(school boss) was really clever for conjuring up such a sneaky device. I realized it was a lost cause, and taught the boys to make stools and grub boxes instead. But they never showed the kind of zeal for these that they had for the birdhouses.
The boys, and indeed all of the able-bodied men of the village, loved playing soccer, using tin cans, a bundle of rags, anything that could be kicked, when there was no ball available. They had no concept whatsoever of boundaries, however. Often two players would disappear into the bushes still kicking and in pursuit of the ball. They would kick it down along the shore, through swampy places full of marsh grass, and finally back out to where the other players were sitting awaiting their return. Some white lime and a marking device were flown in and we set out to make a proper soccer pitch. This activity was watched with enormous interest, and even the men listened politely as I tried to explain with gestures and the aid of one or two older lads who knew some English. When play resumed, however, the game did not change one iota. They completely ignored the outsider’s strange views and kicked the ball all over the cleared portion of the island. In fact, they wore out the soccer balls at such an alarming rate that someone in the agent’s office at Sioux Lookout sent a wire in via the DOT asking with sarcasm whether we were roasting the soccer balls and eating them for Sunday dinner.
In the summer of 1949, I went north again in early June to teach school a second time. Things went well for the first week, although I was a little troubled one day when I noticed a dead husky floating in the lake just off the small dock where we were in the habit of drawing our drinking water. The missionary and his family had a wooden yoke that went over the shoulders and there were hooks on each side for a pail. The water was carried up to the house and transferred into a large drum. A drinking ladle hung on the wall nearby. Since the dock was on a small bay quite a way from the main dock and other cabins or teepees, and the lake was considered by all to be pristine, nobody thought it necessary to boil the water before drinking it. I was in the midst of teaching the children a simple song one day when I began having the worst stomach cramps I had ever experienced. They continued to grow more severe, and before long I had to let the children out for an early recess while I went to rest at the rectory. I began to feel feverish and then the full impact hit me. I became very ill indeed, racked by a burning fever and serious abdominal distress. I took to my bed at once and, apart from dealing with the seemingly never-ending diarrhea (there was, of course, no indoor plumbing, only a slop pail and the outhouse near the black spruce of the bush), I didn’t leave the room until I was carried down the crooked stairs by two of the strongest men in the village one week later. They used a blanket in lieu of a stretcher.
At times I was completely out of it because of the raging fever, and my stomach ached constantly with severe cramping. Mrs. Garrett was next thing to a saint in her unflagging patience in emptying the pail, her attempts to get me to take some soup and her general aura of compassionate care. The missionary himself, who knew some basic first aid but also recognized a serious illness, had sent a message courtesy of the Department of Transport to the small outpost hospital in Sioux Lookout describing my condition. The word came back that a plane would be coming in as soon as some murky weather cleared. It was several days before the decision was made to come in, and it was raining lightly when I was carried down to the company dock and put on board the single-engine Norseman float plane. The cargo area had been emptied to make way for a stretcher. So they bundled me aboard, gave me some morphine tablets and we taxied off across the rough waves.
It was a bumpy ride, and it got worse after takeoff as the plane bucked high winds and I heard the pilot tell his co-pilot that he’d seen lightning up ahead. We flew through a thunderstorm—the roughest ride I’d ever known in the North or anywhere else. I lost track after a while, but I know we put down on a series of lakes all that long afternoon, each time waiting for rain and clouds to pass sufficiently to make possible another “leapfrog” ahead. It was getting dark when I heard one of the two men up front mention “Pickle Crow,” and I suddenly felt the loss of altitude. We were about to land at the gold-mining town about a hundred kilometres north of our goal of Sioux Lookout. There, an ambulance was waiting and took me to the fairly primitive runway where a Cessna was ready to go. When we eventually landed safely at Sioux Lookout, another ambulance was waiting. I remember being placed beneath the wing of the plane, out of the drizzle, before being hoisted into the back of the vehicle.
In those few moments a familiar face appeared above me and as if from a great distance I heard a kindly voice asking how I was. It turned out to belong to Rev. Tom Griggs, the rector of the little Anglican church in Sioux Lookout. I had preached for him on the Sunday I had spent waiting for a plane a couple of weeks before. We accidentally met once again in the former Anglican Book Room on Jarvis Street in Toronto some twenty years or more afterwards, and he told me that when he had seen me that evening in Sioux Lookout he had felt greatly alarmed. “I thought you looked in very bad shape indeed,” he said. He remembered telling his wife he had doubts whether I’d pull through.
There is now a modern hospital in Sioux Lookout, but in the summer of 1949 it was a small two-storey building with tarpaper brick siding down by the railroad tracks. The town was a major train junction for the CNR, so the noise of steam engines was constant. Natives and whites were kept in separate wards. Nobody on the staff spoke Cree or any other Indian dialect. There were two doctors and a handful of nurses for the entire town as well as the hospital. I was there for five and a half weeks, lost twenty-five pounds, and in the end was a much wiser and, yes, a more compassionate person for the experience. They told me afterwards that for the first two weeks I simply lay there, and I recall feeling so ill that I didn’t much care whether I got better or not.
In any case, the dysentery continued and at the same time my abdomen became as hard as a rock—so much so that the senior of the two physicians told the other in my hearing that he thought it would be necessary to perform surgery because of suspected major abscesses. In the end, thankfully, the more junior man, who had been with Allied troops in Italy during the war and had considerable experience with diseases attacking the gut, argued against the knife, opting instead for a new drug he had seen used in Italy near the end of the war, streptomycin.
The drug worked and, though I remained shaky for some weeks, I gradually made a full recovery. The official diagnosis was confirmed as amoebic dysentery. My hair, much of which had fallen out because of the fever, grew back in and had waves it didn’t have before.
One night, after I’d been there over three weeks and was beginning slowly to regain interest in getting back to health, they brought in a young miner who had been trapped for several hours by a cave-in at Pickle Crow. He’d been pinned by a large rock that crushed his leg. By the time he was rescued, the injury and resulting complications had necessitated an amputation just above the knee. He was put in the bed next to mine following his surgery and for several days after he had recovered consciousness he was in near-constant pain even though still heavily sedated. At night he would toss and turn and moan that his “foot” was hurting terribly. When he finally felt well enough for us to talk, I learned about what it was like to have a “phantom limb.” He described the sense of his foot still being there and of it being trapped beneath part of the tunnel roof. He was not that much older than me and so we formed a bond in the fellowship wrought by suffering.
As mentioned previously, small as it was, the hospital kept whites and Aboriginals segregated. Most Cree patients were on the second floor, but there was a special room for children on the first, where I was. Since there was no staff person fluent in Cree or any other Native language, and since I had learned a number of key phrases and in particular how to read and pronounce the syllabics (invented by Anglican missionaries in the 1800s), once I was able to get around I was called upon at times to act as a rough interpreter.
In one instance a Cree hunter named Big Beaver, from Bearskin Lake, had been stalking some ducks from his canoe when he grabbed his loaded shotgun by the muzzle and accidentally blew his thumb off. When surgery was required to fix the wound, a nurse came down and asked me to assist them. I went upstairs and found the doctor trying to judge whether or not his patient had had enough anaesthetic injected to leave
