The Long Exile by Melanie McGrath

Author:Melanie McGrath [McGrath, Melanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-53786-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2006-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

The high winds break open the ice and send the liberated sea into whirling whitecaps. One feature of the ice around Ellesmere is its mobility. The pack ice rarely stabilises before February. Before then it is in constant motion, floes smashing together, rafting one upon the other, grinding and jamming together.

Ellesmere Island had been claimed for Canada, near to where Paddy Aqiatusuk and the other Inuit were brought to shore, by the captain of the Arctic, J. E. Bernier, only fifty years previously. Early human populations used Ellesmere as a bridge into Greenland, coming up from the south and west, crossing on to Ellesmere from across the Cardigan Strait in the west and up past Coburg Island in the east. They travelled principally on the ice foot, a belt of ice formed between the high and low water marks of the tides. The ice on the foot is stable and relatively smooth. Later, when polar explorers came to Ellesmere Island, they named this characteristic feature “The Highway to the Pole.” A thousand years ago or more, Thule settled there for a while, but moved south when the Little Ice Age of the fifteenth century blew in. A tiny group of survivors persisted in the extreme northwest of Greenland and it was these the Baffin Islanders came across in the mid-nineteenth century. Some years later, the American explorer, Robert E. Peary, stumbled on them, named them the Polar Eskimo and hired a few as guides on his expeditions to the North Pole.

Paddy Aqiatusuk knew none ofthis.ifo first thought was to presume there had been some mistake. The qalunaat had brought them to the wrong place. He decided to confront the detachment policemen. Until then, the priority had to be to establish the tents. The wind was icy.

The men hauled the group's possessions from where the d'lber-vtile's cargo barge had dumped them, tethering their dogs, and rolling out their canvas while the women and children hastily unravelled the guy ropes.

An RCMP Peterhead appeared from the gloom and headed towards them. An Inuk man leaped out into shallows and made fast the boat, followed by two policemen, one huge and massy, the other thin and reedy, and the trio made their way to the shore. The large policeman scanned the group setting up camp on the beach.

“Which one of you is Fatty?” the big fellow asked in Inuktitut.

Paddy Aqiatusuk bristled. He sensed Ross Gibson had been talking about him to this new fellow. Now neither could be trusted.

“Are you the boss?” The policeman introduced himself as Corporal Glenn Sargent and the white man beside him as Constable Clay Fryer. The Inuit special constable's name was Areak. Sargent was a well-built, powerfully handsome man, the kind women pick out in a crowd. He had cut his teeth on the St. Roch. After that he had been posted to the police detachment at Herschel Island on the northern edge of the Yukon and had followed this with a stint at Spence Bay before finding himself commanding the RCMP's most northerly detachment at Craig Harbour.

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