In both places, the Company's expansion was essential to its own-and Canada's-future. During its western and northern hegemonies the 11BC exploited a territory that was commercially untouched. Just as its slow but persistent move across the continent laid down the matrix of subsequent prairie settlement, its invasion of the land ma.s.s North of Sixty carved into that bleak landscape the lines of human traffic that would become its permanent pattern of habitation. Of the fifty main population centres in the modern Northwest Territories, three-quarters had been former fur-trading stations. As in the West, the Company served to protect Canada's sovereignty from outside, mainlv American, pressures, not by heroic gestures or patriotic deeds, but simply by being there.*

"For at least 150 years," William Watson, a professor of economics at McGill University, noted, "the Hudson's Bay Company dominated the northern economy, both as a monopsonist [the only buyer] in the market for furs and a monopolist [the only seller] in the market for finished goods. There can be little doubt that it was The Bay-and not northerners, whether white or non-white-that was best served by this system." A

*Canada's claim to ownership of the mainland portion of the Northwest Territories was based on its inclusion in the 1870 transfer of the HBCs charter lands to the recently formed Dominion. The islands of the Arctic archipelago were ceded to Canada through the British Colonial Office in 1880 "to prevent the United States from claiming them, and not from the likelillood oftlicir proving ofany value to Canada."

ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 233.

simpler rationale for the Company's domination of the North was offered by Bob Chesshire, a veteran Bay man in charge of its fur-trade department in the 1940s. "At one time," he said, "we dispensed all the welfare in the Arctic, and the Government took the position that since we had a monopoly, we could b.l.o.o.d.y well provide the relief I told them that was all right but that we only had a monopoly because no one else could operate in the d.a.m.n country."

Except for explorers trying to find the North West Pa.s.sage, or each other, Canada's far northern reaches had remained almost entirelv outside the white man's purview until the nineteenth century, with only the whalers or the occasional missionary, looking for new positions, daring to break its silence. First to appear were the Moravians, who in 1771 established a mission at Nain, on the Labrador coast. Members of the world's oldest Protestant church, founded on the teachings of Jan Hus, the Bohemian martyr burned at the stake by Catholic persecutors in 1415, these dedicated men of G.o.d provided solace and support where little was available.*

By the 1890s, Canada's North had become an area of intense theological compet.i.tion, with various denominations attempting to carve out spiritual monopolies.

*Early missionaries had some unexpected problems with their gospel, which claimed that those who obeyed the Ten Commandments would go to heaven, Ahere it was very beautiful, while those who sinned would go to h.e.l.l, where it was very hot. To the preachers' shivering listeners, h.e.l.l didn't sound so bad.

When Father Pierre Flenri, the Catholic missionary at Pelly Bay in 193 5, told his flock about how Jesus Christ had once walked on water, he was surprised to find they were singularly unimpressed. When the good Father asked why, a member of his congregation replied, "What's so difficult about that? We walk on water all winter."

234 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

There is a doc.u.mented story of Father Henri Grollier, OMI, racing Archdeacon James Hunter down the Mackenzie River in the winter of 1858-59 to evangelize new districts around Aklavik. (The Catholic beat the Anglican.) With Roald Amundsen's epic 1903-6 east-to-west journey across the roof of North America, the 400-year quest for the fabled Pa.s.sage came to an end.

The Arctic became, if not more accessible, at least less mysterious and more frequently visited. As more southerners ventured beyond the tree -line, they encountered the Inuit.* Because the white man entered a climate that defied his own survival, he had to manufacture a set of myths to account for the ability-and willingness-of the Inuit to endure. Such mythologies were expressed in many dubious ways, but the underlying message from those early contacts was that the people of the North were happy campers, frolicking in the snow-"Nanooks of

*"Eskimo" is the Indian (most likely Alontagnais or Naskapi) name for the northern aboriginals. It was the designation originally used by whites because a Jesuit in 1611 had heard Indians refer to the northerriers as Eskintantsiks, a derogatory term meaning "eaters ofraw flesh." It is used in this chapter onlywhen authors or resident HBC Factors refer to the aboriginal population by that word. In uit, the more contemporary term, simply means "people." (Inuk is the singular of Inuit.) Canada's 2 5,000 Inuit are divided into eight tribal groups: Labrador, Ungava, Baffin, Iglulik, Caribou, Netsilik, Copper and Western Arctic. They speak a common language, Inukt.i.tut, which has six dialects. Dwellers in the Western Arctic have in recent years coined a new word, "biuvialuit," to distinguish themselves from other Inuit. Those who live in Northern Quebec (Ungava) are "Taqramiut" (people of the shadow); they call the aboriginal citizens of Labrador "Si(linirmiut," people of the sun, which rises in their land first.

ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 235.

the North" done up in polar-bear pants, their children playing with litters of photogenic puppies in cute igloos. "The Eskimo makes his or her appearance with a smile," wrote the northern expert Hugh Brody in a dev- astating parody of this silly stereotype. "[He] is an eternally happy, optimistic little figure; a round, furry and cuddly human with a pet name; a man or woman who amazes and delights our European representatives with innocent simplicity. Gorge themselves as they might on raw meat and blubber, a stereotypical Eskimo of the impossible north wages his battle against environment in astonishing good humour." Brody also pointed out the difference between Inuit and Indians: "The 'Eskimo' smiles from the sidelines; the Indian is cunning, warlike and stands in our way. This distinction between the two peoples is a geographical and anthropological myth, but the double stereotype has nonetheless persisted. . . . The one at war with nature, the other with settlers."

Other observers have noted differences in their philosophical approaches to life, with the Indians tending to be more introverted and generally less mischievous. One example: for a time during the 1950s many Indians and Inuit suffering from tuberculosis were lodged at a hospital near Moose Factory in northern Ontario. "The Eskimos were very smart,"

recalled Jj. "Woody" Wood, a local HBC Factor. "They never complained but could get their point of view across. When there was an economy drive, the cook kept serving spaghetti. n.o.body said anything, but I remember one supper hour when the hospital was unusually quiet. As the nurses started making their rounds again, they found everything-the light fixtures, toilet bowls, door k.n.o.bs-decorated with spaghetti. That was a creative protest and very unlike anything the Indians might have 236 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

done." Stuart Hodgson, the first resident Commissioner of the Northwest Territories,* notes that one of the main differences between the Indians (Dene) and the Inuit is that Dene settlements or camps are usually along a lake or river, whereas the Inuit are seldom far from salt water.

Inuit survival had a lot less to do with mischief or good humour than with an environment that daily stretched the limits of human endurance.

Generations of men and women grappled with the exigencies of a frozen world that held out no advantage, except that it was home. The many historical instances of starvation, cannibalism and infanticide were eloquent evidence of how agonizing it all had been-the numbing cold, the constant quest for sustenance, and the unremitting search for shelter and for driftwood for cooking fires.

To cheat nature they had to be tough. EJ. "Scotty" Gall, a veteran HBC Arctic trader, recalled that while building a boat at Tuktoyaktuk, he once saw his Inuk a.s.sistant pull nails out of the hardwood planking with his teeth. That story may or may not be true, but Father Frans Van der Velde, the veteran Arctic missionary,

*A Grade 8 dropout and successful union organizer, Hodgson was an improbable appointee to head what was, before his arrival, a colonial old boys' club, the Northwest Territories Council. (During his union days he headed an organizing drive for the International Woodworkers of America in Newfoundland, where union -busting goons nearly killed him. He was terrified by his narrow escape. The next morning, when he looked into a mirror, he found his hair had turned white. Only later did he realize that in his nervousness he had put toothpaste instead of Brylcreern on his head.) During his dozen years as Commissioner (1967-79), when he actually lived in the NAVF, f lodgson shook up the council and left a permanent and enlightened imprint on the North. "The Arctic does funn), things to you,"

he once observed. "It's a jealous ]over and it doe3w't forgive."

ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 237.

reported that an Inuk used his teeth like a third hand. The Inuit developed quite extraordinary ways to deal with their surroundings. While the wind that howls across the flat tundra prevented them from using such primitive communication methods as yodelling or Tibetan "far-away singing," they learned to ftel movement a horizon away, so that they could communicate with arm-signals at great distances.

Until a version of Cree svllabics was introduced by the Reverend EJ. Peck in 104, the Inuit had no written language, transmitting their myths and history through songs, stone carving and elders' recited memories. The half-dozen dialects of their spoken language catch the underlying sophistication of their culture. They use different words when addressing dogs or people, and some verbs possess a dozen tenses, so that instead of merely a past, present and future there are a near and a distant future, an imperative, a negative past and present, an interrogative, a subjunctive and so on. Many words describe snow because its exact condition is so important for hunting or trek-king.*

In the early days, Inuit lived entirely off the land and sea, lighting fires by rubbing driftwood or striking bits of pyrite together, fashioning cooking pots out of soapstone, and making garments from sealskin with needles of goose or gull wing bones. Driftwood and whalebone were carved into harpoons; fish strips were frozen into thick, smooth packets to build sled-runners-providing basic rations in emergencies. No part of an animal was wasted. Seal windpipes were used as snow-house windows, ptarmigan bladders made children's balloons, fish

*Some of the more common are igluksaq, which is snow suitable for shelter-building on long journeys; pukak, a powder snow; ganik, falling snow; piqtuq, snow being blown about by a blizzard; mauya, soft, deep snow.

238 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

eyes were snacks-a munchy Arctic version of Smarties. Inuit in the Western Arctic lined the hoods of their sea] jackets with wolverine fur because frost won't stick to it. But the main source of nourishment, clothing and equipment was the caribou. Like the buffalo of the plains and the deer of the forests, the animal was a walking emporium, its skin used for tents, clothing, sleeping bags, ceremomal drums, hunting bags, gloves and buckets; its antlers turned into bows and arrows, thimbles, sled handles and anchors. Its migration cycles fitted in with native life (or vice versa). Herds of caribou moved like great quadruped tides from the margin of the boreal forest to the edge of the Arctic Ocean, migrating between their rutting and calving grounds, involuntarily feeding man and wolf along the way. While he was stationed at Baker Lake in the 1920s, Archie Hunter, who spent thirty-five years with the HBC, watched the caribou go by: "One could look across Baker Lake by telescope to the rolling land around the mouth of the Kazan River and, at first, see nothing," he recalled. "Then, as the gla.s.s was focussed, what appeared to be a sea of antlers came into view and then the caribou themselves. The hillsides seemed to be moving. In whichever arc the gla.s.s was turned there were the animals, thousands upon thousands of them. One old native told me of watching a caribou herd during the fall migration which took three days to pa.s.s where he was camped."

The herds are supposed to have originally numbered a hundred million, and as late as 1907, the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton estimated Canada's caribou population at thirty million, though both figures were probably exaggerations. According to calculations compiled for the Fourth International Reindeer Caribou Symposium, held at Whitehorse, Yukon, in 1985, the North American caribou count had by then declined to between 2.3 million and 2.8 million animals, of which ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 239.

Inuit using a traditional muskox- or caribou-rib bow drill

only half the herds were increasing in number. The grad ual decimation of the life-sustaining critters was bad news for all but the Company. "The sooner the caribou are gone the better ... for then more food-stuffs can be imported and the natives will be forced to trap and become fur producers or starve," a trader told Philip G.o.dsell in 1934. G.o.dsell, who himself spent two decades in the Companys northern service, abhorred that 240 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

att.i.tude, commenting in his memoir, Arctic Trader, that it was "a case of the Indian and buffalo over again. As long as the caribou are plentiful the Eskimo is independent of the white man but once the caribou are gone he becomes nothing but flie white man's slave."

The Company att.i.tude of encouraging the Inuit to become dependent on its goods was reminiscent of Sir George Simpson's edict, outlined in an 1822 letter to the HBC's London Committee: "I have made it my study to examine the nature and character of Indians and however repugnant it may be to our feelings, I am convinced they must be ruled with a rod of iron to bring and keep them in a proper state of subordination, and the most certain way to effect this is by letting them feel their dependence upon us. " J.W Anderson, who spent his life with the HBC In the Canadian North, had a more thoughtful approach. "There is an optimum period in the dealings of any primitive people with the white man," he concluded. "This might be described as the period of time when the aborigines have sufficient of the white man's material civilization to ease the burden of life, but yet not enough to disrupt their way of life-muzzleloading g-uns instead of bows and arrows; twines and lines for fish nets and snares, instead of tree and willow roots ... steel traps instead of deadfalls. And one must not overlook those undoubted and perhaps harmless comforts, tea and tobacco, two of the greatest amenities we have given to the original inhabitants of Canada." The Inuit reached that turning point in the middle of the twentieth century; their treatment ever since has been a patronizing mixture of neglect and manipulation. But in the lexicon of villains that most Inuit feel have threatened their way of life, government ranks first, the missionaries second-and the Hudson's Bay Company a distant third. This is not because the HBC was particularly benign but because it ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 241.

was interested in selling them goods, not-as was the case with Ottawa and the churches-in converting them to new ideologies or ways of living.

THE HUDSON'S BAYCOMPAT,~ moved into the Far North with the founding of Fort Churchill south of the Arctic Circle early in the eighteenth century, but its commerce was with the Cree arriving from woodlands to the south.

The only trade with the Inuit was from Company sloops irregularly dispatched into the upper reaches of Hudson Bay to barter harpoons, knives and lances for sealskins and whalebone. "So fond are these poor people of ironwork, that they lick it with their tongues before they put it by; indeed, I have seen them so transported with pleasure as to fall into dreadful convulsions," reported Andrew Graham, with his usual style of operatic exaggeration, after leading one of the earliest expeditions out of York Factory. The first regular trading station set up specifically to deal with the Inult was Fort Chimo (Kuujjuakj, at the south end of Ungava Bay, established by Nicol Finlayson in 1830. Not much business developed because the aboriginals had few items worth trading, but the Bay men hunted beluga whales and set up other whaling stations along Hudson Bay's east sh.o.r.e. In 1860 alone, twenty-three hundred white whales were harpooned off the Little Whale and Great 1Xhale river posts, but within a decade overkill had ruined the hunt.

European whalers had been active in Davis Strait since the early eighteenth century. In pre-petroleum days the bowheads' blubber was valuable as a lighting oil and lubricant, while their baleen (h.o.r.n.y tissue in the mouth with the consistency of human fingernails that allows whales to filter food from the sea) was used instead of spring steel or celluloid in many applications, including buggy whips, umbrella ribs and stays for women's 242 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

corsets. Whale tongues were an exotic delicacy, and whale oil was so valuable that the profit from a pair of harpooned animals was enough to pay for a new ship. At the peak of the east-coast hunt, in the decade after 1820, some 750 vessels took part, landing more than eight thousand whales.

The commerce was so lucrative that men spent their lives in pursuit of the huge mammals; one Scottish harpooner named Peter Ramsay died of old age aboard the Erik while on his fifty-sixth annual whaling expedition into Baffin Bay. It was a rough trade. Interminable tedium alternated with moments of mortal danger as crews scrambled to answer the cry, "Thar she blows!"

"It was not some primitive blood l.u.s.t which prompted these sailors to endure the intense danger and prolonged monotony of a whale hunt," Daniel Francis wrote in his Arctic Chase. "The whalers probably served the most commonplace of masters, the need for a living wage. Today whaling is widely regarded as a slaughter of the innocents, but the men who engaged in it believed themselves simply to be doing a job-more perilous than most, less lucrative than many. Like those who engage in any task demanding skill, physical endurance, and bravery, the men had a fierce pride in their work, and popular writers found it easy to transform them into folk heroes." Only very occasionally did a whaler mildly lament the nature of his calling, such as this entry in the log of Captain William Scoresby, one of the most successful hunters: "There is something extremely painful in the destruction of a whale ... yet the object of the adventure, the value of the prize, the joy of the capture, cannot be sacrificed to feelings of compa.s.sion."

As the business grew more compet.i.tive, the whalers began to set up sh.o.r.e stations to process the oil and to afford themselves the chance of profiting from a second summer in the whaling grounds. Tiny communities ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 243.

sprang up at Cape Fullerton in Hudson Bay and in sheltered coves such as the eventual sites of Pond Inlet and Pangnirtung on Baffin Island. It was at these makeshift camps that the first prolonged contacts between whites and Inuit took place. The Inuit found most ships' captains happy to barter almost any item aboard their vessels for polar bear and fox skins. The whalers hired the aboriginals to help man the harpoon boats and to trap for furs that could be taken back and sold at highly profitable rates, while the Inuit were, for the first time, exposed to the iron-and-steam-age goods of their employers. Eager to acquire axes, pots, copper kettles, blankets, knives, needles and guns as well as the steel traps that allowed them to catch the animals whose pelts boosted their "gifts" from the white men, the Inuit came to treasure the imported wares. Having acquired rifles and inherited the clinker-built harpoon boats left behind by the whale hunters, the relatively small number of Inuit involved with the hunt gradually moved away from their traditional emphasis on the seal hunts to seek fur-bearing land animals, impatiently waiting for more white men to appear with more goods.

The trade grew even faster on the continent's west coast. The first whaling ships into the Beaufort Sea were a fleet out of San Francisco, and when one vessel-the Grampus-came back with twenty-two bowheads worth $2 5 0,000, even more whalers followed. A wintering station was set up at Pauline Cove on Herschel Island, a rocky outcrop northwest of the Mackenzie Delta, and soon as many as six hundred whalers were living there, trading with the Inuit. Unfortunately, that exchange, which went on for two decades, was not limited to food and fur. From late September to earlyjuly the ships were frozen in, with most of their crews gradually dispersing to aboriginal settlements that had sprung up nearby. Unlike their east-coast counterparts, the western 244 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

Wbaling sbip, the Era, being preparedfor spring wbale bunt, Cape Fullerton, 1904

whalers distributed large quant.i.ties of liquor to the local population and partic.i.p.ated in such uninhibited s.e.xual orgies that a disgusted witness described Herschel as "a paradise of those who reject all restraint upon appet.i.te and all responsibility for conduct; when a dozen ships and five or six hundred men of their crews wintered here, and scoured the coasts for Eskimo women. I do not think it extravagant to say that the scenes of riotous drunkenness and l.u.s.t which this island has witnessed have probably rarely been surpa.s.sed." Another observer noted that "when girls were not obtainable, wives were enticed away from their husbands, or men induced to rent out their wives." On August 7, 1903, two North West Mounted Police constables were finally posted to Herschel to enforce order, but they mainly collected customs duties in response to the HBCs complaints that the whalers were introducing cheap goods into the region.

ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 245.

By 1910, kerosene had taken the place of whale oil and the whalebone-structured corset had gone out of style, driving the price of baleen from a high of fifty dollars a pound to forty cents.* After trying to survive by slaughtering fleets of walrus and sea otters, the whaling crews departed the North, leaving behind an Eskimo population with a taste for European goods that the Hudson's Bay Company was only too happy to satisfy. Because the Company proceeded at its usual snail's speed, accomplishing in a decade what should have taken a season, former whaling skippers quickly established themselves as private traders. The most notorious of them was Captain Christian "Charlie" Klengenberg, who in his autobiography boasted about one of his typical commercial encounters with the Copper Eskimos: "They were so innocent a people of so long ago that I had not the heart to take advantage of them in trade, so all I took was most of their clothes and stone cooking pots and copper snow-knives and ice picks for steel knives and frying pans and a supply of inatches. They had no raw furs with them, but their garmerits would be useful for my family and some of my rascally crew." Klengenberg, who had arrived in the territory from Denmark as the cabin boy on an American whaler, turned his ship, the Afaid of Orleans, into a floating department store, serving, among others, the many Mixed Blood sons and daughters he had sired along the Arctic coast. One of his most popular items was trading rifles for furs, but the weapons lasted a long time. When the resourceful captain found there were few repeat

*Whaling, on a reduced scale, has continued to the present day, with the magnificent animals'various body parts providing a fatty base used in the manufacture ofmargarme, fertilizer, food to fatten ranch-bred mink, and a special grade of oil used to lubricate the guidance systems of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

246 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

customers, he rose to the occasion by handing out steel rods which, he explained, should be used to clean out the gun barrels. After a few applications, the rifles wouldn't shoot straight. Not unexpectedly Klengenberg was standing by, ready to sell replacements. When the Company persuaded the police at Herschel Island to ban the Danish swindler from the country, he begged to be allowed to take his ship on one more round, so he could supply his extended family. The local police inspector placed Constable Slim Macdonald aboard the Maid to make sure the trade was limited to the captain's relatives, When the ship returned to Herschel in the autumn without the constable, Klengenberg lamely explained that the policeman had unfortunately fallen overboard off Rymer Point on Victoria Island. There were no witnesses and the Dane was never charged, but his northern exploits--and Herschel's evil legacy-had come to an end.

The mainland sector of the Western Arctic, which lay to the south and east of Herschel Island, was far more accessible than the sub-Arctic regions on Canada's east coast because it had the Mackenzie River for a spine. With the connecting Liard, Peace, Athabasca and Slave river systems, the Mackenzie's drainage basin covers an area the size of Western Europe, most of it within relatively easy access- especially during the four precious months when the rivers aren't frozen. Though North of Sixty, this was mostly Indian, not Inuit, country and had been a highly profitable fur-trading preserve ever since Alexander Mackenzie's downstream dash to tidewater in 1789, because the frosty climate prompted its woodsy creatures to grow thick fur.* By the 1880s, the Hl3c had put steamboats on the Mackenzie and the Athabasca,

*For a detailed description of Mackenzie's magnificent journey, see Caesars of the Wilderness, hardcover, pages 59-62.

ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 247.

with the Grabame running from Fort Chipewyan to Fort McMurray, where the Clearwater and Athabasca rivers meet, while the Wrigley served the lower Mackenzie. By then the f IBC was maintaining eleven trading posts in the area, with Fort McPherson, less than 150 miles south of the Beaufort Sea, its northernmost installation.* The area's commercial potential received a big boost when a CPR branch line linked Edmonton to Calgary, and Waterways (part of the present location of Fort McMurray) became the Company's regional transportation terminus. The HBC ships looked like awkward floating verandas, with picket-fence rails around their decks, but they fundamentally altered the area's human geography. To push the trade northward, roads were built bridging the Mackenzie's only navigation hazard-the sixteen miles of rapids south of Fort Smith.

Accommodation aboard these early northern "fire canoes" was even more primitive than on their prairie counterparts, as attested to in this diary entry of Elizabeth Taylor, an early traveller down the Mackenzie. She had originally been a.s.signed the Atbabasca River's best stateroom but was b.u.mped to an ordinary cabin by an HBC Factor. "Mine, a single, had a hay tick only as furniture, no toilet articles whatever, and no bedding," she noted with mounting dismay. "I unpacked my blankets and went to bed. Had just settled for the night when a big drop fell on my nose and then another. I got up, spread the mackintosh over the slats above, and lay down again. But from the pattering above me, I saw that I should soon be deluged, so I rose, balanced myself uncertainty on the edge of the berth, and untied my bag

*Founded in 1840 by an HBC explorer named John Bell, the first white man up the Peel River, Fort McPherson became known for the longevity of one resident Factor, John Firth, who was in charge from 1893 to 1920 and died there in harness in 1939.

248 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

of camping things, placed a frying pan under the leak, and tried to steep again. But the leaks came faster and faster, and in fact I spent the entire night in warfare with the waters."*

A later pa.s.senger, on the sternwheeler Fort McMurray, was Jean G.o.dsell, who went down the Mackenzie on her honeymoon in the 1920s. The ship was loaded with Mounted Police inspectors, priests, trappers, traders, card-sharps, Indians and "Improved Scotsmen," as she facetiously called the Mixed Bloods. The captain, decked out in gold braid and bra.s.s b.u.t.tons, was constantly on the bridge, bellowing orders to crew members who paid absolutely no attention, except occasionally to bellow back some appropriate obscenity. The newly married G.o.dsell spent most of her time with husband Philip in the Fort McMurray's "Bridal Suite," which consisted of "a number of sacks of flour upon which we spread our bedroll; a dirty tarpaulin, stretched on hoops of willow, being our only protection from the snow flurries and fall rains which frequently beat down upon the heavily laden craft." The ten-day journey to Fort Smith allowed Mrs G.o.dsell time to ruminate on the HBC outports she pa.s.sed along the riverbank. "The unutterable loneliness of these little outposts of civilization- clinging like birds' nests to the riverbank, a hundred and fifty to two hundred miles apart-strikes one forcibly. Cut off for nine months of the year the life is one of extreme solitude vet, at boat time, they manage to surround themselves with somewhat of a gala spirit.))t

*The Company stopped carrying pa.s.sengers on the Mackenzie in 1948.

tA few years later, while stationed with her husband at Fort Fitzgerald, Jean G.o.dsell created a scandal when she publicly beat up the wife of an RCMP corporal who had been spreading gossip about her. "Blinded by a curtain of flaming red, I reached ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 249.

Despite the relative ease of entry afforded by the Mackenzie and the predisposition of local Inuvialuit towards European trade goods, the 11BC delayed its move into the far reaches of the Western Arctic until the second decade of the twentieth century, when it opened posts at Herschel Island, Baillie Island, Bernard Harbour on Banks Island, and Aklavik in the Mackenzie Delta. Even then, trade at these outstations grew slowly, easily surpa.s.sed by the busy commerce developing along the Mackenzie. In the Central and Eastern Arctic, whaling had also vanished, with the A.

T Gifford making her last voyage into Hudson Bay in 1915. As if masterminded by some benevolent deity, the decline of whaling coincided almost exactly with a dramatic rise in demand and price for Arctic fox.

It was a time when furs ceased being strictly an extravagance, becoming much more popular and affordable. The fox pelts were fashionable not so much as garments but as tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs-collars, m.u.f.fs, neckpieces, and floor-length stoles that dripped with heads, tails and paws. White fox was ideal for the purpose because, unlike beaver or muskrat, it had a luxurious appearance without being unduly expensive and could be dyed almost any colour, with light grey, beige and black most in demand.

Although the market for Arctic fox was firmly established by the turn of the century, it took the Hudson's Bay Company the usual decade to react.

Finally, in 1909, at Erik Cove on the south sh.o.r.e of f ludson Strait, which its

out, caught her by the coat-collar and smashed my fist in her face," she recalW with obvious relish. "For the next few minutes, I thrashed the snivelling creature within an inch of her life, and sent her crawling and moaning back to the barracks with the warning that if, on any future occasion, she as much as dared mention my name this would be but an infinitesimal sample of what she would get the next time."