Coppermine

K E I T H   R O S S   L E C K I E

VIKING CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published 2010

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

Copyright © Keith Ross Leckie, 2010

Map copyright © Gord Turner, 2010

Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists 94

Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Leckie, Keith Ross, 1952–

Coppermine / Keith Ross Leckie.

ISBN 978-0-670-06463-2

1. Murder—Coppermine River Valley (N.W.T. and Nunavut)—Fiction.
2. Inuit—Coppermine River Valley (N.W.T. and Nunavut)—Fiction. 3. Royal North West Mounted Police (Canada)—Fiction. 4. Coppermine River Valley (N.W.T. and Nunavut)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS8573.E337C66 2010 C813’.54 C2010-904519-X

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TO MARY,

FOR HER LOVE AND SUPPORT,

AND FOR GIVING ME ALL MY BEST IDEAS.

THANK YOU, BABY.

a cognizant original v5 release november 02 2010

 love another person is to see the face of God.

—
VICTOR HUGO

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This true story of the murder trial of Sinnisiak and Uluksuk came to me in 1992 as I was researching a screenplay for the CBC movie
Trial at Fortitude Bay
(a contemporary trial in the High Arctic). In the summer of 1917, the Coppermine story was the first jury-system trial of an Inuit in Canada and became a huge show trial, attended by journalists and students of law from all over North America. The press referred to it as “modern law meets Stone Age man.”

The story fascinated me for eighteen years. I planned to write it as a novel, but I had created three produced miniseries for CBC, and they were looking for another. So, somewhat reluctantly, I signed on to script the Coppermine story. I researched it, travelled to the important sites, and fashioned it into the outline of a four-hour dramatic miniseries. Then a regime change occurred at the CBC, and Coppermine and most other projects portraying Canadian history and long form projects were scrapped.

As a long-form writer, I was out of work. That’s when my wife suggested I go back to the original idea and take a year to write Coppermine as a novel. With my son and daughter in university and a mortgage to pay, it was a daunting prospect. I hadn’t written a novel in twenty years. I had a good sense of story and dialogue, but was my prose up to scratch? Could I internalize emotion? As a writer in film and television for three decades, I write as if the viewer may change the channel at any point. Is this a good thing?

What you have in hand is the result. Its strength is in the narrative and the characters, all inspired by real events and people.
Coppermine
is one of those stories that I find just as compelling today as on the first day I discovered it.

I would like to warn historians and explorers that I have taken dramatic liberties. If you’re looking for precise historic accuracy regarding this case, please refer to Gordon Moyles’s
British Law and Arctic Men
or McKay Jenkins’s
Bloody Falls of the Coppermine.
For instance, the rapids on the Coppermine River where Jack and Angituk dump their canoe in Part One are, in fact, a day’s paddle above Bloody Falls, but for dramatic reasons, I represent them a distance below. John Hornby did not testify at the trial, though his statements were discussed. The impressive exploits of Royal North West Mounted Police Inspector Denny LaNauze and Corporal Valentine Bruce are distilled into one character—Jack Creed. The love story may or may not have taken place, but it was inspired by a real person. For these and other historical and geographic offences, all I can say is that I may tamper with facts for dramatic reasons, but I do my best to tell the truth. My job as a scriptwriter and now a novelist is to mythologize the true stories I love.

Let me paraphrase the words of Mr. Twain: Everything here is absolutely true, except what isn’t, and it should have been.

Please enjoy.

PROLOGUE

JULY 6, 1913

FORT NORMAN

NORTHWEST TERRITORIES

The young priest stood on the rough planks of the Hudson’s Bay Company dock at Fort Norman feeling the thousand-mile thrum of the Mackenzie River against the haphazard structure of spruce logs, nails, and ropes under his boots. He savoured the brilliant light of the short-lived Arctic summer sun on his face, anticipating the little steamboat that would bring to him his new companion. His melancholy eyes searched the southern horizon of that vast river through the wind-washed Arctic air, its clarity rendering every image with a dreamlike aspect that only became more intense the farther north one ventured.

Father Jean-Baptiste Rouvière had come to the sub-Arctic two years before, and his thin body and tentative movements were a testament to the burden of his work. He had this day made his way by canoe from his camp into Fort Norman well ahead of the loosely scheduled arrival of the riverboat. He sat down now on a warm spot of exposed granite shield and took out the new journal he had ordered from the Hudson’s Bay store. He had been keeping some notes over the last year, though he had been forced to use them for kindling when the desperate pain in his frozen fingers trumped the importance of record keeping. Now, however, he was determined to write the whole of his experiences—past, present, and future—in this sturdy little book. And he had also vowed to himself always to carry dry kindling in his pocket in order that this record would remain safe.

He looked out again at the seabirds that hovered over the wide river hundreds of miles from any sea. Ravens croaked and muttered in the spruce trees above him. Settling himself on the warm rock and with one eye on the river, he began to write:

It is with humility I begin this journal of my work as your brother in the Lord and in the name of Christ and His mother the Immaculate Mary. I have been deeply blessed by my special mission here in the North. I was chosen by Bishop Breynat himself. Please forgive me my moment of pride in this. The Bishop told me there were stories of an isolated tribe of Eskimos up on the Coronation Gulf—the Copper people—who had never seen a white man, who worked with stone tools and never knew the rest of the world existed. A culture frozen in time. There were rumours they were violent savages, witches and cannibals, but to the Bishop they were the children of God yet to be claimed.

“Go to them. Bring them to the light,” he told me. I was to travel even as far north as the Coronation Gulf of the Arctic Ocean, and find these last few primitives, these Eskimos, some of the most isolated and backward human beings in the world. A kingdom of ignorance. He told me to convert them to the one true faith so that, as he put it, “we may send a few specimens to Paradise.” And I tell you, I rejoiced in the assignment. A challenge and adventure in the Lord’s name. Dare I say it? In the footsteps of Peter? And so I had gone, and gone willingly.
Ecce ego mitte me.
Here I am. Send me forth. I have been here for two years.

The winter was very hard in the little cabin on the Dease River. It was relentlessly, crushingly lonely. I had not anticipated how in the Arctic the regimes of light and time are so very different. I have lived through a nightless summer and a dayless winter. The guide I hired, Mr. John Hornby, a somewhat erratic young man, took me to a tiny, damp, poorly built cabin on the edge of the treeline where the winds seeped freely through the log chinkings, still three hundred miles from my goal: the mouth of the Coppermine River. Then, after we’d had only one single contact with the human creatures I sought, the Englishman left me to go trapping for the entire winter!