Tale VII: War News in Husky Land
When the World War broke out in the centre of civilization, news spread quickly until it got to the wilderness. After that it traveled more and more slowly, but in the end it reached the remotest parts of the earth.
In the far North of Canada it took months and months for the news to filter through the barren lands.
In a lonely outpost on Hudson Bay, the one white man who lived there heard of the War, for the first time, eight months later—in March, 1915, to be exact. It was only a rumor and for a long time he could not understand clearly what had happened.
A tribe of Eskimos hunting south had met some coast Indians who had been trading, at Christmas, at Fort George in James Bay. The Crees had tried to explain to the Huskies what the Missionaries and White Traders had told them, but the peace-loving Eskimos could not realize what the word “war” meant. Furthermore, their knowledge of the Cree language was very confused. They told our man that there were a lot of dead people in the white man’s land, far away over the sea; that the noise was terrible and that the white men’s Igloos were all destroyed. They did not mention the words—war, shell, gas—which the more civilized Indians knew from hearsay and had told to them. They just repeated what had struck their imagination. In other words, what they had understood.
The trader pondered for months over that rumor. In the end he came to the conclusion that there had been a great earthquake somewhere in Europe, like the one in California in 1906, and dismissed the matter from his mind. He never thought of war.
It was in summer, when the supply ship reached his Post, that he learned what had really happened. He left at once to join the French Army and was killed a year later at Verdun.