Читать книгу The Long Exile: A true story of deception and survival amongst the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic - Melanie McGrath - Страница 7

In the early autumn of 1920, Maggie Nujarluktuk became a woman with another name. It happened something like this. Maggie was sitting on a pile of caribou skins. She had a borrowed baby in her amiut, the fur hood of her parka. A man was filming the scene. His name was Robert Flaherty. Maggie was about to pull the baby out of the amiut and set him to play beside a group of puppies as Flaherty had instructed, when looking up from his camera, he said, ‘Smile’, grinning to show Maggie what he was getting at and told her, through an interpreter, that he had decided to change her name. She laughed a little, perhaps conscious of his eyes, blue as icebergs, then lifted the baby into her arms, placed him beside her and pulled the puppies closer to keep him warm.

‘Well, now, Maggie,’ Robert said. He winked at her, wound the camera and lingered on her face. She watched his breath pluming in the chill Arctic air.

‘How's about Nyla?’ He allowed the name to roll around his mouth. ‘Yes, from now on you are Nyla.’

If Maggie minded this, she didn't say. She already knew she has no choice in the matter anyway.

Maggie Nujarluktuk was very young back then (how young she didn't know exactly), and very lovely, with a broad, heart-shaped face, unblemished by sunburn or frostbite or by the whiskery tattoos still common among Ungava Inuit women. Her thick hair lay in lush coils around her shoulders and her skin and eyes were as yet unclouded by years of lamp smoke or by endless sewing in poor light. Her lips were bowed, plump but fragile-seeming, and it was impossible to tell whether her smile was an invitation or a warning. Beneath the lips lay even teeth that were white and strong, not yet worn to brown stumps from chewing boots to make them soft. And Robert Flaherty had just renamed her Nyla, which means the Smiling One.

Robert Flaherty's movie had begun in something of a rush. Only three weeks earlier, on 15 August, the schooner, Annie, had dropped anchor at the remote Arctic fur post of Inukjuak, on the Ungava Peninsula on the east coast of Hudson Bay, and a tall, white man with a thin nose and craggy features had come ashore with his half-breed interpreter, introduced himself to the local Inuit as Robert Flaherty, and announced his intention to stay in the area long enough to make a motion picture there. The film, he said, was to be about daily life in the Barrenlands.

The stranger moved into the fur post manager's old cabin, a peeling white clapboard building on the south bank of the Innuksuak River and hired a few hands to help him shift his things from the shoreline where the Annie's crew had left them. Among the expected baggage of coal-oil lamps, tents and skins were the unfamiliar accoutrements of film-making, lights, tripods, cameras and film cans, plus a few personal belongings: a violin and a wind-up gramophone with a set of wax discs and three framed pictures, one a photograph of Arnold Bennett, another of Flaherty's wife, Frances, the third a little reproduction of Frans Hals' Young Man with a Mandolin. The number of possessions suggested that Robert Flaherty was settling down for a long stay. Within a day or two of his arrival, he had hung his pictures above the desk in his cabin, lined up his books along a home-made shelf, rigged up a darkroom, setting several old coal-oil barrels outside the door to serve as water tanks for washing film, and found three young men he could pay to haul his water and supply him with fresh meat and fish. By the time a week was up, the cabin looked as though it had always been his home and Flaherty was busy assembling his lights and cameras and running tests. In the evenings, he could be heard humming along with his gramophone (he was particularly fond of Harry Lauder singing ‘Stop Your Ticklin' Jock’) or playing Irish jigs on his fiddle.

The local Inuit were not much used to white visitors, and the new arrival turned the little settlement of Inukjuak upside down. No one knew quite how to place Robert Flaherty. His particular brand of whirlwind energy was new to them. Nor had they ever come across a qalunaat, a white man, with such sturdy warmth and rushing good humour. The fur traders they had encountered were glum and troubled and fond friends of the whisky bottle. News of the stranger spread, and the Inukjuamiut, as the people living around Inukjuak are called, began coming in from outlying camps to inspect this new addition to their world. Flaherty greeted them all with smiles and gifts of ship's biscuits and this, too, felt out of the ordinary. A few wondered, darkly, what the strange qalunaat wanted from them and drifted back out to their camps, but more stayed on, intrigued by the stranger and eager to audition for a part in the movie he said he was about to make.

Flaherty was soon holding try-outs on the river bank in front of the fur post manager's cabin. To play his leading man he picked a strong, good-natured fellow in his thirties called Alakariallak, who was renowned throughout Cape Dufferin for his hunting prowess. Flaherty renamed him Nanook, meaning ‘bear’. To play one of Nanook's wives Flaherty chose a local woman called Cunayou, to play the other, Maggie Nujarluktuk.

This was not Robert Flaherty's first attempt at making an Arctic film, but it was almost certainly his last chance to get it right. A few years later, when he had become famous, a journalist asked him why he had persisted back then, after so many setbacks and difficulties, and he replied, as he often did, with an aphorism, saying that ‘every man is strong enough for the work on which his life depends’. In 1920 Robert Flaherty believed his life depended on this movie. And, as it turned out, he was right.

Flaherty had first pitched up in the Canadian Arctic ten years previously, looking for iron ore, in the employ of Sir William Mackenzie, a Canadian mine owner and railroad baron whom Flaherty had met through his father. Mackenzie had invested considerable capital in a transcontinental railway across Canada and he was planning to lay track as far north as Churchill, Manitoba, a bleak Barrenlands settlement on the west coast of Hudson Bay. Mackenzie's goal was to link the railway with a new shipping route across the bay and thereby create the shortest navigation between the wheat plains of Manitoba and the flour mills of Europe, which were then connected overland and by sea through the St Lawrence River to the Atlantic. There were additional benefits, which Mackenzie, being a good businessman, had not ignored. It was well known that Hudson Bay's seabed was rich in iron ore – for centuries whalers had reported compass interference whenever they sailed there – and some enormous iron ore lodes had been discovered on the east coast of the Bay in the Ungava Peninsula just north of Labrador. Mackenzie reckoned there might be money to be made extracting the ore and shipping it to Europe.

His geologic interest focused on the Nastapoka Islands, a cluster of granite nubs lying just off the east coast of Hudson Bay at 57° North. The Nastapokas had figured in some prospectors' logs as being worthy of exploration. Inuit had been living in the area for thousands of years but the place was only scantily mapped and virtually unknown to white men. Mackenzie needed someone young and ambitious with courage and flare, even a little recklessness, to blaze a route through. In 1910 he chose Robert Flaherty. The railroad baron had employed Flaherty's father, Robert Flaherty Snr, and knew the family from the old days, when the American frontier was still open and the Flaherty family had helped to settle it. At 26, Robert Jnr already had a reputation for adventurous prospecting in the northern forests of Canada and although he had had no direct experience of the Barrenlands, Mackenzie felt inclined to take the risk on him.

The Flahertys had come over from Ireland sometime during or just after the potato famine and, travelling south from Quebec, they had settled in the tough mining country of Michigan. There Robert Jnr's father, Robert Henry Flaherty, had met and married Susan Klöckner, the daughter of Catholics from Koblenz. Robert Henry had done well for himself, buying up a modest little mine at the foot of Iron Mountain, Michigan, where Robert Joseph was born, on 16 February 1884, the first of seven children.

The family lived a comfortable upper-middle-class life. Robert Jnr grew up with a love for the outdoors and a disdain for civilisation which was remarkable even among boys living in the wilds of Michigan. This untroubled existence came to a sudden end, though, in 1893, when the price of iron ore slumped and Robert Snr was forced to lock out the miners at his Iron Mountain operation and later, when things did not improve, to close the mine down altogether. Of necessity, he took up a position as a mining engineer in the tiny backwater of Lake of the Woods in upper Ontario, leaving his wife to bring up their children alone.

Susan Klöckner was a loving, devout and uneducated woman and she did her best to raise Robert Joseph in the fear of God, but none of her sermonising appeared to have the slightest effect on her eldest son. If there was a god in Robert Flaherty's life he was to be found in the woods with the bears.

So the boy grew up wild, and when Robert Henry returned to Michigan his son begged to go with him on his next posting to a remote outpost, the Golden Star Mine in Rainy Lake, Ontario. It was a Huckleberry Finn kind of a life and Robert Jnr took to it like a trout to tickling. For two years father and son camped out in the woods, hunting rabbits, tracking bear and learning woodcraft from the local Ojibwa Indians. During the long winter nights, the boy lost himself in the adventure stories of James Fenimore Cooper and R. M. Ballantyne and in the long summer evenings Robert Snr taught his son to play the Irish fiddle. Robert Jnr learned some sharper lessons from the Ojibwa too. Years before, miners and fur trappers had brought booze and misery into the lives of the Indians living in northern Ontario. The sight of strong, capable men staggering around begging moonshine off the miners crept across the young Robert's tender heart like a shadow. If this was what men called civilisation, then he wanted no part of it.

When Robert Snr's two years in Rainy Lake were up, the Flaherty family moved on again, to the Burleigh Mine back near Lake of the Woods. Deciding their son needed some formal education, Susan and Robert Henry dispatched Robert Jnr to Upper Canada College in Toronto. The college was run with the rigid discipline of an English public school. It was intended to whip the boy into shape, but only made a square hole for a round peg. Robert Jnr soon contrived to get himself expelled, returning to Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay) on Lake Superior, where the Flaherty family were then living and enrolling in the local school. Even there Robert Jnr chafed against any kind of formal instruction, preferring instead to spend most of his time with the English mining engineer and adventurer, H. E. Knobel, who encouraged the boy's fiddle playing as well as his fantasies.

It was through Knobel that Flaherty first heard tell of Hudson Bay, a remote seaway bitten out of the eastern Canadian mainland. Knobel had been canoeing there and had stories to tell of the rapids he had paddled, the portages he had passed and the Indians and Inuit he had met on the way. The young Robert was so taken with Knobel's stories of adventure in remote places that, after a final and brief flirtation with book learning at Michigan College of Mines, he gave up formal education altogether and went north, into the woods to prospect for ore, hoping, one day, to travel as far as Hudson Bay. When, in 1910, Sir William Mackenzie asked him to lead an expedition to the Nastapokas, Robert Jnr felt his destiny calling. He did not hesitate.

Taking his tent, his rockhound kit, canoes and an Indian guide, the 26-year-old Flaherty paddled along the Mattagami River north, across some of Canada's toughest portages, then followed the Moose River as far as the Hudson Bay trading post at Moose Factory in James Bay, a broad finger off the southernmost curve of Hudson Bay. At the factory, he stopped briefly to resupply, then took a boat to Chariton Island and hitched a ride on a schooner going north to Fort George. There he came upon an encampment of Inuit who guided him to the Hudson Bay post at Great Whale, otherwise known as Kuujjuarapik, a tiny settlement on the tree line, at the edge of the Barrenlands.

Flaherty was used to wilderness, but no wilderness he had ever experienced matched this. The Barrenlands made the deep, silent forests and rugged hills of his childhood seem as safe as apple orchards. He felt the flinty, lichen-painted sweep of the tundra and the great expanses of sea and ice and sky as a swelling in his chest. The starkness of the place enthralled him. It was as though every step further north was a footfall on a new discovery. The tundra rolled out, empty and uncompromised, all around him. If any land could be said to be the antidote to the diseased, corrupted, famine-ridden Ireland of his ancestors, it was here, where there were none of the tired overlays of human history, only the shallow sun and the shadows of low clouds chasing along the rock. Nowhere, not even in northern Ontario, had Flaherty felt more free.

He took on some Inuit guides at Kuujjuarapik and was soon as captivated by them as he had been by their land. These men understood the Barrens in a way Flaherty had never understood Michigan or lower Canada. Only now, in all this emptiness, did he begin fully to comprehend the fullness around him. He watched these men pull their living from it. He saw them moving over the fearsome weft of ice and stone as if it were a carpet and across the sea as if it were a lawn. He had grown up a witness to the demoralisation of the Indians who lived to the south. But these Barrenlanders were different. They still seemed in possession of a raw, unquestioning confidence, a strong, visceral simplicity which had long been lost at the tree line and, further south, in the hubbub of the cities. This huge, open terrain lived in them. You could not separate them from the environment, as the Indians had been separated from theirs. Without the Barrens, they would cease to exist. It dawned on Flaherty that he was witnessing something unique and precious, a window into an older and, perhaps, a better world.

The Inuit were not the first people to visit the Arctic. That accolade belongs to the Indians. As early as 5500 BCE, Indians had been moving from the forest on to the tundra in summer, following the migration routes of caribou, and they continued to move seasonally on to the Barrenlands for the next 2,000 or 3,000 years, until a change in the climate drove them back down south. It was not until some time between 3000 BCE and 2200 BCE that the Inuit crossed the Bering Strait, which was then a land bridge, into what is now North America, and spread eastwards until, by 1000 BCE, they had reached Labrador. The Inuit were the first people to occupy the Arctic permanently and they brought with them two technologies essential to their survival there, the bow and arrow and the kayak. From time to time they encountered Indians and when they did there were skirmishes, but for the most part they lived, untroubled, for 2,000 years or more until around 1000 AD when they had contact first with Vikings then with European adventurers, the best known of whom was Martin Frobisher, who arrived on Baffin Island in 1576 looking for gold. By the seventeenth century whaling ships from Scotland and North America were making regular forays into Arctic waters and overwintering in Hudson Bay. There they set up whaling camps to which the Inuit were drawn by the promise of paid work and by metal knives and, later, by rifles.

The Inuit were friendly towards Robert Flaherty, perhaps because they sensed his admiration for them. He was genial and gave off an air of integrity without ever being stiff or formal. Unlike most qalunaat he seemed genuinely keen to learn Inuktitut and the Inuit at Kuujjuarapik quickly got the sense that he saw them as equals and understood that, in the Barrenlands, it was they and not white men who were kings. His good manners, amiability and his fiddle-playing all helped endear him to them, as did his willingness to pay for the guiding and hunting they did for him. In the long history of contact between whites and Inuit, he was, they could see, someone quite rare. White men like Flaherty were hard to find in Inuit country.

From Kuujjuarapik, Flaherty continued north, and, after four months of travelling, he finally reached the Nastapoka Islands in January 1911. He and his guides set up camp and he began immediately to explore, digging through the hard-packed snow for rock samples and documenting everything he saw with photographs. He also took pictures of the men and women he encountered along the way. In their company, he began to feel both recognised and exposed. Their resilience, their competence and their good humour touched him. More than that, he felt drawn to their wildness and after only a few days in the Nastapokas he began to sense his destiny lay not in the rock but in these people and the way they made him feel.

After returning to Toronto to report his findings, Flaherty almost immediately found an excuse to go back up north. This time his aim was the Belcher Islands, an obscure cluster of rocks off the coast of Cape Dufferin, just south of the Nastapokas. The cape occupied an area the size of England and had a population of 200 Inuit, some of whom hunted walrus out on the Belchers. On the Nastapoka trip he had been told of the existence of a large island in the Belcher group whose tall blue cliffs bled when scraped and this suggested to Flaherty the presence of high-grade iron ore there. The island did not appear on any of the maps and there was no mention of it in any navigation charts, but Flaherty had witnessed the precision with which the Barrenlanders memorised their landscape and were able to recall its contours. He decided not to believe the maps but to put his trust in the Inuit instead.

The following year, he set out in the 63-foot sloop, Nastapoka, but was forced back to Kuujjuarapik by bad weather. Running low on supplies, he sailed south to Fort George to restock and when the sea froze over some months later he took off once again, this time by dog sled, intending to cross the Ungava Peninsula to Cape Dufferin, then complete the remainder of the journey to the Belchers on the sea ice. That far north, he figured, the ice would be stable. He was wrong. The ice proved so turbulent that year that Flaherty had to abandon his original plan. Instead, he decided to cross the Ungava Peninsula and try to reach Fort Chimo, or Kuujuak, on the eastern side. It was a crazy plan. Ungava was an unmapped, treeless tundra the size of Norway. No white man had yet crossed it from one side to the other, partly because travelling in the interior was exceedingly dangerous. Away from the coast, the only available food, aside from the odd Arctic hare, lemming or fox, was caribou and the caribou populations had been radically reduced since the introduction of rifles to the region. The adventurer Albert Peter Low had recently been forced to turn back from the Ungava interior to the coast on the point of starvation and Flaherty had none of Low's experience.

Undaunted, Flaherty hired three Inuit guides, ‘Little’ Tommy, Tookalok and Wetallok, and the four men took off on three dog sleds. For several days they followed Wetallok until the guide finally admitted that he had no idea where they were but had been too proud to say. Poor weather set in and the men, weary and hollow with hunger, had no choice but to stop and dig in. Over the next few days, frostbite got to them, snow blindness followed close behind, but they could do nothing except sit inside their snowhouse waiting for the storms to clear, making mental lists of the dogs they would eat and in what order. Flaherty wrote in his diary that the temperature fell so low the dogs vomited from the cold. The four men survived, but did not reach the Belchers.

Flaherty set out again to go north the following year, 1913. In St John's, Newfoundland, he bought a 75-foot topsail sloop, Laddie, and had her rerigged and belted with greenheart to withstand ice. He loaded up his rock hammers, his acids, litmus and sampling bottles and this time he took along a Bell and Howell movie camera, portable lights, film stock and a developer and printer. His photographs had generated some interest in the south and he wanted to capitalise on that. By now, Flaherty was a good deal less interested in iron ore than he was in the ordinary life of the Barrenlanders. Wherever he went, he sensed that Inuit culture had already been compromised by contact with whaling crews and white explorers and he was desperate to film a way of life whose existence was fragile. He begged to be taken along on kayak trips and to be taught how to flense seals and sew clothes from caribou skins. At every opportunity he got out his camera and filmed. On one of his filming expeditions to the interior of Baffin, Flaherty's komatik, dog sled, broke through some rotten ice and his film fell into the water and was ruined but with his characteristic aplomb Flaherty took this setback in his stride. When Christmas came that year, he threw a party and Inuit sledged in from camps two days away at Fair Ness and the Isle of God's Mercy and Markham Bay to see what the qalunaat had to offer. Flaherty treated them all to ‘varicoloured paper hats’ and to tinned sardines. He was delighted by his new friends and, by and large, they returned the compliment.

On 14 August the following year, Laddie sailed into Hudson Bay on a course for the Belchers. A week later the islands hoved into view, exactly as the Inuit had described them: a hand of long, icy fingers the chief of which bore blue spiny cliffs. The Laddie moved towards this largest island but as she did so, a terrific gust of wind roared out of nowhere, blew her on to a reef and tore a hole in her hull. The crew piled into the whaleboat and made for the shore. Flaherty decided there was nothing to be done but to get on with what he had come here to do. Once the prospecting was done, they would have to rely on the little whaleboat to get them across the notorious waters of Hudson Bay back to the safety of Moose Factory. Over the weeks that followed, Flaherty collected samples, labelled and weighed, took pictures and sketched plans of the location and distribution of the iron ore. Then he and his men clambered into the whaleboat, said a quick prayer, and turned south.

Late August/early September is storm season in the eastern Arctic and the little whaleboat was buffeted around like a twig in a stream. It took them ten days to travel the 800 miles south. Several times they considered themselves as near to dead as made no difference. Eventually, the outline of the Moose Factory post came into view and they raced towards it, feeling they were finally safe. When they got close they noticed that the post flag was at half-mast and assumed some dreadful calamity had befallen the post. They disembarked with caution and were greeted by Monsieur Duval, the post factor, dressed in linens and a straw hat, who explained that he had set the flag at half-mast because he missed his beloved Normandy and longed for a little Camembert and a glass of apple brandy and sensed that France and all her loveliness was for ever lost to him.

Before leaving on the Belcher expedition, Flaherty had used his time in the south to court Frances Hubbard, the daughter of eminent geologist Lucius L. Hubbard. Now he returned to her and, despite rumours that Flaherty's affections were not confined to Frances alone, the couple were married in New York City on 12 November 1914, with Frances buying the ring. A friend of theirs later noted that Robert ‘was like a light and [Frances] was like a sensitive photographic plate’. The couple passed their first winter together editing what remained of Flaherty's film of Inuit life and the following spring they showed a rough cut at the Convocation Hall in the University of Toronto, where the picture was met with a wall of polite incomprehension.

By the autumn of 1915, Robert and Frances were apart once more. Robert spent that Christmas back at the Belchers, feasting on pea soup and currant buns and whiling away the time it took for the sea ice to freeze solid teaching the Inuit how to sing ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’. Between times he set his camera rolling. The following September he headed south, with 30,000 feet of exposed film.

The Flahertys worked through the early winter of 1916 and by Christmas they had a rough cut of the new film prepared and printed. This they sent off to Harvard in the hope that the university might screen it and Robert set himself to the business of refining the edit. As he was sitting over the negative one day, concentrating on the frames, a cigarette dropped from his fingers on to the film can, and the film flared, and burst into twists of flame before finally slumping to the floor in a heap of blackened celluloid. It was a bad film, Flaherty said later. He would just have to go back out to the Arctic and make a better one.

But not on Sir William Mackenzie's time. Flaherty's old benefactor had long since turned his real attentions away from Arctic ore to the war in Europe. There was no money to be had for Flaherty's adventures from that quarter and Flaherty had none himself. For a while, he ploughed his energies into the lecture circuit and making babies. Frances gave birth to three girls in close succession: Barbara, Frances and Monica. The new family moved to Houghton, Michigan, to stay with Frances' parents, then found a house of their own in New Canaan, Connecticut. But the empty spaces of the Arctic tapped on Flaherty's heart and he longed to return.

In the early spring of 1920, he saw his chance. At a particularly dreary cocktail party in New York he was introduced to Captain Thierry Mallet of the Révillon Fréres trading company. Flaherty was a warm, convivial man, and he was used to people gravitating towards him, rewarding them for their attention with his rough-tough tales of the kind of pioneer life which already seemed to belong to another, more fascinating, age. Thierry Mallet was no exception. Mallet knew the settings of Flaherty's tales. Révillon Fréres had recently opened posts in the Ungava Peninsula to capitalise on the Arctic fox populations there. The fur trade was picking up after a long wartime stagnation. As Mallet told Flaherty, a good white Arctic fox pelt was now selling at the wholesale fur market in Montreal for C$25 and Mallet's company was feeling buoyant. Its great rivals still needled it, though. The Hudson Bay Company was celebrating its 350th anniversary that year and Révillon Fréres was hoping to outdo its rivals when it came to celebrating its own 200th anniversary in three years' time. Did Flaherty have any good ideas, Captain Mallet wondered.

As it happened, Flaherty did. His idea, he told Mallet, was to make an adventure film about an astonishing group of people living in a world of unimaginable harshness, a world in which Révillon Fréres also operated. It would be the first film of its kind, a genuine trailblazer and he, Flaherty, would be willing to sell Révillon Fréres the rights to it. Flaherty saw Mallet's eyes take on a new intensity. He was in.

A few weeks later, the venerable Révillon Fréres company signed a contract promising Flaherty C$11,000 in exchange for the rights to his as yet unmade Arctic adventure film and on 18 June 1920 Flaherty found himself at the railhead in northern Ontario with some new camping equipment, a canoe, a Haul-berg electric-light plant and projector and two movie cameras. Just over two months after that, on board the schooner Annie, Flaherty ‘let go anchor at the mouth of the Innuksuak River and the five gaunt and melancholy-looking buildings’ of the post ‘stood out on a boulder-ridden slope less than half a mile away’, as he wrote in his diaries.

By the time he reached Inukjuak in 1920, Robert Flaherty had a good sense of what he needed to do and how to do it. Before he left New York he had paid a visit to the Craftsman Laboratories to get advice from Terry Ramsaye and Martin Johnson, who were trying to put together an adventure film from Johnson's various travels in the tropics. Film-making was new and, in spite of his experience filming on Baffin Island, Flaherty was unsure about the grammar of film sequences and shots. He had also updated his equipment. The Akeleys he had bought to replace the earlier Bell and Howell used graphite for lubrication rather than oil so they were less likely to freeze. They were also the first cameras to be fitted with gyroscopic tripod heads allowing the camera to be tilted and panned by a single movement without too much jerking. Eastman Kodak had provided an old English Williamson printing machine, which Flaherty screwed to the wall of his cabin beside his Frans Hals print. He had also brought developing fluid and a small battery of lightweight lights and a Graflex stills camera, and soon after his arrival in Inukjuak he fixed up a rudimentary darkroom with a drying annex, heated by a coal-burning stove, in which to dry the developed film.

So Flaherty finds himself in this tiny, remote settlement, with nothing but his equipment, a few pictures, his gramophone and a tremendous sense of his own destiny. He is keen to begin filming before the weather closes in and ice creeps across the sea so he takes Alakariallak, Maggie and Cunayou out along the coast and he films his first sequence, of hunter, wives, children and dogs all emerging, one by one, and as if by magic, from the one-man kayak seat. It's a bit of a joke, a moment of comedy in what will, he hopes, be a tense and dramatic tale of survival against the odds. He films Maggie pulling the baby from her amiut and setting him down among the husky pups. He watches her smile through the Akeley. He says, ‘Smile!’

A few days later, Flaherty sets up the projector in his cabin and invites his cast in for a viewing. He offers round hot tea and sea biscuits and quickly discovers that Maggie, Alakariallak and the rest have no idea what a film is or, for that matter, what the images represent. When he shows them stills of themselves, they hold them upside down and he has to take them to a mirror before they are able to understand what it is they are looking at. Finally, when everyone is crammed in and settled and seems to have at least some idea of why they are there, he runs the rushes, noting with satisfaction, later in his diary, the gasps and giggles of his cast as they recognise themselves in black and white and two dimensions.

Summer is short in the Arctic and this one is quickly done. By mid-September the summer birds are gone and the long winter is once more closing in like a fist around Inukjuak and the business of making a movie suddenly becomes a good deal more complicated. Inukjuak lies south of the Arctic Circle but by October the light is already limited to six hours a day and by November there is only sufficient daylight for three hours' filming. The water for washing the film begins to ice up and, as winter grips, Flaherty's helpers are forced to cut a hole through six feet of ice, pull water up in buckets, pour it into barrels and load it on to a fourteen-foot-long sled hauled by a ten-dog sled team to the little cabin. A constant wind sends smoking whorls of dry snow blasting into the camera lens, blizzards break open and in a matter of minutes the cast are unable to see as far as their own hands. As temperatures drop, film shatters inside the cameras from the cold and the men are forced to stash the retorts and sometimes even the cameras inside their parkas to keep them warm enough to work. The moment the cameras are brought into the relative warmth of the cabin, they frost up and have to be taken apart and dried piece by piece. One time the Graflex is so badly affected by condensation that Flaherty has to dismantle it completely only to discover that he cannot recall how to put it back again and one of his Inuk helpers has to sit down at his table and gradually, by candlelight, put it back together.

Flaherty constantly finds himself having to charge after hunters too excited by the prospect of a kill to stop and remember to pose for the camera. He spends a good deal of time trying to persuade the Inuit to repeat their actions or simply stand where they are told. Maggie and Cunayou fall out. There are disputes over pay.

But none of these setbacks seems to discourage the filmmaker for long. He bounces from day to day in a kind of ecstatic trance. In his spare time he fiddles for the locals, or sets up impromptu screenings of his rushes. In all the excitement, the contradictions of his ambition pass him by. Here he is, a white man banked by a fur trader, making a film about an idealised kind of Inuit life which, if it ever existed, has long since been turned upside down by, among others, white men and fur traders.

By November the sea around Inukjuak is frozen firm and by December it is stable enough to travel on long distance. At Christmas, Flaherty throws his customary party for the Inuit, serving up sardines and sweet tea, and making a space in the fur store to dance square reels and Irish jigs. When the New Year arrives he decides that what his film needs is a polar bear hunt. The bears are rarely seen around Inukjuak but Alakariallak says that female bears often pass the winter with their cubs in dens at Cape Sir Thomas Smith, 200 miles north along the Ungava coastline, and so, on 17 January 1921, Flaherty sets off with Alakariallak and another man he has nicknamed Harry Lauder after the singer and the party turns north. They reckon on being away a month, allowing ten days each for the journey there and back and another ten for bad weather, stopping to film wherever they find polar bear. But the going proves difficult, the ice near to the coast pushed into mountainous pressure ridges and the dogs hard-pressed to pull the sleds over broken ice fields and knife-sharp candle ice, and when eventually they reach Cape Sir Thomas Smith there are no polar bears. For a few days they meander across the cape, one time travelling all day and night only to find themselves within two miles of their starting point. No bears. The dogs become more and more desperate from cold and hunger until they eventually stage a rebellion, making a dash for the shelter of the hunters' snowhouse and refusing to allow themselves to be harnessed, and Alakariallak has to carry the lead dog to the sled whimpering with misery and cold. Still, they see no bears. One by one the dogs begin to starve. The men are so cold now and so low on fuel, they are reduced one night to burning the cross bars from the komatik (the sled) to keep them warm. The following night they have nothing left for a fire but film. Four 200-foot rolls are sacrificed to boil water for their tea. They lose two dogs to starvation before Flaherty finally makes the decision to turn back for home. In eight weeks away they have not run into a single bear. They begin the return journey by day, travelling in small bursts, walking beside the sleds whose dogs are by now too weak to pull them. The sea ice pours on either side, as flat and formless as a newly ironed sheet. As they walk, Alakariallak keeps them cheerful with stories of the bears he has killed the year before. At night they build a makeshift snowhouse and he sings them versions of the songs he has heard on Flaherty's gramophone. The following day they stumble into Inukjuak, dark with snow blindness, their hearts like old stones, their noses half eaten by frostbite, their feet frozen into their boots, hardly able to believe they are alive still. The Révillon Fréres post manager, Stewart, comes out to meet them, brings them back to the cabin, unwraps their feet and sets them up with mugs of hot, sweet tea. Only the week before, he reports, two huskies dug a female bear and her two cubs from their den a couple of hours' travel away from the settlement. The bear and her cubs battled it out against the dogs and sent them spinning into the air and sliding back on their bellies. There was no need to have gone all the way to Cape Sir Thomas Smith. For a moment silence falls. Then Alakariallak grabs his sides with both hands and laughs and laughs so hard that tears leak from his eyes.

Perhaps it is this brush with mortality which draws Robert Flaherty closer to Maggie Nujarluktuk. In any case, he begins to spend more time with her. Everything about Maggie must seem so fresh, so unpolished and innocent, as different from the huddle of sophisticates Flaherty knows in New York as snow is from Shineola. Of course, he knows nothing about what she is thinking or feeling; neither, really, can he imagine it. She is unexplorable, a terrain that even he cannot reach nor will ever fully know. This, precisely, is her charm. Who knows why she goes to him? Ambition, curiosity, love even? He cannot tell, and it does not matter.

As winter deepens, Robert Flaherty and Maggie Nujarluktuk become lovers. They conduct their affair in the clapboard cabin, overlooked by Frances Flaherty and the boy with the mandolin and a pile of cameras. After a while she moves from her family snowhouse to live with him. No one expects it to last and this, too, is part of the beauty of it.

All through the winter, Robert Flaherty continues filming, developing the film as he goes along and staging little shows of the rushes in his cabin with hot tea and sea biscuits and, often, music and even dancing. As winter gives way to the spring, bringing long, clear days of brilliant sunshine, Flaherty films Alakariallak cutting snowblocks with a walrus tusk snow-knife, heaving them one on top of another to form a dome, while Maggie goes in after to caulk the joints between the blocks with dry snow, packing the surface smooth, the baby tucked safely in her amiut. When it proves too dark to film inside the snowhouse, Flaherty has Alakariallak and his friends build a half-dome exposed to the daylight as a prop. For two days they labour but each time the structure proves unstable and collapses and Flaherty stands by while the Inuit laugh out loud at their mistake and set themselves to the task once more. At the end of the second day, a stable half-dome stands on the sea ice. They build a sleeping platform of snow inside and line it with skins and Maggie sets a qulliq, or blubber stove, burning with seal fat. While Robert Flaherty winds his camera this made-up family goes through the routine of turning in for the night, Alakariallak sliding under the sleeping skins while Maggie and Cunayou undress the children and slot them in their places, before pulling off their own sealskin parkas and slipping naked between the children and their man.

Spring gives way eventually to summer and finds Robert and Maggie still together, communicating, now, in a mix of Inuktitut, English and sign language. The tundra, too, ends its silence. By late June, the snow is melting on the tops of eskers and hills, then later on the lower ground. The sun warms the black soil and speeds up the process. Where the tuff gives out to lake water or streams, seams of ice-free water appear. The night shrinks into a thin, blue glimmer. Heather begins to uncurl and grow buds. Summer birds appear from the south, rustling among the willow collecting twigs for their nests and, later, insects for their young. The air whines with bees and mosquitoes, pink saxifrage bursts from the willow bed, the grasses grow cotton tops and, when the Annie drops anchor at the mouth of the Innuksuak River in August 1921, the lovers already know that Robert Flaherty will be heading south alone. He will leave Maggie Nujarluktuk there, on the shores of Hudson Bay, with their baby swelling in her belly.