C Ihe Ladies c cu. V'VVAN - History and Classics, Department of

XXXIVTHE LADIES, THE GWICH'IN, AND THE RATside of the mountain. This is when my brother-in-law was a strong man andhe made it in one long day with me. It was hard for me to keep up with him butI never gave up. We got back to Ft. McPherson. I gave some of my money to myfather. A canoe was lent to us and we departed. We paddled all day, and byevening we got back to Aklavik. (I: II - I 3)Sittichinli considered his brother-in-law untutored in country living; asVyvyan expressed it, "Lazarus would often say scornfully: 'Mission school nogood, never teachJimmy live off the country'" (140). When he was hve years old,his mother died. At the request of his father and with the help of ArchdeaconWhittaker, Jim was sent to the Anglican school at Hay River (Koe 1:1). Thisyoung man, who would go on to become chief of his people in Inuvik, did all hecould during the Rat River trip to earn the respect of his elder relation. Althoughhe struggled to measure up to Sittichinli's standards, he fared well, as isevidenced by the fact that his uncle, Peter Enock, hired him to help guide a furtrade company manager from Aklavik to Fort Yukon during the subsequentwinter (Koe 1:13), thus taking him back to his parents' home town in Alaska(2:7). As for Koe's complaint about the mosquitoes, it compares with manyother people's. Travelling in late August, Charles Camsell, a northerner by birthand a veteran traveller, found in 1905 that "the mosquito season was almost over,otherwise we would have had a still more unpleasant time. Rat River has a very evilreputation in the mosquito season, when those pests are so thick that one notonly eats them but actually breathes them" (198).Vyvyan's views of her guides are mixed. Her praise of Sittichinli' s "magnihcentphysique" is offset by repeated expressions of anxiety that she and Dorrien Smith"were completely in their power" (97, 108, 122). In combination, these expressionsintroduce in the book a racial and sexual tension that probably had more todo with European ideas about the wilderness and its inhabitants than withVyvyan's actual experience. She had no need to be anxious about Sittichinli' strustworthiness. Son and brother of Church of England ministers, he representedone of his culture's most prominent families. And the mounties foundhim sufficiently trustworthy to serve as a special constable. This job earnedSittichinli an undesired fame hve years later, in 1931, when he helped track downthe Mad Trapper of Rat River, AlbertJohnson. In fact, Sittichinli would be theone to turn Johnson's bullet-hlled body face-up after the posse gunned himdown on Eagle River. Interviewed by novelist Rudy Wiebe in 1987, Sittichinli, by