Chapter 28 ~ Endings
Our days in the tent ended suddenly after a particularly wild night of wind and storm. Jim Houston had urged us to take advantage of the hut vacated by Mr. Gardner, when the missionary moved into his newly built mission house.
Rosemary insisted we could last out until the end of our stay in Cape Dorset but the area administrator persisted in asking us to move.
I kept a silent, hopeful brief, and thought we should do as we were told, but said nothing. He let us have our way for a while, but one Sunday afternoon in late September, while I was sitting at the seat of the church organ, a few Eskimos moved our house for us, lock, stock and barrel. When I returned to our camp site on the hill, the tent had gone and only a ring of stones marked the place that had been home.
It was a sparkling day with a sprinkling of icing sugar snow on the hills. You could feel winter in the air, but not even the sunshine could cheer my melancholy as I thought of our inevitable, impending departure. Dejected, I walked by the little black tarn, past the big stone mound of the seal meat cache and down to the hut.
It was situated on the edge of the main thoroughfare – a path connecting Chapel Valley with the Art Centre, the trading post, the Houston house and the school. Soon, our house became a stopping place for anyone who felt like a cup of tea. We spent our last week in Cape Dorset brewing tea in the morning, tea in the afternoon and tea at night. We called at the Eskimos’ tents and they returned the courtesy with a call from the whole family. The cerise coloured door of the hut was always opening and shutting on somebody, so by the time the HBC supply ship, Rupertsland called in the harbour, bound for Frobisher Bay, we were in danger of becoming social butterflies. The day before our departure was a Sunday. At the last moment I bought a complete set of the prints which were sold only in Cape Dorset. A mincing white youth employed by the Co-operative served me with a languid air. I handed over the cheque, grabbed the cylinder of five prints and left the stifling atmosphere of the heated Art Centre. He had taken so long to serve me there was no time for lunch, so I tossed the cylinder into the hut, grabbed my tape recorder and dashed over the hill to the church and the unaffected simplicity of the Eskimos.
As I moved along the path, down into the valley and across the stream, I could see the people at the doors of their tents. They were watching and waiting. As they saw me they stepped down to the path and into a procession that grew longer and gayer as more people joined in, and we went up to the church.
Simonee was waiting at the church door to greet us all we whispered together about the order of the hymns and I took my place on the organ bench, while the men shuffled into the pews on the left and the women into the seats on the right.
Looking down at them they seemed to have such sweet natured faces as they smiled shyly and raised their eyebrows in silent messages of greeting.
That organ was probably never pumped and pedaled so hard as it was that afternoon. We put gusto into all the old favorites – Cwm Rhondda was rendered like a Welsh rugby team on a Saturday night after a win at Twickenham, and The Twenty Third Psalm would have drawn encores at the New York Met.
When the service ended, I asked Pudlat to give me a special rendition of the Mingo Lake Hymn. I pointed to my tape recorder and he understood at once. He called the Eskimos forward and I could tell by the grins on their faces we were to have a whooped-up version.
They pressed on to the platform in front of the altar. I held out the microphone, switched on the recording machine and Pudlat gave out with the first low note. A hundred voices picked up the tune. There were flat voices, flute like voices, loud and husky voices. As they ended the second verse, I switched off the machine and picked up the note on the organ. They were right on key. When the fourth and last verse began, we let everything go.
As the last note died, I saw Simonee raise his hands to his face and wipe his cheeks. Overcome, I turned away and busied myself with the tape recorder. It seemed that Simonee the composer and everyone on the platform, including myself was in tears.
I recovered enough to manage a shaky smile at Simonee and suddenly I realised they were not wiping away tears. They were mopping sweat off their faces.
The stove had been lit as a special gesture because of our parting, and the whole congregation, clustered together on the platform near the organ had been gently roasted by the red-glowing stove.
Rosemary was patiently waiting outside the church to take final pictures of the congregation. Pudlat and Simonee and Oshowetuk and their families lined up in a cheerful row outside the church door, posing like veteran models in their best Sunday parkas, and when she had finished her roll of film, we set off for home down the rocky pathway into Chapel Valley.
The snarling and excited shrieking of a staked team of huskies carried over the valley on the crisp air. By the beach a man was feeding his dog team. The animals crouched at his approach, hauling back as far as their chains would allow, then they snapped at the unexpected ration of meat as it was thrown at them.
To see a man feeding his dogs so liberally was a sure sign winter was about us, and as soon as the snow settled the huskies would be unchained and harnessed instead for sled hauling.
That night, we shared out our remaining food supplies among our friends, and the next morning, wearing our shabbiest parkas to signify our sadness and our reluctance to leave, we boarded Oshowetuk’s canoe and set out for the Rupertsland.
She lay out in the harbour, shrouded by squalls of wet snow. We both felt as chilled and grey as the sleet in the cold, sombre dawn, as we grabbed for the rope ladder to climb up on deck.
A cheerful Newfoundlander helped us over the side of the ship. Already she had steam up and the planking throbbed beneath my feet. Oshowetuk’s canoe circled the Rupertsland in farewell. I could see his hand waving, but he was too far for me to see his features clearly any more.
An old, familiar smell of frying bacon wafted up from the galley. It was months since we had eaten any and my mouth began to water as the Rupertsland slid past the headland of Cape Dorset, bound for Frobisher Bay and the world outside.
Behind us we left a land already bleak with winter, yet peopled by a race full of warmth and courage and humour.
They had shared with us the unforgettable beauty of their Arctic Summer. In danger they had cared for our lives as dearly as their own, and in distress, they had cared for our comfort in kind unselfishness.
I kept the cape in sight as long as I could. Wind streaked the snow flurries horizontally, blurring the landscape and I felt within me an inescapable guilt as I left the Eskimos of Cape Dorset to their certainty of Arctic cold and dark while I sailed off to the comfort of another, more alien civilization.
In the realms of technical invention we were thousands of years apart, but in the sphere of humanity to man, the Eskimos still possessed the key to that dignity which Twentieth Century man lost a long time ago.
