This beautiful print most likely illustrates an early episode in the story commonly referred to as “the blind boy and the loon.” In this scene the family’s igloo is attacked by a polar bear, and the young blind man is guided by his sister so that he can take aim to shoot the intruder with his bow and arrow. (Note: Kananginak was under the impression that the image depicted the legendary Baffin Island hunter Tiktaliktak.). Lovingly stencilled by the young Kananginak, the son of the artist, it is no doubt also faithful to Pootoogook’s original drawing. By nature stencil prints are quite different one from the other; this print is a particularly sensitive rendering.

Curator Norman Vorano suggests that this print was possibly the first one created after James Houston’s return from his printmaking research trip to Japan in the spring of 1959. (Kananginak Pootoogook believes the first was another of his father’s prints, Joyfully I see Ten Caribou. Vorano is certain, however, that this print was the first entirely stencil fine art print created at Cape Dorset.

Literature: This image is illustrated in Christine Lalonde and Leslie Boyd Ryan, Uuturautiit: Cape Dorset Celebrates 50 Years of Printmaking (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2009), p. 35, cat. 33; and in Norman Vorano, Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration (Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2011) cat. 19.