by Farley Mowat
The excitement of the shooting, and of the river crossing, ebbed as suddenly as it had risen and I stood on the rough rocks along the slope and looked down on the dead and dying deer. There were a dozen of them lying in my sight along the shore. Their blood was still pumping thickly into the foam-flecked eddies at the river’s edge, for only two of them were dead. The rest lay quivering on the rocks and lifted heavy heads to watch us blankly or, struggling to their feet, plunged forward only to fall again.
It was a sight of slaughter and of horror, and the knowledge that each of these dying beasts was swollen with young did not make the bloody spectacle easier to bear. I was seeing the blood of the land flow for the first time, but though my eyes were still those of a stranger and I was sickened by the sight, Franz was quite unperturbed. Rapidly, and with the agility of a deer himself, he leapt among the rocks to reach the cripples. He carried a short-bladed knife and as he reached each wounded doe he made one dexterous thrust into the back of her neck and neatly severed the spinal cord running inside the vertebrae. It was efficient and it was mercifully quick. Within ten minutes all the wounded animals lay still and Franz began the task of cutting up the meat.
One long stroke sufficed to open up the bellies. The sharp blade was used with such control that while it split the skin, it did not even mark the soft tissues of the swollen stomachs, distended with the fermenting leaves and lichens that the deer had fed upon. Then, reaching a bare arm into the hot cavities, Franz disemboweled each beast with one strong pull. Carefully he removed the livers and the kidneys and, using his knife as a chopper, he severed the hindquarters from the trunks. Leaving the forelimbs untouched, he sliced through the skin under the chins and cut out the heavy tongues.
I watched with fascination and repulsion, but so sure were all Franz’s movements and so deft his touch, that the horror of the scene began to dull. I was filled with admiration for the man’s skill. Though I did not know it then, I was watching a man of Tyrrell’s deer people do his work, for Franz had learned his knacker’s arts at the hands of the Ihalmiut, who are, in truth, a People of the Deer.
In less than twenty minutes all the carcasses were drawn and we were carrying the hindquarters to the shore. Where half an hour ago a herd of living deer had stood, now there were only shapeless, bloody heaps of meat that steamed gently upon the melting snow. The transition was too quick to have its full effect upon me then, and by the time I had lived in the land long enough to understand the truth behind a killing such as this, I too came to view it through Northern eyes, and to recognize the stark utility of death. But now it was my first spring in the Barrens, and the deer had returned. With their coming the long hiatus that life suffers during the interminable winter months was over. Outside the cabin the meat-hungry dogs raised their gaunt faces and howled exuberantly as each new change of breeze brought the strong smell of deer.
Kunee and Anoteelik were in an ecstasy. Anoteelik rushed knee-deep into the swollen river to help us land and eagerly snatched up a piece of still-warm meat and wolfed it down with feverish excitement. I remembered that this was the first fresh meat he had tasted in long months, and Anoteelik had not yet forgotten those starvation days by Ootek’s Lake. Kunee was not far behind him, and I cannot describe the emotions that filled me as I watched this girl-child with a knife in one hand and a great chunk of dripping back meat in the other, stuffing her little face and burping like an old club man after a gargantuan meal.
For the first time Hans showed some animation. He smiled. I do not know whether it was from pleasure in the killing or from anticipation of fresh food. His smile was—well, expressionless.
Franz too was smiling as we unloaded the heavy cargo and he shouted at Kunee to get a fire going. A new spirit of enthusiasm and fresh life was in the place, as if new blood flowed through the veins of those about me. Even I was stung by an emotion I could not analyze, and I felt alive as I have never felt before.
The fire had just been lit and a pot of deer tongues just set to boil when a wild babble from the dogs brought me outside again. This time I looked directly to the crossing, and where the butchery had taken place there was a great new herd of does milling as it came up against the stream.
This time there was no shooting, though Hans could hardly restrain his urge to take up a rifle and empty it again. The deer seemed to ignore the cabin that stood in full view and in a minute they had all taken to the stream. Heavy as they were, they swam buoyantly and powerfully so that they made the crossing without losing ground and landed literally in our own front yard.
The dogs became insane and threatened to tear their tethering posts out of the frozen ground. The deer paid them, and us, but little heed. Splitting into two groups, they flowed past the cabin, enveloping it for a brief instant in their midst. The stink of barnyard was strong in our nostrils as they passed, then they were gone beyond the ridge.
In less than an hour I had seen so many deer that it seemed as if the world was full of them, but I had seen nothing yet. That afternoon Franz took me on his sled and we drove warily along the rotten shore ice of the bay, to the Ghost Hills. The heat was remarkably intense; at noon the thermometer had reached 100; and so we wore nothing but thin trousers and cotton shirts. Water lay deep upon the ice and the sled was really more of a boat than a land conveyance. An hour’s travel took us to the north shore of the bay, and here we tied the dogs and climbed a long gentle ridge that faced the south. Below us lay Windy Bay, and beyond it the shattered slopes of the Ghost Hills. It was a scene to be recorded on gray paper, for the growing things had not been able to keep pace with the precipitate transition of the seasons, and the subtle overlay of color that would suffuse the summer plains had not yet begun to flow. The rotting surface of the ice was dark, but framed in ivory drifts, still lingering on the shores and in a thousand gullys and ravines. The hills were dun-colored heights sheathed in rock and long-dead lichens, with startlingly black patches of dwarf spruce spotted along their lower slopes. To the north, the plains sank into white and snow-filled hollows, hiding the muskegs and ponds; then lifted to reveal a hueless and leaden waste that stretched to the horizon.
From our vantage point all of this achromatic world lay somberly below us as we waited for the coming of the deer. We had not long to wait. Franz caught my arm and pointed to the convoluted slopes of the distant southern hills, and I could just discern a line of motion. It seemed to me that the slopes were sliding gently downward to the bay, as if the innumerable boulders that protruded from the hills had suddenly been set adrift to roll, in slow motion, down upon the ice. I watched intently, not certain whether the sun’s glare had begun to affect my eyes so that they played fool tricks on me. Then the slow avalanches reached the far shore and debouched over the bay. I tried to count the little dots. Ten, fifty, a hundred, three hundred—and I gave up. In broken twisted lines, in bunched and beaded ropes, the deer streamed out onto the ice until they were moving north across a front of several miles.
From that distance they barely seemed to move, and yet in a few minutes they had reached the center of the bay and had begun to take on shape. I had binoculars, but in my preoccupation with the spectacle below I had not thought to use them. Now I lifted the glasses to my eyes. The long skeins dissolved at once into endless rows of deer, each following upon the footsteps of the animals ahead. Here and there along the lines a yearling kept its place beside a mother who was swollen with the new fawn she carried. There were no bucks. All these animals were does, all pregnant, all driving inexorably toward the north and the flat plains where they would soon give birth.
The leaders reached our shore and began the ascent, but across the bay the avalanche continued and grew heavier. The surface of the bay, for six miles east and west, had become one undulating mass of animals, and still they came.
Without hurry, but without pause, unthinking, but directly driven, they filed down to the ice and, following the tracks of those w
ho had crossed first, made for our shore. Highways began to grow. The black ice was pounded and shattered until it again became white with broken crystals. The broad roads stretched across the bay, multiplied, grew into one another until at length they disappeared and the whole sweep of ice was one great road.
The herds were swelling past our lookout now. Ten paces from us, five, then we were forced to stand and wave our arms to avoid being trampled on. The does gazed briefly and incuriously at us, swung a few feet away and passed on to the north without altering their gait.
Hours passed like minutes. The flow continued at an unbroken level until the sun stood poised on the horizon’s rim. And I became slowly conscious of a great apathy. Life, my life and that of Franz, of all living things I knew, seemed to have become meaningless. For here was life on such a scale that it was beyond all comprehension. It numbed my mind and left me feeling as if the inanimate world had been saturated with a reckless prodigality in that sacred and precious thing called life. I thought of the twelve deer slaughtered on the banks of Windy River and I no longer felt horror or disgust. I felt nothing for the dead who were drowned beyond memory in this living flow of blood that swept across the plains.
It was nearly dusk when we roused ourselves. We walked silently to the sled and I felt a little sick. I began to doubt the reality of the vision I had seen. The ice had begun to freeze as the sun went down and the sled bumped so wickedly over the endless hoofprints that I was forced to run along behind it. A dozen times we passed close to a late herd of deer and each time the dogs, in defiance of Franz, lunged in pursuit and could be halted only when we overturned the sled to hold them back. There was no doubt about it—the vision had been real.
That night I sat for a long time on the ridge behind the cabin, smoking and thinking of that vision. I knew little of the People of the Deer as yet, and now that I had seen the herds, I was aware that I knew nothing of the deer themselves. The People and the deer fused in my mind, an entity. I found I could not think of one without the other, and so by accident I stumbled on the secret of the Ihalmiut before I had even met them. I believe it was this vague awareness of the indivisibility of the Barrens People and the caribou that made my later attempts to understand the Eskimos yield fruit.
Since the time of the first arctic explorations, la Foule—the Throng—has baffled the curiosity of men. Unlike the immense herds of the prairie buffalo, whose habits were open to the eyes of human intruders, the caribou have always remained wrapped in an aura of mystery that has never quite been penetrated. It was known that at certain times of the year, and in certain places, the deer would suddenly appear in herds which blanketed the land. Then, in a few days, they would be gone again. Where had they gone? Well, to the north, the south, or to the east and west, but to what destinations and for what reasons, no one knew.
But as time passed a rough pattern began to emerge from all the conflicting tales told about the deer, and it became known that most of the great herds summered on the plains of the open Barrens and, for the most part, wintered southward inside the protecting timber of the high arctic forests. These two movements were known, but after I had been a year in the Barrens, yet another movement became obvious to me—a migration that I shall discuss in detail later on.
The does, moving up from the forests to cross the mouth of Windy Bay in the first weeks of spring, soon began to disappear and there came a week when only little bands of stragglers, the sterile does, were seen. These did not hurry, for they were not driven by the compulsion of their swollen bellies. Old does, and those that had not been bred, passed gently by but on their heels there came a new upsurge. The bucks arrived. For a few days the hard-packed crossing places were again so thickly carpeted by the brown backs of animals that the ice could not be seen. Then suddenly the bucks too had passed our camp, following the trails of their does, who were even then giving birth on the flat lands five hundred miles to the north of us. The bucks passed, and that was the end of the spring migration, though stragglers continued to come our way for many weeks.
The beasts that passed under my eyes that spring were hardly things of beauty. Their rough coats were molting, and in places the passage through the thick forests had rubbed the winter hair away from great patches of black skin. The distended bellies of the does and the ugly bovine heads of all the animals, quite without antlers in the spring, bore no resemblance to the graceful shapes that our minds conjure up at the word “deer.” Certainly these caribou were not graceful, swift-limbed animals; and yet their long and knobby legs, with huge splayed feet, carried them over the rough land with a deceptive speed and sureness.
Nor did their manners make them more attractive. Does, fawns and bucks, without exception, enlivened the long day’s trek with a ceaseless succession of belly noises that made each herd seem like one noisy knot of rampant indigestion. The belly rumblings formed an undertone to the castanet-like clatter of their feet, for the “ankles” of caribou are fitted with a loose cartilage that, when they move, emits a clicking noise not unlike the muted sound of rocks being tapped against each other, under water.
By the end of June the last stragglers, the wounded and the sick, had passed by Windy Bay, leaving the land about our camp to countless flocks of ducks, gulls and sandpipers who kept up a constant cry and movement over the little ponds and the softening muskeg bogs. The snow was gone by then, yet the passage of the deer was still remembered, for the low bogs had been so cut and torn by the pounding hoofs that areas of moss, covering acres in extent, had been churned to chocolate-colored puddings of ancient peat, torn from its frozen sleep and left to melt under the heat of a forgotten sun. The heavy stench of barnyards hung over such spots as these for many weeks.
Even the surfaces of the great ridges, paved with frost-shattered rocks, clearly showed the eternal passage of the deer. Trails crossed and intersected everywhere, so that in all the country it was difficult to find a single square yard of land which did not bear the deep impress of a long-used trail. Even on solid rock the trails were clearly marked and some had been worn into the gray gneiss for a foot in depth.
But while the land at Windy Bay was given over to birds, the anxious does had borne their fawns on the chosen ground of the high flat plains that lie to the south of Baker Lake and Thelon River. The fawns were with the herds, grunting and coughing about their restless mothers. These precocious children can outrun a man within hours of their birth and can give even the great arctic wolf a difficult pursuit. It is well for them that they are so forward, for many of their mothers are singularly lacking in maternal instincts and it sometimes happens that the does desert their young in the face of danger. So it is not uncommon to meet young fawns roaming alone in the wide spaces of the plains. These lost youngsters will attach themselves to men and follow them for hours, for, like all caribou, the fawns are cursed with a great curiosity about things better left alone.
When the fawning is done with, the restless urge that brought the Throng northward still remains upon it. Now the great herds split into little groups which remain forever on the move. In eddies and milling crowds they circle aimlessly across hundreds of miles of tundra in each few days. The deer have no home. Winter and summer they must always be on the move, for when such numbers gather at any given spot, the lichens and dwarf willow leaves that form their chief foods are speedily exhausted and if the deer remain, they starve.
Thus throughout the hot July days the northern plains are filled with restless little groups of deer which shift about and pass like tumbleweed. But in late July a new compulsion seems to seize them, and this is the movement I referred to earlier as one that still remains quite unexplained. A few of the tiny groups suddenly decide to drift toward the south. As they move, they are like the beginnings of a growing avalanche, for they pick up and carry with them all the herds they meet, and the momentum of the march increases rapidly from day to day. By early August this movement is a flood. The blood of the
Barrens flows back the way it came in spring, led by the does and fawns who congregate in immense herds. So the midsummer movement rushes southward at increasing speed until, reaching the forest edge, the wave of deer is halted and flung back in disorder and confusion, as waves are flung back under granite cliffs. The vast summer herds break up, and once again they eddy slowly about with complete aimlessness. Behind the wave of does, and sometimes mingling with them, the bucks, now carrying incredible spreads of velvet-covered antlers, follow along the trail of the stampede. Then, slowly, a recoil begins, and once again the deer drift to the North.
No man can tell the full reason behind this summer flight, for winter is still far away and, before it comes, all the deer will have moved north again nearly to the limits reached in spring. Perhaps they make this summer migration because of the flies. Mosquitoes and black flies abound so richly in the Barrens that for weeks on end a wise man does not stir from his dark cabin by day unless driven by urgent need. Summer travel is a constant flight, an endeavor to escape the pursuing haze of winged tormentors. I have seen men remove their shirts after a day in the summer Barrens, and those shirts had to be peeled away from the body, for they were glued to the flesh with the blood of countless bites. The flies are not the least of the Barrens’ defenses and they have greatly assisted in protecting the land so long from white men’s violation.