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.