The New North

by Agnes Deans Cameron

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.