus Christ!”

  Ouyerack was not the first Inuk to identify himself as Jesus. In 1924, on Baffin Island, a man named Neakoteah proclaimed himself “Jesuee” and insisted that the only way his acolytes could reach heaven was by starving themselves to death. He threatened to kill anyone who refused to starve himself.

  Eventually, Neakoteah was shot and killed by a non-acolyte. As his dead body was being washed, the Primus stove illuminating him reputedly sang a song about its flame being everlasting.…

  An Inuk from Repulse Bay named Putjuuti also believed he was Jesus, and what better way to prove it than by baptizing his fellow Inuit? He cut a very deep wound in his scalp, and out flowed a cascade of blood. Enough to baptize his whole village.

  Before Putjuuti could perform a single baptism, he died from loss of blood.

  But a white man could be Jesus, too. In the 1920s, a missionary showed a picture of the bearded Jesus to some Inuit in western Hudson Bay and asked them if they knew this man. “Of course,” they said. “He came here last year in a whaling ship and slept with many of our women.”

  Ouyerack later corrected himself, saying, “I am Jesus Christ preparing the people for when the other Jesus comes.”

  10

  Enter Peter Sala, the best hunter, the best ice navigator, and the tallest man in the Belcher Islands. Needless to say, the other Qiqiqtarmiut treated him with great respect.

  Outsiders respected Peter as well. In their 1938 expedition to the Belchers, scientists from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History hired him to be their guide.

  In his book Needle to the North, Carnegie Museum ornithologist Arthur Twomey wrote: “Ours was a dangerous sport, but Peter was an unqualified expert.”

  As a guide, Peter was asked to operate the expedition’s outboard motorboat, although, Twomey said, “he had never in his life operated any type of machine.” Even so, he learned how to operate the boat in almost no time.

  The Carnegie scientists seem to have regarded Peter as a real-life Nanook of the North, and just like Nanook in Flaherty’s film, he was (Twomey wrote) “seldom without a broad smile.”

  For the Inuit, smiling was once a survival mechanism. They often smiled when there was very little food or when a white visitor made unconscionable demands on them.

  A few years later, Peter would find it impossible to smile.…

  In the early 1930s, a new Hudson’s Bay Company employee in Great Whale River had been given a bowler hat by his Scottish mother, who may have thought that such a headpiece would be necessary for Arctic survival.

  The employee gave the hat to Peter, who wore it on those rare occasions when he encountered a white man. Maybe he thought this seemingly formal headpiece would bridge the gap between his culture and white man’s.

  On those occasions when Peter wore this hat, I can imagine the Carnegie scientists thinking of Peter not only as a real-life Nanook, but also as the local version of Charlie Chaplin.

  No Charlie Chaplin film—no film of any sort—had ever been shown in the Belchers, so Peter would probably not have understood the reference if one of the Carnegie scientists had mentioned Charlie Chaplin to him.

  I recently googled “Peter Sala” and learned that “There are ten professionals named Peter Sala who use LinkedIn to exchange information.” As nearly as I could tell, not a single one of these professionals had the ability to navigate a boat in icy seas.

  Peter sang Inuit songs when he was hunting seals in his kayak, but he also sang the occasional Christian hymn, one of which, the old woman told me, was “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

  Peter probably learned such hymns from the Anglican mission in Great Whale River, where he sometimes went to retrieve the Hudson’s Bay Company’s supplies and mail.

  Such songs might help pass the time when I’m out hunting … he may have thought when he heard these hymns.

  After announcing that he was Jesus, Ouyerack pointed to Peter and declared that he, Peter, was God.

  With his dark complexion, high cheekbones, and slightly chubby face, Peter did not resemble the storybook image of God—an elderly, woolly-whiskered Caucasian gentleman who defies the laws of gravity by sitting on a cloud.

  No matter if Peter was neither Caucasian nor perched on a cloud: he was the best hunter in the Belchers.

  At first Peter seemed surprised by his new identity. He took a day or two to deliberate on it, then admitted that, yes, he was in fact God.

  I asked the old woman what had become of Peter’s bowler hat. She shook her head. “Gone,” she said.

  11

  In their first religious gesture, Peter and Ouyerack ordered most of the sled dogs to be killed. For those dogs were Satan. Or maybe they were just unbelievers. Either way, it was best to dispose of them.

  Another reason to kill the dogs: the world was coming to an end, according to Keytowieack’s Bible, and when it actually came, there would be no need to travel by dogsled … an Inuk could go anywhere he or she liked simply by flying through the air.

  “In those days, you didn’t need a boarding pass to fly,” a grinning Taliriktuq told me, but his grin turned into a frown when he added, “You just needed to believe.”

  To newly converted Inuit in the Arctic, the notion of flying through the air had so much appeal that some of them felt obliged to cut off most of their hair. For they thought too much hair would drag them down to the earth or at least inhibit their skyward journey.

  When the world ended, there would be no need to hunt seals or walrus, no need to gather berries, no need to net fish. For there would be no more hunger, Peter and Ouyerack told the other Inuit.

  No more hunger—how extraordinary those words must have seem
ed to the Qiqiqtarmiut! No wonder they were so eager for the world to end!

  The old woman had been a teenage girl at the time of the meteor shower. When I mentioned Sara, she started to cry.

  The old woman’s grandson had been helping me translate his grandmother’s Inuktitut. “Enough for today,” he told me.

  Later I learned that Sara Apawkok had been one of her best friends.

  On the following day, I visited the old woman again. Peter was becoming more accustomed to his new role, she told me. He informed the other Inuit that he might look the same as he looked before, but on the inside he was different. There, he was God.

  Hearing this, Sara shook her head, saying, “You are Peter Sala on the outside and you are Peter Sala on the inside.”

  “This girl is Satan,” declared Ouyerack. A Primus stove was lit and held very close to Sara’s face. “Yes, she is Satan,” Ouyerack repeated, gazing closely at Sara.

  One of Flaherty’s sons, a man named Aleck, was a believer in Peter and Ouyerack’s divinity. He told Sara that he would cut off her head if she didn’t change her mind. She didn’t change her mind.

  Aleck was Sara’s half brother. He hit Sara repeatedly with a chunk of driftwood, then several others dragged her from the large snowhouse that was serving as their meeting place, and a teenage girl named Akeenik hammered away at her head with the barrel of a rifle.

  Several minutes later, Akeenik returned to the snowhouse. She announced: “My hands are frozen from killing Satan. Please thaw them out for me, someone.”

  Sara Apawkok was probably thirteen years old at the time. Her death was just the beginning.

  12

  One morning I was brewing some coffee when an ATV pulled up in front of my tent. The driver was Simeonie. “I have some bad news for you,” he said. “New York City is no more. Maybe America is no more, too. Come, I will show you.”

  On the way to Sanikiluaq, we passed a clump of Maydell’s oxytropes, and Simeonie said the roots of this perennial forb tasted very good when cooked with beluga whale blubber.