Thirty or more years ago the interior of Northern Ungava teemed with bands of barren ground caribou. They numbered thousands.
Now, however, only a few, in straggling bands, of twenty or less, are seen. A caribou kill of even a half dozen after a long summer's trip into the interior is an event among the Eskimo. Skins for clothing consequently are rare. The Cape Dufferin people are the poorest clad I have ever seen. The clothing of the persons I chose for the film was no exception, so I cast around for means of getting skins with which to make new and better costumes. No skins were to be had. Those few fortunates who had new deerskin clothing refused for anything I might have in exchange to let it go. I did secure for my own wear a much worn koolitah (hooded coat) and an old pair of deerskin trousers, but the present in exchange was a brand-new Winchester and two hundred cartridges.
Along about freeze-up time, one Nevalingha came into the post to trade, and inadvertently I heard that he and his hunting companion had made a deer kill in the far interior during the summer, so far, however, from the coast that the had had to cache the skins and horns expecting to bring them down by sledge in winter. I approached Nevalingha in the hope of securing the skins, but he explained that all of them were promised, some to his father, some to friends, some to his brother and so on. He couldn't break his promises and at any rate they all needed them badly. As well did I need them, and I made extravagant bids, but all that I had, said he, could not compensate for the lack of warm winter clothing. However, those to whom he was to have given skins were prevailed upon to release him from his promises. I was to give him food and ammunition and walrus meat for his dogs and upon his return with the skins was to pay him as much as if they were all white foxes. Nevalingha, the ne'er-do-well, became prospectively, a rich man. He had never stood high in the factor's favor- "Hell for eatin' and not much for foxes," the latter said. He and his companion were gone three weeks into a country in which the Eskimos had never hunted foxes before. They returned with not only the twenty-two deer skins, but to the amazement of the factor, with the prime pelts of forty-three foxes- to one of these Eskimos a fabulous fortune.
Winter had hardly set in before various Eskimos from north and south along the seaboard came sledging into the post. All of them complained of the hard winter- no seals. The sea ice, said they, was frozen for miles and miles, farther out than in any other year they could remember. There had been a lapse of days in the constant winter winds and the movement and the milling of the ice fields were stilled and, like magic, seal hunting lanes and tidal pools were frozen fast. Until heavy gales again should blow, the doors of their hunting grounds were closed. Some spoke of the long and fruitless vigils, day by day and through the nights, over the breathing holes of seal: some, without seal oil for their lamps, of the darkness of the igloos. They spoke even of madness that comes from starvation, and in distress of mind sought advice as to what they should do with a madman who terrorized and paralyzed the whole village, threatening the safety of women and children and keeping the men from their hunting. There were tales of bear, themselves hungry for the seal upon which they live, prowling about the encampments at night. One old couple asleep in their igloo had been wakened by the snow of the igloo dome falling on their faces, to see by the feeble lamp light the mask of a bear sniffing and growling as he moved his head to and fro- sniffing the good seal oil smell of lamp and clothing. With ready wit the old woman had seized her trimming stick, lighted it, and holding it to the bear's nose had kept the beast at bay while her husband crawled outside for his harpoon!
II
One of the great problems in the making of the film was the construction of an Igloo large enough for the filming of interior scenes. The average Eskimo igloo, about twelve feet in diameter, was much too small. On the dimensions I laid out for them, a diameter of twenty five feet, Nanook and his companions started in to build the biggest igloo of their lives. For two days they worked, the women and children helping them. Then came the hard part- to cut insets for five large slab-ice windows without weakening the dome. They had hardly begun when the dome fell in pieces to the ground. "Never mind," said Nanook, " I can do it next time." For two days more they worked, but again with the same result; as soon as they began setting in the ice windows their structure fell to the around. It was a huge joke this time, and holding their sides they laughed their misfortune away. Again Nanook began on the "big aggie igloo," but this time the women and children hauled barrels of water on sledges from the water hole and iced the walls as fast as they went up. Finally, the igloo was finished and they stood eyeing it as satisfied as so many children completing a house of blocks. The light from the ice windows proved inadequate, however, and when the interiors were finally filmed the dome's half just over the camera had to be cut away, so Nanook and his family went naked to bed and naked to rise with all the cold of out-of-doors pouring in.
III
The mechanical skill of the Eskimo is in many ways remarkable and has more than once stood me in good stead. To one of my men I deputed the care of my cameras. Bringing them from the cold outside into contact with the warm air of the base often frosted them inside and out which necessitated taking them apart and carefully drying them piece by piece. With the motion picture cameras there was no difficulty, but with my graflex I found to my sorrow such a complication of parts that I could not get it together again. For several days its in'ards lay strewn on my work table. "Harry Lauder" finally volunteered for the task of putting them together, and through a long evening before a flickering candle and with a crowd of Eskimos around ejaculation their "Ais" and "Ahs," he managed to succeed where I had failed.
Never shall I forget his proffered ministrations to an ulcerated tooth. After witnessing the inadequacy of all the resources of my medicine kit and the disastrous failure an attempt to pull, he came to me, perfectly right in reasoning and intention, with a tiny drill which he had laboriously fashioned out of a ten penny nail and mounted in a carpenter's brace!
That misunderstandings should arise at times between myself and the Eskimos was, I suppose, inevitable. They were due for the most part to my own inability to comprehend exactly what they meant to say and under ordinary circumstances were soon explained away. Only once under peculiar stress did misunderstanding assume serious proportions. This was with one Auviuk who was, for an Eskimo, of an unusually highstrung and nervous temperament, and for that very reason, I might add, the better suited to fill one of the dramatic roles for which I had cast him. The following scene, however, was not of my staging. It was on our return from the bear hunting expedition which I have chronicled in a former article. For three days we had been without oil- three days of subsisting on cold food and no tea- when we came to a cache and a gallon of the precious fuel, and the almost unbearable tension of numb hunger was relieved. The following day, travelling with difficulty in the face of a bitterly cold drifter, we had halted to disentangle the snarled traces of the team, and Auviuk called to me saying that the oil was gone, had been left behind. Only then did I realize with a poignancy that went through me like a stab all that that oil meant. I could not contain myself. "Harry Lauder" and his companion, scenting trouble, discreetly withdrew, one ahead and one behind, and were lost in a blue of drift. Auviuk had drawn his snow knife from his belt and now brandishing it in front of me was pouring out a lava flow in Eskimo. The harpoons lay lashed in front of me on the sledge, and I was debating my chances of seizing one in time when it dawned upon me that Auviuk's rather startling pantomime was not intended offensively. Out of the drift at this juncture came "Harry Lauder" holding aloft the lost article- an old tin can I had purposely discarded! The incident was closed that night over a love feast of dried apples with plenty of sugar, well cooked and warm.
Spring in the North is a laggard, long in coming. It was not until the last week in May that two lone honking geese flying low over the post brought the natives running from their tents exclaiming "Awyung (spring) is here!" By the end of June all the snow, save deep drifts in ravines and along the slopes of hills, was gone. Arctic flowers, solid masses of purple, white, and yellow, sprang up through the tawn and russet mosses of the plains. Flock upon flock of geese like regiments came sailing through the sky; and coveys of ptarmigan hovered near the post and even perched upon the houses. Arctic salmon, whose sides shone like burnished steel and silver were teeming in the mouths of the streams that tumbled into the sea, and among the islands lying off the coast were multitudes of nesting sea pigeons and elders. Ever kayack that came paddling in was loaded, decks over, with scores of geese, salmon, eiders, and dozens of eggs for trade. The sun went down about eleven and rose again about two; it did not go far below the blue line of northern hills, and the glow of it shot constantly up the sky, splashing color on each cloud bank that sailed by. Everyone now slept when he willed; the voices of some rioting group of youngsters were always in the air.
Nanook was restless, the wanderlust again was upon him. He knew he said one day when we were making the whale boat ready for sea, where there were many white whales that played in a little bottle-necked harbor some three days kayacking up the coast.
We might, he continued, hopefully, get the "big aggie" (picture) there.
Ice fields still lay alone the coast, the blue-green ribbons of water lanes amongst them ever changing with the working of the winds and tide. Came a driving nor'easter herding the floes to sea and before the day was ended all that remained of those vast fields was a thin white line far out in the west.
Wild fowl in multitudes we encountered on the way. Under the leaning brows of great cliffs that rose three hundred feet in air were strata of sea gulls and clouds of sea pigeons and big eiders. A weird medley were their wild cries and screams, the re-echoing of our guns, and the deep booming of the sea.
Where we landed for sea pigeon eggs the sea pigeons swarmed like flies hardly an arm's length above us. Waiting until they approached circling toward him, Nanook with a piece of drift wood would hurl it breast on, bringing down there or four birds with a single throw.
With a gale from the west the ice fields again came in and, rafting high along the bare rock masses of the coast, kept us prisoners. We went inland during the detention, goose hunting among the tundra's tiny discs of ponds. The geese, having shed their wing feathers, were unable to fly. By running them down the men secured them, a task, however, that with the spongy nature of the moss-carpeted ground, was sporting enough.
For two days we worked through every winding lane that opened with the tides, or hauled the boat up on to the floes as the lanes closed in again, until a providential offshore wind finally freed us and we bowled in to a bare rock strip of point which proved to be Nanook's "Culelulewak noona" (the white whale land).
We dared not camp too near the bottle-necked entrance to the whale ground for even from a mile away the banging of an oar against a gunwale might frighten the whales and drive them out to sea. We camped under the lee of a cliff a mile and a half distant, and upon the crest one or another of the men took turns as lookouts for whale. It was two weeks to a day when a school of some twenty all told, came swinging in from sea. Nanook leading the fleet of kayackers slowly paddled toward the Harbor's mouth. " Harry Lauder" carrying the Akeley camera, and myself with the hand camera and film retorts walked overland to the harbor head. We were hardly more than half way over when the lookout signalled that the whales were in. The kavackers at their fastest speed raced for the entrance, and side by side with paddles beating gunwales and all the shouts and yells their lungs could stand came slowly in. The deafening din threw the quarry into a panic. The whales' ear drums, Nanook had explained, are so sensitive that sound not only frightens but hurts them. Their snow white bodies flashed in the sun as they came up to blow or to rush around the small loop of the harbor's end only to meet the barriers of land. Time after time they tried to break through the kayack's cordon only to be driven back again or harpooned if they came too near. For an hour the fight kept on until five, all told, were harpooned. With their kayacks hitched in line, Nanook and his companions spent the remainder of the day towing in the kill and hauling them out on shore. Two days were consumed in cutting up the kill and apportioning it, and then with the whale boat full of meat which Nanook was taking as presents to his people at the post, we left for the south, all the stock of film I carried exposed on Nanook's last "big aggie."
When August came we began speculating as to when the little schooner with its mails from home and news of the busy world would come. The factor and I thumbed through the post diaries for years back for dates of past arrivals and, averaging them up, we each made a bet upon the date we thought would win. We kept a lookout almost constantly, on the hill, and offered a prize, a sack of sea biscuit, to him who first should see her sails.
She arrived at last, and was received enthusiastically by every person and every dog about the trading post. My belongings, which long since had been at least partially packed in expectation of departure, were taken aboard. I looked once more about the cramped quarters that I had occupied for a year at the trading post, and finally followed my baggage on to the schooner.
Nanook and his companions came aboard for a last farewell. When the ship headed out to sea, reluctantly they took leave; but off either side they followed in their kayacks until the ship, gathering speed, slowly drew away. I saw them turn at last, still waving as they made in toward shore to the little spots of tawny tents which, standing out in the vastness of dreary wastes of shore, are all that they call home.
Robert J. Flaherty, "Life Among the Eskimos," World's Work, October 1922, pages 632-640.
© 1998, David Pierce, on editing and revisions (if any)
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