My Little Corner of Canada, March 13

The High Arctic Exiles story is a complicated and long story. In this article, I will only deal with the new environment we faced.

When we were relocated from the eastern coast of Hudson Bay in Nunavik to Resolute on Cornwallis Island in the High Arctic in 1953, we arrived in a very different environment than what we were used to and expected.

Dumped on the beach where there was only gravel as far as the eye could see, we felt very lost and abandoned.

It was late August and it was already snowing heavily. A strong harsh wind was blowing from the north.

On land, there was no wildlife except for a few starving musk-ox. In the sea, tens of thousands of beluga were migrating east from the waters of the High Arctic to their wintering waters in Baffin Bay and Davis Strait. They were followed by hundreds of grunting walrus headed in the same direction.

By the second week of September, the small bays and inlets started to freeze. By the end of September, it was possible to travel by dog team on the sea ice.

Lured by the smell of human settlement, the polar bears started coming close to our small camp. The frantic barking of our dogs indicated another bear was dangerously close to our iglus. Some had to be shot when they came right to our doors.

By mid-October, Lancaster Sound was covered in ice. The temperature plummeted. Daylight was only a few hours. The first week of November, the sun disappeared under the horizon. It would not reappear for three months. Our morale sank with the sun.

The winter months were dark, extremely cold (minus 40, 50 and 60) and blizzards sometimes lasted a week. Our hunters had to hunt by moonlight.

In the first week of February, usually Feb. 4, the sun finally peeked over the horizon for a few minutes. Our morale soared. Life was once again emerging from the darkness.

By April, we were under 24 hours of sunlight, which lasted for three months. The snow bunting was the first to arrive. The newborn seals were growing in their dens under the snow.

For us children and teenagers, the endless sunlight was too precious to waste on sleep and many times, throughout the spring, we stayed up for 24 hours straight, followed by 14 or 16 hours of sleep.

In May, June and July, we stalked the seals basking on the ice in the warm sunlight of spring. Seabirds arrived. Beluga, narwhal and walrus migrated west through Lancaster Sound to their summer waters in the High Arctic. The polar bear and her cubs grew fat on the plentiful seal.

The first resupply ship usually arrived the last week of July or the first week of August. The shipping season lasted about one month. When the last ship departed, we felt more homesick, trapped, and forgotten.

Summer was short, lasting about four or five weeks. The first snowfall came around the third week of August. Another cold and dark winter loomed.