by Farley Mowat
“I should have thought of that,” Awasin chuckled.
“Thought of what?” Jamie asked.
“Why, of those bucks,” Awasin replied. “With the mating season coming on, the old fellows get mean. They won’t let a young deer come near them. They probably chased this fellow of ours right down the valley!”
“Well, there’s only bucks left in the country now so I guess we’ll have this youngster with us all winter,” Jamie said. “We ought to give him a name. I’m getting tired of calling him Hey You.”
“How about Otanak!” Awasin suggested. “It means the backward one—the one who got left behind.”
“Good enough,” said Jamie. “Come on, Otanak, no supper for anyone till we get home.”
That night they made plans. They would make their main camp in the hidden valley. There they could build a comfortable cabin and have an unlimited supply of firewood. But still many serious problems remained.
There was the question of food. Finding the herd of bucks in Hidden Valley was a help—if the bucks stayed all winter. But the boys urgently needed prime hides for their winter clothing. Also, and even more important, they had to have a much greater stock of fat to see them through the winter. This meant remaining at Stone Igloo Camp, as the boys now called it, until the bucks had come.
Jamie had been keeping track of the days by cutting little nicks in the edge of the lead sheet from the Viking tomb. Now he did some calculating. “I think it’s about September fifteenth,” he said, “and that means we’ll be lucky if the winter doesn’t hit us in a week. Maybe the bucks have already gone south some other way.”
“I doubt it,” Awasin replied. “The bucks don’t move until the first heavy snow. Then they go fast. We must act quickly when they come.”
The next morning saw two inches of new snow on the ground. After breakfast Awasin climbed inland to get a view up the valley to the north.
For a long time he could see nothing moving over the white stretch of the valley. Then his quick eyes caught a tiny movement in the pale northern skies. He watched till he was sure. “Ravens!” he whispered at last. “The Black Ones—the brothers of the deer are moving.”
He strained his eyes until they hurt, and at last he was rewarded. Many miles to the north he saw something that looked like the flicker of heat waves on an August day. There was no doubt about it now. Far up the river valley the white snows had disappeared and it was as if the whole landscape was moving. A great wave of deer was flowing down the valley with the slow but resistless motion of a wall of lava flowing from a volcano.
Awasin raced back to camp. “An hour—maybe two—and they’ll be here!” he cried breathlessly. “Hurry!”
They put out the fire and scattered the glowing lumps of moss. Everything loose went into the stone igloo. Then they made their way to the gap in the deer fence.
During the preceding days Awasin had visited the stone pillars in the fence and had put a lump of loose sphagnum moss on top of each. Now as the morning breeze played down the valley it stirred the moss and made it seem that each of the pillars was a living thing—a hunter waiting for his prey.
No deer were in sight, but already there was a faint familiar odor—the barnyard stench upon the breeze. Quickly they completed their plans. Jamie was to take the rifle this time, and hide in one of the hunting pits near the gap. With Awasin’s assistance he heaped up a pile of boulders in front of the pit to act as a barrier to the deer.
Awasin had equipped himself with a homemade spear made from a short piece of spruce brought home from Hidden Valley and tipped with his hunting knife. He took up a position on the opposite side of the gap behind a huge square chunk of rock.
They waited, and as the suspense grew, Jamie remembered what old Denikazi had said about the migration of the bucks: “They come like thunder, and for the space of a day the world is theirs. Then like the thunder they are gone, and nothing moves upon the frozen plains till spring returns again.” Jamie knew that every shot would have to count. He crouched low, watching with straining eyes a ridge a half mile to the north that cut off the view up the valley.
Suddenly the crest of the ridge underwent an amazing change. It was as though a forest had sprouted on that naked hill. Thousands upon thousands of twisting branches seemed to be springing from the rocky ground and waving gently in the breeze.
Jamie knew the trees were the antlers of the deer coming up the far slope. He pressed the butt of the rifle tightly against his shoulder.
Now the deer had reached the crest and were breasting it. Their antlers thrust high into the air, and the beasts were moving in such a compact mass that their broad horns formed one impenetrable hedge of bone.
They swept over the ridge and down towards the fence while another mass of beasts replaced them on the crest. In mere moments it seemed to Jamie that the entire world was hidden under the brown bodies of the deer.
The smell was so strong that he began to choke. His ears were deafened by the clicking of ankle joints, and of antlers striking antlers. A kind of panic overwhelmed him and he fired wildly into the throng.
Certain that he must be crushed into pulp beneath those myriad feet, he ran up a small rocky hillock that stood out like an island to breast the approaching flood. From the precarious top of this mound Jamie began firing again.
His shots had no perceptible effect. Six or seven animals reared up momentarily, then disappeared beneath the press of bodies. The caribou were too tightly compressed, and too imbued by the urge of the moment, to pay any attention to the puny efforts of a boy and a gun. They did not swerve, nor slow. Irresistible as the sea itself they flowed steadily forward.
Awasin, on his side of the gap, was almost as overcome as Jamie had been. He too was afraid of being trampled to death, but his hunting training came to his rescue. Yelling like a fiend, he leaped to his feet and began thrusting with his homemade spear at the beasts that hemmed him in. Soon a mound of bodies grew up about him like the breastwork of a fortress. The deer continued past, swirling about the islet where the Indian boy stood, soaked in blood, and wild with the excitement of the moment.
Jamie, on his pinnacle of rock, had begun to realize that there was no real danger. The bucks made no attempt to harm him. He believed he could have descended from his rock and stood in the middle of the multitude and been unharmed, for the deer would have flowed around him, leaving him untouched. Just the same he stayed where he was, but his panic was gone. Now he fired only an occasional shot when a particularly fat buck came close by. After half an hour he stopped. Enough deer were dead.
The endless movement of the deer began to hypnotize him. He sat still as a statue while the tremendous impact of the spectacle gradually registered on his mind. The heaving, seething sea of antlers and brown backs flowed on. Time passed like light. The flood poured on…
It must have been several hours later that Jamie looked down from his perch and saw no living deer. Instead he saw the bloody figure of Awasin walking toward him. Stiffly Jamie lowered himself from the rocks.
The world was very still and motionless.
They met beneath the rock pile and said not a word to each other. Silently they walked back to their camp, each alone with his own thoughts. Never, while they lived, would they forget this day—for they had looked deeply into one of the great mysteries of the animal world.
CHAPTER 17
Building a Home
NEITHER HAD MUCH APPETITE FOR dinner. The reaction from the slaughter was so great that they did not even talk of preparing the meat they had killed. They had seen too much blood that day, and too much death.
The sound of foxes barking finally aroused them.
“They’re up by the gap,” Jamie said after listening for a while, “eating the deer, I guess. Maybe we should go back and fix things up.”
Awasin slowly nodded his head. “That’s right,” he replied at last. “We have to finish the job. If we let those deer go to waste now we’ll be no better than murderers.�
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It was a long job and an unpleasant one. For the next four days they were constantly busy either at the carcasses of the forty-seven bucks they had killed, or at Stone Igloo Camp, where they were preparing the meat and the prime hides. There was still enough heat in the pale sun to dry partly the fine hides taken from the bucks, and the frosts at night were heavy enough so that no special care was needed with the meat. It was merely packed away under rock piles near the camp.
The biggest task was the preparation of the fat. They kept the fire going all day, and for most of each night. The tea-billy hung over the fire all the time, filled with fat.
There were two kinds of fat, and they had to be prepared separately. The suet could simply be cut into chunks and boiled until it became liquid. Every now and again Jamie would pour off the hot grease into the frying pan, which he had fixed in the moss on a piece of ice. When the pan cooled he had another five-pound slab of suet to add to the steadily growing pile.
The most valuable fat was what could be boiled out of the bone marrow. They had collected all the leg bones and, using the hatchet, Awasin smashed these to pulp. Jamie then boiled them and skimmed off the rich yellow stuff that floated to the surface. It was slow work because the tea pail was so small, but at the end of the fourth day they had ten blocks of marrowfat that was soft and creamy and tasted rather like butter. In addition they had thirty blocks of hard, waxy lard melted down from the body fat.
During this period they continued to lift the net each day. Since the weather was now cold enough to preserve the fish, they did not bother trying to dry them, but simply cleaned them and rocked them down. But on a morning near the end of September there was an inch of ice over the little bay in the river and the net came out for the last time. The big lake too was frozen over, and the only open water was at the rapids.
Now it was time to move into Hidden Valley. One cold, bright day, accompanied by Otanak, they set off, carrying some camp equipment, their tools, and a week’s supply of food. All the rest of their stores lay under rock caches, or were carefully stowed away in the stone igloo. Later, when the snows were deep, they planned to build a sled to carry the remainder of their supplies to Hidden Valley.
Before leaving, Jamie took a careful inventory of the stock of food. It made a most impressive total.
Over a hundred whitefish and trout had been partly dried or smoked, and nearly as many fresh trout were frozen under the moss. Packed away in the stone igloo were two hundred pounds of lard and marrowfat; sixty pounds of dried deermeat; some pemmican; forty pounds of dry berries; fifteen pounds of Labrador tea; and a good pile of deer tongues. The deerskins and the hanks of sinew were also stored away in the igloo.
Scattered about near the camp were half a dozen stone caches containing the balance of the deermeat. It was a good big larder—more than sufficient, and as long as it was available the boys would never starve.
In Hidden Valley they at once set about picking a site for their cabin. The valley was divided into three parts, like beads strung along the esker ridge. Each of these parts had its section of forest and one or more small lakes. The center section soon proved itself the best. Behind a ten-acre stand of trees an abrupt cliff shielded the spot from the north. And right in the center of the woods was a little lake, big enough to supply drinking water and so well protected that there was a chance it might not freeze clear to the bottom even in midwinter. The esker, that natural highway, ran right past the small lake and anyone living in this spot could travel to either end of the valley in less than an hour.
At dusk they pitched a temporary camp in the woods, and that night they lay by a roaring spruce fire, making plans.
With the dawn they were up and anxious to get to work. They chose a small clearing in the center of the woods, near the lake, where the ground was fairly level. Then they separated into the forest to seek out, and blaze, enough trees for the cabin walls.
It was then they began to realize that the job was not going to be so easy after all. There was lots of timber, but it was of an unusual kind. The trees were thick at the base but the trunks tapered very sharply—like inverted icecream cones—towards the tops. Slow growth, and the struggle with the elements, had made them this way. There were practically no straight logs the proper length for cabin walls. Also, the little hatchet had never been meant for chopping down trees a foot in diameter. It took them a full hour of backbreaking labor to chew down their first tree. Then it took another hour to chop off the gnarled and stone-hard branches. By dusk, which fell in early afternoon, they had one tree down—but the log they cut from it was too heavy to be dragged back to the cabin site.
Dispirited and miserable, they sat about the fire that evening. They had hoped to have their cabin built in a week or ten days, but now they realized that it might be springtime before they were ready to move in. They were a gloomy pair as they stretched their sore muscles and shivered in the night frost.
After a long, glum silence, Jamie spoke. “Well,” he said, “we must make up our minds that we can’t do it. At least not the way we planned.”
Morosely, Awasin agreed. The original plan had been to build a cabin twelve feet square, laying the logs up in rows and notching them at the corners. This would have required fourteen-foot logs in order to allow for the overlap at the ends. Now the boys had found they could hardly manage to chop down a tree that would make a fourteen-foot log, and if they managed that much, the log was not only too heavy to haul back to camp, but its ends differed so much in size that it was almost useless anyway.
Jamie sat looking into the fire. Occasionally he glanced up at the black walls of the forest in front of him. “Look at all that wood,” he said, “standing up there as thick as hairs on a dog’s back.” Then slowly an idea began to take form in his mind. “If those trees were only a few inches apart, instead of five or six feet apart,” he thought, “they’d form a solid upright wall!” He considered the idea for a moment longer.
Then he jumped up and shouted. “That’s it! We’ll set the logs on end, then we won’t need them more than six or seven feet long!”
Thinking it out as he went along, Jamie explained his idea in detail. Awasin grew enthusiastic and began adding ideas of his own. They talked for an hour, and when they finally crawled under the deerskins for the night they were in a cheerful and happy mood. The new plan looked like the answer.
Now they wanted logs ranging from five to eight feet long, and these could be cut from much smaller trees. After three days of constant hacking and chopping they had a pile of twenty or thirty logs beside their chosen site. Then they began construction.
The work was largely a matter of trial and error, and there were some fierce arguments about the ways and means. Jamie wanted to use two living trees, that were about the right distance apart, for the back corner posts. Awasin wanted the cabin centered in the clearing, and he won out. The first chore was to dig four holes (using the frying pan as a shovel), as deep as possible, at the four corners. This was not difficult, since the clearing was on a thick bed of sand washed down from the esker and there was no permanent ground frost in it. When the holes were down three feet and touching solid rock, they carefully erected the corner posts. The two in front were seven feet above the ground level, while the two back posts stuck up only five feet.
The next job was to tie pairs of saplings crosswise between each pair of corner poles—one sapling inside and one outside in each pair. There were two pairs for each wall, a lower pair a foot above the ground and an upper pair a foot from the tops of the corner posts.
Jamie had been about to use the precious rope for the tying job until Awasin stopped him. “Babiche will do that job better,” Awasin said, and he set about making some Indian rope.
First of all he took a deer hide and scraped and cut all the hair from it. Next he soaked it till it was soft, pegged it out on the ground, and made a slit in the edge near one corner. From here he began a spiral knife-cut that went round and round, cutting off
a strip about an inch in width. By the time Awasin had reached the center of the hide, he had a piece of skin an inch wide and almost a hundred feet in length.
He soaked this for an hour in warm water, then took it in his hands and rolled it between his palms, starting at one end and working along to the other. Back and forth he went, and as the hide slowly dried it began to form a round, rawhide rope a quarter inch thick and as strong as the best hemp line.
When a piece was needed, they soaked it until it was soft, then tied the logs in place. As the rawhide dried it shrank, and the joint became as tight as if it had been spiked.
The work went very slowly. After two days of building the boys had only the framework completed. It measured ten feet square, seven feet high in front and five feet at the back.
The next chore was cutting the wall logs. These had to be a little smaller than the corner logs, so that they could be slipped between the horizontal pairs of saplings. The back wall was fairly easy, for all the logs in it were the same length, but the sides were another matter, since they sloped from front to back, and each new log had to be a different length from its neighbor.
It took three days to build each side wall, and two days each for the back and front walls.
The door was easy. They simply left out four of the upright logs in the center of the front wall. For a window there was a narrow opening, one log deep, covered with a thinly scraped piece of deerskin to let in a little light.
Ten days after beginning construction, the walls were up. And it was none too soon. On the tenth day the boys had to make a trip to Stone Igloo Camp for more food, and when they emerged from Hidden Valley they were startled by the change in the world below them. The plains had vanished beneath a heavy fall of snow. The lakes and rivers had disappeared as well, and only slight depressions in the white blanket showed where they had been.