Coppermine (36 page)

Creed said a quick goodbye to Angituk and then he left to have a talk with Wallbridge. When he had gone, Sinnisiak turned to Uluksuk.

“Why don’t you change us into ravens and we can fly home? Or a bear. If you become a bear, you can break this cage, maybe.”

“I cannot become a bear. Don’t you understand? We are too far from home. I am weak here. I cannot find the power. There are no spirits here. I am sick.”

“Have a candy.”

The old man took one and licked it, but he didn’t trust it and gave it back.

ANGITUK LEFT THE CELLS
not long after Creed, giving a little wave to Cowperthwaite as she passed the front desk. She was sad Creed had gone in such a hurry and seemed so distracted. She had hoped they might have a few minutes alone together. She wanted to tell him about her search for her father.

Angituk went to find the first address on Cowperthwaite’s map. Her excitement grew. The place was a big old mansion with added wings on the outskirts of town, where old people came to live in the care of the St. Mary’s Anglican Order of Nuns. The nuns were friendly in a brisk way, but visiting hours were over. Angituk explained she was looking for her father. They didn’t believe her at first, but finally, when Angituk said his name, the head nurse recognized it and allowed her inside.

The ward was set up like the sleeping room of Angi’s mission school. The nun directed Angituk to locate bed B12; there she would find Angus McAndrew. It was after lights out. Most of the elderly men she passed were asleep. As she went by them, Angituk looked at their pale, unconscious faces and worried that if he was like them, he might not have much time left.

Her heart pounding, she approached bed B12 to discover a pleasant-looking man, clean-shaven, with pink cheeks and a full head of white hair. His eyes were closed. She watched him intently for a moment before she spoke his name. He immediately opened his blue eyes and turned to look at her with a kindly smile. When he spoke, his voice was frail.

“Who are you?”

“I am … my name is Angituk. Are you Mr. Angus McAndrew?”

“Aye, lad. I am. What can I do for you?”

“I am looking for a man with your name. Were you ever on a ship that went up north to the Mackenzie delta many years ago?”

“Sure. She was called the
North Pole.
Fine vessel. I loved the ice and snow.”

Her heart pounded faster. “Do you remember the village of Paulatuk, along the coast to the east?”

“Of course! Very nice people up there. Very friendly. I shot a polar bear. A big brute that almost ate me!”

Angituk’s excitement grew. “Really? A bear? And … and do you remember a young woman named Kunee?”

“Ach, beautiful she was. An Eskimo princess. I remember her face as if it were before me. Do you know her?”

“Yes! But she is gone. I … I am her child. And you are …”

Her lips trembling, eyes tearing up, Angituk took his limp hand in hers. He smiled again, but there was something vague and unfocused in the blue eyes and loose smile that she found unsettling.

“Yes … yes, I loved those years in the Congo. Did I tell you about the lioness I shot there? Mean creature. Had killed two villagers.”

She stared at him in sudden alarm. “No, we were talking about the North. The Mackenzie delta. Paulatuk. My mother, Kunee.”

“Oh, yes. An African princess. Black as coal. What a temptress!”

“No. The North. Ice and snow. You were in the North. In
Canada.
The Arctic. Paulatuk!”

A female voice came from behind her, a note of amusement in it. “Angus was never in the Arctic, or Africa, or anywhere else, my dear.” It was the nursing sister who had let her in. “He was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Canada on 102nd Street for forty years. He married my cousin.”

“But he said he knew my mother.”

“He’s dotty, love. He’ll tell you anything. Quite sad, really.”

Angituk turned back to the man she had for a long, deep moment thought was her father. “You never went to Paulatuk? You didn’t know Kunee?”

“I knew her well indeed. The daughter of a warlord named Pan I supplied arms to outside Shanghai,” the little old man told her. Then he fell silent.

“He loved books, you see, dear. All his spare time in the library. Especially after Ethel’s death.”

“Beautiful, she was. A Chinese princess. I remember her as

if she were standing before me. As if she were standing before me …”

Angus McAndrew’s eyes unfocused and his lips continued to silently repeat the last sentence. Angituk looked up at the nursing sister, who then saw her brimming eyes. Her voice softened and she placed a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry, my dear. He’s not who you’re looking for.”

“My mother said he had a picture, a tattoo of a sea woman on his left forearm.”

“Have a look.”

Angituk hesitated, but now the nursing sister’s curiosity was aroused and she leaned over and rolled up the sleeve of his bed shirt. Beneath the grey hairs the translucent skin of the forearm was clear and unmarked. Angi took a long, deep breath, wiped her eyes with her sleeve, then thanked the nurse and left.

That night she lay in the soft, warm bed of her hotel room and stared at the ceiling. She felt a horrible relief. Relief that the little man dying in the bed wasn’t her father. The dream her mother had given to her of the tall, handsome white father remained intact. He was still out there. And she would continue to hunt for him.

THE NEXT MORNING,
James Wallbridge stood before the jury to present his summation for the defence. Creed noted that Angituk seemed distracted, but when she saw him watching, she smiled and began to focus on Wallbridge’s words, to translate them for the accused. He found himself thinking how proud he was of her, of how well she had adapted to this strange and bizarre new environment.

Wallbridge spoke first to the court of the laudable efforts of the priests. “These men had made it to their goal: the mouth of the Coppermine River. An impressive feat. And they had begun their ministry and everything was friendly with the Eskimo at first, but then . then they got into trouble. The key is found in Father Rouvière’s final entry in his journal: ‘We are threatened with starvation. We do not know what to do.’ Weak, starving, desperate, they had headed south through heavy snow to get to the treeline where there was fuel, where there might be animals to eat. It had taken three days to walk just a few miles. They were facing death when the two hunters found them. One way or another, they had to have their help.”

It was Wallbridge’s turn to wipe his face in the morning heat, leaving the jury for a moment to ponder the implications of these last words. Then he set off on a new tack.

“These Eskimos we are now asked to judge are men absolutely unlettered, knowing nothing of our civilization except what stories and rumours they have heard. They gaze around this fair city and what do they see? When they look at our buildings, they see mountains. To them our horses are big dogs. Our trains are not trains, but ships that run on land. They see things through different eyes. Their world and our world are not the same.”

Murmured comments passed through the courtroom as Wallbridge caught his breath.

“They are not merely remnants of the Stone Age. They
are
the Stone Age, here and now. The great charter of English liberties, the Magna Carta, provides that each man must be judged not by his superiors but by his peers.
Peers,
according to the Oxford dictionary, meaning ‘equals in their own land.’ Unfortunately, this we cannot do. We are in violation here of one of the greatest principles of the Magna Carta! We have none of their peers here. It would take years to realize this fundamental tenet of our justice system, to find and transport a jury of Eskimos all the way down here to hear this case. It is regrettably … just not possible.”

Wallbridge cast his eyes to the floor as if taking a small part of the responsibility for this failure. Creed suddenly realized that the staid and sometimes fumbling Wallbridge had a certain talent for the dramatic. The courtroom all leaned forward to hear where he would now go.

“But … what
is
possible … what we
can
do, is try and approach in our minds something of the same by trying to understand the Eskimo point of view. In short, you members of the jury must think like an Eskimo. Think … like an Eskimo.”

E.K. Mainprize chuckled softly as he took notes. This defence tactic was brilliant. Justice Harvey glared at him. Wallbridge continued.

“You must descend to their point of view. When you judge if the conduct of these men was reasonable or unreasonable, you must put yourself in the position of these untutored savages and determine whether
in their minds
they were justified or not.

“From the Eskimo point of view, the three things they fear most are evil spirits, strangers, and white men. Exposure to the white man began in 1771 when Samuel Hearne brought a war party of Chipewyans that massacred their entire camp at Bloody Falls! It was an unfortunate start.

“The next contact with white men came, according to the testimony of Mr. Uluksuk, in his grandfather’s time when hostile white men came from a ship and killed two Eskimos. Begging the court’s patience, I offer an interesting aside. This reference to white men would have been, according to my math, around the year 1850. There were no records of white men travelling in the Coppermine area at that time, except … except for the ill-fated Franklin Expedition of 1845. Could it be that this reference to ‘hostile white men’ referred to the desperate remnants of Franklin’s crew stumbling south, crazed from lead poisoning and starvation, attacking and killing the first human beings they came across? And they in turn being killed. Perhaps a blessing under the circumstances. The history of encounters between the Copper Eskimo and the white man in this region has not been one of peace. It has been one of sudden violence and death.”

Wallbridge paused a moment to let his message be considered. Justice Harvey finally prompted him. “Thank you, Mr. Wallbridge, for your interesting historical speculations. But please continue the summation.”

“I submit again: the three things the Copper Eskimos fear most are evil spirits, strangers, and white men. These two white priests were all three!

“Now, any man, whether he is white or black or red, civilized or uncivilized, is justified in killing another in his own defence. To preserve his own life. If he does kill in self-defence, that killing is what we call ‘justifiable homicide.’ As long as his belief that he is in danger of being killed is reasonable, he is justified in defending himself by taking another life. I respectfully submit that what these men did was nothing more than any of you would have done if the concern in your minds had been the same.

“Now I don’t suggest that you would have come to their conclusion, knowing your fellow human beings as you do. But these Eskimos, these primitive men, these savage men of the Stone Age, were they not justified in the conclusions they came to? Were they not justified in believing that these men were going to kill them? Did the priests themselves, in their ravaged state, their desperation, become murderous? Were they stripped of all vestiges of their civilized training and reduced to their own brand of savagery?

“Was it not reasonable, considering the minds of the accused, the little knowledge they had of the white race, and the three great fears they had—strangers, evil spirits, and white men? In the Eskimo life, evil spirits are a fact of life, supernatural wonders swirling around them every day, appearing at any time in any guise. Were they not justified in believing their lives were in danger?”

Wallbridge took a moment to let this sink in before he set off on his final tack, reading briefly from notes.

“As for cannibalism, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
recognizes ‘the consumption of a small part of the body of the dead man in order that his ghost might not trouble the killer’ as a definition. It is an ancient tradition in many primitive countries. And then again, it is not so primitive, is it?” Wallbridge paused for effect. “It is a tradition practised, in fact, across the street, in the Catholic Church!”

The courtroom had followed Wallbridge’s summation with interest, but with this statement he completely captivated them. Bishop Breynat and his priest stared at Wallbridge in shock.

“Is it not true that half the population of Canada believe at Communion they are eating, not a piece of bread and drops of wine, but through transubstantiation the actual flesh and blood of Christ? This widely accepted ritual of respect was endorsed by no one more than the priests themselves! In fact they taught the Coppermine Eskimos to say the Mass and consume the flesh and blood of Christ!”

Wallbridge’s assertion garnered a welling up of protesting whispers. Justice Harvey let it rise for a few moments while he himself reflected on the implications. The Bishop crossed himself and spoke the word “blasphemy” under his breath.

McCaul disliked where all this had gone, but despite his experience and impressive memory he could think of no grounds on which to object. Harvey brought the courtroom to order and asked Wallbridge to stick to relevant facts.

Having made the points he wished, Wallbridge finished quickly, asserting at the end that the defendants were really like children. “They see the world much differently than we do. We must offer, as British and Canadian law dictates, a jury of their peers. We must judge them not by our standards but by theirs. Whether they believed the priests to be demons or just hostile, threatening white men, there is no question they were acting in self-defence.”

When Wallbridge sat down, Creed gave him an appreciative nod. He had done very well. Creed wanted to applaud.

C.C. MCCAUL KNEW
he had to calm things down to a rational, unemotional level. The “cannibalism as Communion” ploy by Wallbridge was a coarse, sensational red herring. He expected that the jury, men of his age and station, felt the same way.

“I have spoken on the peculiar and important significance of this case,” McCaul began conversationally, “what makes this case so different from others. The advantage of British justice … now Canadian justice … and fair play is to make it known that if a white man travelling in the North is killed, the tribe will not be threatened. A punitive expedition will not come to exterminate the tribe, as has been the case in other countries. They will be given the same fair trial as any white man would get under similar circumstances.