Pilgrim in the Palace of Words Read online

  We stopped for lunch four or five kilometres in. The light had flattened out, and it had begun to snow. At first it was beautiful. Great fat flakes drifted down. We grinned at each other and ate our sandwiches under the boughs of a giant spruce. Everything was fine. We set off again with the whole afternoon ahead of us. The temperature had dipped — hovering around minus ten degrees Celsius — but there was no wind and we had all the gear we needed. We were well dressed for the cold and kept up a good pace, feeling the blood surge through our legs and arms.

  The snow was falling more thickly, but it was as pretty as a Christmas card. The only problem was that the tracks we were following were slowly being filled in. After a while, they were just shallow depressions, hard to see in the low winter light. And at last they vanished altogether.

  Four hours in we came to a wide valley swinging off to the north.

  “Is it this way?” I asked Mark.

  “Um … um …” he hummed. I could tell he was looking for a sign, something he recognized. “Yeah, I think we go this way.”

  “I thought you were here before?”

  “I was … but it was summertime. I don’t quite …” He glanced back at the way we’d come, then down the valley again. “It must be this way.”

  The snow was around mid-shin by now, which meant the person going first had to break through it, pushing one ski boot through the deep snow and then the other at no more than a walking pace. The skis were no longer gliding. There was just too much snow. It was hard work, and after ploughing this way for another hour, Mark suddenly stopped. “Um …” he began again, and this time I knew we were in trouble. “I don’t think this is it, after all. I think we need to be in the next valley over.”

  Both of us gazed at the sky. Snowflakes the size of potato chips drifted all around us. Even our own tracks, just behind us, disappeared as soon as we left them.

  “What should we do?” I asked.

  “Well, we can’t stop here. We have to go back.”

  So we tucked our heads down and turned around. Back at the entrance to the valley, we toyed with the idea of returning to the car. It was now late in the afternoon, but we could make it there not too long after nightfall if we really hurried. On the other hand, the hut — by our best calculations — couldn’t be more than another couple of kilometres into the next valley.

  It seemed reasonable to keep going toward the hut. We were warm enough. In fact, we were dripping with sweat, and the first tiny sparks of fear were beginning to appear. It was hard going. The skis were now almost useless. They sank into the knee-deep snow, but we pushed on, taking turns breaking the trail. It was almost impossible to advance more than two hundred metres before the other guy had to take over. It was like playing soccer with a bowling ball. My thighs ached, and we had to stop often, grasping for our water bottles, trying to keep ourselves focused.

  If the hut was two kilometres away, I reasoned, we could still make it. It was just a matter of hard work. I began to count off my steps, figuring that two full steps equalled about a metre. I counted off ten metres and then twenty … all the way up to a hundred. Only ten of these would make up a kilometre. Counting off the numbers gave me something to think about.

  An early-winter twilight was descending, and though we had flashlights, we knew we had to make the hut by nightfall. The hut was at the top of a cliff. Mark had joked about that from the beginning. “It’s the last hundred metres that are the hardest,” he said. “You have to go straight up to get to the hut.”

  That final thought almost killed us.

  My mind was numbed. I could only think of the numbers, measuring off my steps. We’d been skiing now for almost eight solid hours and the last two had been excruciating. Everything below my neck was sloshing with lactic acid. I would count two hundred steps, then turn the lead back over to Mark. Two hundred more steps and I would return to the front. Slowly, I counted off a full kilometre.

  Just as I yelled this proud fact to Mark, who was now in the lead, he collapsed into the snow. The white stuff underneath him had given way. We had crossed over a stream without knowing it. Mark was now sunk to his shoulders in snow, and his feet and skis were in a metre of water below that.

  “Jesus!” he yelped.

  I clipped out of my skis and got onto my belly. I’d seen this in movies before. It was how you were supposed to rescue people who had gone through ice. Mark’s feet were on the bottom, so he wasn’t going to sink anymore, but still he wasn’t able to move and I thought he might go into shock or something. Mark let loose with a blue streak of swearing, and I told him to calm down while I gripped one of his arms and began to haul him out.

  It took a while, but he managed to squirm up and out onto the surface of the snow again. His pant legs were soaked through, though, and already they were crusting with ice.

  “Shit,” he muttered, looking around. “How far do you think we are from the fucking hut?”

  “At least a kilometre … and then, you know, it’s straight uphill for the last bit.”

  Mark’s face was pink with rage and frustration. “Shut the fuck up!”

  “Okay, okay … what are our options here? What should we do? We need to think.”

  The shadows had enveloped us now. There wasn’t much light left in the sky. “Should we push on?” I asked. I was worried, actually, that I wouldn’t even be able to reason with him anymore. As bad as I felt, I knew he was having a worse time of it. Hypothermia was a real possibility.

  “No,” he growled. “We have to —” He shook his head.

  “We have to what?”

  “We have to build a snow cave.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “I don’t see that we have much choice.” He inhaled. “Look, we dig a hole in the snow and cover it up with spruce boughs. Maybe we can light a fire or something. We’ve got our sleeping bags. We just have to get through the night and then we can get out of here in the morning.”

  I looked around. The snow hadn’t let up at all, and it was now most definitely dark. “Okay,” I said.

  “Take off your skis,” Mark said. “We’ll use them as shovels. We’ll dig over there — in that big drift.” The temperature was falling. “C’mon, dig. Help me dig.”

  You can’t really have a book about language without mentioning the Inuit and their sixty-four words for snow. Or is that one hundred and twenty-eight? I don’t know. Each time the story gets told the number gets bigger. I call it the Great Inuit Snow Hoax.

  The Inuit constitute a number of different groups, from the Kalaalit in Greenland to the Inupiaq of Canada, the Alutiiq in Alaska, and the Yup’ik in Siberia, whose similarity in language is perhaps the best argument for the land bridge migration hypothesis over the Bering Strait.

  For a long time the Inuit were called Eskimos, a term still used in parts of Alaska. The word Eskimo comes from a derogatory term thought to be from an Algonquian language to the south. Some say it means “eaters of raw meat,” though no one is quite sure because the word has come to us third-hand via an early French trader’s approximation of it: Eskimaux.

  As for the Inuit and their words for snow, they don’t really have that many. The original field research comes from Franz Boas, a famous anthropologist and linguist who, in 1911, wrote that “Eskimos” had only four words for snow: aput, expressing snow on the ground; qana for falling snow; piqsirpoq for drifting snow; and qimuqsuq for a standing snowdrift.

  The whole thing is a misunderstanding. Even Boas’s catalogue of four words greatly misses the mark. The language of the Canadian Inuit, Inuktitut, simply doesn’t work the same way English does. Boas was looking for nouns. In the bias of an English-speaking world, nouns rule. The subject and the object have always been at the heart of English sentence structure. We tend to divide the world into things rather than actions or properties. Inuktitut, and most of the indigenous languages of the Americas, work quite differently.

  In Inuktitut the verb to snow, qanniq, can be modified by li
terally hundreds of different suffixes — anything from who’s talking about the snow (and who they’re talking to) to the time, causality, and speed of what’s happening. Even then it’s just as likely that a conversation about snow would be based around different verb roots like to freeze or to blow or to drift or even to clump together.

  These long, extended verbs often form whole sentences and really can’t be thought of as single words at all. So to talk about how many words the Inuit have for snow is quite ridiculous. You might as well try to count how many sentences in English contain the word snow. It just doesn’t make sense.

  Try this sentence on for size: Qanniqlaukaluaqtuq anitunga. It means: “Although it’s snowing very heavily, I’m still going out.” That’s a whole sentence in English, a sentence of nine different words, a sentence Mark and I had foolishly managed to act out.

  Mark and I dug out a pit in a snowdrift, covered the roof with spruce boughs, lumped more snow on top of that, and then built a small fire by the entrance. In fact, it wasn’t that bad. My feet were cold, but only because I’d stubbornly kept my socks on. They were damp, and even down there in the sleeping bag, they just never warmed up.

  At the first light of dawn we skied back out to the car. It took four or five hours, and my legs were like blocks of cement. They had become so stiff from the cold, cramped quarters, and gallons of lactic acid gushing through them that when we at last got to the car I could hardly bend myself into a sitting position. We drove after that, as quickly as we could, to a hot springs not far away. When I dipped myself in the steaming water, I actually screamed — a curious mix of both pleasure and pain.

  A people’s environment does, obviously, have a huge impact on their language. It’s not always as simple as counting words, though. A word is like a chess piece. It doesn’t really matter how a chess piece is carved — whether it’s shaped like a horse or a castle. It doesn’t matter what it’s called — a rook or a bishop or a knight. What matters is how it’s used, how it moves.

  Languages function within a certain environment. They’re tools for surviving within that environment. But that’s not to say they don’t migrate. In fact, despite all my talk of territoriality and environmental construction, languages tend to move around a fair bit. They’re organic things, and like all living things, they roam endlessly, searching for places where they’ll be most successful.

  The ancient world was a pretty fluid place. Things moved and changed all the time. Peoples and ideas swept across different landscapes, as they do today, interacting with one another and the new environments, creating new worlds out of old. Languages have always had to change and adapt. They are, as the Inuktitut might say, not so much things as actions.

  Where the tundra meets the great boreal forests, where the Inuit lands end, we find evidence for one of the most astonishing language migrations in the New World. All along the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories are the Dene. The word Dene, of course, means “People.”

  On the northern banks of the Mackenzie, at a junction with Great Bear Lake, there’s a little Dene settlement called Tulita. Great Bear Lake is the third biggest lake in North America. People forget that, I suppose, because it’s frozen over for a good part of the year. In fact, supplies are trucked into Tulita over ice roads, making for a precarious crossing in the spring months.

  Tulita used to be called Fort Norman. It was a trading post, but now it’s home to about three hundred and fifty people. Most of them are Willow Lake Dene. They have satellite TVs and telephones. Out on the fringes of town, however, there are a couple of dozen people from the Mountain Dene band, and they still tend to live on the edge of things, making their living by hunting and trapping, much as they’ve done for thousands of years.

  Both speak a Dene dialect called Slavey. At the little schoolhouse there they still teach the kids how to hunt caribou, how to sew the skins together, and presumably how to avoid spending the night in an improvised snow cave.

  Grizzly bears come down into Tulita a couple of times a year, and when this happens, everyone unties their dogs. Not so the dogs will attack the grizzlies. The dogs wouldn’t have a chance, no matter how many of them there were. No, it’s to give the dogs a fair chance of getting away. Even at that, four or five dogs never seem to return after the night the grizzlies hit town.

  It’s a rough life for everyone up there. One woman I know of had already had six children. She was twenty-eight years old. She was having her seventh, already several more than she could handle. But there’s an unwritten law in this community. If the next baby is a girl, she’ll keep it. If it’s a boy, then she’ll give it up and someone in the community will always take it. They take care of their own here. Even in the language you can see this. In Slavey there are two different words for brother, depending on the birth order. An older brother is a sUnaghe, while a younger brother is a sechee. They’re different because of what they do. An older brother carries responsibility. He can take care of the younger children. He can hunt with his father and carry part of the family’s workload. A younger brother is, well … not exactly a burden but someone who is, at least for the time being, less useful.

  So words are less about things and more about what things do, what things mean. The Dene language describes the way of life in the Far North. It’s a language at home in the long winter, a tongue spoken at the very edge of the Arctic Circle.

  What’s surprising then is that this same language — or dialects of it, anyway — can be found in pockets all down the long spine of North America. On the Great Plains where the buffalo once roamed in herds of millions, there are Dene. And farther south, in the sunbaked canyons of Arizona and New Mexico where they grow corn and live in pueblos, there are more Dene.

  We can follow this linguistic trail for thousands of kilometres through a series of wildly different landscapes. And what that means for the people and their language is as fascinating a story as you’re likely to find in the study of the world’s languages.

  The winter was a long one. The ice was thick on the great lake, and the people moved out across it in a long line. A wind howled across the ice but, wrapped in thick buffalo robes, the people plodded on. Beneath their feet the ice shifted sometimes in thunderous cracks, but still they moved on across the long lake to the safety of the farthest shore.

  One small boy rode on his grandmother’s back. Only his little pink face peered out from the bundle of robes, but with his clear young eyes he spied something black in the ice, just off to the side of the long trail of people. “Isu,” he called through the wind. “Grandmother, there’s something in the ice.”

  The grandmother stopped and squinted into the wind. It was true. Something black was sticking out of the ice.

  “It’s a bone,” the boy cried. “Or a horn. Can I see it?”

  The grandmother let the boy skitter off her back and onto his feet. He tottered across the ice toward the odd thing sticking out from the ice, and she could do nothing except follow.

  When they arrived, they saw that it was a large horn, though not the horn of a ram or any other animal they could identify. The boy danced around it. “Can I have it? Can I have it?”

  So, not wishing to let anything go to waste, the old woman began to chip away at the ice around the horn, hoping to free it. In her mind, as she worked, she wondered what animal it might have come from and how it came to be there.

  Even as she pulled on the horn, trying to release it, the ice started to crack. With a momentous shudder the crack ran through the ice sheet and across the whole length of the lake. In a moment it split wide open, leaving half of the long line of people to the south of it and half to the north. Each half scattered, running in opposite directions. Those who were caught in the north remained there. Those on the other side, those to the south, well, they kept on going, moving farther and farther into the lands of the sun.

  The above is a story that was told by Helen Meguinis, who was one of the elders of the Tsuu T’ina band. The Tsuu T’in
a live in southern Alberta several thousand kilometres south of their Northern Dene cousins. Their treaty lands are on the southwest edge of the oil-rich city of Calgary. T’ina is one spelling of Dina — that is, Dene.

  The Tsuu T’ina live in a completely different world. When the ice split on the lake, whether metaphorically or literally, the Tsuu T’ina were the group who headed into the grasslands in the middle of the continent. It’s difficult to say when this happened. As an oral history, the story dates back hundreds of years, and over those many centuries, the Tsuu T’ina lost their northern ways. Like the other nations of the Great Plains, especially the Blackfoot and the Stoney who are their nearby neighbours, the Tsuu T’ina adapted to the ways of the buffalo hunt. They lived in teepees and learned to ride horses, all words and concepts that don’t even exist in the dialect of their Northern Dene cousins.

  Tsuu T’ina, by their own accounts, means simply “Many People,” which is ironic considering that only about two thousand people still live on the Tsuu T’ina reserve. And fewer than one hundred are still fluent in the Tsuu T’ina language. Even Helen Meguinis passed away, sadly, in 2007 at the grand old age of eight-three.

  Of the three hundred aboriginal languages spoken in North America at the time of European settlement, one hundred and fifty have disappeared completely, and only a handful of the remaining ones are still acquiring new speakers. And that was why I jumped at the chance to go to a powwow on the Tsuu T’ina reserve one dusty summer day. I drove out of Calgary and headed west to a point where the long prairies turn into the forested foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

  This was to be a huge powwow. Several thousand people were going to be there. Dene representatives were coming down from the north. There would be Cree and Ojibwa, too. Even the neighbouring Blackfoot would be arriving in their trucks and campers.