Читать книгу A Richard Rohmer Omnibus - Richard Rohmer - Страница 14

Near Aklavik / 7:25 a.m., MDT

Sam Allen’s eyes opened slowly as he wakened. Their dark brown pupils moved slightly from side to side as he focused on the white material of the tent just a few inches from his face. Then he remembered where he was.

His eyes closed again. They never opened very wide, for Sam Allen, like his Eskimo forefathers, had been raised on the land and the ice and the snow. The slitted eyes were those of the hunter who lived off the harvest of the sea and the animals which moved across the barren tundra.

But for young Sam, lying half asleep in his small white tent, pitched on the snow under a stand of jackpine next to the swath the gas pipeliners had made as they passed on their construction journey to the south two years before, life was not that of a hunter. In 1962 Sam’s father, old Joe Allen, had moved, along with twelve other Eskimo trappers, from Tuktoyaktuk northeast across the ice to Sach’s Harbour on Banks Island. There, it was said, white fox existed in abundance.

It was a good move. The white fox did indeed abound on Banks Island, and the white man paid good prices for the magnificent furs. The families at Sach’s Harbour flourished and were prosperous. Sam’s father had built a primitive but comfortable house for his wife and nine children. Sam, the oldest, went for his schooling to Inuvik with hundreds of other Eskimo and Indian children from the Mackenzie Delta region, brought there each fall to be educated according to the white man’s plan. There they lived for nine months of the year, from the time each was the age of six until they finished high school, or decided, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, to drop out and stay with their families in the settlements or maybe get a job at Inuvik or with the pipeliners — or maybe not work at all.

Sam Allen had lived through that cruel process of education which the white man had decided was best for the Indian and Eskimo. He had survived the wrench of being taken from his family at such a young age to live under the benign regimentation of the Anglican priests who ran the hostel to which he was assigned. As Sam grew older, his education increased far beyond that of his father, Joe Allen, and it became much more difficult for Sam and his classmates to return home at the close of the school year to their families living in tents or shacks in the settlements all along the Arctic coast.

Sam Allen had indeed survived the educational system. He was a determined, headstrong, intelligent, inventive young man. Unusually proficient in mathematics, he had been encouraged to go south to the University of Alberta at Edmonton to take a degree in civil engineering. His tuition and expenses were paid for by the government of the Northwest Territories. Sam worked hard, and graduated near the top of his class. Long before he finished at the university, he had been approached by several of the major oil companies who all wanted the first Eskimo ever to graduate as an engineer. He would be very valuable to the company which got him as a symbol that they were co-operating with the Eskimo people. Sam listened carefully to each of the proposals, thanked each of the company representatives, and said he would be in touch before the end of his final year. Then he kept on with his studies.

It had been 1970 when Sam, still a teenager, had become deeply involved in the work of COPE, the Committee for Original People’s Entitlement. The government, without any consultation with the Eskimo trappers who occupied Banks Island, had granted rights to a French company to drill exploration wells and do seismic tests. When the oil exploration people arrived with their first equipment, all hell broke loose. COPE became immediately involved in an attempt to protect the Sach’s Harbour Eskimos. They retained a Yellowknife lawyer and eventually, after the threat of an injunction, an agreement was worked out between the government and the local people. Even then it was apparent to Sam that the main intention of the government departments was not to protect the native people but to push for exploration and development. This meant that the native people had to organize to protect themselves. So Sam had become involved in the work of COPE while he was still at school in Inuvik, and was soon recognized as a born leader. At Inuvik, too, he had met the new lawyer who had come to practise there, Robert Porter. Porter had taken an interest in Sam, and it was he who had encouraged him to go on to university.

Now Robert Porter was Prime Minister, and Sam Allen a graduate civil engineer working with Imperial Oil in the Mackenzie Delta, leader of COPE, and a militant spokesman for the native people. Although Robert Porter had made a full commitment to recognize the aboriginal rights of the Eskimos and Indians of the Northwest Territories and the Yukon and to provide a settlement similar to that made by the United States with the Alaskan native people, negotiations had not yet got under way. The native people, even Sam Allen, felt that Porter ought to move more quickly, because the pipeline was now almost finished. After three years, the southern section from the United States border near Killdeer, Saskatchewan, north to Yellowknife was complete. The last sections near Camsel Bend, northwest of Yellowknife, were under construction linking Yellowknife to Prudhoe Bay and the Mackenzie Delta. But no settlement had been made with the native people. When the construction jobs were gone, nothing would be left. The Indians and Eskimos would be as poor as before, while the white man drained away their natural wealth. Something had to be done. Sam Allen was doing it.

Sam turned over on his right side to look into the sleeping face of his woman. Bessie Tobac was a Loucheux Indian girl whom he had known from the time they were both at school in Inuvik. She was three years younger than Sam, and he had not paid much attention to her then. But when he arrived back from university and had started to work for COPE, he found that Bessie was already a vice-president of the organization. She had been working at the craft shop at Inuvik for about five years, and had become the first native person to be promoted to be assistant manager of that store. Like Sam, she was bright, and totally dedicated to the cause of her people.

As Sam looked at her still sleeping, he could see wisps of her raven black hair sticking out from under the parks hood which framed her somewhat angular face, thin nose and full red lips. He gently put his arm around her and moved his bare left leg to wedge it between Bessie’s, and forced them gently apart. At his touch, Bessie’s eyes opened to look into Sam’s. She smiled at him and put her arm around him, and her legs opened in response to his pressure. It was time to make love. It was time to begin the day.

In the hours ahead they would finish laying the last of the ten packages of high explosive they had brought with them out of Inuvik the day before.