Coppermine (19 page)

“It’s fine meat. Lean and tasty. Better than the meat from the cows we have in the South. And the southern cow hunt isn’t nearly as interesting.”

“But my favourite thing to eat is
uviluit
—mussels.”

“Shellfish? Where do you get them up here?”

Angituk’s eyes shone at the memory. “The ocean, of course. West along the coast. You can gather them on the seabed under the ice at low tide. There are places at Cape Parry where high tides make caves. We dig a big hole through the ice and when the tide goes out we light lanterns and slip down into these caves, these caverns under the ice, and walk through the tide pools to gather the
uviluit.
We would eat them out of the shell, all salty. My
amaamak
—my mother—could find lots of them to fill her bags. We’d stuff ourselves. It was scary and beautiful with only the glow of the lantern for light. We’d collect bull kelp and dulse to eat too. And we’d look up high to the ceiling with a thousand icicles hanging from it, through the green ice to the sun, all dim and distant.

“You know, Father Ducot had picture books on the churches in Rome. Cathedrals. Beautiful big rooms, but I don’t think the tide caves at Cape Parry are any less beautiful. But all the time there was the groaning of the sea at low tide way back in the caves like something alive and dangerous, about to rise and come after us.”

“It sounds dangerous.”

“Yes, it was! My mother told me some children were caught by the tide rising too fast and trapping them deep in the chambers, and they drowned. We were warned. We stayed very close to my mother.”

He had never seen Angituk so animated as by this breathless telling of the childhood memory of the caves and her mother.

“I’d very much like to see that,” Creed responded.

“Sure …” she said. Her voice trailed off, the silence swelling between them as they both realized this was unlikely.

WHILE WRITING IN HIS JOURNAL
one morning, Creed made the calculations and discovered it was Christmas Day. Angituk was excited by the announcement, for she remembered it as one of the few occasions of pleasure at the mission school. She told Creed how the children secretly—for it was forbidden to speak their language—called it
Quviahugvik,
“the occasion of happiness.” They were all given oranges as gifts. She could still remember her first incredible bite of that tangy, sweet fruit on Christmas morning.

Childhood Christmas mornings for Creed began with jumping on his sleeping brother, Charlie, to wake him up before dawn to go and see what Santa had brought. Charlie took a lot of waking up and would groan and push him away, even on Christmas morning. But then Charlie would finally give Creed his big smile and whisper, “Let’s go see,” and they would creep downstairs to find their stockings stuffed with walnuts, tangerines and candies. Gifts of new hockey skates or a rugby ball or a punching bag would await them, and there would be more wrapped presents under the tree. And there, near the fireplace, would be convincing indications of the visit by Santa Claus—sooty footprints leading from the hearth to the tree, an empty glass of milk, a half-eaten cookie, teeth marks on a carrot for Rudolph—signs that had Creed believing in the existence of the old saint until the embarrassing age of eleven. Creed told Angituk all of this. Her knowledge of Santa Claus was vague, but she understood him to be a most generous spirit and was stricken to hear Creed no longer believed.

CREED OFFERED TO TELL
the hunters the story of Bethlehem and the birth of Jesus Christ. They had heard of this Jesus Christ fellow from the priests, but not of the circumstances of his birth. To the Copper people, birth, as Angituk had explained, strongly influenced the life ahead. The prisoners listened with great interest as Angituk translated.

“When Jesus was born, his parents, Mary and Joseph, were travelling.”

“To new hunting grounds?”

“Well, yes, sort of.”

“What season? Caribou or seal?”

“It was winter, so seal. And the baby was coming and there was no room in the inn, or … the big igloo, so they had to go to the stable … or a little igloo, and have the baby there, surrounded by cows and sheep.”

“Tell us, what are cows and sheep?”

Creed was beginning to warm to the telling. “Actually, they were caribou and husky dogs, and they all loved the baby. And three wise men came, who had seen a star that marked the birth of Jesus.”

“Wise men?”

“Shamans,” Angituk ventured.

“Absolutely. Powerful shamans who saw the star, and they brought gifts.”

“Which star?”

“It was a new star then. It was … Polaris.”

“Of course.
Ubluriaq,
the North Star.”

“That’s right.”

“What gifts did they bring?”

Angituk prompted him. “Walrus oil. Narwhal tusk. Hard wood.”

They passed those on to the hunters, who were impressed.

“And then the shepherds came,” Jack continued.

“What are shepherds?”

“Seal hunters,” Angi suggested quietly.

“Did I say shepherds? I meant seal hunters. A bunch of seal hunters came in from the ice edge to see the baby, because good spirits had come to them and told them that Jesus was born. But then there were enemies.”

Creed now had the hunters fully engaged in his narrative. Angituk too.

“There was a king, an evil shaman named Herod, who was jealous and sent hunters to kill the child.”

“Probably Cree,” Sinnisiak ventured, looking at Uluksuk, who nodded.

“Could be. But the seal hunters and the shamans protected the baby and the bad hunters didn’t find him, so there is a happy ending to the story of Jesus’s birth. He went on to be a great man. A teacher and the best hunter of all.”

Uluksuk and Sinnisiak were very interested in the story. Uluksuk offered, “Before we killed them, the priests showed us pictures of this Jesus, both as a child with his mother and as a man, but we had no idea what he had done.”

Angituk took it upon herself to fill in the details of the life of Jesus. Uluksuk listened very carefully to the description of the miracles: the casting out of demons, restoring the blind to sight and the dead to life, walking on water.

Uluksuk casually assured them, “I have done all these things myself except for the loaves and fishes. That was a good one. I will try that one sometime soon. Go on with the story.”

So when Angituk told the rest of the story, about the Crucifixion, she could not explain why some people had wanted to kill Jesus. Creed, too, was hard put to come up with a translatable explanation. Jealousy on the part of the bad shamans was as close as he got. The hunters found this troubling. Uluksuk brought out a small, very worn coloured card with a painting of Christ in agony on the Cross. Father Rouvière had given it to him the night before he died.

“Is this what will happen to us in the South?”

“No. They do not crucify people anymore.”

But he could see neither of them was convinced.

THAT NIGHT,
Creed and Angituk sang Christmas carols. She remembered every word of every verse of “O Come All Ye Faithful” and “Silent Night” in English as she had learned them at the mission school. Then she sang the latter in her own language, her voice clear and beautiful, bringing tears to Creed’s eyes:

Unuak naguyuk,

Talvani nunami,

Uilagahuk

nutaganikpaktuk,

Angutinuak ataniuyuk,

Negiyutagvingmi-ituk,

Anilihaktukjesus,

Anilihaktukjesus.

At midnight, they shook hands all around, an unusual white custom the Eskimos enjoyed, and wished each other a Merry Christmas. The two prisoners heard the words and enthusiastically repeated them with surprising accuracy.

“Merry Christmas! … Happy New Year!” Sinnisiak revealed a real talent for pronunciation.

Creed had a small silver penknife his father had given him before he went overseas, and this he gave to Angituk as a Christmas gift. She was surprised and delighted.

Sinnisiak began to tell stories. They were jokes, really. Though Creed was only the third white man Sinnisiak had met, he liked to talk about white men and the strange things the Eskimos had heard about them.

“What did you hear we were like?”

Angituk laughed at Sinnisiak’s ideas as she translated them for Creed. “They knew white men were very tall and big and pale-skinned and hairy.”

Sinnisiak had enjoyed watching Creed’s beard grow, inspecting it from time to time. It was so thick compared to his own, like a wolf pelt.

“Some said white men had no chin,” Sinnisiak continued in Angituk’s translation. “Some said you only had one eye. And others …” Angituk was really laughing now. “Others said you had a mouth in the middle of your stomach!

“The people heard stories that the white man could be very generous with food and tools and then suddenly could be very selfish and dangerous. Even kill,” Angituk went on to explain. “These changes in mood are rare in Eskimo society. Only the spirits are allowed such indulgences.”

“What else do you know about white men’s religion?”

Sinnisiak spoke up.
“Gratias ago vos! Deus beatus vos! In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti!”

Creed smiled at his perfect pronunciation, his surprising proclivity for remembering language memorized more than two years earlier.

“Does he know what any of that means?” Creed asked Angituk.

“No,” Sinnisiak responded, and they all laughed.

“They know nothing of the white religion except for the one day the priests showed them pictures, and what you’ve told them now,” Angituk said.

“How would you describe the Copper Eskimo religion?” Creed asked her. “What do they believe? Do they have a supreme being? Do they believe in an afterlife? Do they agree with our creation story?”

“You mean Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden?”

“Yes.”

She paused. Creed seldom asked her such a direct question and she began to tell her tale slowly, as if laying the groundwork for a long story and knowing a skeptical audience when she saw one. “My people believe that the Earth has four corners with pillars holding up the sky. Storms come out of holes cut in the sky by unhappy Spirits of the Dead. The stars are dead people or animals. We don’t know why they go up there.”

“Where did humans come from?”

She thought about her response for a moment. “In the beginning, when the world was new, there was a woman …” Angituk smiled. “A single woman. It was Kannokapfaluk. She needed a husband, but there were no men, so finally she met a strong, charming, and handsome dog and mated with him. This worked out very well and they had many, many litters of children together. In fact there were so many children, they could not feed or look after them. So Kannokapfaluk took off her two great mukluks. She divided the children into three groups. She put some of the children in one mukluk and some of the children in the other and set them off afloat on the ocean. One mukluk landed not too far south, and those people became the Cree and Chipewyans. One mukluk floated for a long time on a current and landed much farther south, and those people became the
Kabloona,
the white men. You are the hairiest and most like the dog. But the children that Kannokapfaluk loved best, who were most beautiful like her, she kept with her and gave them the best land on the Coronation Gulf, and that is us. There you are. Do you like our creation story?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Like the Christian Bible.”

“Well, your stories are not quite like the Bible. The Bible is based on real people and things that actually happened.”

“Oh, you mean like the seven days to create the world or the parting of the Red Sea or the virgin birth? Or, for that matter, Christ’s miracles and his resurrection?”

Creed heard the teasing in her voice. Despite his own doubts about the Christian Church, Creed felt a hypocritical pang of offence. He was up for a good fight. “The Bible is a historical record.”

“No more than our beliefs. They are based on everyday life,” she explained. “Animals, weather, landscape. They are to connect and explain what we can see and what we can’t. We have taboos with food, as you do. At the mission school I enjoyed your Bible stories, like David and Goliath. They are almost as good as ours.”

Creed smiled at her, and she continued.

“We believe in the old days there were monsters roaming the land, hunting humans for food. A young hunter named Swan was given special powers, and he travelled all over the Coppermine valley turning these monsters into animals men could hunt. And there was a race of nasty giants, the
Tornrin,
that we had to chase away. And a gang of female giants with sharp teeth to eat our hunters who were finally defeated by our women. We still have Paija, who plays tricks but not dangerous ones, and Nighihk, who knocks down igloos if he doesn’t like you. We have the hairy hunter dwarfs called
inyourligat,
so short their bows drag on the ground as they walk. And then we have the evil
Wenigo,
which lives at the treeline, waiting for when we go to get wood, to catch us and eat us.”

“So let me understand. The
Wenigo
eats human flesh and is considered evil, yes? But Uluksuk and Sinnisiak ate human flesh too. Are they evil?”

Angituk’s eyes flashed in anger. He was trying to trick her. “It is two different things. The
Wenigo
has a lust for human meat. Uluksuk and Sinnisiak ate the livers out of respect.”

“You call that respect?”

“Yes. Respect for the spirits of the priests. As they have for the spirits of the caribou they kill.”

“They killed harmless white men.”

“Are any white men harmless?”

Creed stopped for a moment. She had taken this in a direction he didn’t want to go. “What about an afterlife? Do your people believe in heaven and hell?”

“I have told you about the
attiaq.
If you are wise or loved or a good hunter, your spirit may be invited to enter a new- born child, and he becomes you. And, don’t laugh”—her eyes flashed defiantly against anticipated disbelief—“but I remember events and people and feasts at certain camps that my great-grandmother experienced that I did not. I was never at certain places, certain camps, and yet I remember them clearly.”