People of the Deer

by Farley Mowat

  Next to him stood the children, Kunee, Pama and Anoteelik, who were the visible expression of the Ihalmiut’s waning will to live. Behind the children was Iktuk, wife, mother and source of new life—yet her work was nearly done, for the children were old enough to live without her aid.

  Then came the dogs, the precious dogs, the three survivors of a once good team. These three scrawny things were treasures and irreplaceable. Mobility was their potential in the family, and without their power to move across the frozen land, not even a great hunter could survive for long.

  That was the family then—except for the old woman, Epeetna. What was her place? Nothing more secure than the niche that love and filial affection could ensure for her, and these emotions die readily enough when hunger closes its inexorable jaws.

  On the night after Angleyalak’s return with the two birds, the old woman did not sleep. It was her time, and she had waited for it through too many starving years. She had looked forward with a hard relief to death and this night her seeking ended in a wall of snow. Yet now that it was time, fear rose within her—the fear that is so strong in the old, and which makes the terror of young men in danger look pallid and a sham.

  It was not long before the members of her family took refuge from their bellies’ agony in sleep. But the old woman sat on and stared unseeingly over their quiet forms. She heard the whimpers of little Kunee and the uneasy mutters of the man, her son. But most clearly did she hear the whisper of the sand-like snow as the never-ending winds drove it along the polished curve of the igloo’s dome. The harsh rustle filled her hearing until she was no longer conscious of the little human sounds. The snow noise rose in gradual ascension and, as it grew, so grew her fear of death.

  The long night was nearly over when the skeletal guardians of the passageway, the dogs, lifted gaunt heads and cowered against the snow blocks to leave the passage free for her. And the old woman passed out of the igloo into the darkness. The ground drift of driving snow enveloped her and the darkness grew about her. She stood naked but for her fur trousers, and now she loosened these and they slipped soundlessly into the drifts. The wind whined like a beast in pain, and the darkness drew about her frail and tortured form.

  When morning came, no one in the family spoke of her. Not even the child Kunee made reference to the missing face. But later, when the brief half-light of day was upon them, Angleyalak went out alone into the snow, and he stood facing the wind with his amulet belt wound tightly about his waist. And then he spoke the words that he had learned as a child in the great and populous camps of the People, he spoke the phrases that he had been taught to say over the newly dead.

  That was in mid-March. It was the time when the days grow slightly longer and when the eternal winter winds usually drop and die away for days on end. Yet on this year the winds forgot their place and mounted steadily, until the whole world that was the Barrens became a single roaring wind without cessation.

  Had there been game to hunt, no man could have ventured out to hunt that game. In the igloo of Angleyalak, the family huddled under the skin robes upon the sleeping bench— and waited.

  By day there was a faint pallid glow to lighten the still gloom of the snow house. By night there was nothing, for there was no deer fat to burn in the little lamp. The wind rang on the snow walls with such devilish persistence that its voice at last ceased to be heard and became one with a growing silence. The dogs no longer stirred, but lay in tightly curled, half-frozen balls, with noses under tails, sleeping the unconscious sleep of those who near the end of hunger.

  The two birds were eaten. The children had the balance of their meat, but Angleyalak had a small share. The guts and feathers went to the dogs and only Iktuk ate nothing. Her husband tried to make her eat his own slim portion but she turned from him coughing blood, and would not eat.

  A week after the old woman had left the place, Iktuk could no longer stir except to cough. It was at this time that Angleyalak went to the igloo of Ootek, which stood only a few hundred feet away, and he had trouble finding that igloo because the ground drift—the never-ending ground drift—obscured the way like a thick mist.

  In Ootek’s igloo there were the man, his young wife, Howmik, and a child who was still nursing at her dried-up breasts. Ootek himself had eaten nothing for twelve days, and the scraps of old robes that had been boiled over the last handful of willow twigs had gone to the two who could not live without each other. This was the third child of Ootek, and the first one that had lived a full year’s span. Hunger had taken the others in their time, and now Ootek was prepared to disregard the law which says that first the hunter must be fed.

  Angleyalak spoke to Ootek and they debated, quietly and with long intervals between their words, some course of action they might take. They knew Franz was away on his distant trap lines and they knew that he might not return to his camp for a month or more. And that would be too late. But now Ootek remembered hearing of a white man who had recently built a tiny trading post some ten days’ journey to the east, in order to trade with the coastal Eskimos who sometimes wintered inland from the sea. It seemed to Ootek that they should forsake the Little Hills and make their way eastward, seeking to escape from death. Yet when Angleyalak heard this suggestion he could not agree to it. He knew that he could not join Ootek and the rest, for Iktuk could no longer walk and Angleyalak had no dogs with strength to pull the sled.

  A week later there were still four igloos on the shores of Ootek’s Lake, but only one of these held human life. The People from the other three had set out toward the east in a forlorn and nearly hopeless struggle for survival, with the inexorable presence of destruction close upon their wavering trail.

  In the remaining igloo, Iktuk wakened suddenly from a long sleep, and she would have screamed in terror at what she saw, but her thin blood ran backward down her throat and choked the scream. The others slept beside her and did not stir, for only Iktuk had glimpsed the devil who had come for her.

  Struggling terribly, she gained a brief control of her choking lungs and in a wild paroxysm, she forced the life-giving fluids from her chest. The hemorrhage flowed heavily from her gasping mouth, dripped over the edge of the sleeping ledge, fell, and froze instantly upon the floor.

  In the middle of the day which followed, Angleyalak awoke and found his wife’s body frozen in a grotesque contortion on the snow below the ledge. He tried desperately to drag it out of the igloo before the children woke but he could not bend the legs and arms that had been flung out from the body in the last convulsive efforts of its life. He could not move his wife and so, for the little time which remained to him, he could look down upon the bloody face of one whom he had loved so greatly that he had dared remain on at this place, instead of following the faint hope that had taken all the other People to the east.

  A dog had also died that night, so it was eaten. The children ate the dry and bitter meat of the dog that died of hunger, and Angleyalak ate just enough to keep his strength in hand for what remained. A week passed and the other dogs were killed before they grew so thin that they became completely useless to the living. March passed into April and at long last the winds retired and in the daytime the sun shone clearly, growing higher in the winter-faded sky.

  The last of the dog meat was eaten and one morning Angleyalak took his old rifle and crawled out the door tunnel into the light of day. The hunter was going hunting once again. Dragging the rifle behind him, he crawled weakly over the ice-hard snow and he had gone perhaps a hundred yards, his eyes half-blinded by the glare, when he saw movement on a ridge ahead of him. Trembling with weakness and with hope, he raised his ancient gun, steadied it briefly and fired at the miraculous vision of the caribou that stood watchfully before him.

  The children, huddled together in the igloo, heard no shot for none was fired. They ate no meat that day—for there had been no deer. And in the white brilliance of the day, the thing that
was Angleyalak grew stiff, beside the old and useless gun which still pointed to the unblemished drifts where the hunter had seen the last of all his deer.

  It was just after dawn of the following day when Franz reached Ootek’s Lake. He made at once for Ootek’s igloo, but when he found its tunnel drifted in with snow he knew the People had gone elsewhere, perhaps to Halo’s Lake, and so he prepared to travel south again to his own distant camp. He swung his dogs along the shore, but when one of them raised its head and howled, Franz glanced off to the side and saw a brown, shapeless hummock on the snow. At first he thought it was a wolverine and he slipped his rifle free of its case. But the brown thing did not stir and when Franz reached it, he recognized the man.

  Franz feared the dead, for his Indian blood runs strongly through the imagery of his white man’s mind. He did not touch the frozen corpse, but turned his dogs back until he came to the igloo of Angleyalak. The passageway was open, though only a narrow cleft remained free of drifts. Fearful of what lay under the still dome, Franz called aloud, but got no answer. He would have turned and fled from the place then, but faintly he heard a sound, as of an animal that has been maimed and left for dead.

  Franz tied his dogs. Then, summoning all his courage, he wormed his way down the long passage that was nearly filled with drifted snow. He came in time to save the younger children. They were both awake, and waiting for their father. Now dimly they saw that he returned, and the whimpers of the little girl grew louder.

  Franz covered Pama’s frozen corpse and the horrible body of Iktuk with some skins taken from the ledge, and then he stayed a full day in that igloo. He fed the two bony things he had found on soup, cooked on his Primus stove—and he waited patiently while the two children retched it up again; then he once more fed them soup until their rebellious stomachs would accept the nourishment. He kept the tiny stove going at full heat until the igloo’s dull walls brightened and filmed with ice, as the temperature rose rapidly. The little girl held out her hands to him, trembling little talons that were white with frost, and Franz massaged them gently till some warmth returned.

  By the next day the children were already displaying the incredible resilience of the very young. Franz did not dare linger any longer for he had no dog feed on his sled, and little enough food for himself. Also there were the presences of Iktuk, Pama and Angleyalak. A hundred miles lay between Franz and Windy Camp and he was anxious to begin the trek.

  He unloaded and cached the frozen corpses of a dozen white foxes from his sled, and in their place he spread out his own robes with the two children carefully wrapped amongst them. Then he drove south from Ootek’s Lake, and in two days was lighting a wood fire in the stove by Windy Bay.

  Hans came in from his trap line a short time afterwards, and if he was surprised to find the children at the cabin, he did not show it. In a few days he found himself left alone with the orphans, for Franz had forgotten his old anger against the People, and he had forgotten his impatience with their improvident ways. The finding of Kunee and Anoteelik had wrought a great change in him and as soon as he was satisfied that the children would be secure during his absence, he hitched up his dogs again and drove back to the Little Hills.

  At Katelo’s igloo, on the banks of Kakumee Lake, he found starvation had reached the ultimate limits before death intervenes. Franz distributed part of the flour and meat that he had brought with him, then drove on to all the occupied igloos he could find, giving to the family in each enough food to prevent immediate disaster. At Ootek Lake and at Halo Lake there was still no sign of life and Franz had no knowledge of what had happened to the families who had once been there.

  When the food was distributed—and it was only a miserable handout, though it was all Franz had—he returned at once to Windy Bay and after one day’s rest, drove southward on the three-hundred-mile journey to the nearest outpost of white men. This was a tiny trading post at Deer Lake, run by a young half-breed manager who was himself completely isolated from the world in winter, except that he had an ancient short-wave radio over which it was sometimes possible to transmit his halting signals in Morse code.

  Franz reached Deer Lake in seven days, and of those seven, he spent three fighting a spring blizzard. Once at the post, he and the manager labored over a message that would tell the outside world of the plight of the Ihalmiut. It was a message of great importance—for it was to be the first message ever to go out from the inland plains; the first cry for help in all the centuries that the People had lived their hidden lives within the land. Franz was the first of those—traders, trappers or missionaries who had heard of the People and their plight—to take it on himself to seek help for them. He was the first to care.

  The message went out slowly, each word tapped out two or three times. At Churchill the big radio station picked it up and relayed it south. The days were passing and Franz waited at Deer Lake for the answer which was so long delayed. The days were passing.

  As to what happened to the message—who can say? At first, no doubt, the authorities were skeptical of its validity, and in any case one must investigate before one spends the funds of government. Also it was the first time that the authorities had been called on to help the inland People—“Why should they need help now, after all these years?” But at last the wheels began to turn. A message was dispatched to The Pas. An aircraft was hired and a flight was made. That flight failed. A second flight was made and a plane landed at the extreme south end of Nueltin and unloaded its supplies.

  Meanwhile Franz had been expecting an aircraft from Churchill, the direct and shortest route, and when he heard that someone had sent a plane from The Pas instead, he left Deer Lake to find the cache which had been made over two hundred miles short of its destination. Time was running out.

  Franz traveled over a hundred miles to find the cache, and when he found it he discovered that it consisted largely of things that would be of no aid to the dying men and women in the camps. There were white beans; sacks of white beans, for people who had no fuel for fires and whose world was still one of ice and snow.

  Loading his tired dogs with the things that could be used, Franz started north again: two hundred miles of bitter driving, with the spring thaws already making progress very difficult.

  Time had been running out.

  Franz had traveled almost a thousand miles on behalf of the People. He came to the camps again in time to learn that Eepuk, Aljut, Uktilohik, Elaitutna, Epeetna, Okinuk, Oquinuk and Homoguluk—people he knew well—had not been able to await his corning. It was spring. These dead ones were buried under rock piles where the snow had left the ridges. There were others, too, who did not have the benefit of graves, but whose bodies were attended to by wolves and wolverines, so that their spirits may never know the rest that comes only to those who are buried properly. In the camps where these had died there had been none left to bury them.

  Franz had done much for the Ihalmiut, and in so doing had done much for himself. The old bitterness and anger, the legacy of his own treatment at the hands of white men, was all gone. No, not quite gone, but turned against those who deserved it, and no longer against the People of the Little Hills.

  As for the People—it was only another spring for them, no different from twoscore springs which had been theirs during the last half-century.

  And there was something to balance the ledger this time, for now a message had gone out. Now the government could not ignore the People any longer, nor plead ignorance of the charges who had been placed in its care by the white man’s law. The message had gone out. The response to it had been too slow, and badly bungled, but at least there had been a response; and at long last the government acknowledged that in the great plains there lived a people who were its wards.

  Fifty years of darkness had intervened between the time of Tyrrell’s visit and this belated recognition of the People he had found. Now half a century of casual forgetfulne
ss was at an end, and for the second time in their long history as squatters in this land of ours, the existence of the Ihalmiut was admitted. And surely this was a bright victory for the conscience of our race, not dimmed or clouded because that victory came too late to do more than prolong the last dying spasms of the People of the Little Hills.

  4. The Lifeblood of the Land

  On the day following the arrival of Hans and the children, I was awakened by the sound of heavy firing. The crash of gunshots intruded itself into my dreams until I thought I was again back in the Italian hills, listening to an exchange of rifle fire between the German outposts and our own. When I came to full consciousness the firing remained, so I hurriedly pulled on my clothes and went out into the June morning.

  Franz, Anoteelik and Hans were sitting on the ridge above the cabin and they were steadily firing their rifles across the river. On the sloping southern bank nearly a hundred deer, all does, were milling in stupid anxiety. I could see the gray bursts of dust as bullets sang off the rocks, and I could hear the flat thud of bullets going home in living flesh.

  The nearest animals were waist-deep in the fast brown water and could not return to shore, for the press of deer behind cut off retreat. The does that were still on land were running in short, futile starts, first east then west again, and it was some time before they began to gallop with long awkward strides, along the riverbank. Their ponderous bellies big with fawn swung rhythmically as they fled upstream, for their time was nearly on them.

  When the last of the straggling herd had passed out of range beyond the first bend of the river, the firing stopped and the three hunters ran down the bank and hurriedly began to clear the snow away from the green back of a canoe, which lay beside the cabin. I helped them and in a few moments the canoe was free and ready for the water. Franz and I pushed off into the still-flooded river, and we worked with all our power to gain the other bank before the current could sweep us out into the opening bay. It was hard and exciting work, but even in the fury of that struggle I had time to notice that the water was not all brown. Long, tenuous, crimson streamers were flowing down the river, fading and disappearing as they joined the full flow of the current. We grounded on the opposite shore and leaped into the water to beach the canoe, out of the river’s grasp.