MAINLY CONCERNING FOOD
"Man does not live by bread alone."
Exigencies of life have caused the Mackenzie Eskimo to formulate on vital matters an unwritten law to which each gives assent. Succinctly stated, this system of Northland jurisprudence runs thus:—
(a) Should a man, inadvertently or by malice aforethought, kill another, the wife and children of the man so killed remain a burden on the murderer so long as he or they live.
(b) A drift-log found is treasure-trove, and belongs to the finder, who indicates possession by placing upon it a pipe, mitten, or personal trinket of some kind. Whalers, missionaries and Mounted Police are a unit in testifying that precious flotsam of this kind has remained four or five years in a land of wood-scarcity without being disturbed.
(c) No one must eat seal and walrus on the same day. Thus a check is given to luxuriousness and the Eskimo is self-prevented from falling into the fate which overtook Rome.
(d) All large animals killed are to be looked upon as common property of the tribe and not as a personal belonging of the man who kills them. Thus here, under the Northern Lights, do the Farthest North subjects of the Seventh Edward work out in deeds the dream of Sir Thomas More's crescent-isle of Utopia where men lived and worked as brothers, holding all things in common.
The Eskimo realises that the pleasure of life is in pursuit, not in acquisition. Where wants are many, joys are few; the very austerity of his life has made a man of him. Laying up few treasures for the elements to corrupt, accumulating no property except a little, a very little, of the kind designated by Wemmick as "portable," he, to better and saner effect than any man, decreases the denominator of his wants instead of increasing the numerator of his havings. Surrounded by the palcocrystic ice, the genial current of his soul has not been frozen by that ice. An Eskimo family accepts life with a smile and, in the faith of little children, goes on its way.
An old Scot once prayed, "O Lord, send down to Thy worshippin' people at this time the savin' grace o' continuance." Only one man has less need to pray that prayer than the Scot himself, and that man is the Eskimo. The Indian eats and sleeps as his wife works, but while there is spear-head to fashion or net to mend, the clever hands of the Eskimo are never idle. Thrifty as a Scot, ingenious as a Yankee, every bit of the little property that he has is well kept. You find around this igloo no broken sled-runner, untrustworthy fishing-gear, nor worn-out dog-harness. Civilisation has nothing to teach this man concerning clothing, house-building, or Arctic travel. Indeed, one may hazard the opinion that the ambitious explorer from the outside, if he reach the Pole at all, will reach it along Eskimo avenues with this man as active ally and by adopting his methods of coping with Northern conditions.
On account of the malignity of nature, it is rare that an Eskimo attains the three score and ten Scriptural years. Few, indeed, live beyond the age of fifty-five or sixty. If his life is short, it is happy. This pagan has grasped a great truth that his Christian brother often misses, the truth that happiness is not a luxury, but the highest of all virtues, a virtue filling the life where it originates and spreading over every life it touches.
There is about this Mackenzie Eskimo a certain other-worldliness which we insistently feel but which is hard to describe, and to us his generosity is sometimes embarrassing. At Peel River a band of Kogmollycs met us, carrying on board pieces of their ivory-carving. One man exhibited a watch-chain containing fifteen links and a cross-bar, all carved from a single piece of ivory. He wanted thirty-five dollars or the equivalent of that for his work, saying that it represented the leisure hours of two months. The engineer tried to make him lower his price, but with a courteous smile he shook his head, and the carving was dropped back into artikki recesses. Afterwards, with the air of a shy child, the clever carver came to me and offered me the chain as a gift. It was probably a difficulty of articulation rather than a desire to be scathing which induced this man subsequently to refer to the one who tried to beat down his price as "the cheap engineer."
Surprised at the magnificent physique and unusual height of this little group, one of us began measuring the chest expansions, length of limbs, and width of shoulders of the men and women we were talking with, while the other of us jotted the figures down in a note-book. Many of the men were over six feet tall, and none that we measured was under five feet nine inches. One young giant, Emmie-ray, was much interested in our researches. The whalers call him "Set-'em-Up," for his name bears the convivial translation, "Give us a drink." "You going to make better man, you get Outside—make him like Emmie-ray?" As Emmie-ray pursues the tenour of his Arctic way, hunting the walrus, standing, a frozen statue, with uplifted spear over the breathing-hole of the seal, to the end of the chapter he will think of himself as being used for a stimulating Delineator-pattern in the igloo of the white man.
Forty years ago, when Bishop Bompas came across a band of these people, instead of being awed at the appearance of a white man, they took him for a son of Cain! Their tradition was that, in the early history of the world, an Eskimo murdered his brother and fled to the inhospitable parts of the earth. The bishop, coming to them from the unknown south, must be a direct descendant of the outlaw, with his hands red with a brother's blood.
Circling the ocean-edge from Siberia, without doubt this people came originally from Asia, as the Chipewyans did before them and the Crees before that, the more newly arrived in each case pressing their predecessors farther away from the food-yielding ocean. The Anglo-Saxon estimates all habitable land by his ell-measure, fertility of the soil, its ability to yield turnips, potatoes, and flax, and forty-bushel wheat. The measure of desirability of range of northern tribes has another unit—blood, and flesh, and fish. Your Eskimo and Chipewyan and Cree cares not a potato-skin for your waving fields of grain, your apple-orchards and grape-vines. What he is after is blood and blubber and good dripping flesh; these his soul craves in the night season. These peoples who made their way into the continent by the open door at the north have come down through the years toward the habitat of the white man, not because they loved him, but because a stronger tribe has pushed them back from Arctic flesh-pots.
At the Mackenzie mouth we enjoyed the companionship of that courteous Eskimo gentleman, Roxi, and heard the story of his last winter's larder, but not from his lips. At the beginning of the season Roxi had whale-meat and fresh walrus, and also flour that he had earned from the whalers. In a characteristic burst of generosity he gave the greater part of this to needy members of other tribes who had had poor hunts and who found themselves at the beginning of the Long Night with empty Mother Hubbard cupboards. The Eskimo winter has many mealtimes, and Roxi had but a poor idea of the higher mathematics. Long ere the darkness of the Great Night relaxed its overbearing blackness Roxi got very hungry, and he had no food. Life is dear, even on the edge of things. So into the silence Roxi crept and dug down through the ice and frozen sand to the skeleton of a stranded whale killed three years before. All the sustaining flesh had been eaten from it more than a year ago, but the dried tendons were still there. By chewing these assiduously and picking bones already bare, this generous soul kept life in his body. As I heard the story, the last words of the gallant Sidney dying in agony on Zutphen's field that another's thirst might be quenched came across the ocean from another age and a far land, "Thy necessity is greater than mine." Britain's heroes, men of the finest mould, manifest on the shores of many seas.
Inherited tastes in foods, like inherited creeds, are mainly a matter of geography, or of history, or of both. An Englishman had preceded us to the Arctic, going in in 1907, and the story of his food discrimination still lives in tepee of the Cree and Eskimo topik. The North is full of rivers, the cold bottle is always at your disposal, and generally, if you are any shot at all, you can get the hot bird. But this son of a thousand earls, or of something else, wouldn't eat owl when owl was served, though he would eat crow. Now, eating crow is to most a distasteful task, and the guides questioned the Englishman regarding the gastronomic line he drew. "Aw!" replied he, "No fellow eats owl, you know. Never heard of the bweastly bird at home, but crow ought to go all right. The crow's a kind of rook, you know, and every fellow eats rook-pie."
Having put the seal's body into his own body and then encasing his skin in the seal's, the cheery Eskimo strides the strand, a veritable compensation-pendulum. The seal is so much an integral part of this people that if a geologist were to freeze a typical Eskimo and saw him through to get a cross-section he would have in the concentric strata a hybrid of Husky and seal. Holding up his transverse section under the light of the Aurora, the investigator would discover an Arctic roly-poly pudding with, instead of fruit and flour, a layer first of all of seal, then biped, seal in the centre, then biped, and seal again. This jam-tart combination is very self-sustaining and enduring. Deprived of food for three days at a stretch the Eskimo lives luxuriously on his own rounded body, as a camel on his hump.
Reading an Arctic bill-of-fare in southern latitudes may give one a feeling of disgust and nausea, for it is all so "bluggy." You feel differently about it at 70º North. You put prejudice far from you, comfort yourself with the reflection that raw oysters, lively cheese, and high game are acquired tastes, and approach the Arctic menu with mind and stomach open to conviction. It is all a matter of adjustment. Because raw rotten fish is not eaten in Boston or in Berkeley Square there is no reason why it should not be a staple on Banks's Land.
We had brought with us on our transport two years' provisions for the detachment of Royal Northwest Mounted Police stationed at Herschel Island, and we had been privileged to taste the concentrated cooking-eggs and desiccated vegetables which formed part of their commissariat. Now, a concentrated egg and a desiccated carrot or turnip bear no more family-likeness to the new-laid triumph of the old Dominick or the succulent vegetable growing in your own back-yard than the tin-type of Aunt Mary taken at the country fair does to the dear old body herself. Whale-meat is better than concentrated cooking-egg, seal-blood piping hot more to be desired than that vile mess of desiccated vegetables. I know. I feel like the old Scot who exclaimed, "Honesty is the best policy. I've tried baith."
But we do not live on seal alone in the North, for there is a bewildering bill-of-fare. Reindeer have a parasite living on the back between the skin and the flesh, a mellifluous maggot an inch long. Raw or cooked it is a great delicacy, and if you shut your eyes it tastes like a sweet shrimp. Don't be disgusted. If you have scooped shrimps from their native heath, you have discovered the shrimp, too, to be a parasite.
Another Arctic titbit is that fleshy cushion of the jaw of the whale which in life holds the baleen. What is whale-gum like? It tastes like chestnuts, looks like cocoa-nut, and cuts like old cheese. Whale-blubber tastes like raw bacon and it cannot very easily be cooked, as it would liquify too soon. It is a good deal better than seal-oil, which to a southern palate is sweet, mawkish, and sickly. Seal-oil tastes as lamp-oil smells. But you can approach without a qualm boiled beluga-skin, which is the skin of the white whale. In its soft and gelatinous form it ranks among northern delicacies with beaver-tail and moose-nose, being exceedingly tasty and ever so much more palatable than pigs-feet.
Musquash in the spring is said to be tender and toothsome, but that overpowering smell of musk proved too much for our determination. You may break, you may shatter the rat if you will, but the scent of the musk-rose will cling to it still. There is a limit to every one's scientific research, and, personally, until insistent hunger gnaws at my vitals and starvation looms round the edge of the next iceberg, I draw the line at muskrat and am not ashamed to say so. Compelling is the association of ideas, and the thought grips one that muskrat must taste as domestic rats (are rats domestic?) look. Raw fish at the first blush does not sound palatable, yet raw oysters appeal. The truth is that meat or fish frozen is eaten raw without any distaste, the freezing exerting on the tissues a metabolic change similar to that effected by cooking; and it is convincingly true that bad fish is ever so much better frozen than cooked.
Blubber is not a staple, as is so often misstated, but it is a much esteemed delicacy. During the summer months the Eskimo has to provide light and fuel for that long half-year of darkness within the igloo. The blubber obtained in summer is carefully rendered down and stored in sealskin bags—the winter provision of gas-tank, electric storage-battery, coal-cellar, and wood-pile. In using oil for fuel, this master artificer of the North has anticipated by decades, if not centuries, the inventive adaptability of his "civilised" cousins. The blubber appears in a blanket between the skin of the animal and its flesh, and when it is spared for food, is cut into delicious strings, an inch wide, an inch deep, and the longer the better. Give a Fur-Land kiddie a strip of this sweetmeat and he grins like that Cheshire cat he has never seen. He doesn't eat it, but drops it into the cavernous recesses of his stomach, as you lower your buckets into the well of English undefiled. "Disgusting," you say. It's all a matter of latitude. Watching a roly-poly Innuit baby finding its stomach-level with plummet of seal-blubber sustains the interest of the grand-stand for a longer period than watching your child dallying with the dripping delights of an "all-day sucker." These little babies have the digestion of an ostrich and his omnivorous appetite. Suckled at their mothers' breasts until they are two or even three years old, when they are weaned they at once graduate into the bill-of-fare of the adult. Walrus-hide is about as uncompromising as elephant-hide, and an inch thick. You see little chaps of three and four struggling valiantly with this, nibbling at it with keen delight, as a puppy does on an old shoe, or your curled Fauntleroy on an imported apple. The Eskimo mother has no green apples to contend with in her kindergarten and need never pour castor-oil upon the troubled waters. Every day in the year her babies are crammed with marrow and grease, the oil of gladness and the fat of the land.
To many Eskimo the contents of the paunch of the reindeer is the only vegetable food they get, and this is eaten without salt, as all their food is eaten. They crack the bones of any animal they kill to get the marrow, which is eaten on the spot, the broken bones being pulverised and boiled to make much-prized gelatine. To his fish and flesh the Eskimo adds a bewildering plenitude of wildfowl. Last spring, eighteen hundred geese and ducks were killed by Eskimo on Herschel Island sand-pit. It is the paradise of pot-hunter and wing-shot. Captain Ellis of the Karluk, with one Eskimo fellow-sportsman, got a bag of 1132 ducks, geese, and swans in three days' shooting, to send to the wrecked whalers off Point Barrow, Alaska.
Who are these people, and whence came they? Each little tribe is a book unread before, and full to the brim of fascination. When they are confronted with the picture of an elephant in a current magazine, they are all excitement. The book is carried eagerly to the old man sunning himself down in the anchored oomiak. Animation, retrospection, agitation chase from his seamed face all traces of drowsiness. "We used to know it." "Our fathers have told us." "This land-whale with its tail in front once lived in the land of the Innuit." We are now the ones to become excited. Intending merely to amuse these fellow-Canadians who had been kind to us, we stumble upon a story of intense interest. "Where did your fathers see this animal?" we asked. "Here, in this country. In the ice his bones were hidden," said the old man. With this he relapsed into the torpor we had disturbed, and no further word did we elicit.
Captain Mogg, of the whaling schooner Olga, two winters ago pursued his whaling operations far to the north and east. Ice-bound at Prince Albert Land, he stumbled upon a little settlement of Eskimo. These were completely isolated from and had had no communication with white men or any community of their own race. Only one of their number had seen a white man before—one old, old woman, the grandmother of the band. The captain of the Olga speaks Eskimo fluently, and to him this ancestress of the "lost tribe" had an interesting story to tell. She remembered a white man who came across the Great Sea from the west in "a big kayak," and she extended her arms to show its size. Her people had given this stranger seal-meat and blubber and the "Chief" from the great ship had presented her with a piece of cloth as red as the new-spilt blood of the seal. This grandmother-in-Ice-Land is without shadow of doubt the very child to whom M'Clure gave a piece of red flannel far back in the early fifties while prosecuting his double search for the Northwest Passage and the lost Franklin. We have M'Clure's record of the incident and the little girl's questioning wonder,—"Of what animal is this the skin?" Thus does history manifest itself on the other side of the shield "after many days."
Through the years, the Eskimo has fared better than the Indian. It would seem that the London Directorate of the H.B. Co. expected its servants within the Arctic Circle in the days that are past to do almost a Creator's part and make all things of nothing. The scanty provisions and trading goods from England which filtered in thus far were to be given to the Indians in exchange for furs, while the Factor and his people were largely expected to "live on the country."
Cannibalism was not unknown. The winter of 1841-2 was an especially hard one. On the 18th March, 1841, J. William Spence and Murdock Morrison were dispatched with the winter express from Fort Good Hope to Fort Macpherson. During the second night out, while they were asleep in the encampment, they were knocked on the head by four starving Indian women, immediately cut to pieces, and devoured. It is further reported that these women previously had killed and eaten their husbands and all their children except one little boy. Of the two murdered Scots they ate what they could that night and made pemmican of what was over, reporting afterward that one was sweet but that the other, tasting of tobacco, was not so good.
Father Petitot gives us another glimpse of that awful winter. His naïve words are, "Chie-ke-nayelle, a Slavi from Fort Norman, was a winning fellow, handsome, gracious, the possessor of a happy countenance. On his features played always a smile of contentment and innocence. In his youth he had eaten of human flesh during the terrible famine of 1841. He killed his young daughter with a hatchet-blow, cooked her like flesh, and ate her as a meat-pate. It is said that after one has partaken of human flesh, the appetite for it often returns. I hasten to add that Chie-ke-nayelle, in spite of the soubriquet mangeur de monde which is irrevocably rivetted to his name, has not succumbed to such an appetite. He is indeed an excellent Christian. Nevertheless, I would not like to camp with Chie-ke-nayelle in time of famine."
Another starvation story related by the good Father is not quite so ghastly. He tells us of one "M. Finlaison of burlesque memory," who, when all provisions were out, took his fiddle and, calling the men of his fort before the door of his empty larder, played to them a Scottish reel. That was their dinner for the day,—instead of meat they had sound. The narrator adds, "In America they would have lynched the too-jovial Scotchman. In the Northwest the good half-breeds laughed and applauded the master."
The winter of 1844 also was a season of distress. Referring to this year, a beautiful young Indian woman said to the sympathetic priest, "I did not wish to eat the arm of my father. I was then a small child of eight, and I had not been able to see my old father eaten without crying out with loud screams. But my mother called to me in rage, 'If you do not eat of it, it is that you condemn us and hate us, then you will surely go the same way.' And I ate the flesh of my father, hiding my sobs and devouring my tears, for fear of being killed like him; so much was I afraid of the eyes of my mother."
Another Indian woman confesses, "I left my husband, a hunter at the fort, and took with me by the hand my only child, a boy of six, and directed my steps towards Ka-cho-Gottine. It was indeed far. I only knew the way by hearsay. Once I myself have eaten of my father, but now I am a Christian and that horrible time is far from me. I have a qualm in thinking that my stomach has partaken of the author of my days. Meanwhile his flesh has become mine, and what will happen to us both on the final resurrection day?" Here Father Petitot interpolates, "Ah! if she had only read Dante!" "I did not intend to keep my boy with me, he was too young and too weak. I did not wish to devour him. I had no heart for that. I decided to abandon him. At the first camp I left him, and knew they would eat him there. I wept on thinking of the horrible death that awaited my only child. But what could I do?" This story has a more comfortable ending than the previous one. We breathe relief in learning from the priest that the following night the little boy overtook his mother. He had walked all day and all night, following her snowshoe tracks. They went on together, the third day they snared some hares, and their troubles were over.
Father Petitot tells of a Rabbit-skin Indian who found a mummified body in the forks of a tree near the Ramparts of the Mackenzie and who came running into the Mission, his hair on end with fright, asking excitedly, "Did God make that man or was he made by the men of the Hudson's Bay?"
Another tale of his is of an Indian, Le Petit Cochon, who had a tape-worm and thought it was a whale. "Unfortunate!" exclaims the Father, "possessed of a whale! That's the difference between Le Petit Cochon and Jonah." Sucking Pig said he would join the Church if the priest would rid him of the tape-worm. But we must use the words of Petitot himself, for they are too delicious to lose. "Christmas night, 1865, after midnight mass, Le Petit Cochon, carefully purged, both as to body and soul, by an emetic, two purgatives, and a good confession, content as a King, received holy baptism. I gave him the name of Noel."
In starvation times, guests were not appreciated. Robert Campbell of the H.B. Company, writing from Fort Halkett in 1840, says, "God grant that the time of privation may soon end, and that I may not see a soul from below till the snow disappears." These days of the early forties when England was engaged with the Chartist risings at home and her Chinese wars abroad, were surely parlous times up on this edge of empire. The Fort Simpson journals of February 4, 1843, record, "The Cannibal, with young Noir, and others of the party of Laman, arrived this evening in the last stage of existence, being compelled by starvation to eat all their furs."
Still these sonsy Scots kept a good heart and were able to jest at their misfortunes with the grim humour that belongs to their race. Neither empty larder nor other misfortune disheartened them. The recurrence of New Year's Day and the Feast of St. Andrew were made ever occasions for rejoicing. Up on the Pelly Forks under date of November 30th, 1848, the record reads, "Though far from our native land and countrymen, let us pass St. Andrew's Day in social glee. So fill your glasses, my lads, and pass the bottle round." Three years later, on the same anniversary, the lines are, "Very cold for St. Andrew's, and no haggis for dinner."
And as January Ist ushers in the year 1845, the Factor at Fort Macpherson bursts into verse:
"This day, Time winds th' exhausted chain
To run the twelvemonths' length again.
I see the old bald-pated fellow
With ardent eyes, complexion sallow,
Adjust the unimpaired machine
To wheel the equal, dull routine.
Underneath the record a postscript appears, in another hand:
"Oh let us love our occupations,
Bless the Co. and their relations,
Be content with our poor rations,
And always know our proper stations.