People of the Deer

by Farley Mowat

  This then is the home of the People. It is the gift of the land, but mainly it is the gift of Tuktu.

  8. Eskimo Spring

  As I became more competent with the language I discovered that the talk of the People was largely devoted to times past. It almost seemed as if the Ihalmiut were making a deliberate effort to relive those dead days, as if they wished me to see them, not as they are, but as they had once been. Slowly and carefully they used words to rebuild the old shattered pattern of life as it had been lived in the Barrens, so I might also live with them in those happier times. And it was not long before their efforts began to have the desired effect, and I could see, in my mind’s eye, something of the richness and vigor of the life the People had led in those vanished years when a man might stand on a hill and though he looked to the east, to the west, to the north or to the south, he would not know where the land was, for all he could see was Tuktu the deer. All he could hear was the sound of their feet. All he could smell was the sweet scent of the deer.

  In the days that are gone, the deer came out of the forests in spring and the does’ bellies hung heavy with fawn, and the strident demands of new life rang through the land. Then the People would come from the tents which stood by the abandoned igloos of winter, and old men and old women stood by and smiled a toothless welcome for Tuktu. The hunters came from the tents and saw to it that the kayaks were ready. If the kayak coverings were torn, then the women hurriedly soaked hides in the melting streams and stretched the new skin over the slim ribs of the hunting craft.

  When the deer began to cross the thawing rivers that ran near the camps, the men went out to hunt. They carried their deer spears and they pushed their kayaks into the ice-filled waters of rivers and lakes. The women walked down the shores to the places where converging rows of stone pillars had been built many generations before to funnel the migrating herds to where the hunters waited. These fences were put right by the women, for the winter gales might have toppled the stones and torn off the headpieces of moss which help make the pillars look like men to the deer.

  As soon as these deer fences were ready, the women and the young children would go out into the plains, which were still covered with yielding spring snow. There they lay hidden in depressions amongst the rocks or in the moss until a deer herd came by. As the deer passed, the watchers shouted and jumped to their feet and closed in behind the fear-stricken beasts, driving them into the embrace of the stone fences. The deer ran down between the narrowing arms of the fence until they came to the bank of the river and to the place appointed to the hunters. As the fleeing animals entered the water, the kayaks were unleashed against them and the spring killing began. Spears flashed in the sun and dead deer floated down with the current into the bays below.

  The spring was a time of great killing and yet the People took only enough in those days to meet their needs until fall. For the hides of the spring deer are useless for clothing and the meat is lean and lacking in fat.

  There was much gorging on fresh meat in the spring, for when the sun again stands high in the sky, the bellies of men revolt from the dry meat and the frozen meat that is their diet all winter. Down in the backwaters of the bays on the river, the old men pulled the floating bodies ashore and the women came with their sharp curved knives and flensed the deer where they lay. Then, bent double under the weight of fresh meat and of great bundles of marrowbones, they went back to the camps. But not all of the carcasses of the deer were butchered and skinned; a great many were only gutted and anchored with rocks deep under the fast, cold flow of the waters where the meat would stay fresh well into the last days of summer.

  After the herds had passed by to the north, the People moved their camps up to the slopes of the hills so that the long winds could battle the flies which were coming. Here the People lived till midsummer, awaiting the return of the deer.

  Summer was the time of eggs and young birds. Even the children went daily out over the plains with their toy slings and bows to search for the eggs and the young of the ptarmigan, of the curlew, the ducks, and even of the tiny songbirds of the Barrens. The men too did not let their hunting skills grow rusty, for they searched out the dens of the great arctic wolves and took enough pelts for mats and for the trimming of parkas. But during most of the summer the men worked at building new kayaks, repairing their sleds, and preparing for the return of the herds. In the evenings they went to the hilltops and stared into the flaming sky of the north, waiting and watching for sight of the deer.

  By midsummer the first herds of does were again passing down into the land of the People, and for a month the hunting was done out on the plains. At this time of the year, and until the deer had again swung to the north, the skins were still of little value, except for those of the fawns, and there was no need for a large kill. So the hunters went out with the bows made of the springy horn of the muskox, and they stalked the deer over the hills and killed only a few, picking the fattest beasts with great care.

  At last, in late summer, the herds again swung to the north and passed out of the Ihalmiut land. This was the time of the greatest activity during the year, for it was known that when the deer came back again it would be only for the brief few days as they fled south before the approach of winter; and after that the herds would not be seen again in the land until spring. It was known that when the deer came for this last time to the Little Hills, they would not linger but would come like a flood and pass quickly. All things had to be ready to greet their arrival, for the lives of the People depended on the success of the fall hunt.

  The last rotten ice was all gone from the rivers and from most of the lakes before fall and so the deer followed new routes, swinging along the curved shores of the great lakes, and crossing the rivers just below or above open bodies of water. In the land of the Ihalmiut there were many such crossing places, all of ageless antiquity, where the deer were funneled by the lakes and hills into narrow defiles. To those places the People now moved their tents, setting up hunting camps a few miles away from each crossing so the presence of the tents would not interfere with the movements of the deer.

  In the old days the Ihalmiut told me about, there would be thirty or forty tents near each of the seven most famous crossings, and there would be many scores of tents at other minor crossing places scattered over the land. In these camps the men worked lovingly on their kayaks and sharpened the copper points of their spears till they were as keen as fine razors. The women roamed the land all about, and heaped up piles of willow twigs against the days when they would build the biggest fires of all the year to render down the sweet deer fat. The youths paddled for two or three days to the north and camped on the hilltops from which they could see the approach of the deer and carry the warning back to the camps.

  The men who were too old to hunt watched for signs. They watched for a sudden upswing in the numbers of foxes and wolves and for the forming of the great flocks of scavenger gulls that accompany the herds; but most of all they watched for flights of ravens coming out of the north, for these are the sure heralds of the approach of the deer.

  Excitement and tension built up in the camps as the fall days slowly passed. There were alarms, occasioned by small wandering herds that happened into the land ahead of the migration. And as always some of the People wondered if this time, by some terrible malice of fate, the deer might fail to move south by the particular crossing where the skin tents stood waiting. There was no sleep and little rest. At night the drums sounded and the voices of the hunters sang the songs of the killing of Tuktu, or the People told tales of the deer they had seen and killed in their time, until the late dawn crept into the sky.

  Then on a day in October there would be snow in the air. A kayak would sweep up the river out of the north, and the man in it held his spear aloft as a signal. “They come!” was the cry in the camps, and the hunters ran to their places and the women and children ran to the tops of ridges north of th
e crossing.

  This was the time of the great slaughter. Swimming the rivers, the deer met the repeated onslaught of the kayaks. At the valleys and gullys the deer met the hunters. Blood flowed at the crossings and the hunt went on far into each night.

  In the camps huge fires burned all day and all night and blocks of white deer fat began to mount up in the tents. On the bushes which spread their dead leaves in the hollows, thin slices of meat were laid out to dry until the valleys and hills about the camps by the crossings glowed a dull red under the waning sun. All over the land, but most thickly about the deer crossings, little cairns of rocks sprang up like blisters on the gray face of the plains. Under these cairns were the quartered bodies of deer. On the sandy shores by the tents, many thousands of fine hides lay staked out with the naked sides upward, and women and children worked over these hides, cleaning and scraping them thin.

  The excitement mounted to a frenzy of action until, in less than a week from the day the man in the kayak had first signaled the approach of the deer, the great herds were gone. The crossings were empty of living deer and only the dead remained there.

  The snows came, and all things—save man and the ravens—turned as white as the snow. The ptarmigan found their white feathers, the fox turned white, and the weasel. The snowy owls drifted out of the most distant north and they too were white, as white as the great arctic wolves.

  Then it was winter and the great herds were gone, but there still remained game to hunt out on the bleak winter plains. In the valleys protected by hills, so that the snow did not drift thickly over their floors, and in the high places where the wind kept the land scoured free of snow, and the lichens were not too deeply buried, there were still a few deer who had been caught, and cut off, by the advent of winter.

  If it happened that by accident or bad luck a family of the People became short of meat in the winter, then food could still be procured by a good hunter. It was harder to hunt Tuktu in winter, for then the deer were in small groups, widely spaced, and they were wary. Only when the ground drift was thick or during a blizzard could they be approached by the hunters.

  But if the deer were hard to hunt, they could be easily trapped. When a hunter set out, not from need, but from a desire to eat of freshly killed meat, he might choose to dig a pit in the side of a drift. The pit had high walls, sometimes built up with snow, and there was a ramp up one side also built of hard snow blocks. On the top a thin layer of brush covered with snow concealed the trap, and for bait there was a handful of moss, or better yet, a piece of frozen urine of a man or of a dog. It is a strange fact that the deer smell urine from a great distance in winter, and because it is salty they will abandon all caution to reach it. Even the wolf knows this, and often a wolf will lie hidden near a snow hummock where he has urinated, knowing that if there are deer near at hand, they will come to the bait.

  Sometimes, if the snow was not deep enough for a pit, the hunter dug a sloping trench, only as wide as a deer, into a snowbank. At its end he would place the bait, and when a deer descended the sloping incline, it could neither back out nor turn around, and so it was caught.

  Briefly that was the way of things in the old days the Ihalmiut remembered so well and talked of so freely. But the way of things now is so bitter that it was hard for me to persuade the People to speak of the present. For a while I knew no more about it than I could see for myself, or had picked up from Franz. Then little by little I began to gather odd fragments of tales from the time that is now, and at last I was able to reconstruct the present pattern of life as it is shown by the happenings which took place under the Little Hills in the spring of 1947.

  I have already written of what came to pass by Ootek Kumanik in that fateful spring when Franz found the two orphans, Kunee and Anoteelik. I also mentioned three other families who had fled eastward in search of help.

  Now I will take up their story and complete it, so you will see the new way of life in the plains as I came to see it, so you will understand why the Ihalmiut dwell so much on the days when the deer were many, and life was good to the People.

  The story was told to me—mainly by Ohoto—in a series of short incidents spread over a year in time. Some of the details and much corroboration came from others of the Ihalmiut, particularly Ootek and Owliktuk. But in some places I had to supply the continuity of events from what I know of the men and women concerned, and from what I know of their land. This tale therefore is not given to you as being completely factual in all its details. Nevertheless it is a true history of one spring in the present years of the Ihalmiut.

  Because it is primarily Ohoto’s story I have chosen to let him be the spokesman for all:

  In the time of my father we of the People exchanged our spears and our bows for the rifles of white men and in the early years of my youth the rifles gave us meat when we had need, and though the old ways had changed a little, life in this land was still a pleasant thing.

  But now, often enough we do not have any shells for the rifles we own, and that seems strange to me. When the white men first came to the edge of our land and told us of the virtues of guns, we believed them. When they told us to put by the ancient deer hunts of our People and turn to the killing of foxes instead, we did what they wished and for a time all was well, and we prospered. Like most of the People I became a fine hunter of foxes from the days of my youth, and I knew all the ways they might be caught. But I did not know much of the hunting of Tuktu as it was done in the days of my father, for I never needed to know while there were shells for my rifle.

  Now, often enough, there are no shells for the rifles, and I cannot tell why, for I still trap many foxes as the white men wished me to do, yet when I take my catch to the wooden igloo in the South, there is no one to greet me but Hikik the squirrel. It was that way first on a winter many years before you came into the land, and I remember the winter well, for the traders told us they must have many foxes that year. They were so anxious that we gave up the great fall hunt of the deer and used all of our skill and our strength to trap foxes, believing we could trade them for food at the place of the white man and so we would have little need of deer meat. But when, in midwinter, we took our pelts south, the door of the wooden igloo stood open and the white man had gone, leaving only the smell which lingered for many long years. Only dead things lay in his camp. The boxes were empty and there was no food in the place and no shells for our guns, so we could not even hunt meat for ourselves.

  Indeed I remember that winter, though I wish it would go from my memory. Epeetna, who was my first wife, died during that time and my two children died with her. Nor was I alone in hunger and sorrow for in the camps of the People only one out of five lived to see spring.

  Some of those who survived tried to return to the old way of living given us by Tuktu the deer, but it was found that we did not have the old skills we needed. Some hoped and believed the white man would return and so, stubbornly, clung to their fox traps. These are gone. Only those remained who tried to return to the deer, and few of these are still alive.

  Then five winters after the first white man went away, another came in his place. Once again we threw away the pursuit of the deer, for we felt that this time the white man would surely remain. Once more we had shells for our guns, and all things seemed well, yet last winter the white man again left the land, and again we had nothing to eat but the skins of the foxes we had trapped for the trade.

  Why is it you white men should come for a time, stay for a time, and then suddenly vanish when we are most in need of your help? Why is it? Why can we not take our fox pelts to the trader and have shells for our guns in return, for this is what the trader taught us to do? This mystery I cannot understand...

  Well, because we did not have shells, we did not have enough meat in the camps during the winter. You have already heard of the winter I speak of, and of the death of the parents of Kunee and Anoteelik by the shores of Oo
tek’s Lake. But you have not yet heard how it went with those of us who fled toward the east, where we had heard a rumor of the presence of a new trader.

  There were four hunters living on the shores of Ootek’s Lake and their families were as I shall tell you. There was Angleyalak, his wife, his old mother, and his children Pama, Kunee and Anoteelik. There was Ootek, and Howmik his wife, and a child in her womb and another in her amaut. There was Owliktuk, his wife and his mother and his children. There was myself, and Nanuk, my wife, my old father called Elaitutna, and the children Aljut and Elaitutna, who were the sons of my wife by a man who is dead.

  In the late months of the winter I speak of, Ootek and Angleyalak took all the dogs we four families still had and traveled south to the camp of Franz to tell him of our need, which was great. While they were gone I went out alone over the snow-covered land to seek out the caches of deer meat Franz had made as bait for his fox traps in the fall. I found only one cache, for the snow had hidden the rest. And the one I found had also been found by Kakwik the wolverine, who had left only bones and chewed skin for me.

  When I came in empty-handed from my trip over the Barrens, I found Ootek and Angleyalak had returned from the South. They told us Franz had little food to give to the People, for his own caches were empty. Then I knew a very great fear, for the deer could not come again to our land until long weeks had passed.

  Although we did not have hope, still while we had dogs to pull our long sleds, we went out to hunt on the sterile slopes of the snow. But when the dogs began to die from their hunger, we could go no more to the plains. That did not matter, for there was nothing to hunt, and had there been, we had no shells for our guns.