Chapter 24 ~ A Dog’s Life
Religion played a large part in the lives of the people in Cape Dorset, although it was superimposed like a veneer on a solid, basic belief in spirits, which, the Eskimos assumed were in all things, inanimate or not, animal and human.
When a person died, it was customary to give his name to a newborn child. If there was no infant, the name was given to a dog, and the man’s spirit was kept alive until a baby was born to carry on the name. Meanwhile, the dog was never beaten or chastised, it was given affection and care, good food and favouritism, a rare state of affairs in a society which treated its dogs in a seemingly neglectful fashion during the summer season when dogs were of more nuisance than use.
Travel by dog sled was impossible after the ice and snow had melted then most travelling was done by boat. With their work of sled hauling ended, the huskies entered the worst phase of their existence.
They were either chained to the ground, separate from each other, to prevent fighting, or they were taken out by canoe and marooned on small islands, where they fended for themselves, digging for small crustaceans at low tide. Those chained in camp were rarely fed and they were a miserable sight.
They lost their magnificent winter coats, they looked mangy and scraggy, which indeed they were, Huskies do not bark, they howl and squeal. The hungrier they became, the more ferocious they sounded at the approach of anything edible. The more they howled, the more they were beaten or stoned and the question of their mean tempers was an arguable point.
Most Northerners, Eskimo and non-Eskimo, claimed huskies were naturally vicious and so treated them abominably. A few believed they became dangerous because of the ill treatment they received.
It was an unanswerable question, like deciding which came first, the hen or the egg.
In the early days we were at Cape Dorset, two regular callers at our tent were two black and white puppies – almost full grown. They were amiable creatures and announced their arrival at the low door by a musical throaty purring. They were as mild and as woolly as lambs in their thick young coats and soon were christened Mutt and Geoff.
I was finding it hard work to eat through the bully beef, and thought it seemed a little wasteful, after two successive meals out of one tin, I felt Mutt and Geoff were welcome to the remainder. While they were free to roam, they were playful, never snarled or snapped, and they followed us like pets. One day, they failed to arrive and I presumed they too had found bully beef eaten too often was too monotonous. It was not until a few days later that I discovered what had happened to them.
Cape Dorset settlement was spread over a wide area, covering three small valleys, each of which led to the beach. One morning, I was walking along the path to the most westerly valley and heard a hullabaloo of howling and screaming as I passed a stretch of bald, barren rocks. It was near to the place where a little girl had been killed by dogs earlier in the summer.
I moved towards two animals lying entangled in their tethering chains as their owner flung a handful of stones to quieten them. The dogs were Mutt and Geoff, which went almost hysterical with excitement and wagged their tails vigorously although they could scarcely move a leg, so trussed were they in the unfamiliar fetters. The two animals had grown up. Puppy days were over and they were secured, as required by law.
Fully grown dogs which were not chained were liable to be shot by the local dog officer, who might be a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or the local government administrator. In Frobisher, the year previously, the police held a “dog shoot” and killed about two hundred huskies roaming the settlement. The officer in charge told me so.
To the Eskimos, who depended on their dogs for mobility in winter, it was tantamount to a city motorist having the engine of his car wrecked for a parking offence.
From the time Mutt and Geoff were chained up, they would have the dog’s life of every husky in the Arctic – work in winter and semi-starvation in summer. Rosemary and I travelled the path near the dogs frequently, so they fared pretty well for scraps of tinned beef until we left Cape Dorset.
The Eskimo population of three hundred and twenty was mostly young. There were many children, many young married couples and only four men who could be described as old. They were Parr, a lame man of sixty-seven; Tudlik, aged seventy, who was blind; Kingwatsiak, nearly ninety, partly blind and whose legs were crippled, and Kiakshuk, hale, hearty and a talented, prolific artist.
Kiakshuk, Tudlik and Kingwatsiak were neighbours in “chapel valley” and our first introduction to them was through Alma Houston. Tudlik’s tent was by the shore, where not even moss grew on the rocks. He had been an excellent carver in the days when he could see, and although he could carve only by feel, the Houstons still bought his work and if they gave away a carving to a visitor, it was almost certainly Tudlik’s work. He made only owls. They were fashioned with a pen knife and smoothed with a nail file. Compared with his former work, they were crude, but infinitely more valuable to any collector of soapstone carvings, and particularly more appreciated by those people who met him.
Tudlik was sitting outside his tent, carving an owl when we called on him. His soft skinned hands and his frayed jacket were white with fine powder from the soapstone he was filing and Rosemary asked him to look up to have his photograph taken. He turned his sightless gaze upwards, feeling for the warmth of the sunshine to ensure he was well placed and she would get a good picture.
Blindness had only recently come upon him, but advance of the disease had been rapid. Before he had lost his sight, Tudlik had made several drawings for the new Eskimo art form of printing. Among his drawings was a strange geometric design, the only one produced by the people, and it was understood by no-one although Tudlik had named it “Division of Meat”. The picture was said to bear no resemblance to the cutting up of seal, whale, musk-ox or polar bear.
It was among the edition of prints made in Cape Dorset in 1959, and the stone block from which it was made is now destroyed. A bizarre and possible explanation of the strange composition was given to me by a member of the Department of Northern Affairs, who knew of Tudlik and his history.
“Years ago, Tudlik married a woman who was stricken with a crippling disease. It was probably poliomyelitis for it left her limbs useless. For a long time, she clung to life, lying inside her tent, quite helpless and unable to move. One day, when Tudlik returned from hunting, he found a few terrible remains of the woman who had been his wife. A pack of roving dogs had entered the tent during his absence and they had attacked and devoured her. So who knows what was in Tudlik’s mind when he drew that curious picture. It certainly is not the way you divide up a seal.”
From Tudlik’s place, the path led over a low hill, past a burial ground on top of the rise and down into “chapel valley” proper, where about twenty families lived.
In the first group of tents on the left-hand side of the track was Kingwatsiak’s tent. He was said to have been born in 1877, before records were officially made or any census taken in the North. He was certainly the oldest Eskimo in the Eastern Arctic, for Kingwatsiak had been an adult in the Nineteenth Century when whaling ships from Britain hunted the schools of whale for sake of their oil to fill the lamps of Europe and for the tough whale skin to manufacture into long leather bootlaces.
Mr. Wattie, son of the owner of a whaling ship had befriended Kingwatsiak and taken him on a six-month holiday to Scotland where the young Eskimo must have been a great curiosity, just as he said he found life in Britain a strange and curious thing.
It was about the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and Kingwatsiak remembered being taken to different places by train and by “big dogs.” The big dogs, of course, were horses, drawing the old-fashioned tramcars and carriages in those days.
He said they were called British Islands, but he went for days without coming to the sea. He had never seen so many people and when the streets became crowded with shoppers at Christmas time, he was kept at the home of the Wattie family for five days, in case he became lost in the hustle and bustle.
When Alma Houston finished translating Kingwatsiak’s tales for us, he learned his photograph was to be taken and asked us to wait for a while. He pulled an old tin box from beneath his caribou skin sleeping robe and withdrew from it a small packet containing a bright Coronation Medal, presented to him in 1952, the year Queen Elizabeth was crowned.
He pinned it proudly to the left breast of his faded parka and sat bolt upright, his long white hair reaching to his shoulders, his useless legs stretched out in front of him while Rosemary went to work with her cameras.
During his visit to Scotland, Kingwatsiak had been named Andrew by the Wattie family, so when the Queen’s third child was born and christened Andrew also, he took an even deeper interest in the royal family. (He had a picture of the Queen pinned to his tent pole.)
Kingwatsiak was not a man to let an opportunity go by, so he spoke to Alma Houston in Eskimo while his photo was being taken and he asked that she write down a letter, in English, and send it to the Queen.
She borrowed one of my pencils, and Kingwatsiak dictated his message. He wanted the Queen to know she had named her son after himself, Andrew, Kingwatsiak, and he wanted the Queen to send a reply to him quickly because he was an old man, and Arctic winters felt colder the older you became and he might not live long enough to receive her reply unless she wrote right away. The letter was duly translated, written down and posted to London, and to Kingwatsiak’s great delight, before the winter ended, he received a gracious reply from Buckingham Palace: “The Queen commands me…”
That was the first visit of many I made to old Kingwatsiak’s tent. Later, I called on him with his most regular visitor, the Missionary, who shortly after my arrival, prevailed upon me to become organist at Cape Dorset’s unique church.
