THE
VETERAN MAGAZINE, Sept., 1921
A British Eskimo
From The Arctic to Death
(This little article probably appears in several magazines as a repeat./drf)
IT came to me only yesterday—the hardest blow of the war.
A “returned postal packet,” and inside a letter of my own sent him several
weeks ago. On its face was the soulless stamp “Deceased.”
Six years ago we met, John Shiwak and I, in the most
detached part of the Empire— the hyperborean places where icebergs are born,
where seal grunt along the shore, where cod run blindly into the nets of adventurous
fishermen gone north in a midsummer eight weeks of perilous, comfortless,
uncertain industry.
Far “down” the desolate coast of Labrador, a thousand
miles north of my Newfoundland starting point, I came on him in a trifling
settlement that hugged, shivering and unsteady, about a long white building, a
trading post of the Hudson’s Bay Company—the merest collection of windowless
boards that housed human beings only in the less harrowing summertime.
For John Shiwak was an Eskimo.
Just one week I knew him, and then we separated never
to meet again. But in that week I came to know him, better than from a year’s
acquaintance with less simple souls, and his record to his glorious end proves
how well I did know him.
There, where the bitterness of ten months of the year
drives the two straggling thousand human beings of half as many miles of
coastline to the less grim, less bleak interior, John Shiwak had awakened to
the bigness of life. He had taught himself to read and write. Every winter he
trailed the hunter’s lonely round back within sound of the Grand Falls, which
only a score have seen—often alone for months in weather that never emerged
from zero.
And every summer, when the ice broke in June, there
came out to me in Canada his winter’s diary, written wearily by the light of
candle, hemmed in by a hundred miles of fathomless, manless snow. And no
fiction or fact of skilled writer spoke so from the heart. He was a natural
poet, a natural artist, a natural narrator. In a thumb-nail dash of words he
carried one straight into the clutch of the soundless Arctic.
And then came war. And even to that newless,
comfortless coast it carried its message of Empire. John wrote me that he would
be a “soljer.” I dismissed it as one of his many vain ambitions against which
his race would raise an impossible barrier. And months later came his note from
Scotland, where he was in training.
I followed him to England, but before we could meet he
was in France. When, last summer, he obtained sudden leave, I was in Devon. His
simple note of regret rests now like a tear on my heart.
But I have heard from him every week. He was never at
home in his new career; something about it he did not quite understand.
Latterly the loneliness of the life breathed from his lines. For he made no
friends, in his silent, waiting way. His hunting companion was killed, and the
great bereavement of it was like a strong tornado. He was cold out there, even
he, the Labrador hunter. But the heavy cardigan and gloves I sent did not
reach him in time. . . .
In his last letter was a great longing for home—his
Eskimo father whom he had left at ten years to carve his own fortune, his two
dusky sisters who were to him like creatures from an angel world, the doctor
for whom he worked in Labrador in the summer time, his old hunter friends.
“There will be no more letters from them until the ice breaks again,” he
moaned. But the ice of a new world has broken for John.
He had earned his long rest. Out there in lonesome
Snipers’ Land he lay, day after day; and the cunning that made him a hunter of
fox, and marten, and otter, and bear, and wolf brought to him better game.
And all he ever asked was, “When will the war be
over?” Only then would he return to his huskies and traps where few men dare a
life of ice for a living almost as cold.
John Shiwak—Eskimo—patriot.
LACEY
AMY.
London Daily
Mail, Jan. 11, 1918.
******
[John Shiwak, as is well known, was a member of the
Royal Newfoundland Regiment, and was killed at Cambrai, November 21st,
1917.—Eds.]
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