People of the Deer

by Farley Mowat

  Only the women do not sing their songs, for this is tabu while there are men present, but they carry the burden of the chorus and their high-pitched voices chant in the darkness like the unearthly voices of spirits.

  The night passes quickly. Games, songs and stories fill the hours until the sun is again on the upsweep of its course in the round white belly of the dawn sky. The People eat a little and then go to sleep, all together up on the willow mats of the ledge.

  In winter, the great length of the nights passes in the same pleasant manner. This is the time when the almost continuous darkness and cold could well drive men mad, but it is also the time of the greatest song feasts. Then song-cousins visit each other’s camps and they give valuable presents and receive presents as valuable in return. Song-cousins contest with good-natured rivalry in the singing of songs to the accompaniment of the drum. Many new songs are composed and sung in the igloos in winter.

  But songs alone do not fill the nights. There is a wide variety of games and of these the gambling games are the most interesting. The favorite gambling sport of the Ihalmiut is, like so many things in their culture, almost indistinguishable from an Indian counterpart. To play it, two men or two teams of men face each other over the expanse of a robe. The “dealer” has a stone or some other small object concealed in his hand and very rapidly he places that hand under the robe, then under his backside as he squats on the ground, then behind his back, and finally he holds the clenched fist up in full view of his opponent. Instantly the second man must indicate where he thinks the object is—in the hand, under the buttock, behind the back or under the robe. When, and if, he guesses correctly by putting his own hand in the corresponding spot, he becomes the dealer. The odds against him are three to one, and he may lose just about everything he owns before he gets a chance to carry the ball, but then he usually wins everything back again, with interest. The game is played with such speed that it is almost impossible to follow the motions of the players and, if nothing else, it makes for a remarkable quickness of eye.

  In other days the Chipewyans used to hold gambling contests with their blood enemies, the Ihalmiut, on the narrow strip of land which divides their territories. I have heard the tale of one such game which lasted for two days and two nights without a break. The particular tournament I speak of ended with the Eskimos holding the entire wealth of the Indians, and they had to level their rifles and spears at the losers to prevent what threatened to become a sanguinary battle.

  Among themselves, the Ihalmiut gamble with an eye to reality. They are well aware that a man who loses his rifle or his team of dogs will probably die of starvation. So it is the custom for the winner to return most of what he has won at the conclusion of the game. Thus the loser suffers no hardship. He may even have the dubious pleasure of losing the same rifle five times over, in the course of one evening of gaming.

  These are but a few of the pleasures which belong to the days of the People. Their most lasting pleasures come from the labors of creation. Old Hekwaw at work on a new kayak is a man who is lost in his task. He knows the exquisite pleasure of creating a thing he can love. He knows all of the subtle joys of a fine craftsman as he delicately shapes the slender ribs of his craft. And it is only because he is in love with his labors that he can bring to completion this vessel, so light and graceful. He has only tools that he makes for himself. Using a bow drill constructed of a small bow, a wooden rod and a fine point of metal, he drills tiny holes in the willow ribs of the kayak and laces them firmly to the frame with delicate lashings of rawhide. He prolongs the easy sweep of the little craft into a long fragile beak supported by longitudinal stringers composed of dozens of short sections of spruce which have been intricately mortised and fitted together to make a piece of the requisite length. When the kayak frame has been finished, it looks like the exquisitely delicate skeleton of a great fish. It is a true work of art. Later, when it is covered with hides, Hekwaw paints a brilliant design on its decks with colors he grinds from stone and mixes with the fat of the deer. At length the kayak will take to the water, it will live under the hand of old Hekwaw and give him joy.

  The Ihalmiut do not fill canvasses with their paintings, or inscribe figures on rocks, or carve figurines in clay or in stone, because in the lives of the People there is no room for the creation of objects of no practical value. What purpose is there in creating beautiful things if these must be abandoned when the family treks out over the Barrens? But the artistic sense is present and strongly developed. It is strongly alive in their stories and songs, and in the string-figures, but they also use it in the construction of things which assist in their living and in these cases it is no less an art. The pleasure of abstract creation is largely denied to them by the nature of the land, but still they knew how to make beauty.

  They know how to make beauty, and they also know how to enjoy it—for it is no uncommon thing to see an Ihalmio man squatting silently on a hill crest and watching, for hours at a time, the swift interplay of colors that sweep the sky at sunset and dawn. It is not unusual to see an Ihalmio pause for long minutes to watch the sleek beauty of a weasel or to stare into the brilliant heart of some minuscule flower. And these things are done quite unconsciously, too. There is no word for “beauty”—as such—in their language; it needs no words in their hearts.

  10. The Boy and the Black One

  From several of the people, and through many evenings of talk and of storytelling, I have gathered together the parts of this story. I tell them now not as history, but as living memories which are woven, impartially, from threads of legend and from threads of reality. Here are three such memories, and these recall three days from a year which is past—days that are linked together by the passage of time, by the spirit of the Black One and by the recollection of men. To our eyes the stories the Ihalmiut love to recount of the past must appear as creations of fantasy, but in the eyes of the People these stories are the stuff of which life is made. It matters little whether things happened as they are said to have happened. It only matters that the three days I speak of were good to the People who treasure their memories.

  The first day was a cloudless one in September. A steady south wind kept the glowing leaves of the dwarf willows in motion above the close-cropped lichens. A raven circled lazily over the river called Innuit Ku, alone in the sweep of the sky, playing and rolling in the wind like a leaf caught in an updraft of warm air. The raven could see more than the man, yet Hekwaw knew without seeing that the tundra to the north had come alive and was moving.

  Hekwaw climbed carefully into his nervous kayak from an overhanging ledge of rock at the river’s edge. With a few quick strokes of the long, double-bladed paddle he sent the kayak clear of the slack water and into the swift and steady flow of the river. The south wind carried the smell of cattle and the rough banks of the river were scarred by deeply worn ruts like the trails thirsty cows leave on the muddy banks of placid woodland streams in the far South.

  The kayak drifted on toward the mouth of the river, where it emptied into Kakut Kumanik, and the stink of fresh manure grew heavier on the air. A strange waterline ran along the shores, a wide band of pure white, set between rock and water in sharp contrast to the brown stream and the black rocks. This was a belt of hair, a solid mat of hair shed in the river during the passage of the deer which had come that way in the space of a week.

  A hundred yards short of the river mouth the steep banks abruptly subsided and the low rolling plains lay open to Hekwaw’s gaze. Now he thrust against the paddle and the kayak fled into a backwater and hung there, rubbing its thin flanks on the edge of the rocks.

  Hekwaw loosened the lashings of his deer spear and lifted the short-handled weapon until the arrow point just grazed his lips. Then he laid the spear across the thwart in front of him, satisfied that it was ready. He waited.

  Three minutes, four... then the deer came!

  They seemed to emerge from the r
ocky banks of the river as if by some strange geological genesis. They came quickly to the edge of the water in single file, a fawn leading and agilely threading its way between the sullen shapes of the boulders.

  Hekwaw moved no more than the rocks about him. He held the kayak in check against the overhang and watched steadily as the fawn reached the water and, behind it, a hundred deer crowded forward on the slope.

  The fawn stopped by the edge of the river and grazed idly amongst the harsh sedges while the rest of the herd reached the bank and began to shoulder each other forward. Turning a startled look on the throng which pressed upon it, the fawn left the sedges and waded carefully out until the current caught it and swept it off its feet. Then, with head high and its minute tail erect, it struck off bravely for the opposite shore.

  Still Hekwaw did not move. He waited without motion until half of the deer had crossed, and the great bucks who were in the rear had entered the water. Then the kayak leaped into the swift current like a dog unleashed and in an instant it was among the swimming deer. With his left hand on the trailing paddle, Hekwaw steadied the fragile craft, and with his right hand he gripped the spear at its balance point—lifted it high—and made his first thrust.

  His appearance had been so sudden that for a few moments the deer flow continued unbroken, but as the spear went home the river of deer dissolved into clots and fragments. There were perhaps fifty beasts in the river when Hekwaw appeared among them and these gave way to panic. Some swam for shore, and when their feet were almost on the rocks, turned about and thrashed back into the dangerous center of the river. A doe plunged in eccentric circles while her fawn, borne under by the surging hoofs of a group of bucks, was carried lifeless downstream. With their massive antlers raking the air, the bucks turned and followed the drowned fawn toward the bay.

  Hekwaw sent the kayak after the fleeing bucks. He closed with them in half a dozen strokes, but for the moment he made no effort to come into spear distance. Instead he held the herd as a good cowboy holds a herd of beeves, and the bucks swam ahead of him with all the strength they could muster, holding their heads half sidewise to catch recurring glimpses out of white, staring eyes of the pursuing thing.

  The hunter held them until a good mile of open bay separated them from safety on all sides and they were thrusting their weary bodies far beyond the river mouth. Then things were as Hekwaw wished. Without effort he drew abreast of the last buck in the line. It shook its head, swerved violently, but could not avoid the flickering thrust of the spear. The spear barely seemed to touch the beast before it was withdrawn, and the kayak was gone, leaving the doomed buck to die.

  Hekwaw killed with the ease and dexterity of a trained butcher, but with far less effort. Soon the herd of fat bucks swam no more and the surface of the bay was free of all motion except where the wind ruffled the clear waters.

  Meanwhile a raven had dropped steeply down out of the white sky until he was flying heavily above the dying deer back at the crossing place. But his hunger was held in check by the sight of three tiny figures approaching along the south bank of the river. Angrily he circled over a doe, unwilling to acknowledge the approach of the woman, the boy and the dog. Then they were close. The raven suddenly forgot his anger and towered steeply up from the rocks, and the boy’s sling whirred like a grouse in flight. The smooth stone caught the raven on the bend of his outstretched wing and sent him spiraling wildly into the current of the River of Men.

  Finished with the bucks, Hekwaw turned back toward the river mouth. As he passed each of the floating deer he stopped to hook the foreleg cunningly behind the antlers in such a way that the deer’s nostrils were held above the water and the animal could not become waterlogged and sink. The breeze was rising and it was brisk enough to make the kayak bound like a live thing. Hekwaw bent forward over his flying paddle. Under the worn parka his muscles ebbed and flowed until the kayak slipped above the river’s grip, rising lightly above the touch of the fast water, and skimmed upstream to the crossing place.

  He was halfway there when he met the struggling body of the drowning raven. Hekwaw grasped it swiftly and stuffed it into the cockpit beside him, then drove on and beached the kayak on the shore, where his wife waited.

  Later that day, Bellikari, the son of Hekwaw, walked for many miles around the shores of Kakut’s Lake. Whenever he found the grounded carcass of a deer, he waded into the water, gutted the dead beast and dragged it up on the land. If the hides were prime, he skinned them off with the skill of one who knows his work well. Then the naked carcass was quartered and placed in a hollow on a nearby ridge. Above the meat, and around it, Bellikari erected a bastion of great stones to hold the wolverines away. Atop the pile he placed the antlered skull with the antlers still stretched against the pale sky, so that when the snows came, the dead deer would still signal its whereabouts to the man who had killed it.

  When Bellikari returned to the night camp near the crossing place, the work there was nearly done. His mother, Eput, was squatting before the fire, carefully tending the iron pot she had carried on her back the whole thirty miles from Ootek’s Lake. The pot was black with the thick soot of oily bones and scraps of fat meat, for inside the pot the fat was being rendered from the deer. The liquid fat bubbled silkily up to the rim as Eput threw in new strips of fine white suet which she was stripping from a pile of meat beside her.

  Hekwaw sat on the ridge by the river, surrounded by a towering, bloody mound. Brilliant red meat it was, caught in the driving crimson rays of the setting sun which made the meat glow like the coals of a great fire. Hekwaw saw Bellikari and hailed him.

  “Come here, little belly!” he called. “There is still much meat to slice while you spend the day walking pleasantly looking for duck eggs on the shore. Take these piles and spread them carefully upon the willow bushes and keep them clear of the ground.”

  Grinning broadly at the jibe, Bellikari went to help his father make the dry meat for the winter’s food. At last they were called back to the fire by Eput, and the sky was dark above them.

  Now the three Eskimos had finished their meal, and night fell upon them. They spoke of the hunt which was passed and there was laughter then, and singing afterwards. Eput bragged a little of the blocks of fat she had cooled and hardened in swathes of wet moss. Hekwaw and Bellikari looked at her handiwork and pretended to find bits of bone and twigs in the sweet-smelling and flawless blocks.

  The fire died down and, as the boy Bellikari sat staring into the coals, his father reached into his hunting pouch and brought out the beak and the talons of the raven. Hekwaw had bound the bill and the feet in a tiny rawhide sack, and as Eput looked on with a frightened solemnity in her lined face, Hekwaw sewed the things from the raven onto the back of his son’s parka.

  Bellikari turned a puzzled face to his father, and the old hunter spoke to him quietly, by the side of the dying fire.

  “Son of Eput,” he said, and he looked not at his son, but to the dark plains that stretched away to the north. “Son of Eput, here is a thing for you to remember all the days of your life. In the time that is yours you will listen for the voice of the Raven. When the Raven Spirit calls in the night, you will listen and do what the spirit says you must do. This day you brought down the Raven, and the Black One does not die as other birds die. In all of my time I have not heard of a man who came close enough to the Black One to strike him down from the air. I think this is a sign that the Raven Spirit will help you, has chosen to help you. So you must not again lift your hand to the Black One of Air, but listen instead to the voice of the Raven in the long hours of darkness and do what his voice shall tell you to do.”

  Hekwaw finished speaking but Bellikari did not reply. He felt of the tiny packet sewed to his parka and he was a little afraid. Later that night, when the three of them lay under a fresh hide by the failing warmth of the fire, he snuggled close to his father and, when an arctic fox chose to bark
from the hill, Bellikari listened and his heart thumped in his breast, for he was listening for the voice of the Black One of Air.

  And so the first day of this story comes to an end. Beyond it lay the time when the snows came and the River of Men lay hidden under the sheath of white ice. The deer disappeared to the south, and Hekwaw and his family gave up the skin tent by Ootek’s Lake and built their igloo by the nearby lake where Alekahaw—the Lame One—had his winter camp. The snows grew deeper and the cold sharper. Then one day Hekwaw’s neighbor, Alekahaw, set out with his family to visit a distant camp of the People far to the north on the banks of the River of Men. The second of the three days tells of what came to pass during that journey.

  The short winter day was half over, and Alekahaw was in a hurry. He waved the dog-driving stick over his head and the tail bones of a wolf which were tied to the stick rattled loudly in the still air. The dogs heard, and bounded forward again, and the twenty-foot komatik—the sled—creaked over the exposed black rock of a ridge and careened off into the snow-packed gully below.

  Kaluk, Alekahaw’s wife, sat on the sled with her children, her six-year-old daughter, Kowtuk, and her three-year-old son, Kelaharuk. Alekahaw ran beside his dogs on the upgrades, but on the down slopes he flung himself on the back of the komatik, for he had a leg that was crippled from an ancient thrust of a wounded muskox’s horn, and he could not run so well as other men.

  The sled charged down the slope and the dogs curled up their tails and drew in their rumps as they scampered to get out of its way. The snow lay like a pavement of quartz and no wind blew over its burnished white face. The sun hung pendant on the rim of the sky and it was a cold, dying flame, though it stood at the peak of its rise for that day. Under the hides on the sled, the woman sat still as a dead thing, for she had no motions to waste in her struggle to protect herself and the children from the cold which beset them.