The Time Before This Read online

  Bone Lake was a jumping-off point, for the pioneering process as well as for myself. The very town itself had been dropped from the air, brought in piece by piece, in a fantastic series of helicopter lifts, together with the cement, the steel, the cranes, and the men to bolt it all together.

  It had been built, populated, and lived in, all within six months. Grocery bills were being paid, or not paid, long before the last hammer stroke faded on the brittle air; love was made there, before the first railway sleeper was even hewn. It was part of the fabulous leapfrog of this century; first the town was flown in, then the rail link snaked northwards to join it. Later there might be a road, if the road, like the railway, could be made to float on top of a semi-liquid, semi-frozen peat bog, five hundred miles from end to end.

  But already Bone Lake was the springboard for the next jump ahead; already, only three years old, it was an old-fashioned town, serving a frontier which had already been pushed northwards over a hundred glacial hills; already it was in decay. It was like a western cowboy town, but frozen stiff in restless history; built on stilts above the permafrost – the icy slush which served for ground hereabouts – it seemed doomed to inherit, within a decade, the mouldering graveclothes of Klondike and Dawson City.

  As in so many other parts of Canada, the rule was boom or bust, feast or famine; it was chicken one day, feathers the next. For Bone Lake, now a mere way station on the road to the bounding future, it would soon be featherless again.

  Not all its transients could save it – its survey teams, its replacements for the Dew Line crews and for the American bomber stations. Not all its brash fortune hunters, its spongers and drifters, its people like me; not its lost-looking Eskimos and its tribal aristocrats – the Indians working on the high steel. Not all this restless tide of toughs and tradespeople and friendly finance men could keep it alive for very much longer.

  Except for an ex-king, there could be nothing so ex as an ex-frontier; and this was ordained as Bone Lake’s doom. Once more, new life lay to the north and north-west, opening up in a giant sky-wide fan like the glittering northern lights themselves. It was there that men were staring, and heading, and hurrying, as fast as people like Ed the pilot could carry them. Casualties such as Bone Lake could only be left behind, bobbing and sinking in the wake of the advance.

  I came to know those northern lights very well, on my criss-cross journeys round and about the Arctic Circle. They were beautiful, like the banners of hope; white and pale yellow and ghostly blue, flickering and fading, filling the whole night sky like a Christmas candle-glow ten thousand miles across. Reflections from far northern ice, they tell us, or cloud layers moving, or vapour trails which mirrored a midnight sun. But in Greenland they are known to be the souls of the dead playing ball with the skulls of seals. This is much the best explanation I ever heard.

  I came to know Ed very well, also, and to like him. He was a type, but an essential and admirable one, and as much a part of the northland scene as the waste of snow itself. In a quarter-century of flying, he and his fellow pilots had had a notable share in the opening-up of the new frontier. Without Ed, and about fifty men like him, the Canadian north would still be lagging.

  Ed had flown everywhere, from Baffin Island to Alaska and the far west; he had carried men and dogs and stores and machine tools; he had crashed gently into half-frozen lakes, and taken off blind into swirling snow blizzards. He knew it all, and what he knew was still only just enough, as he admitted, to keep him and his plane in one piece.

  With me, he answered questions when they were asked, and his answers were accurate and revealing, filling out the thousand silly gaps in my knowledge. But basically he was a non-talker; when he was on the job he fell into a dedicated trance; he would sit stock-still in enormous concentration, as if ready to lift the plane and keep it aloft by its own stirrups.

  Sometimes he paid no attention to me at all, and he would explain, ten minutes later, that something had been ‘a tricky bit’. Once he said, curtly: ‘Shut up a minute,’ and when next I glanced aside we were banking sharply, and climbing steeply, and still looking up at a craggy, pitted iceberg which had loomed out of the low-flying fog like a suddenly raised fist.

  When we had emerged, and I was still sweating, he said ‘Sorry’. I realized he meant that he was sorry to have shut me up. But I was far from objecting. As long as he worried, I knew I did not have to.

  Ed planned all our journeys, knowing what I wanted to see and, more important still, what other things I must not miss. It was a harsh and desolate land, but wildly beautiful; if, as the history books say, Jacques Cartier called it ‘the land God gave to Cain’, then Cain did much better than he deserved. Of course, there were places like the Hudson Strait, fog-shrouded and raw, which were indeed forbidding; the miles of glacial tundra were as ugly as all featureless things must be; and there were other ominous wastes of ice and snow, tormented by cruel weather, where the price of laggard travelling would certainly be death.

  But against the grim and the ravaged, there were four attributes which constantly recurred, on all our voyaging. They were beauty, nobility, human kindness, and hope. On balance, this northland was no frozen wilderness. Under its austere fabric was a warm and beating heart; under the battleground, the good earth of valour and love.

  We had so many cordial welcomes that I lost count of names and places. For the most part it must have been due to Ed, a popular and even famous character who was greeted everywhere with an invariable, open-handed pleasure. He was their link with the outside, the tested link which they had come to trust in sickness, in evil times, in disaster. At one little hamlet near Frobisher, they knew him as ‘the Mercy Man’; the label bespoke the lore of some memorable rescue, a dozen years earlier. But I had the feeling that if I, alone and a stranger, had dropped in upon any of these isolated settlements, I would have been made to feel just as much a friend.

  It was something – it was really something – to fly for two or three hours in a bucking, not too warm, not too comfortable plane, across an ancient spreading ice-cap known to be two miles thick, or a waste land inhabited only by ghostly grey wolves and wandering caribou, and the musk oxen which looked like the world’s shaggiest dogs, and then to set down at a trading post or a hamlet where the sound of our plane brought men and children running, and where we stepped out into a ring of smiling, welcoming faces.

  The pattern was always the same; it warmed the heart with the same eye-pricking suddenness, every time. Foremost in the reception committee would be the three wise men of all these communities – the trader, the priest, and the policeman. Behind them was this circle of beaming Eskimos – the bundled-up, indistinguishable men and women, the roly-poly children, the dogs on holiday from their snarling; and behind them again the tiny village of tar-paper houses and corrugated iron shacks, made to seem more wretched still by the brief, revealing midday sun. But they only seemed wretched. The shacks and the sheds and the half-buried igloos were home town, and we were as welcome there as flowers at midsummer. The smiling faces told us that, on every occasion.

  ‘I don’t know what they’ve got to smile about,’ said Ed once. ‘They have nothing! If a man loses a single harpoon in winter, ten people can starve to death. And why smile at us? By and large, we hardly do a damn thing for them. Not what we should. Not what we could. But they always smile. They smile when you tell them they’re dying of TB. They must be the last of the naturally happy people. Or else resigned to it.’ He sighed. ‘Sometimes it makes you ashamed to own a ten-dollar bill.’

  I was sure that, of all people, he need feel the least ashamed; and he must in fact have come to realize this himself. Our welcome was always real, beyond belief; the night-long gossip, the laughter, the hallowed practical jokes, the broad pantomime – all bore witness to an unalterable friendship. When we took our leave, even at such a horrid hour as five o’clock in the morning, the goodbyes were always a community affair, boisterous and true. Though their friend was leaving, the
y trusted him to come back again.

  These were the simple places. There were others, larger, more sophisticated, which could boast a mayor, a chamber of commerce, a Rotarian glad hand. Their hospitality was perhaps a calculated matter; a travelling newspaperman might sanctify their names in print. But all was forgivable, when measured against the hard work they were doing. The pioneers of this thriving wilderness must be allowed their share of the limelight, since they had sparked the light themselves.

  There were other places, sophisticated in a grisly sense, places which I disliked by instinct while admitting that the twentieth century gave them some kind of sanction. We would follow a meandering ore-train across Labrador, and lose it, and fly over icy seas, and snow slopes, and the great nothingness of the northland; and then our next landfall would be a cluster of radar domes, and US army hutments, and enormous supply depots, and snowmobiles instead of dog sleds, and an underground life as complex and metropolitan as New York. These were the men on guard, the men on the far side of the Arctic medal; watchmen on the special sectors of the Dew Line, surrounded by the fearful toys manufactured for an age of fear.

  They were cheerful men, but preoccupied, aloof. While we were casual visitors, they were the steadfast garrison. We dropped in, they stayed put. When asked for details, they grew cagey, turning questions into woolly answers, and answers into jokes. Under their standing orders, they had no other choice save this frivolity. But it was sad to realize that soldiers in this majesty and splendour of the north must look further north again, and discover only enemy masks.

  Yet while men could adorn or deface the great canvas, it remained a sublime masterpiece. For me, all its magic could be summed up in one single scene, observed on the last day of our tour, when we flew eastwards from Pond Inlet, and down the length of Baffin Island, and then back to our home base on Bone Lake. Over Baffin, whose seaboard rises in great, steep-to, three-thousand feet cliffs to a tremendous spine of icy mountains, we came upon the ultimate in Arctic splendour.

  It stood at the end of an enormous, hidden, unruffled fjord; it could only be called an ice castle. Its peak must have been over six thousand feet high, reaching imperiously for the sun; its base was pure blue ice, falling headlong into the sea. In between, it rose tier upon tier in the fantastic architecture of raw nature; if ten million years had gone to the making of this sculptured fortress, not one of them had been wasted.

  I gazed at it in entrancement, while Ed, without any prompting, made a second pass over it, and then a third. When he saw my face, he smiled, and nodded downwards in agreement. He was not the man to be awed, even by this magnificence, but he was a man to be confident in the wares he could set before me.

  While we were droning our way southwards again, on the last lap of our journey, I said: ‘You keep the best till the last.’

  He looked up from his instrument panel, his hands steady and relaxed on the controls. ‘It’s quite something, isn’t it? … There are two or three like that … No one knows anything about them, except that they’re there.’

  ‘What’s underneath it?’

  ‘Ice. Then rock. Then God knows what.’ The plane wavered slightly in a drift of vapour, and he bore down with a controlling hand. ‘This is a funny part of the world. You get things like that mountain of ice, which should have eroded away long ago. And they’ve found whales’ skeletons, a thousand feet above high water mark.’

  I said: ‘You’ll have to translate for me.’

  Ed grinned. ‘Well, whales can’t fly. Never could. The old sea level must have been that much higher.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘At the beginning. When the first ice was melting. It was a kind of colossal spring run-off. But this was the very spring of the world.’

  The very spring of the world … The poetic phrase, so odd-sounding on the lips of this gruff, monosyllabic man, stayed with me on all our homeward journey. The ice castle stayed with me also, noble and memorable, never fading from the inward eye. Its towering might had seemed to crown the whole northland.

  It was from such majestic prospects that I returned to Bone Lake, to watch, once again, the old man at the bar making an arrant fool of himself.

  Bar Two

  I had planned to write the core of my story there at Bone Lake, while it was fresh in my mind and the atmosphere itself was still available to help me; then travel a bit more, to pick up the loose ends; then go back home to tie the whole thing up in a good solid knot. But the writing was slow, because I wanted it to be good – good enough to match the country; and on the third day, only halfway through, I pushed back my chair, and stretched, and shaved, and wandered down to the hotel bar in search of company.

  I felt I needed to take a breather, and to look at something else besides a typewriter keyboard and a dreary, hollow hotel room.

  The company was there. It was the same company as before, and the same interior scene, and the same cast of leading characters. But this time they were playing it harder. And this time I was close by.

  The thin girl called Mary sat on her stool, watching, waiting. Joe the barman bobbed about, dispensing good fellowship at sixty cents a pledge. Ed bought me a drink. The Ox man and the Weasel man, now at my end of the bar, began walking through their crude roles. Their victim began his same act in the same doomed way.

  This time he was giving us a longer monologue; full of wild and whirling words, recalling an old-time preacher who could only hope to hold his audience by noisy melodrama. I caught snatches of it. The phrase ‘I know!’ was always there, like some idiotic sales slogan. And something about the time before this. And something about punishment, and something about our last chance, and total destruction, and human survival. It made as much sense as before, and that could not be construed as a compliment.

  Yet he did not deserve the rough treatment they handed him. There were more charitable ways of dealing with an old eccentric than by baiting him to distraction. And if charity was not the long suit, at Bone Lake as at any other place, then practicality might have taken its place. An old man out of his wits could hardly be an asset to the gathering.

  Or so I thought. But I realized that I might be one of a naïve minority as I watched the ring of faces round the old man – a smiling ring, though not at all like the Eskimos – and heard the undertone of taunting comment. The silly old man was their first choice of fun. The conviction became stronger still as the Weasel, with an atrocious public wink, minced up to him and said: ‘You had another vision, Pop? Tell us about it. Or would you rather pass a miracle?’

  In the laughter, the old man’s reply was lost. But it seemed that he was now struggling for self-control; the furious face, seamed with age, yellow-white beneath the smoky lamplight, was working and trembling under the pressure of some inner mastery. When silence fell, the Weasel asked: ‘What was that again, Pop? We missed that pearl.’

  With threadbare dignity, the old man took a slow sip of his drink, staring at the Weasel over the rim of his glass. Then he set it down on the counter, and turned back, and answered: ‘I said, do not address me as Pop.’

  The Weasel sniggered. ‘What’s your name, then, Pop?’

  ‘You know my name, well enough. I am Mr Shepherd.’

  ‘No kidding …’ The Weasel, not liking the change of pace, sought about for a new probe. But he was forestalled by his friend, the man I called the Ox. The Ox, who had been following the exchange in silence, was now gesturing for attention with a sweep of his arm; his mouth was opening and closing, on the verge of some notable contribution. The Weasel chipped in. ‘Silence for my friend!’ he called. ‘My friend has something to say.’

  The Ox raised a stubby forefinger, and tapped the old man on the chest. He spoke with tremendous self-conceit, as if he knew he had the best line in the play.

  ‘What I want to know,’ he said. ‘If you’re a shepherd, where’s your sheep?’

  After the build-up, it was so ludicrous that it won a roar of laughter. Some of the card-players turne
d to join in. I even grinned myself. I had forgotten the old man’s name was Shepherd. For a moment it seemed to add the final touch to a foolish fantasy, in which an ox asked an acute question and a shepherd lost his flock. For a moment, it seemed that the old man deserved all he got, including our laughter.

  But only for a moment. The Weasel, giggling, said: ‘That’s a good one! That’s the best crack I ever heard!’ The Ox smirked round about him in triumph. The old man, embattled and mocked, turned away, shaking his head, blinking up at the light, silenced by inanity. I knew then that I should not even have grinned.

  To cover shame and irritation, I turned away myself, and spoke to Ed. I said the first thing that came into my mind, reverting to something we had been talking about earlier.

  ‘At the present rate, another fifty years will see the whole northland opened up. It’s a fantastic prospect!’

  My voice must have been sharp, to emphasize a change of subject; and I was unlucky to hit a moment of silence. A few people looked towards me, as men do when they hear a new voice. But it was the old man himself who whipped round, and glared directly into my face, and shouted: ‘It is not fantastic at all! It is normal! It is history!’

  Suddenly everyone was looking at me. The girl swung round from the bar counter, on guard for my reaction; her face seemed smaller, pinched by anxiety that she might have yet another rescue on her hands. The Weasel watched me closely, needing to know if I were an ally or an enemy. The Ox stared at me, discovered that I was younger and smaller, and wrote me off with a contemptuous jerk of the head. Other people at the bar glanced from the old man to me, sizing up the match. Even Joe the barman moved a few steps in my direction, and muttered: ‘Simmer down, now,’ as if he feared a new focus of discord. In the space of a few seconds, I had become part of the show.