The Long Exile: A true story of deception and survival amongst the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic. Melanie McGrath
and embraces the sea. Everything to the north of Inukjuak as far as Cape Jones is high coast, everything to the south, low, horizontally orientated and blessed with coves and wide beaches. Though Inukjuak lies at approximately the same latitude as, say, Inverness, Scotland, it is, all the same, resolutely Arctic, thanks in part to the uncompromising winter ice which stills the waters of Hudson Bay for eight or nine months of the year. The interior is a plateau of granite overlaid with glacier-scoured limestone which the Inuit call sekovjak, a word meaning ‘resembles landfast sea ice’. What constitutes the Arctic is often disputed, though never by the Inuit, for whom it is simply home. Some non-Inuit commentators define it as the area north of the Arctic Circle at 66° 33', but this merely marks the point where there is midnight sun at summer equinox and no sun at all at winter equinox. Others claim it is most easily characterised by the presence of permafrost, but that, too, is a problematic definition, because at lower latitudes the permafrost is patchy and often incomplete in places which seem to be, in every other way, part of the Arctic region. Surprisingly for a region so often characterised by its coldness, winter temperature is a bad indicator of where the Arctic might begin and end. Nowhere in the Canadian Arctic does the winter temperature routinely fall below −46°C and, when it does, it rarely stays that way for long, while parts of Siberia regularly experience winter lows of −73°C. The Yukon and other subarctic Canadian regions can sometimes be colder in winter than parts of the country further north. In the end, low temperature matters less than the persistence of permafrost and ice, or even aridity.
A working definition on which most people agree is to say that the Arctic begins where trees end. The tree line is not really a line at all. It is rather a zone, or an uneven strip, where candelabra spruce gradually give way to ever smaller, simplified specimens until the entire species becomes so stunted and so widely dispersed that it takes on the appearance not of a tree but of a gnarled finger. A little further north trees of any kind give out altogether. Those trees which do persist in the northernmost reaches of the tree line ‘zone’ are unable to produce seeds, but reproduce by layering, sending a branch to the ground where it roots and grows a clone of the parent tree. In some parts, this strip of dwarfing, scattering and layering is hundreds of miles wide, in others, it narrows to just a mile or two. Nor does it appear at any particular latitude. In the northwest of the continent, near the Mackenzie delta, there are trees as high as 66° North. The tree line drops to lower latitudes as it meanders east, largely as a result of the freezing action of Hudson Bay. The area at the tree line may well be solid permafrost or, as around Kuujjuarapik, the permafrost may appear in patches, but it will follow a single rule. Above the ‘line’ the temperature on an average July day will remain below 10°C, the temperature necessary for tree growth. By this reckoning, the Arctic proper begins roughly at the tree line and the subarctic region lies in the northern boreal forests below. Thus the Arctic begins at latitudes as high as 60° and as low as 55° North. By this reckoning, the Arctic and subarctic regions of Canada together make up 40 per cent of the country. The region is almost mind-bendingly vast.
Barrenland tundra, the region of land above the tree line stretching across the whole of Canada, has many unique characteristics not found in any other land formation. The Arctic tundra looks the way it does first and foremost because of the action of ancient glaciers, which have for eons ground up rock and dragged it down to the sea. In Ungava, glaciers also carved out a flotilla of basin lakes and channels which now sit stranded on the plateau, giving it, at least from the air, the appearance of an old bath sponge whose pores are baggy with wear. Lakes, rivers, summer run-offs and spills are all extremely common in the Barrenlands, though many of them may either be solid with ice or dry through most of the year. There are more lakes in Arctic and subarctic Canada than in the rest of the world put together.
Glaciers are also responsible for dumping sand and gravel into ridges, or eskers. In the deep interior of the Ungava Peninsula, where Alakariallak met his end, the eskers sometimes rise a hundred feet into the air and they are broken by spillways and erosion gullies. Many are marked with inukshuks, the man-shaped mounds of rock built by Inuit to act as pathfinders. Arctic foxes and caribou also use eskers as lookouts, so they have historically been good places to hunt. Despite all this glacial carving and dumping, the low, scoured hills around Ungava are, relatively speaking, not deeply eroded. The tops of what were once hills have been reduced to naked rock but you find none of the horns, corries, U-shaped valleys or fiorded coasts that there are further north, on Baffin Island, say, or among the islands of the Queen Elizabeth Group. In Arctic terms at least, Ungava is a gentle, open land with less to hide than its more northerly neighbours.
Its relatively mild nature does not render Ungava any less bleak. There is plenty of naked rock. On the edges of the eskers no plant-life is able to endure the relentless, desiccating westerly winds and in the absence of any firm purchase for plant roots, these formations are usually naked. The worn slopes of the granite hills are also bare, partly for the same reason and partly because no soil is able to settle there. But the westerlies are not all bad. In the summer they bring cloud and summer fogs and so, in spite of the drying effect of the wind itself, the area is damper than much Arctic tundra, and there are grey-green lichens to be found in every sheltered spot.
Arctic soil everywhere is, unsurprisingly, poor and nitrogen deficient, but on the rocks beneath bird colonies or on perching knolls or fox lookouts, nitrates accumulate and there the tangerine splash of nitrophilous lichen, Caloplaca elegans, blends with the more familiar grey-greens creating points of brilliant colour. More important than the clouds and wet fog to plant growth is the permafrost which keeps the moisture brought by the westerlies in the topsoil allowing dwarf shrubs to thrive across much of the inland plateau. The areas not directly fringing the sea are covered by scrubby heathland. As in the rest of the Arctic, the growing season is too short for annuals, but on the heathland below the nubs of rock and esker, the ground is carpeted in creeping willows whose branches can reach as high as two feet in sheltered spots. By Arctic standards a willow that high is as much of a giant as a sequoia in Yosemite. In Arctic conditions a willow may take as many as 400 years to grow as thick as a man's thumb.
Around Inukjuak itself, dwarf willows are the only tree-like shrub, but south of Inukjuak a few dwarf birches grow, though these rarely venture out more than six inches or so from the root. Among the perennials are the Arctic heathers, Cassiope, and Arctic cottonheads, whose stems Maggie Nujarluktuk gathered to serve as wicks in her stone lamp. In September, the berry-bearing members of the genus Vaccinium growing on Ungava's southern slopes produce the tiny blueberries and lingonberries so beloved of Ungava Inuit and of their children in particular. Furry mosses grow around Ungava, too, and, in summer, Arctic poppies, rosy sedges and pretty, bobbing saxifrage poke up from the willow carpet. On alluvial flats beside the Ungava's many rivers, cotton grasses wave above the thick cushions of sphagnum moss which the frost heaves up into tussocks. Where the rivers disgorge into the bay there are white strands of sand, and in the pockets of soil trapped by boulders, sandworts and scurvy grass flourish. Sea pinks raise their heads above the rocky parapet and crowd the tops of the low cliffs where the air is warmer than at the frosty selvage of the shoreline.
In Ungava human life has always been concentrated along the coast where there are seals, walrus, beluga and, in the past, large whales. By comparison, the interior is forbidding, and in Maggie's time it had become more so, because the once dense herds of caribou had been reduced by the introduction of rifles. Before 1900, the caribou were uncounted and uncountable. Like the American buffalo, they ranged in herds with no discernable beginnings or ends. In 1900, when naturalists, sensing a sudden and dramatic drop in their numbers, began counting, there were something like 1,750,000 caribou living in the Canadian Barrens. Fifty years later this figure was 670,000, 60 per cent down on the previous half-century and in 1955, only five years after that, the herds had diminished to 277,000 individuals, 60 per cent down again. Changes in the pattern of the weather and gradual variations in the tree line have always made caribou populations vulnerable to catastrophic but temporary declines but nothing had done anything like the damage caused by the rifle. By the fifties, those quarter of a million or so surviving caribou were scattered across land larger far than western Europe and locating them had become a hunt for needles in haystacks. Between 1900 and 1950, caribou had virtually disappeared from central and northern Ungava and Inuit living around Inukjuak were forced to paddle south by kayak or umiak, often as far as Richmond Gulf, near