At the End of the World Read online

  “Tomorrow I will feed you this dish,” Simeonie said, perhaps to make me feel better now that my country was no more.

  In Sanikiluaq’s small hotel, I saw a group of Inuit sitting around a TV and watching what’s now referred to as 9/11. Today was September 13, so they were actually watching rebroadcast excerpts from the terrorist attack of two days earlier.

  Now I realized that a Hudson Bay gale wasn’t the only reason I hadn’t seen any planes for the last few days: Transport Canada was following the FAA’s example and grounding all its flights, including flights to the Belchers.

  “So many people!” one of the Inuit remarked, pointing to the screen.

  A man made a joke about New York’s skyscrapers, using the Inuktitut word for penis and adding a suffix that meant giant. The others burst into laughter.

  “BANG! BANG!” a woman laughed, aiming an invisible gun at the television.

  My first thought was: These people are insensitive. Likewise, my second thought.

  My third thought: they weren’t being insensitive at all. For the world on the screen was so removed from the local world of wind and ice, rock and lichen that they could be watching a movie … a disaster movie or even a comedy.

  One of the viewers switched channels to a Road Runner cartoon. No, protested another viewer, who switched it back. “There’s an American here, and his country is falling down.”

  This other viewer, a man named Jacky, told me that I should drink lots of seal blood, and this would give me the strength to face the fact that my country was in trouble.

  Jacky had a hole in his cheek from having been stabbed by a walrus tusk while he was hunting. Occasionally, he would reach up and feel the hole as if to make sure it was still there.

  Images: the North Tower bursting into flames, a crowd of people running to escape a billowing cloud of smoke, and a substance similar to confetti floating down from the sky.

  Sounds: screams, sirens, bells, bullhorns.

  A two-or three-year-old boy sitting on his mother’s lap pointed to the screen and laughed, “Ijur … na … ru … naq, ijur … na … ru … naq.” (Ijurnarunaq means funny or amusing in Inuktitut.)

  “Unbelievable, ladies and gentleman, just unbelievable!” exclaimed a newsman into his mike.

  Unbelievable. None of the viewers seemed to know this word, so I searched my English-Inuktitut dictionary, and I couldn’t find its equivalent.

  Seated next to Jacky was a nephew (great-nephew?) of Aleck, the man who clubbed Sara with a piece of driftwood. He was polishing a soapstone carving (technically, serpentine) and only intermittently looking at the screen.

  The North Tower burst into flames again, this time in slow motion and filmed from a different angle, and the woman with the child clapped her hands, maybe because this was a more esthetically pleasing shot of the Tower’s demise than the previous one.

  An attractive newswoman talking into her mike inspired these words from a woman wearing a faded Mother Hubbard dress: “Such nice clothes.”

  Context: we’re watching a relatively small screen in a relatively small building perched atop some much-eroded, much-faulted rocks that once formed an ancient mountain range.

  Simeonie rested a sympathetic hand on my shoulder and said, “Who made these attacks?” “Terrorists,” I told him. “It’s good that we don’t get any tourists in Sanikiluaq,” he said. For he did not know the word “terrorist.”

  Only two tourists had traveled to Sanikiluaq this year—both birdwatchers and both English.

  Speaking of birds: a man walked into the hotel and showed me a soapstone carving of an eider duck. Would I like to buy it? he asked me. Maybe later, I told him.

  Speaking of birds again: I noticed that one of the women looking at the TV was wearing a necklace composed artfully of bands put on Canada geese by bird banders from somewhere south of here.

  More confetti. More billowing smoke. Another pretty newswoman. Aleck’s nephew said he would talk to me about the 1941 murders, but only if I put away my tape recorder and used my siut (ears).

  “How can people live so far above the ground?” asked an elder, gesturing at the city’s remaining skyline.

  The hotel’s manager allowed me to use one of his phones to call a few friends in New York City. “We were supposed to have a speedy defense system,” one friend said, adding, “Oh well … at least I’m alive.”

  “You are where? Where? You can find out about this horror show in the middle of Hudson Bay?” another asked in astonishment.

  My lady friend, who lived just outside Boston, said, “America has joined the rest of the world.”

  There was another channel switch, not to a Road Runner cartoon but to the Reverend Billy Graham, who was saying that all of the victims of 9/11 had gone immediately to Paradise.

  “Para … dise!” repeated the young boy on his mother’s lap. This was perhaps his first word in English.

  My ninety-one-year-old grandfather once called my mother to tell her that Billy Graham was squatting naked in his bathtub. Or maybe the squatter was Johnny Carson, he wasn’t really sure.

  At the time my grandfather wasn’t senile, but he did watch a lot of television.

  Aleck’s nephew got up to leave. “Remember,” he told me, pointing to one of his ears.

  Most of the others got up, too. Simeonie offered to drive me back to my tent, but I said I preferred to walk. For 9/11 had affected me considerably less than the events in the Belchers of sixty years earlier, and I thought walking might help me discover why.

  13

  I walked past Flaherty Island’s gravel pit, which—so goes the qallunaat joke—is indistinguishable from the rest of the island.

  In my mind, I saw the Twin Towers collapse, and on the ground I saw the waving plumes of arctic cotton (Eriophorum angustifolium), a sedge plant that Inuit women mix with charcoal to heal the umbilical wounds of newborns.

  Floating up and down in the waves was a fleet of eider ducks speaking to each other like an orchestra of oboes.

  I walked past drift logs lying askew, isolated, or piled high—the de-articulated bones of the sea.

  I also walked past some washed-up coral. Contrary to what you might think, there are quite a few northern coral species, but since they don’t form reef structures, they’re not as blatant as tropical species.

  Here was a much larger clump of Maydell’s oxytropes than the one Simeonie and I had seen earlier. It was larger for a very good reason. There were several lemming burrows nearby.

  Yum-m-m, says a plant’s roots when it encounters the nutrient-rich home of a creature like a lemming.

  In a story I heard from Markassie, two lemmings—husband and wife—envied human beings so much that they began talking like them. You make dinner, no, you make it. To hell with you! A snowy owl heard them shouting at each other, flew down, grabbed them, and ate them.

  “That’s what happens when you don’t speak your own language,” Markassie told me after he finished the story.

  So necessary are lemmings to the diet of snowy owls that a very good lemming year means that owls will breed promiscuously, and a bad lemming year means they’ll breed hardly at all.

  Lemmings don’t commit mass suicide by jumping off cliffs except in the Walt Disney so-called documentary, White Wilderness.

  Another Disney moment: Walt’s cameramen were trying to shoot (film) a pair of polar bear cubs, but the mother bear kept interfering, often aggressively, so the cameramen shot (killed) the mother in order to shoot (film) the cubs.

  “Disney is one of the great liquidators of Western culture,” observed Czech artist-animator Jan Švankmajer.

  A few years earlier, in Igloolik, Nunavut, an Inuit elder was telling me a story about the origin of the earth while his grandchildren were watching Creepshow 2 on television. Occasionally, the man would look at the screen. Then he looked at it more often. Finally, he fixed his gaze on it …

  … and I never did find out how the earth originated.

&
nbsp; The giant hypnotic eye of a television screen—almost any screen—demands that viewers stare at it rather than, as Odysseus’s men did with the giant eye of the Cyclops in The Odyssey, thrust a spear into it.

  “It’s life I believe in, not machines,” wrote ecologist Loren Eiseley.

  Kalopaling with victim

  I saw another fleet of eider ducks, but I didn’t see a kalopaling, a giant eider duck or a giant dressed in clothes made of eider duck skins, opinions disagree. A kalopaling’s specialty: dragging people into the sea, drowning them, and then eating them.

  Several scaber-stalked Leecinum mushrooms looked positively robust compared to the ground-hugging, wind-snipped plants around them. You can huff, and you can puff, but you can’t blow us down, they seemed to be saying to the wind.

  In his popular book Kabloona, French writer Gontran de Poncsins referred to the Arctic tundra as “a dead earth almost colorless in its brown monotony.” The bright orange Leecinum caps proved Monsieur de Poncsins wrong.

  In the fall, the flaming scarlet of bearberry leaves and the golden glow of dwarf willow leaves also prove him wrong.

  The word “tundra” is derived from the Finnish word tunturi, which means treeless hills. But most tundras do have trees, albeit trees of a dwarf variety whose anchoring roots protect them against strong winds. Like the aforementioned dwarf willows, which I found almost impossible not to step on.

  The gale was dying down. Instead of a single raven, there were now four or five ravens making fanciful pirouettes in the air above my tent. I shouted at them: “Ijurnarunaq, ijuranarunaq!”

  Beside my tent, a late-blooming Arctic poppy was cheerfully lifting its gold-yellow blossoms to the sky.

  At last I realized why I was more affected by the events of sixty years ago in the Belcher Islands than by the terrorist attack on New York City of two days ago—there was no mediation, none whatsoever, between me and the old woman’s eyes.

  “Only connect,” wrote novelist E. M. Forster.

  14

  From my notebook: A bright Sunday morning, and almost every person of sound mind and body seems to be out berry-picking rather than attending Sanikiluaq’s igloo-shaped church. A very good sign …

  If, according to Anglican missionaries, sewing on Sunday offends Jesus, then berry-picking on Sunday doubtless would be even more offensive to him.

  The Bible was even more strict than the missionaries. Exodus 35:2 states that “whosoever doeth work therein [on the Sabbath] shall be put to death.”

  “Satan” was the word used repeatedly by early missionaries to remind the Inuit of their great adversary. Satan was all around them, in every tundra nook and cranny, those missionaries said.

  The missionaries extolled the virtues of the Holy Land, saying it was Satan-free. In the 1920s, an Inuk in eastern Hudson Bay was so inspired by this news that he slid into his kayak and began paddling toward the Holy Land. He was never heard from again.

  Satan still has a strong presence in the Arctic. One thousand-year-old petroglyphs with incised shamanic faces occupy rocks on Qajartalik Island in Hudson Strait. The local Inuit, who are Pentecostal Baptists, call these faces “Devil Masks” and periodically try to etch crosses onto them.

  The Qiqiqtarmiut assumed Satan was a real person … as did a beaming Jehovah’s Witness I recently met in Boston. He informed me that Satan might be my next door neighbor, my banker, or even a member of my family.

  At forty-seven, Keytowieack—the Bible reader—would have been considered an elder. For the Inuit, elders were regarded as fonts of wisdom, so Keytowieack probably figured that the other Inuit would listen to him when he said that Peter Sala and Ouyerack were not God and Jesus, respectively.

  But the growing hysteria eliminated any possible wisdom he might have imparted. A hysteria Peter Sala’s mother fanned by screaming that Keytowieack was Satan. “Satan! Satan! Satan!” several others yelled, pointing at him.

  Peter himself had this terse dialogue with Keytowieack: “You are Satan.” “I’m not Satan.” “I am God, and I say you are Satan.” “There is only one God, and he is not here in this snowhouse.”

  Once he heard this denial of his status as God, Peter yanked loose a slat from a sleeping platform in the snowhouse and flung it at Keytowieack. “I have hit Satan in the mouth!” he announced.

  A bleeding Keytowieack retreated to his own snowhouse and opened his Bible. Maybe he wanted to find a passage that would explain the behavior of his fellow Inuit … or maybe just a passage that would offer him solace in what was rapidly becoming a desperate situation.

  Keytowieack was asleep when the old woman, then a teenage girl, peered into his snowhouse. It was at this time that she saw the pages of his Bible “moving like grass moves in a strong wind.”

  The snowhouse had no opening where even a gentle wind could have entered, the old woman added.

  The next day Peter, with a harpoon in each hand, kicked down the wall of Keytowieack’s snowhouse. He threw one of the harpoons at Keytowieack, pinning him to the ground.

  “Look at me, for I am God,” Peter said. Keytowieack did not look at him. Peter repeated his words. Keytowieack looked the other way.

  A man named Adlaytok joined Peter. “I have borrowed some bullets from Jesus,” he said, by which he meant Ouyerack. Peter gestured toward Keytowieack, and Adlaytok shot him twice, then kicked him.

  Peter thrust his other harpoon into Keytowieack’s face, after which he shouted, “I have killed Satan!”

  “Everyone was thinking, ‘I’m going to be the next Satan,’” Simeonie said. And the old woman told me: “Parents told their children to agree with everything Peter and Ouyerack said … even if they said that qallunaat had six legs!”

  On the evening of the non-churchgoing Sunday, many of the Qiqiqtarmiut had red lips and red teeth … not because they were victims of religious violence, but because they’d been eating the berries they had picked.

  15

  From my notebook: Flakes of snow locked together in weightless spokes flutter around crazily and melt when they touch the ground. The silence is so complete that it brings a slight whistling to my ears. A lovely evening. So lovely, in fact, that all thoughts of 9/11 have been jettisoned from my mind.

  The silence brings a slight whistling to my ears. I liked that sentence so much that I included it in a letter to Farley Mowat, who had asked me to send him some sort of message from the Belchers, one of the few places in the Canadian North he’d never visited.

  Paper offers a physical landscape, with four separate directions—north, south, east, and west. You can crumple it, spill coffee on it, and create abstract art on it with arrows and cross outs.

  You can even use paper for your lavatorial needs—don’t try doing that with your computer.…

  Imagine that you’ve just gotten a fervently scrawled letter from your friend Mushpan Mike in Last Chance, Alaska, telling you that he’s fallen in love with a female moose. Then imagine getting the same letter as an email. It’s no longer love.

  Since cursive writing is not taught anymore in schools, you can say good-bye to fervently scrawled letters from Mushpan Mike.

  First sentence of a recent article in The Wall Street Journal describing new pens: “Trying to write a note by hand after years of typing on a keyboard or a smartphone can be discouraging.”

  In the same issue of The Wall Street Journal, an advertisement shows a giant hand reaching out to touch an up-to-date smartphone like Michelangelo’s God bringing life to Adam. The caption reads: Touching is believing.

  Digital technology = the latest religion?

  As God, Peter Sala did not touch—instead, he harpooned. That he seldom missed his target when he was hunting seals or walrus must have enforced his divinity.…

  I asked Markassie whether he remembered the murders. He shook his head. He was only a year old at the time. Also, his family was camped in a different part of Flaherty Island, and “we only knew what was happening in our own camp and nowhere e
lse in the world.”

  Ernie Riddell, the local Hudson’s Bay Company trader, was located on neighboring Tukarak Island, and he didn’t know about the murders, either. Nor did the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

  Over twenty years earlier, in their only visit to the Belchers, the Mounties had examined two separate instances where deranged individuals had threatened to go on a killing spree. Those individuals were killed by other Qiqiqtarmiut before they could engage in those sprees.

  The Mounties did not prosecute the killers of the would-be killers because they were ignorant of the law. Or ignorant of white man’s law. The Qiqitarmiut had their own time-honored ways of dealing with violent misfits.

  Or they knew how to deal with such misfits before the arrival of an alien religion.…

  The visiting Mounties recommended that a permanent RCMP detachment be established on the Belchers. An idle recommendation, for the Canadian government refused to fund such a remote posting.

  Now it was Markassie’s turn to ask me a question. He said, “I keep hearing about this word in English called ‘Internet.’ What does it mean? When I first heard it, I thought it was the same as initait [a drying rack], but I now think it means something else.…”

  Might we consider a person like Markassie “pre-Internet,” just as we might have considered his not-so-distant ancestors pre-Contact?

  I told Markassie to imagine a spiderweb so enormous that it encompasses the wide, wide world. I did not mention the spider’s prey, however.

  16

  In February of 1941, the Inuit in Peter and Ouyerack’s camp moved to Tukurak Island, where they hoped the hunting might be better than on Flaherty Island. They brought their new religion with them.

  Ouyerack was talking increasingly about the end of the world. He did not think this was such a bad thing, except for those who did not believe in it. They should be killed, he said, unless they were good hunters.