by Farley Mowat
Out on the frozen plains the Ihalmiut wait with famine in their low-domed homes. And they know fear, for they can no longer tell if the remaining herds will pass within reach of their camps or whether they will pass a hundred miles away and bring no hope to those who starve and die. On the narrows between the two lakes in the wooded country the bones of the deer mount upward to the surface of the waters. And along the frozen rivers of the Barrens, the new rock graves of men mount upward through the drifts.
5. Under the Little Hills
Summer, which follows spring so closely that the two are almost one, was upon us before it was possible to travel to the shores of Ootek’s Lake and meet the People. I had arranged with Franz to take me there while Hans and the children were to remain at Windy Bay to feed the dogs we left behind, and to care for the camp.
As Franz and I prepared for the journey north, I was excited and at the same time depressed. Much as I wished to meet the Ihalmiut in their own land, the fragmentary glimpses of their lives that I had from Franz had left me with a strong feeling of unease at the prospect of meeting them face to face. I wondered if they would have any conception as to how much of their tragedy they owed to men of my color, and I wondered if, like the northern Indians, they would be a morose and sullen lot, resentful of my presence, suspicious and uncommunicative.
Even if they welcomed me into their homes, I was still afraid of my own reactions. The prospect of seeing and living with a people who knew starvation as intimately as I knew plenty, the idea of seeing with my own eyes this disintegrating remnant of a dying race, left me with a sensation closely akin to fear.
We could not make the journey northward by canoe, for the raging streams which had cut across the Barrens only a few weeks before were now reduced to tiny creeks whose courses were interrupted by jumbled barriers of rock. No major rivers flowed the way we wished to go, and so the water routes were useless to us. Since the only alternative was a trek overland, we prepared to go on foot, as the Ihalmiut do.
But there was a difference. The Ihalmiut travel light, and a man of the People crossing the open plains in summer carries little more than his knife, a pipe and perhaps a spare pair of skin boots called kamik. He eats when he finds something to eat. There are usually suckers in the shrunken streams, and these can sometimes be caught with the hands. Or if the suckers are too hard to find, the traveler can take a length of rawhide line and snare the orange-colored ground squirrels on the sandy esker slopes. In early summer there are always eggs, or flightless birds, and if the eggs are nearly at the hatching point, so much the better.
Franz and I, on the other hand, traveled in white man’s style. We were accompanied by five dogs and to each dog we fastened a miniature Indian travois—two long thin poles that stretched behind to support a foot-square platform on which we could load nearly thirty pounds of gear that included bedrolls, ammunition, cooking tools and presents of flour and tobacco for the Eskimos. With this equipment we were also able to carry a little tent, and food for the dogs and ourselves: deer meat for them, and flour, tea and baking powder for us. We had more than the bare essentials, but we had to pay a stiff price for them.
Equipped with pack dogs, it took us better than a week to cover the same sixty miles that the Ihalmiut cross in two days and a night. I shall not soon forget the tortures of that march. While the sun shone, the heat was as intense as it is in the tropics, for the clarity of the arctic air does nothing to soften the sun’s rays. Yet we were forced to wear sweaters and even caribou skin jackets. The flies did that to us. They rose from the lichens at our feet until they hung like a malevolent mist about us and took on the appearance of a low-lying cloud. Milugia (black flies) and kiktoriak (mosquitoes) came in such numbers that their presence actually gave me a feeling of physical terror. There was simply no evading them. The bleak Barrens stretched into emptiness on every side, and offered no escape and no surcease. To stop for food was torture and to continue the march in the overwhelming summer heat was worse. At times a kind of insanity would seize us and we would drop everything and run wildly in any direction until we were exhausted. But the pursuing hordes stayed with us and we got nothing from our frantic efforts except a wave of sweat that seemed to attract even more mosquitoes.
From behind our ears, from beneath our chins, a steady dribble of blood matted into our clothing and trapped the insatiable flies until we both wore black collars composed of their struggling bodies. The flies worked down under our shirts until our belts stopped them. Then they fed about our waists until the clothing stuck to us with drying blood.
The land we were passing over offered no easy routes to compensate for the agonies the flies inflicted upon us. It was rolling country, and across our path ran a succession of mounding hills whose sides and crests were strewn with angular rocks and with broken fragments filling the interstices between the bigger boulders. On these our boots were cut and split and our feet bruised until it was agony to walk at all. But at that the hills were better walking than the broad wet valleys which lay in between.
Each valley had its own stream flowing down its center. Though those streams were often less than five feet in width, they seemed to be never less than five feet in depth. The valley floors were one continuous mattress of wet moss into which we sank up to our knees until our feet found the perpetual ice that lay underneath. Wading and stumbling through the icy waters of the muskegs, floundering across streams or around the countless ponds (all of whose banks were undercut and offered no gradual descent), we would become numbed from the waist down, while our upper bodies were bathed in sweat. If, as happened for three solid days, it rained, then we lived a sodden nightmare as we crossed those endless bogs.
I am not detailing the conditions of summer travel in order to emphasize my own discomforts but to illustrate the perfectly amazing capacity of the Ihalmiut as travelers. Over sixty miles of such country, the People could move with ease, yes, and with comfort, bridging the distance in less than two days of actual walking. And they, mind you, wore only paper-thin boots of caribou skin on their feet. It is not that they are naturally impervious to discomfort, but simply that they have adjusted their physical reactions to meet the conditions they must face. They have bridged the barriers of their land not by leveling them, as we would try to do, but by conforming to them. It is like the difference between a sailing vessel and one under power, when you compare an Ihalmio and a white traveler in the Barrens. The white man, driven by his machine instincts, always lives at odds with his environment; like a motor vessel he bucks the winds and the seas, and he is successful only while the intricate apparatus built about him functions perfectly. But the Barrens People are an integral part of their environment. Like sailing ships, they learn to move with wind and water; to mold themselves to the rhythm of the elements and so accomplish gently and without strain the things that must be done.
By the time we were in sight of the Little Lakes I was aware of a desperation not too far from madness. I cursed the land and the ephemeral dreams which had brought me to it. I cursed Franz and the poor dogs, whose eyes were swollen almost shut by the constant assault of the insatiable flies. I was so tired that I did not greatly care whether or not I survived—if only those bloodthirsty legions of winged horrors would let me die in peace.
On the last day Franz was in the lead, followed by three dogs, while I trailed a half-mile behind trying to force my dogs to efforts beyond their powers. I heard Franz call and when I looked ahead I saw three human figures where before there had been only one. Franz stood on the crest of a ridge and beside him were two other men, all three gesticulating and shouting at me down the slope.
The sight of strangers seemed to offer some kind of hope and I abandoned the plodding dogs and ran heavily up the hill, slipping and falling among the boulders. When I reached the crest, Franz and the other two men were sitting cross-legged on the rocks and a little breeze was playing along the ridge to cool them off, an
d to hold back the flies.
One of the strangers was manipulating a little drill which looked rather like a bow and arrow, with the arrow pointed down into a piece of wood upon the ground while the bow, with its string wound twice around the arrow’s shank, was being pushed back and forth parallel to the ground. From the spinning tip of the drill rose a little curl of yellow smoke and I realized that the fur-clad man was making fire.
Our matches had long since been ruined when the top of the can in which they were carried came off during a river crossing. For three days we had had neither a smoke nor a mug of tea—two things that just barely make life endurable for white men in the Barrens. Now I stood panting on the hill and watched an Eskimo casually producing fire as our distant ancestors had produced it in their time. The man looked up at me and smiled, a transfiguring smile which spread like the light of fire itself over his face.
Franz motioned me to sit down while he got out the pail and the packet of sodden tea. Now the second Eskimo, a short and solid figure of a man, stepped forward, took the pail and with a broad grin ran down the slope to fetch us water from a tundra pool. Franz nodded his head after the water-getter.
“Ohoto,” he said. “One of the best of them. And this one over here is Hekwaw, the biggest hunter of the bunch.”
It was again a succinct introduction, typical of Franz. It was so brief because from his long contact with the People he had come to see them with straight eyes and could not understand how weird and curious they would appear to me, who saw them with the oblique gaze of a man of civilized experience.
However, if Franz would tell me no more than their names, I could at least appraise them for myself. Both were dressed in holiktuk—parkas—of autumn deerskin with the fur side turned out. The parka of Hekwaw, the firemaker, was decorated with insets of pure white fur about the shoulders and by a fringe of thin strips of hide around the bottom edge. Ohoto’s was even more dressy, for it had a bead-embroidered neck and cuffs. But despite the beads and insets, the general appearance of both men was positively scruffy. Great patches of hair were worn off the garments and rents and tears had been imperfectly mended, evidently by an unpracticed hand. Food juices and fat drippings had matted the thick hair that remained, the dirt from unidentifiable sources had caked broad patches of the fur.
Below these heavy parkas, which the two men were wearing next to their skins, were short fur trousers called kaillik, and these were met, above the knee, by the yellow translucent tops of the skin boots.
My first reaction as I saw and smelled these men was one of revulsion. They seemed foul to me and I felt the instinctive surge of white man’s ego as I wondered why the devil they couldn’t find clean clothes to wear. That was, of course, the superficial thought of one who had no knowledge, but it typifies the conclusions drawn by most white men, particularly missionaries, when they view the “savage in his abhorrent state of nature.”
But on that summer day in the Barrens I wasn’t so interested in dress as it may seem. My curious glance at the men’s clothing was perfunctory, for I was fascinated by the men themselves.
Hekwaw—the Bear, the others called him—was a mountain of a man, but a scaled-down mountain. His muscles bulged and flowed under the loose sleeves of his old parka and the rhythm of the spinning fire drill was reflected in the pulse of tendons in his short and massive neck. Sweat beaded up steadily under his lank black hair, then growing into drops it rolled down the oblique slant of his low forehead, ran along the deep seams of his skin until it found an outlet and, bypassing the broad planes about his half-hidden eyes, fell clear from the sprawling nostrils of his flattened nose. His broad and sensuous mouth with its wide, swollen lips worked in the same rhythm as the drill, and the half-dozen grizzled hairs that were his beard wagged to the same quick tempo.
It was a parody of a face, a contorted parody which was meant for comedy but which had a wild essential quality that restrained my desire to laugh. There was a deep intelligence where one might expect to see only brute instinct, and there was humor and good nature that belied the weathered hide crinkling, apelike, on the brow and on the flat-planed cheeks.
Hekwaw removed the drill and shook a little pinch of smoldering ash from the fire board onto a pile of dry and brittle moss. Then he knelt before it and his cheeks swelled while his eyes disappeared altogether under their taut folds of skin. He blew, and the fire caught, giving birth to a minute greenish flame.
Ohoto returned with the water and with a great armful of green willow twigs, none bigger in circumference than a lead pencil. Franz took our precious “tea-stick” from one of the dog’s packs and jammed it into the moss so that the pail hung suspended from it over the tiny fire. And the day was so brilliant that the sun obscured the flames and only a twist of smoke from the green wood showed that the water was slowly being brought to the boil.
Now I had opportunity to see Ohoto. His was a young face, still rounded and without the crevassed wrinkling of old Hekwaw’s. His hair had been roughly cut so that it hung like the uncouth tonsure of some pagan priest, and it was as coarse as the hair of the deer. The cut hair disclosed a high, broad forehead and the eyes below it had not yet retreated into caves to escape the glare of winter snows. They were black and very bright, with the alert curiosity of a muskrat. Ohoto had an empty stone pipe clenched between his immense and regular white teeth, and I was not too slow to take the hint. I pulled out a bit of plug, damp and covered with debris, and when Ohoto saw it, he beamed broadly.
Now I forgot the discomforts and despair of the long trek. At last I was amongst the People, in the heart of their own land. And it was evident that at least some of my forebodings had been groundless.
The tea pail boiled over and the tiny fire hissed feebly and died. Franz flung a handful of leaves into the pot and while they steeped I relaxed on the fragile reindeer mosses below the crest of the high ridge. For the moment I was free of the blindness which had been mine while we had been forced to struggle so hard against the unmerciful antagonism of the land. I was free to look out over the summer plains and for the first time to feel something of their beauty, and begin to understand the libel that is perpetrated by that name—the Barrenlands.
In winter perhaps the name has validity, and at all times of the year it has validity for those whose minds have hardened over visions of great forests or neatly cultivated fields. Even after two years in the land, I too have often found myself using the word, and meaning it.
Staring out over the limitless expanse I at first saw only a rolling world of faded brown, shot through with streaks and whorls of yellow greens, for when I tried to see it all, the individual colors merged into anonymity. It was a barren sight, and yet that desert face concealed a beauty that rose from a thousand sources, under the white sun. The deep chocolate bogs, laden with rich sepia dyes that stain the streams and pools, were bounded by wide swales of emerald ledges and tall grass. On the sweeping slopes that rose above these verdant meadows, the dark and glossy greens of dwarf birch scrub formed amorphous patches of somber vitality that were illuminated by broad spaces where the brilliance of ten million minute flowers drew to themselves small butterflies as gorgeous as any in the world. Even on the shattered ridges that are given over to the rocks, the creeping lichens suffused the gray stone with a wash of pastel tints ranging from scarlet through the spectrum into velvet rosettes of perfect black. There was no lack of color rising from living things—but it is only that the eye beholds too much in this land that has no roof and no containing walls. The colors flow together and are lost in distance that the eye cannot embrace. And so we only see the barrenness that follows when beauty flows too thinly into the sponge of an illimitable space.
These were the living colors that I saw upon the land, but there was much else to see as well. The lakes beneath us were quite uncountable, a meaningless jumble, looking like the shattered fragments of a great mirror. Between the shining sha
rds of water were the Little Hills, low formless ridges whose slopes seen from the distance were gray-green with lichens, and whose crests were mottled with black rock. To the horizon on the north, the fading glint of lakelets caught the sun and glittered like dew upon brown grass. I knew that somewhere in that maze must lie the twisted course of Innuit Ku, River of Men, but for the life of me I could not distinguish it in the aquatic puzzle spread out below.
While I stared, Ohoto came over and squatted on his hams beside me, also looking out over the land—his land. I lowered the glasses. He grinned again, and, in the grand manner of a small townsman showing his city friend the sights, he began to point out the things of interest.
It did not matter that he could not speak my language, nor I his. Ohoto had the power of expression without words. There was a directness that made his gesticulations seem as clear as printed English. Now he stretched his arm toward a rather large lake that lay only a few miles to the north, and said, “Ootek Kumanik!”
Looking with my glasses, I could see three little grayish pimples by the shores of Ootek’s Lake and as I strained my eyes I could also see a fine thread of smoke. The tents of the People!
Rapidly Ohoto swung his arm to the north and pointed out the other lakes: Halo Kumanik, Kakumee Kumanik and, lastly, Tingmea Ku, the little Goose River that leads the lakes into the great current of Innuit Ku itself. But I could still make nothing of Innuit Ku. It seemed to be only a string of lakes, set amongst countless other lakes, and lacking all the continuity of a great river. Later, when I traveled on it, I was to marvel at its clear-cut shape and its directness; but seen from the distance it simply blended into the watery chaos and disappeared. It became part of the chameleon shape the Barrens show to all outsiders.