Minik by Kenn Harper

Author:Kenn Harper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2017-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

Minik’s bravado, his flair for publicity, and his apparent self-confidence belied a terrible insecurity. Four months earlier, as he trekked desperately northward in his futile attempt to reach the Arctic and live the life of an Inuk again, a perceptive newspaper reporter had asked, “But even if he gets there, can he do it? He has been in America since he was seven, and even though he is unfit here, it is probable that his life has made him equally unfit for that environment. If so, it will be his crowning tragedy and the crowning injustice of the heartless science that made of him a subject. He will be literally a boy not without a country, but without a place on earth.”

The experiment begun by the museum’s scientists and sanctioned by Jesup had been curtailed years before. It had drawn inexorably to its own sad close. As far as the museum and the Peary Arctic Club were concerned, the experiment would formally end on the following day.

Wallace bid farewell to Minik at Beecroft’s camp on Hunter Island on the night before departure. He brought with him his son, Willie, Minik’s onetime playmate in the halcyon days at Cobleskill. Now twenty-two, Willie was about to become a father—his young wife, Matilda, would give birth to their first son in only four days. Sometime after the death of Rhetta Wallace and the virtual collapse of William Wallace’s world, Willie had gone to live with relatives. This tearful parting with Minik was also their first reunion in many years.

On July 10 Minik sailed from New York for St. John’s on the Red Cross Line steamer Rosalind. The line had given him free passage. Once in St. John’s he would transfer to the Jeanie. Bridgman was at the pier to see him off and, to be sure, to make certain that he left. It was not a pleasant farewell, but the Peary Arctic Club had to keep up appearances. Minik carried with him a few unlikely gifts—a set of dentist’s tools given him by a dentist in New York, who had instructed him in their use, and a medical kit, a last-minute gift from a doctor.

Chester Beecroft remained suspicious of Bridgman’s motives, even as the Rosalind steamed away. “They may balk on taking poor little Minik back to Greenland, fearing he may injure Peary,” he told a reporter. “If he is left in St. John’s…I shall go there and bring him back. He can always have a home with me.”

Bridgman, never one to leave affairs half finished, wrote to Wallace that evening, “I bade Minik good-bye this morning on the Rosalind and was glad to see him looking so well and cheerful. I hope the journey will be agreeable and that he may ultimately be of real service to his people.”

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