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 his hand sufficiently numb for repair. The doctor seemed anxious not to overdo the medication. I could see that whenever he asked Big Beaver (Gitchee Amik) if it hurt or not when he pinched his arm, the man just grinned a stoical smile and said nothing. So the doctor pricked him with a needle and said: “Does that hurt?” He didn’t reply, and the doctor made a second attempt. I asked in Cree if it hurt. His eyes widened and he said, “Yes, it does, and it really hurt the last time too!” He was then given a much larger dose of the painkiller and eventually everything was sewn up and his arm was put in a sling.
A couple of days later, a girl of about eight or nine from Fort Albany was flown down to Sioux Lookout suffering from extensive burns to her chest, arms and legs. She had suddenly walked in front of the opening to her family’s teepee just as her mother threw a pot of near-boiling water out after some cooking. The girl was suffering from shock and was in extreme pain even after many days of treatment. Since she was in the small private room on our floor, we could hear her screams and almost continuous crying. Finally I was able to make out some words that she kept repeating as she gradually became more articulate. She was saying simply, “I want to go home, I want to go home.” I told the nurses and they said perhaps it would comfort her if I could say even a few words she might recognize. I was happy to do so, and read her a hymn in Cree as well.
One would think that after having been so ill I wouldn’t return to Big Trout. But I was back again the next summer. The year was 1950. Soon after my arrival I learned that the nurse who had been put in charge of the new, fully equipped nursing station had quit suddenly. The Indian agent’s office sent word that they would like me to live in the station and to administer first aid, dispense such simple basics as Aspirin, cough syrup, ointment for scabies and so on, and keep an eye on things until her replacement could be found. I did so, and found myself holding regular dispensary hours three nights a week following dinner. No nurse appeared all summer.
The first night when I looked out there was a lineup of about twenty-five adults and children at the door, and I could see others heading my way. The thought of the gap between their expectations and my woeful ignorance was terrifying. However, with the help of a youth of about seventeen who had been out at the residential school for several years and could interpret a