CANADA: Turn of the Season

Ptarmigan were turning white, and overhead, in the slate sky, geese were going south with the season. Ice was beginning to form in the Mackenzie River delta. At Aklavik, in the northwest corner of Canada’s Arctic backyard, men hurried to unload the last supply ship of the season. The last Arctic transients (scientists, construction workers, summer prospectors) flew upriver in a float plane, the last scheduled flight before the freeze-up.

Even the Eskimo hunters were leaving. For weeks they had been feeding their Huskies a rich diet of fish, getting them ready for the long Arctic winter. Now it was time to start out for the muskrat and white fox trapping grounds on the delta. Soon Aklavik would be all but deserted—a lonely clutter of wooden buildings, clapboard shanties and Eskimo tents perched on a frozen mud flat.

Standards Are Different. Headquarters of the 96,000 square miles of delta and tundra in the Aklavik subdivision (permanent pop. some 250 whites, 1,000 Eskimos and 250 Indians), the little town has an Anglican and a Catholic mission, a token naval force and an overworked squadron of the R.C.M.P. Social center is the North Star Inn, northernmost hotel in the Western Hemisphere.

“Standards in my hotel are different from those outside,” says Marge White, the inn’s buxom (245 Ib.) proprietress, who is her own bouncer. “I don’t care what goes on if it doesn’t cause a riot.”

What a Man Wants. Trail’s end for the Arctic wanderers, the eccentrics or outcasts who drift north to escape civilization, Aklavik can infect the unwary with an almost tropical languor. Some men lose interest in the “outside,” forget to bathe or change clothes, learn to live on blubber and half-cooked caribou, sometimes move in with the Eskimos. Others simply come to cherish the quiet, sedative sameness of the Far North. The old-style beachcomber is a vanishing type. But even today the Mackenzie delta still shelters a British diplomat’s son, three Oxford graduates, the Eskimo children of a British aristocrat paid to keep out of England. “We are all fastened to the Arctic by the strongest ties,” said a bewhiskered remittance man. “We are either devoted or desperate.”

Almost dead center between Russia and the U.S. on the shrunken maps of air-age geography, Aklavik is also a radar station. But Canadian forces plan no expanded outpost there. Rather than pin down expensive garrisons, Canada expects to use fast-moving airborne troops for future northern defense. This suits the Aklavik sourdoughs to perfection. “I hope the north is always a frontier,” said one old-timer as he watched the supply boat shoulder south through the ice last week. “We need a place where a man can still do what he wants, when he wants.”