The Long Exile by Melanie Mcgrath

scraping out a meagre living from a landscape of rock and gravel. When the Hudson Bay Company post at Fort Ross was closed in the summer of 1947, the survivors from this company experiment were again moved, west this time, to Spence Bay. They were never returned to their homeland.
    In 1939, five years after the visit of Sir Patrick Ashley Cooper, an ex-Hudson Bay Company fur trader called lames Cantley arrived in Inukjuak and set up a rival trading post a little farther upriver, calling his new enterprise the Baffin Trading Company. The Inuit found him abrasive and mean. He did not rate them either. For a while, the price of fox fur rose steadily, the competition between the Baffin Trading Company and the Hudson Bay post keeping the price paid for pelts in line with the growing demand for Arctic fox in the southern fur markets. The Inuit of Inukjuak did their best to shrug off the horrors of the past years and settled back to their customary lives.
    Far away, a war began in Europe.

CHAPTER FIVE

    S UPPOSING the bad times to be over, at least for a while, Paddy Aqiatusuk married a widow. Mary brought four children with her, all a little younger than Josephie: two boys, Elijah and Samwillie, Anna, a delicate little girl left crippled at the age of two by an outbreak of polio, and a baby, Minnie. There were now five more mouths to feed in Aqiatusuk's camp and among them no adult hunters.
    During the winter of 1939 snow crept across Ungava from the east, melted in a brief, warm spell, then froze hard over the tundra. Unable to scrape through the ice to feed on lichen clinging to the rocks, what few caribou remained on the peninsula began slowly to starve, their living bodies nipped at by wolves until they were little more than walking skeletons, flesh trailing in ribbons behind them as they stumbled to their deaths. There was no point in hunting them, so little nourishment remained on their bones.
    By Christmas the meat caches in Aqiatusuk's camp were empty. There were seal, still, and some walrus, but they had to be hunted ever farther from the settlement, either at the floe edge or out on the islands. Paddy Aqiatusuk and Josephie Flaherty were often away for days at a time, moving their trap lines farther and farther out along the coast, camping at the floe edge where the seals swam.
    Whenever they were sure they would not be going too far from camp, Josephie and Paddy would take Paddy's stepson Elijah alongto hold the dogs and act as lookout. The trips exhausted the boy, just as they had exhausted Josephie before him, and before Josephie, Aqiatusuk and Aqiatusuk's father, in a continuum of extreme physical endeavour stretching back into the dimmest reaches of the past. It was a brutal regime and by the time the three of them reached the home camp they were so grim from the day's exertions that it was all they could do to sit, mug of tea in hand, sucking in the smoke from their cigarettes and staring at the icy floor. Within minutes the boy would be fast asleep, in place, chin folded on to chest. The two men would sit awhile, saying nothing. Paddy Aqiatusuk suffered from back pain and odd, inexplicable twinges which kept him from sleep. He often passed the night hours carving hunters and polar bears, building living armies of greenstone and ivory, against the time when he might have to call upon them.
    The early years of the war passed Ungava by. Then, in 1941, the U.S. air force began to build a wartime air base at Fort Chimo, or Kuujuak, in eastern Ungava and American troops poured in to staff it. Inuit employed at the Fort Chimo base passed through Inukjuak on their way to other bases in the eastern Arctic, bringing with them stories of the war, but no one in Inukjuak, least of all Paddy Aqiatusuk and losephie Flaherty, could quite believe them. There had been skirmishes between Inuit and Indians at the tree line for three thousand years, but the Inuit had lived all this time in the Arctic without an all-out war. Of the