sealskin and fat, but every day Rynee took a goosewing and swept the place until it shined.
Very occasionally, Josephie was asked to act as guide on some Radiosonde expedition. One bright summer day finds him heading out to the quay with the radio operator, Freddy Woodrow, TomManning from the Geodetic Service and two fellow Inuit, an oddity by the name of Noah, who wears an old top hat and has a reputation as a wifebeater, and Soralee, in whose Peterhead the group will travel. There are women washing sealskins down at the quay on that particular day, leaving pools of soap and milky water in the rock-pools beside the shore. The men pass them by, stopping to remark on the weather, the state of the char run, then clambering aboard Soralee's Peterhead, they stow the tents, the Coleman stove, the primus and the
qalunaat
paraphernalia on board and settle in for the journey. The going is good and by early afternoon they are tying up at the Hopewells, where Manning has some surveying to do. Having the remains of the day to themselves, the Inuit men take the Peterhead out char fishing, catch thirteen and get three seal into the bargain. Pitching camp at a respectful distance from the
qalunaat
, beside a tidal lake filled with foul-smelling seaweed on a rocky platform covered in saxifrage, they put out the fish to dry and dine on barbecued seal.
The following morning they head north, past patches of ice blink and water sky, where the drifts of pack ice still remain out in the channel. A sun dog throws a halo of yellow light across the clouds and a tribe of Ungava Canada geese fly by, honking. Soon the low coast of southern Ungava has risen into the grey cliffs of the northern peninsula, a landscape Josephie recalls from his youth but now seldom visits. They stop in the middle of the day on a lonely outcrop of rock, so that Manning can find eider eggs, and by early afternoon they are at sea once again, pressing north towards Cape Smith. There they are slowed by low-hanging cloud and cobwebs of rain-filled mist and decide to put in at the Cape Smith Hudson Bay Company detachment, a neat, white clapboard building in the shadow of a wall of barren pillow lava, where Noah proceeds to mug-up while Josephie and Soralee see to the boat and unpack the
qalunaat's
things. They stay up late that night, sitting on packing boxes, chewing over the old times, long gone and only sometimes missed, but missed sorely when they are. During the return journeyon the following day, the coastal cloud momentarily lifts and Jose-phie finds himself sailing past land which was once, not very long ago, so familiar he would have been hard-pressed to consider it as anything other than an element of himself, the rock skeleton on which his life's body is hung. But he is slipping up now, remembering inlets where there are none, imagining around the next headland some strong feature of his childhood which no longer exists, the landscape requiring a conscious calling to mind where there was once a simple sense of knowing.
As southern Canada wakes up to her northlands so Josephie Flaherty begins, slowly, to forget them.
CHAPTER SIX
I T IS AUTUMN 1952 and Constable Ross Gibson, Royal Canadian Mounted Police number 16593, is stepping off the ski-plane at Inuk-juak and taking in the scene. This is his first Arctic posting. He smells the air, so frail it is almost as if the world into which he has landed is an alternate universe perched above the clouds. Still, he is here, and determined to make the most of it. The Arctic detachments, “G” Division, are a proving ground. They possess a certain cachet back at RCMP headquarters in Ottawa, where it is said that if you can survive in “G,” surrounded by thousands of miles of lonely tundra, with Inuit and no one else for company, then you can survive pretty much anywhere.
Ross Gibson was born in Gibsons, British Columbia, of Irish immigrant parents in the year before losephie Flaherty, the greatgrandchild of Irish
Very occasionally, Josephie was asked to act as guide on some Radiosonde expedition. One bright summer day finds him heading out to the quay with the radio operator, Freddy Woodrow, TomManning from the Geodetic Service and two fellow Inuit, an oddity by the name of Noah, who wears an old top hat and has a reputation as a wifebeater, and Soralee, in whose Peterhead the group will travel. There are women washing sealskins down at the quay on that particular day, leaving pools of soap and milky water in the rock-pools beside the shore. The men pass them by, stopping to remark on the weather, the state of the char run, then clambering aboard Soralee's Peterhead, they stow the tents, the Coleman stove, the primus and the
qalunaat
paraphernalia on board and settle in for the journey. The going is good and by early afternoon they are tying up at the Hopewells, where Manning has some surveying to do. Having the remains of the day to themselves, the Inuit men take the Peterhead out char fishing, catch thirteen and get three seal into the bargain. Pitching camp at a respectful distance from the
qalunaat
, beside a tidal lake filled with foul-smelling seaweed on a rocky platform covered in saxifrage, they put out the fish to dry and dine on barbecued seal.
The following morning they head north, past patches of ice blink and water sky, where the drifts of pack ice still remain out in the channel. A sun dog throws a halo of yellow light across the clouds and a tribe of Ungava Canada geese fly by, honking. Soon the low coast of southern Ungava has risen into the grey cliffs of the northern peninsula, a landscape Josephie recalls from his youth but now seldom visits. They stop in the middle of the day on a lonely outcrop of rock, so that Manning can find eider eggs, and by early afternoon they are at sea once again, pressing north towards Cape Smith. There they are slowed by low-hanging cloud and cobwebs of rain-filled mist and decide to put in at the Cape Smith Hudson Bay Company detachment, a neat, white clapboard building in the shadow of a wall of barren pillow lava, where Noah proceeds to mug-up while Josephie and Soralee see to the boat and unpack the
qalunaat's
things. They stay up late that night, sitting on packing boxes, chewing over the old times, long gone and only sometimes missed, but missed sorely when they are. During the return journeyon the following day, the coastal cloud momentarily lifts and Jose-phie finds himself sailing past land which was once, not very long ago, so familiar he would have been hard-pressed to consider it as anything other than an element of himself, the rock skeleton on which his life's body is hung. But he is slipping up now, remembering inlets where there are none, imagining around the next headland some strong feature of his childhood which no longer exists, the landscape requiring a conscious calling to mind where there was once a simple sense of knowing.
As southern Canada wakes up to her northlands so Josephie Flaherty begins, slowly, to forget them.
CHAPTER SIX
I T IS AUTUMN 1952 and Constable Ross Gibson, Royal Canadian Mounted Police number 16593, is stepping off the ski-plane at Inuk-juak and taking in the scene. This is his first Arctic posting. He smells the air, so frail it is almost as if the world into which he has landed is an alternate universe perched above the clouds. Still, he is here, and determined to make the most of it. The Arctic detachments, “G” Division, are a proving ground. They possess a certain cachet back at RCMP headquarters in Ottawa, where it is said that if you can survive in “G,” surrounded by thousands of miles of lonely tundra, with Inuit and no one else for company, then you can survive pretty much anywhere.
Ross Gibson was born in Gibsons, British Columbia, of Irish immigrant parents in the year before losephie Flaherty, the greatgrandchild of Irish
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