Under Aqiatusuk's guidance, he acquainted himself with the habits of Arctic animals, where each preferred to live and how and what it ate, where it travelled, how it paired and bred, for how long the young remained close to their mothers, where they were at their most vulnerable. He learned how to stalk caribou on the flat, wind-blown tundra, and how to use a white fur baffle to outfox seal. He came to a precise understanding of where and when to fling the harpoon or release the bullet that would make a creature his. He discovered the arts of flensing and butchering meat and where to store it so that wolves, foxes and dogs could not take it. When Aqiatusuk had fox pelts to trade, he took his stepson with him. The boy learned how to talk to white men and how much not to say.
Another winter approached and Maggie Nujarluktuk took sick and, within a few weeks, she died. Her body, wrapped in skins and buried beneath the rocks, joined the company of silent souls out on the tundra, their skeletons kept from the prying paws of wolves and foxes, their stories meshed into the tangle of willow. The exact cause of her death remains unknown. In the 1930s, 740 of every 100,000 deaths among Inuit were unexplained, twenty times the rate among the population of Lower Canada. The family said a prayer, burned Maggie's clothes and returned to their lives. Josephie was not encouraged to cry, nor to vent his rage. No one thought to write to Robert Flaherty with the news, nor did they look for explanations. Death was the well-worn path, too familiar to be mapped.
Josephie found himself alone in the world. Alone, that was, but for Paddy Aqiatusuk, from whom this shy, sensitive, loyal boy began the slow process of learning, as he was never able to learn from his real father, how to become the son to a man. Maggie's death brought them closer. They would not realise quite how far each depended on the other until they were forced apart. But for now, all that lay ahead in a distant future neither could predict and to which, in the Inuit way of things, neither gave much thought.
Josephie Flaherty's knowledge of the world beyond the limits of Ungava remained as thin as summer ice. He got a taste of it in 1934, when the governor of the Hudson Bay Company, Sir Patrick Ashley Cooper, arrived in Inukjuak on the Nascopie and was borne ashore to the accompaniment of a personal piper. An inspection of the newly painted clapboard Hudson Bay post followed, and Sir Patrick distributed a few cans of sardines, the odd tin of hardtacks and a good deal of ill-conceived advice. After his inspection, he emerged to address the assembled Inuit in English.
‘Now that we have seen you,’ declaimed Sir Patrick, ‘we are happy and will leave you with the confidence that you will work with our post manager as one large happy family, you following his advice as if he were your father, for he does the things which I tell him and I want you to do the things which he tells you.’
The speech was later published in a book and distributed around the Hudson Bay posts of the eastern Arctic. Josephie never saw this book. Nor did he or any of the other Inukjuamiut ever master what it was that Sir Patrick wanted or why the piper had piped him in. Around Inukjuak, the incident became an old itch or, rather, the memory of an itch. From time to time someone or other scratched it. Between times, it was forgotten along with the world below the treeline that it represented.
From Inukjuak, the Nascopie travelled on that year to Cape Dorset, Pangnirtung and to Pond Inlet at the northern tip of Baffin Island, picking up 52 Inuit, one Hudson Bay Company post manager, 109 dogs and various possessions and transferring them all to new fox-trapping grounds at Dundas Harbour. When hunting was hampered by rough ice, the manager sent half the party to Crocker Bay, 30 miles west, where they proceeded to starve. The whole party was then transferred back on to the Nascopie, the Cape Dorset and Pangnirtung Inuit were returned home while the Pond Inlet Inuit were taken to Arctic Bay. When Arctic Bay proved uninhabitable the Nascopie transferred the Inuit once more, to Fort Ross near the entrance to Bellot Strait, where they passed the next ten years scraping out a meagre living from a landscape of rock and gravel. When the Hudson Bay Company post at Fort Ross was closed in the summer of 1947, the survivors from this company experiment were again moved, west this time, to Spence Bay. They were never returned to their homeland.
In 1939, five years after the visit of Sir Patrick Ashley Cooper, an ex-Hudson Bay Company fur trader called James Cantley arrived in Inukjuak and set up a rival trading post a little further upriver, calling his new enterprise the Baffin Trading Company. The Inuit found him abrasive and mean. He did not rate them either. For a while, the price of fox fur rose steadily, the competition between the Baffin Trading Company and the Hudson Bay post keeping the price paid for pelts in line with the growing demand for Arctic fox in the southern fur markets. The Inuit of Inukjuak did their best to shrug off the horrors of the past years and settled back to their customary lives.
Far away, a war began in Europe.
Supposing the bad times to be over, at least for a while, Paddy Aqiatusuk married a widow. Mary brought four children with her, all a little younger than Josephie: two boys, Elijah and Samwillie, Anna, a delicate little girl left crippled at the age of two by an outbreak of polio and a baby, Minnie. There were now five more mouths to feed in Aqiatsuk's camp and among them no adult hunters.
During the winter of 1939 snow crept across Ungava from the east, melted in a brief, warm spell, then froze hard over the tundra. Unable to scrape through the ice to feed on lichen clinging to the rocks, what few caribou remained on the peninsula began slowly to starve, their living bodies nipped at by wolves until they were little more than walking skeletons, flesh trailing in ribbons behind them as they stumbled to their deaths. There was no point in hunting them, so little nourishment remained on their bones.
By Christmas the meat caches in Aqiatusuk's camp were empty. There were seal, still, and some walrus, but they had to be hunted ever further from the settlement, either at the floe edge or out on the islands. Paddy Aqiatusuk and Josephie Flaherty were often away for days at a time, moving their trap lines further and further out along the coast, camping at the floe edge where the seals swam.
Whenever they were sure they would not be going too far from camp, Josephie and Paddy would take Paddy's stepson Elijah along to hold the dogs and act as lookout. The trips exhausted the boy, just as they had exhausted Josephie before him, and before Josephie, Aqiatusuk and Aqiatusuk's father, in a continuum of extreme physical endeavour stretching back into the dimmest reaches of the past. It was a brutal regime and by the time the three of them reached the home camp they were so grim from the day's exertions that it was all they could do to sit, mug of tea in hand, sucking in the smoke from their cigarettes and staring at the icy floor. Within minutes the boy would be fast asleep, in place, chin folded on to chest. The two men would sit awhile, saying nothing. Paddy Aqiatusuk suffered from back pain and odd, inexplicable twinges which kept him from sleep. He often passed the night hours carving hunters and polar bears, building living armies of greenstone and ivory, against the time when he might have to call upon them.
The early years of the war passed Ungava by. Then, in 1941, the US air force began to build a wartime air base at Fort Chimo, or Kuujuak, in eastern Ungava and American troops poured in to staff it. Inuit employed at the Fort Chimo base passed through Inukjuak on their way to other bases in the eastern Arctic, bringing with them stories of the war, but no one in Inukjuak, least of all Paddy Aqiatusuk and Josephie Flaherty, could quite believe them. There had been skirmishes between Inuit and Indians at the tree line for 3,000 years, but the Inuit had lived all this time in the Arctic without an all-out war. Of the First World War, which had ended only shortly before Robert Flaherty had arrived in the settlement with his cameras, they knew nothing.
For now though, Josephie had more important concerns. A tiny, fresh-faced girl called Rynee had entered his life and become the woman he was to marry. The love he felt for Rynee was something new. The Inuktitut