Authors: Melanie McGrath
There was no getting away from the fact that Josephie
was
different, though. He grew up tall with gangly limbs and softer, less ruly hair than that of full-blood Inuit boys. His lips were fuller, the face longer, his eyelids adopting a compromise position, halfway between Asia and Ireland. His arms were unusually long and his paddle hands lent him a seal-like air, an impression only strengthened as he headed into puberty and sprouted whiskery facial hair.
Josephie Flaherty's early life was measured out in ship years, by the annual arrival and departure of the supply ship,
Nascopie.
There was a saying in Inukjuak that the second best day of the
year was the day the
Nascopie
arrived and the best day was the day it left. No one disputed which of these days was the more exciting. The moment news of the ship's imminent arrival reached them from the north, men all along the coast would fire their rifles. The members of the Nujarluktuk family would quickly change into their smart clothes, rush down to the shore and paddle out to meet the ship, moving alongside it for a while to exchange smiles and waves with the crew, the Hudson Bay trader, the policemen moving between posts, the missionary, the medic, the civil servant and the occasional geologist or researcher on board. If young Josephie ever looked for his father's face among the passengers, he would not have found it, but it is perfectly possible that he would not have looked.
The family would make their way south along the coast to the mouth of the river, where the high-summer water, free now from ice, rushed to meet the sea, and they would tie up their boats at the “pier,” a strip of sand lined with rocks at the water's edge. By the time the
Nascopie
was at anchor, the family's tent would be up, its guys secured to rocks, and the women would be arranging skins at the sleeping end and stoking a willow-twig fire on which to make tea. A while later, the ship's whaleboat would begin chugging towards the shore, and the Hudson Bay Company post's boat would head out to meet it. From 1935, when the first police post arrived in Inukjuak, an RCMP Peterhead joined the little flotilla. The police were not a welcome arrival. The Inukjuamiut could not see the point of them, since no one ever broke the law. Their chief role, so far as the Inuit were concerned, seemed to be to busy the settlement flagpole with its Union Jack and Maple Leaf every ship time. The routine was always the same. Shortly after the flags began to billow a priest of some sort would be dropped off at the detachment, along with another man in police uniform and an assortment of other
qalunaat
, the flags would flutter upwards and the assembled would sing “O Canada” to a circling audience of mildly puzzled loons. From the vantage of their tents the Inuit would shrug and mutter
ayunqnaq
, it can't be helped.
For the next three days they would all be treated to the bounty of the Hudson Bay Company and the government of Canada combined, which is to say that once the ship was unloaded, the bill of lading checked, the cargo neatly stacked in the Hudson Bay Company store, there would be a “mug-up” and all the sugared tea the Inuit could drink accompanied, perhaps, by some hardtack biscuits and a sardine or two. The mug-up would give way to races, a cat's cradle competition and, perhaps, a football game, the prize for which might be a can of sardines or, perhaps, a tin of hardtack. The following day there would be more tea, a solemn sermon from the visiting priest (Anglican), followed by a photography session during which various
qalunaat
would snap Inuit stiffly sporting their best ceremonial parkas. These same
qalunaat
might then buy a few souvenirs, sealskin clothing, ceremonial drums, soapstone carvings and the like, before boarding the ship once more. After that, the Inuit would be sent to the
Nascopies
medical rooms for a cursory checkup and a reward of a box lunch of hardtack biscuits and sardines. Finally, there would be a showing in the Hudson Bay Company store of a movie, often something with a sea or sailing theme. Though you might think it an obvious choice, so far as we know,
Nanook of the North
was never shown.
The
Nascopie
also brought the annual mail. For the first thirty-three years of his life there was never anything for losephie, which was okay since he could not read.
The day after the screening, at some point during the night, the
Nascopie
would weigh anchor and begin its four-hundred-mile journey west to Churchill, Manitoba, on the other side of Hudson Bay. Some of the Inuit would paddle with the ship for a while, others would watch from the shore, then they would change back into their workaday clothes and would begin to gather their belongings for the journey back to their camps. Those who had credit at the store would stock up on ammunition, flour, lard, tobacco and tea before they went. The remainder would have to make do until the winter trapping season began once more. Within a week, most of them
would already have left the settlement. Another year would go by before they would hear again from the other world to the south.
And so the years floated inescapably by. Josephie grew taller, angular, nervous and quick to smile. His contemporaries had him down as a watcher, one of those people who are forever to be found on the edges of things, looking in. In January 1929, when Josephie was just seven, Thomas Mayne “Pat” Reid piloted the first plane across Ungava. It was a fine, sun-dazzled winter day, the sky vivid, cloudless, the air crystalline and smelling of electricity. The first hint that this day was likely to be any different from the last was when the dogs started to become restless and shift about. A long while later, an unfamiliar whirr was carried in on the wind. People emerged from their snowhouses, tied their snowgoggles to their faces, gazed up at the sky. The noise did not go away. Instead, it devolved into a tremulous buzz. Children clamped their hands to their ears. Their mothers gathered them up, shooing them back into the snowhouses, whilst the men grabbed their guns and stared at the clouds, waiting, until the throb accreted into a whine and the whine slid into a sound something, but not quite, like the clash between two bull walruses, and a giant mechanical mosquito suddenly appeared, dipping dementedly through the sky towards the settlement. The machine continued along the shoreline, swooped down momentarily, then passed by, gradually diminishing until it disappeared in a band of coastal fog, the final remnant of its existence an almost imperceptible shivering in the air, an electric smell not unlike the Northern Lights and a distant sound like the burr of bees.
For weeks after this event, no one could speak of anything else. Inuit families sledged between camps and into the settlement, trying to glean more information. The Inuit rapidly found in it a rich vein of humour. A giant mosquito with a man inside! The post manager's explanation seemed just as unlikely as the creature itself. Why would anyone have wanted to cross so much land when there was already so much nearby?
As for Josephie, he just watched.
Pat Reid's remarkable flight came to be seen as the last good thing to happen in Ungava for a very long time and it marked the end of Josephie's untroubled early life. Later that year, the price of fox fur plummeted. A creamy, unblemished pelt which, the preceding winter, would have sold for C$7 or C$8 fetched only C$1.50, not much more than whalers would have paid for it a quarter-century before. To add to the problem, the Hudson Bay Company acquired a controlling stake in Rvillon Frres and had taken out the competition. As prices slipped further, trappers were soon forced to go out to their trap lines every day, extending them beyond their usual confines into unfamiliar terrain. But foxes were scarce that year and no rise in the numbers could in any case make up for the fall in the price of a pelt. The Inuit held on, expecting things to change. Within weeks, they had eaten all their credit at the store and by 1930 the situation was becoming desperate, as the principal markets for Arctic fur sank further into the slump. For the first time in a decade, the hunger the Inukjuamiut had so happily forgotten roamed around the camps once more.
Though Josephie was unable to comprehend the vagaries of the Montreal fur market or, on a larger scale, the fragilities of economic cycles and stock markets, he was as well able to feel his empty stomach as anyone. In Arctic conditions, a human being requires three times the number of calories that he might in temperate zones. From time to time and for short periods during Josephie's early life the Nujarluktuk family had gone hungry, but this new hunger had certain novel qualities. First, it seemed unrelated to any physical conditions. The weather had not changed, the fox cycle was unaltered. The abstract nature of this famine made it peculiarly frightening. Added to that was the fact that the concentration on trapping had left many families more dependent on store-bought food. Had the starvation hit a decade before, many families would have had dried meat and fish and meat cheese cached away, but they had grown used to buying flour and sugar, and their meat and fish caches had dwindled. Last, no one travelled as far and as often as
they once had done, so the camps were closer together and the population less widely scattered. Each family's hunting grounds now overlapped more widely with those of its neighbours. Hunting and trapping trips began to take on a relentless, desperate quality.
About that time, so the story goes, Maggie Nujarluktuk's husband's sled was found out on the sea ice and, beside it, a neat, man-shaped hole. Of the truth of this, there is still no knowing. Of the man himself, there remains no trace. An accident would have made sense but whether it was an accident or not, the timing of the death of Maggie's husband could not have been worse. For a while Maggie and Josephie got by on soup boiled from the stomach contents of seals and walrus given them by their relatives, but with no hunter in the family, it was not long before they were forced to move in with the dead husband's brother, Paddy Aqiatusuk. From then on, they were Paddy's charges, their survival in his hands.
Luckily for Maggie and her children, Aqiatusuk was no ordinary Inuk. People went to Paddy when they had family disputes, or decisions to make. They went to him with their sick children or their hungry dogs. They sought his advice on camp politics, on alliance-making and settling scores. If they had a disagreement with the fur post manager they would ask Paddy to act as advocate. He was the nearest thing the Inukjuamiut had to a marriage broker, psychologist, politician, sage and benign patriarch.
Paddy Aqiatusuk was also an artist. In his spare time he took pieces of green soapstone and walrus ivory and carved. And what carvings! Bears, walrus, hunters, seals, that would make you forget everything except their cool, seductive contours and graceful lines. In time, Paddy's carvings would grace museum collections across North America and Europe.
And so it is easy to imagine losephie, shy, self-effacing and at an awkward, in-between sort of age, advancing towards his new stepfather with trepidation and a kind of puppyish awe, and his mother, amused and a little embarrassed by her son's zeal, scolding the boy, with something like, “Don't tail after the man, you'll bother him.”
But Josephie Flaherty did not bother Paddy Aqiatusuk. Between the growing boy and the sculptor a firm friendship began. No Inuk boy could have wanted a better teacher, no Inuk man a keener student. True, Aqiatusuk was demanding and often grumpy (too little
ihuma
, undoubtedly), but it was through being in his salty, bear-like presence that Josephie began to leave behind his childish sense of the world and find his way as a hunter and a man. All through the early 1930s, Josephie and Aqiatusuk were companions on the land. During the soft summers, they paddled their
kayaks
across the swell of Hudson Bay while the sculptor pointed out the unexpected currents, odd tides and anomalies of beach and shore and the boy noted the bays and inlets, taking in the contours of the coast. For days they paddled along the Hopewell Islands, out west to Farmer Island, as far as Kogaluc Bay in the north, to the Nastapokas, the Marcopeet Islands and the Sleepers in the south. From these expeditions, Josephie learned to predict the tides, the effect of the winds and the rain and the sun on the sea. He became familiar with the ice and the currents. He discovered where to look for bearded, harp and ringed seal, walrus and beluga whale.
His education continued through the hard winters. From Aqiatusuk he learned how to harness dogs and ice the runners of the
komatik
and to pack a sled so that it did not topple when the going was rough. Together they drove out across the land-fast ice, through pressure ridges, to the pack ice beyond. They ranged way beyond the low hills, where Josephie and Maggie had stopped to pick willow, to the huge, empty spaces of the interior. Aqiatusuk showed Josephie how to lead the dogs, reading their mood, sensing when it was best to run alongside, when more prudent to ride on the
komatik
with the whip, when to discipline the team and when to give them their freedom, when to offer them meat and when to let them go hungry. Gradually, young Josephie distinguished the different and subtle ways in which dogs use their intelligence. By his mid-teens the son of Robert Flaherty was an expert in dogcraft.
Those trips were Josephie's introduction to the tumultuous
churn of ice. Slowly, he learned how to recognise the thin sheet ice which formed from freezing rain and could cover the lichen and starve the caribou. He learned how to spot the thick layer of frozen melted snow which could conceal deadly melt holes below. He sensed when the
sikuaq
or ice soup, which began to form in the sea at the end of August, had become thick enough to bear weight and, later in the year, he recognised when the ice was likely to candle, throwing up the sharp spines that sliced sled dog paws. He learned to watch for ice rising up at the hinges between the ice foot and the shore-fast ice and to predict where it would rear up to form the turbulent, slabby ice ranges the Inuit called
tuniq.
He observed the shadows on the sea left by black ice, and those accompanied by frost smoke which marked open water. He discovered where treacherous ice skins were most likely to be lying across leads and where tiny tremors and a blanching of the air signalled there was land ahead.