Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada's Past (9 page)

Wolves. Siaq was stuffing more heather into the fire when Kannujaq asked her, “How does a Tunik hunt a wolf?”

“They don't,” she said. “Wolf pelts, among the Tunit, are rare and valuable, because it is almost impossible to get near enough to a wolf to kill it.”

But Kannujaq knew how his own people hunted them.

You did not catch a wolf by running it down, nor by ambushing it. The creatures were too wily. They could sense humans, evading them every time. Instead, you used a wolf's habits against it. The wolf was like a dog. If it found food lying about, it would stuff itself with as much as its gut could carry, eating faster than it could think. So what Kannujaq's people did was this: Soften some sharpened antler. Bend and tie it. Freeze it into the centre of a piece of meat or fat. Invariably, the wolf would swallow it down. The meat and ties would melt and digest inside the wolf. The sharpened antler would spring open. Dead wolf.

Siku walked in while Kannujaq was trying to explain this to Siaq. He seemed to grasp immediately what Kannujaq was implying and began to rummage through his bags. In a few moments, he had retrieved a handful of dried, ugly, greyish lumps.

“Is that what you burn in the fire to make people sleepy?” Kannujaq asked.

“That's a mushroom,” Siaq said grimly, “that is very dangerous. It can make one permanently stupid—even kill, if used improperly. But an
angakoq
, like myself or Siku, can prepare small amounts of it properly.”

“But if we made a solution of the stuff,” Siku grinned, “it would be very deadly, indeed.”

“Is there enough to saturate some meat with?” Kannujaq asked.

“I have three bags here,” said Siku.

Siaq ran off to retrieve her own stores.

It took a little over a day to ready everything, and the Tunit needed a great deal of convincing. Kannujaq was adamant about securing their promise that they would help out. Everyone's movements were orchestrated and rehearsed. The homes nearest the beach were left abandoned, storage areas full of meat. As many Tunit as possible would share homes nearest the hills, allowing them a head start if the raiders were sighted. They were not to move far, but only to take cover near the base of the hills.

Kannujaq alone would creep back to the camp to see if the Shining One's men took the bait. If so, he would signal.

There was no back-up plan.

The days were long now, so it was late evening when the Shining One returned in creeping dusk.

One by one, the great boat's torches sprang to life as it reached the shore, to harsh cries of, “Skraeling!”

The camp, and especially Kannujaq himself, had been nervous and watchful. All was set, and cries of alarm spread faster than flame among the Tunit, who were soon running. Kannujaq ran alongside them, desperately hoping that the Tunit would be able to summon their courage when the time came.

His greatest fear was that the raiders would not behave as planned. Siku and Siaq had prepared a kind of rancid-smelling tea out of their
mushrooms, assuring Kannujaq that it would be undetectable on meat saturated with it. They were wrong. Kannujaq himself had sampled some of it. No peculiar scent, but its flavour was off. His stomach had begun to lurch soon afterward.

Maybe the raiders are less observant
, he hoped.

They reached the hills, and could see commotion down by the beach, most likely the raiders kicking in the short Tunit walls, ripping tops off homes, stamping through cook-fires. Kannujaq gave them time, letting the reddish grey of evening come on. After the amount of time it might have taken for someone to boil up soup, he began to creep back down.

Lucky my clothes have become sooty, like the Tunit
.

It seemed to take forever to get down there, but at last he was at the edge of the community. Fortunately, there were large rocks about, enough for him to move among cover.

The Shining One was easy to spot. There was that gleaming face by torchlight, the man who never seemed to stray far from his boat. As before, he was arguing with one of his own. He was frustrated by something. At last, he tore off the gleaming shell upon his head and face and cast it upon the stones of the beach.

His giant servant watched him climb back into the boat, retrieving something near its stern. Then the Shining One stretched himself out, drinking something in hand.

The servant shook his head and left his leader there, joining the other raiders at a fire they had constructed. For fuel, they were burning what precious few tools the Tunit had made, from driftwood, over generations.

Yet they are eating
, Kannujaq noted. They had found the meat, but the poison would take some time to work. He needed patience, as in hunting a seal.

It was a sudden thing when it happened. They were still laughing, but their movements were becoming syrupy, disjointed. Whenever one arose, he teetered dangerously.

Then one of them vomited. The others laughed at this, crazily, before they did the same. The mad pitch of their laughter increased, until
they fell—first to knees, then fully upon the ground. Many began gesturing, calling out at empty air.

Soon the dozen of them were down, some convulsing. One lay still. Others were laughing or weeping uncontrollably.

Kannujaq unravelled the bull-roarer in his hand. He whirled the noise-maker round and round, calling the Tunit.

Where are they
, Kannujaq thought.
Now! Now! I can't do it alone!

Finally, Tunit men appeared next to him, long bear spears in hand. They stood stunned by what they saw, and Kannujaq roared at them to get moving.

He did not watch as they stabbed the giants. His objective was the boat. He ordered several Tunit men to join him and do as he did.

Kannujaq threw himself against the bow of the boat, and the Tunit men did likewise. Together they began to shove it backward, away from the shore, trying to get it out into the water.

Kannujaq's one concern was the Shining One himself. He had assumed that the man would join his fellows in feasting, but he had been wrong. Instead, the man seemed to have gone to sleep in the stern, after guzzling tea all evening.

They didn't get the boat out in time.

There was a dry, rasping sound—that of a weapon being drawn—and the Shining One appeared with a bellow. Kannujaq barely fell away from the boat as a great blade bit into the gunwale nearest his face.

But the Tunit had managed to push the vessel out. There, in the water, the great loon-thing rocked, and Kannujaq knew that the Shining One could not man it by himself.

The Tunit had finished the giants, and many were standing along the beach now, watching the helpless leader of the raiders drift ever further outward. Kannujaq opened his mouth to tell the Tunit to fetch bows, but one glance told him that they were already sickened with murder.

As was he.

So they all watched, stared as a current tugged at the vessel, lazily turning it away from the coast. There stood the Shining One, no longer
shining, but staring back at Kannujaq. It was a strange thing that there was no hatred in those ice-blue eyes, but only despair, and resignation.

In that moment, Kannujaq recognized the colour of those eyes and knew. The Shining One had never come here for plunder. Siaq had kept a secret from all.

The sea raiders had always had enough weapons and tools to spare. The objects Angula had stolen meant nothing to them. As with Kannujaq, what most mattered was kin. Kannujaq was looking at a fellow stranger in these lands, a newcomer, one who has known that dread of the unknown against him. Perhaps his people were not faring well here.

This was a man with nothing left, whose greatest fear—as with all men—was that he would fade away, leaving no trace of his passing. And it was such desperation that had driven his attempts to retrieve his only lasting legacy.

His son.

It was telling that there was no real celebrating over the defeat of the raiders. The Tunit simply wanted to put it all behind them, returning to their shy Tunit ways.

Kannujaq never spoke about what he knew of Siaq, that she had once had a husband from beyond the sea. Nor did he ever speak of what he knew of Siku, whose
angakoq
eyes had come from his father.

Kannujaq offered to bring Siaq and Siku away with him. Yet, just as he knew he could never live like a Tunik, so Siaq said that she was no longer comfortable among her own.

Siku, however, took up Kannujaq's offer eagerly. The blue-eyed
angakoq
, it seemed, had never felt comfortable among the Tunit. And he seemed to like the idea of sledding.

So it was that, in the early evening, when the scant remaining snow was cooling, Kannujaq and Siku made ready to depart. And as Siku watched Kannujaq tighten the lashings on his sled, the boy asked him, somewhat haltingly, “What … am I to say my mother is, if not a Tunik? What are we?”

“I don't know,” Kannujaq replied. But he thought about a word his grandfather had used. “Perhaps we are
Inuit.”

Siku's look was blank. He had grown up with the Tunit dialect, and the word was a foreign one.

“It means something like ‘those living here now,'” Kannujaq said with a grin.

But Kannujaq was troubled by his last memory of the Shining One, his boat swept away on odd currents. Was this the destiny of all strangers in this land? Was it the destiny of his kind?

Perhaps the Tunit would eventually speak of his people only in legend.

Kannujaq had no way of knowing that, while the Viking colony in Greenland would fade from existence, his own descendants would travel freely over the next three centuries, settling not only in Greenland but over all the old Tunit lands. The world would grow much colder, as in the time of his ancestors, and his kind would be the only survivors here. And they would speak of Tunit only in their own legends.

But Kannujaq's mind never strayed far from the present. His musings were eclipsed by annoyance that Siku had disposed of the raider artifacts. The
angakoq
had felt they were evil and was convinced that the sea should have them.

Kannujaq wondered how long they could travel before Siku noticed everything lashed to the sled. The boy had forgotten about Angula's knife, which Kannujaq had snuck back and retrieved. It would be ideal for
iglu
building in the winter.

Like his people, Kannujaq remained, above all else, practical.

IMAGE CREDIT: © PETER HARHOLDT/CORBIS/MAGMA

I
N 1968
I
WAS INVITED
to an Indian display mounted by the grade 5 students of Churchill Avenue Public School in North York, Toronto, as a grand finale to their five-week in-depth study of Indians. Students, parents, and teachers were justifiably proud of the exhibition.

The entire library was one large, open gallery. It was a veritable feast of Native memorabilia. Against the walls were tables bearing an array of pictures, maps, and artifacts, both genuine and plastic. Posters and several large pictures of Indian chiefs and warriors adorned the walls. At one end of the library was a large canvas teepee; in front, a tripod made of saplings meant to represent an outdoor fireplace. Students, faces painted in warlike colours and wearing paper headdresses, mingled with the guests, whom they conducted about the exhibits while explaining what they knew of their respective First Nations. All of them wore nameplates of the tribes whom they represented:
ALGONQUIN, IROQUOIS, SIOUX, HURON, OJIBWAY.
In front of the teepee stood a grim-looking grade 5 chief, his arms folded. Like the rest of the Indians, he had his face painted in hostile colours. I went directly to him.