At the End of the World Page 4

  The Flaherty Islanders were now in the camp of a man named Qarak, who, according to Arthur Twomey, was “the Tukarak symbol of justice, but … justice that was strong and violent.”

  The other Qiqiqtarmiut referred to Qarak as “Big Mouth.”

  Rumor has it that whenever Qarak sneezed, he would beat up his wife because he thought she was responsible for giving him the sneeze.

  In the same camp lived Ikpak, the twenty-six-year old son of the recently murdered Keytowieack. He may or may not have been aware of his father’s death, but he shared his father’s opinion of Ouyerack—namely, that he was not Jesus Christ.

  Ikpak’s wife, Eva, warned him to keep his thoughts to himself, but he didn’t listen to her. He approached Ouyerack, then said, “You are not Jesus Christ, and the world is not coming to an end.” Dangerous words!

  But the end of the world—the natural world—may not be far away now. By a recent reckoning of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, 30 to 50 percent of all flora and fauna could be extinct by the middle of our own century.

  And not just readily visible organisms will be gone. With the melting of sea ice in the Arctic and the Antarctic, thousands of never-to-be-documented microorganisms will go extinct or have already gone extinct.

  “If we don’t stabilize our rapidly declining ecosystems, then the planet will come to look like a spaceship run by technical geniuses,” wrote biologist-conservationist E. O. Wilson.

  To find the location of Qarak’s camp, I googled a map of Tukarak Island. At the top of my screen was an advertisement for National Car Rental, although no car, rental or otherwise, has ever been driven on roadless Tukarak Island.

  Ouyerack may have been short, but he was not a garden gnome. Even so, my computer inexplicably decided to route me to a garden gnome website while I was trying to get online information about Ouyerack’s activities in Qarak’s camp on Tukurak Island.

  Speculation: the raised basaltic reef that constitutes Tukarak Island has never known the presence of a single garden gnome.

  Specifically, the website was designed for people who like to purchase garden gnomes, stab them in the head with a knife, and then post online photos of them in this sorry condition on the site.

  “Man, your head is haunted,” wrote the nineteenth-century philosopher Max Stirner in The Ego and Its Own.

  Gazing at the garden gnomes with knives protruding from their heads, I had the following thought: Better tango rhythms than algorithms!

  17

  Qarak’s camp on Tukurak Island was only a short distance from Laddie Harbour, where the rotting remains of Flaherty’s boat still rested, and even closer to Flaherty’s overwintering camp on the island.

  Qarak was old enough to have met Flaherty: might the filmmaker have given him “gun food” (popcorn)?

  Whether or not Qarak had partaken of Flaherty’s gun food, he did like guns. “My father told me that Qarak was always threatening people with his rifle,” one of my informants told me.

  Ouyerack was not pleased that Ikpak had denied his divinity. He said to Qarak: “Jesus will be coming soon, and he will not want to meet people like Ikpak.”

  He did not need to say another word. Grabbing his rifle, Qarak shot Ikpak twice between the shoulder blades, and when he noticed his victim was still moving, he put a bullet in Ikpak’s head.

  “Satan is dead!” announced Ouyerack. Again. Then he pointed to the halo around his head. Might this putative halo have been a vestige of the traditional Inuit belief that angakut are bathed in a perpetually bright light?

  Inuit angakut reputedly knew irinaliutit, or magic words. Ouyerack seemed to know only one magic word—Satan—but that turned out to be enough.

  Perhaps because her own life might have been at risk, Eva accepted the loss of her husband, saying, “He was a bad man—he was Satan.”

  Qarak was Eva’s father. He seems not to have been perturbed that he killed his own son-in-law. Quite the contrary. “We will sleep well tonight, for I have killed Satan,” Qarak told the other Inuit in his camp.

  Peter Sala returned from an unsuccessful hunting expedition. Right away he said Ikpak’s body should be placed in a cairn, but Qarak did not think Satan deserved a proper burial.

  “I am God,” Peter threatened, and Qarak backed down. Ikpak was placed under a pile of rocks.

  As God, Peter was not exactly love, but he did appear to be mellowing: the bodies of Keytowieack and Sara had not been given any sort of burial.

  The Inuit usually buried their dead in cairns of neatly piled rocks. One day I visited the cairn on the hill above my tent and looked at the skeleton inside it. The skull boasted a wide grin that seemed to say, How glad I am to have lived and died before the arrival of white man’s religion.…

  18

  From my notebook: Today’s temperature is several degrees below freezing, with (mirabile dictu!) no wind, and the air has a sharp high latitude clarity that I wouldn’t exchange for any other air in the world.

  For our species, the word “cold” invariably means something bad: cold feet, a cold stare, a cold shoulder, and the cold that kills cell phone battery life. Which would you prefer, a date with a coldie or a date with a hottie?

  By popular demand, hot—courtesy of climate change—is winning over cold virtually everywhere in the world. And by popular demand, today’s weather exists primarily on a screen, conveyed either via a forecaster or an app.

  Several years ago, on a Boston street, a woman gazing at her digital device walked directly into me. “Sorry,” she apologized, “I was just trying to find out the weather.”

  Last winter my lady friend and I paraded up and down that same Boston street wearing full-body mosquito nets. Winter is not the usual time for mosquitoes, but no one seemed to notice our unusual garb. They were too busy gazing at their iDevices.

  Not so long ago, if you didn’t pay attention to the world around you, you might end up being eaten, but now alas! our species has rendered extinct almost all of the creatures that once had a taste for human flesh.

  One consequence of inhabiting a world without predators: a dulling of the eyes.

  Could the current zombie craze be a subliminal desire on the part of our species to restore the balance of nature by creating a predator, albeit a mostly dead one, that likes to dine on our meat?

  And could the seemingly mindless saunter of iDevice users perhaps be contributing to that craze?

  Such saunterers commonly walk into lampposts or garbage cans while texting, tumble into manholes while talking on their cell phones, or smash into other people while trying to find out about (among other things) the weather.

  One of the few surviving predators is the polar bear. In the Belchers, polar bears were once common, but with the near-vanishing of sea ice, their numbers have decreased significantly.

  A bear is always listening for the crunch of its prey’s skull, Simeonie told me. After hearing that crunch, it can dine at its leisure on the brain and then on various fleshy body parts, without interference from pesky arms or legs.

  The human brain itself has considerable appeal for bears. After all, our brains are mostly composed of fats (specifically, myelin-coated dendrites), and eating fats is necessary if you … or a bear … wants to survive in the Arctic.

  If the bear doesn’t hear a telltale crunch when it clamps down its jaws, it’ll usually wander off in search of other prey, Simeonie told me, adding that the Qiqiqtarmiut used to wear thick fur hats to diminish the possibility of a crunching sound.

  In the winter of 2013, there were twenty deaths from polar bears in the Belchers. The victims happened not to be Inuit, but beluga whales that had become trapped in the ice.

  So there I was, writing up these notes inside my tent, when all of a sudden I heard a sharp scratching sound on the tent’s fabric. My first thought was: polar bear!

  My visitor turned out to be the Inuk who tried to sell me the eider duck carving while I was watching 9/11. In his hand was a differen
t, more self-possessed eider duck than the previous one.

  A one-two punch of climate change and hydroelectric dams on the mainland has affected both the sea ice and the sea’s salinity in this part of Hudson Bay, with the result that the eider duck population has gone into decline …

  … but the bird in the Inuk’s hand seemed to be thumbing its beak at the sufferings the formerly natural world was flinging its way.

  “This bird I carved, he was in the stone already,” the man informed me. “I just liberated him.”

  I bought the carving for $50, a cheap price for such a magical creation.

  19

  Peter Sala’s readings of ice conditions made him a valuable guide for Ernie Riddell, who hired Peter several times a year to take him to the Hudson’s Bay Company post at Great Whale River so he could retrieve mail and get trade items for his Tukarak Island store.

  On March 12, 1941, Ernie and Peter set off on the three-day dogsled journey over the ice to Great Whale. Sharp winds stabbed their faces and dusted their eyebrows with ice.

  Peter was such an expert handler of dogs that Robert Flaherty reputedly filmed him as a teenage dog team driver in his lost Belcher footage.

  It might seem strange that a person who knew so much about sled dogs might think they were Satan …

  … unless you remember that what’s on the outside of a creature, whether a dog or a human being, isn’t always the same as what’s on the inside.

  By 2001, sled dogs had mostly been replaced by snowmobiles in the Belchers. A snowmobile might be more efficient, Markassie told me, “but you can’t eat it if you get stuck somewhere.”

  A few years later, in Inukjuak, I learned that SFU is the Inuit texting acronym for “snowmobile fucked up,” and that POOS is the acronym for “passed out on snowmobile.” Passed out either from drinking too much or from a drug overdose.

  On the same visit to Inukjuak, I saw a woman texting while breastfeeding an infant. Will that infant grow up associating screens with nurture?

  As for myself, I associate coffee with nurture, and I was grinding a bag of robusta in Sanikiluaq’s Northern Store when Jacky—the Inuk with the hole in his cheek—walked up to me.

  “That attack on your country,” Jacky told me. “I don’t believe it happened. I think it was made up for TV.”

  In the store’s DVD bin, I noticed The Towering Inferno. If Jacky had seen it, then this disaster movie about a fire that breaks out in a state-of-the-art high rise in San Francisco might explain why he thought 9/11 was a fiction.

  At the time of my visit, the highest structure in the Belchers was only two stories high—hardly towering at all. This might be another reason Jacky regarded 9/11 as a fiction: buildings as high as the World Trade Center could not exist except on a screen.

  20

  During the trip to Great Whale River, Peter Sala kept repeating, “I am a bad man.…” He did not elaborate.

  As soon as Peter and Ernie arrived in Great Whale, Peter went to see Harold Udgarten, who had met Robert Flaherty in 1914 and who was still working for the Hudson’s Bay Company twenty-seven years later.

  Many of the Hudson Bay Inuit, including Peter himself, referred to Harold as “our white brother,” although Harold was actually of mixed blood—part Norwegian and part Cree.

  All of a sudden Harold burst into the room where Ernie was chatting with another Hudson’s Bay Company employee. “Have you heard about the recent murders in the Belchers?” he said to Ernie.

  During his long tenure with the Hudson’s Bay Company, “Old Harold,” as he was now called, had developed a reputation for protecting the Inuit from the not always pleasant demands of qallunaat, which was probably why Peter chose to tell him rather than Ernie about the murders.

  I wondered whether Peter had implicated himself during his visit to Harold. “I’ll find out for you,” said a Cyberian friend to whom I had told the story of the Belcher murders. He spent close to two hours with his computer … to no avail.

  Two hours seemed to me a long time, but the Cyberian admitted that he got a surge of adrenaline every time he successfully downloaded something, and the longer he worked at it, the more potent the surge.

  Confession: I get a surge of adrenaline every time I upload myself—i.e., get up and walk away from my computer.

  “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys,” wrote Thoreau. “They are but improved means to an unimproved end.”

  I asked another friend who happened to be a psychic rather than a Cyberian to call up the spirit of Thoreau and ask him (it?) what he thought of computers, so she went into a trance. The spirit’s response was, “All the folks in the afterlife use them except me.”

  Until the end of his life, Ernie Riddell couldn’t get Harold’s voice “asking that question” out of his head.

  Telegraph message from the HBC store in Great Whale River to the Company’s headquarters in Winnipeg on March 14, 1941:

  HAVE RECEIVED INFORMATION THAT THREE MURDERS HAVE BEEN COMMITTED RECENTLY IN BELCHERS. ADVISE IMMEDIATE POLICE INVESTIGATION.

  21

  From my notebook: Sea seething with high chop and spume. Tent blown down by the wind for a final time. Relocated to the hotel. Broken TV in room. Manager says he’ll give me a room where the TV works. No, I protested, I like my TVs broken.

  I visited “Siut” and, as per his earlier request, brought my ears rather than my tape recorder with me.

  “You asked about those murders,” Siut told me. “I am a cousin to Ouyerack, and I am a cousin to Keytowieack, so their blood is in me, and I feel bad for all of them.”

  “We are Inuit, so we share,” added Siut’s wife.

  Siut’s wife gave me the following piece of information: Ouyerack’s father had been murdered when he, Ouyerack, was a young boy, and this might have made him want to become a murderer himself.

  Siut himself visited Tukarak Island to get soapstone for his carvings. He told me that the soapstone on Tukarak sometimes turned blood-red because it had been a witness to Ikpak’s murder.

  Siut gave me a greenish (not blood-red!) soapstone carving of a polar bear. “It’s for you … because of what happened to your country,” he said.

  The carving was a gift, but it also carried a message that said “It’s time to talk about a less painful subject.” So we now talked about the Toronto Blue Jays and what a lousy season they’d had. A far less painful subject.

  I gave Sanikiluaq a gift of my own—a lecture about Arctic plant ecology in the village school. During this lecture, I often had to shout so my voice could be heard above the shrieking wind. A common problem here, one of the teachers told me.

  I told the audience that climate change was bringing many vascular plants from temperate regions to the North, with the result that local lichens will likely die off because they won’t be able to compete with the southern invaders …

  “Just like what the qallunaat have been doing to us,” an Inuk in the audience remarked, to a mixture of laughter and applause.

  … and that since lichens contribute significant amounts of nitrogen to the nitrogen-deprived soil of the North, the loss of those lichens could have a disastrous effect on local ecology.

  I also mentioned the high latitude/high altitude plant called Diapensia, sometimes referred to as the “cushion plant” because it grows close to the ground in a mosslike mat. Its dead leaves remain on the plant through the winter, sheltering it from the snow and from wind abrasion.

  Long live death, I was getting ready to say, but then I saw several elders in the audience who’d given me stories about the 1941 killings, and I held my tongue.

  Question from the audience: “How can you be a Naaqtuuq when your stomach is a normal size?” Naaqtuuq, one of several Inuit names for white man, means “Big Belly.”

  A woman in the audience raised her hand. “Diapensia is the first flower to bloom in the spring here,” she remarked, then said: “I feel the land is smiling when I see its flowers.” She was smiling herself.
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br />   The wind was not smiling, though. It suddenly blew open a window behind me and then made a loud caterwauling scream, as if to protest its exclusion from the evening’s event.

  22

  After my lecture, one of the teachers took me to a room in the school where I could check my emails. Seated at one of the computers was a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl. She was playing a video game that featured Godzilla-type monsters and did not seem to notice me.

  If the medium is the message, then there’s no difference between playing a monster video game and googling Harold Udgarten.

  A popular misconception about evolution—it progresses for the good of a species.

  Another misconception about evolution—it occurs only over a long time.

  Just as numerous birds have gone in a single generation from being feeders in the wild to feeders in garbage dumps, so Homo sapiens has evolved in slightly less than a generation from being more or less a free-ranging species to being a species that’s permanently tethered to a screen.

  In his book Exodus to the Virtual World, Edward Castronova writes that the greatest migration in human history is the current move from the real to the virtual world.

  I now joined this migration myself.

  “We’ve gotten color-coded terrorist alerts,” a friend emailed me. “When you get back, you’ll see surveillance screens all over the place,” another emailer wrote. A third wrote: “My life will be changed forever when I buy Apple’s new iPod.…”

  A fourth emailer made this not necessarily funny joke: “If you eat the seals and walruses there, you’ll become a belcher yourself.”

  While I was responding to my emails, I had this thought: I could be a kalopaling (giant man-eating eider duck) typing these words, and no one would be aware of the fact.

  And how did I know that one of my correspondents wasn’t a kalopaling?

  Email from one kalopaling to another: “Social media are awesome, dude. I meet so many human beings, and not a single one of them realizes that I’m going to eat him/her.”