People of the Deer

by Farley Mowat

  One day I casually asked Ootek to check some of the traps while I looked at the rest. An hour later, when I had finished my part and was heading back for the cabin, he joined me. He carried his skin pack-sack and as he jog-trotted across the tundra he held the bag well away from his side as if it contained something far too precious to be subjected to bumps and jiggles.

  Curious, I asked what he had found, but for once he was taciturn, refusing to answer except with muffled grunts. He seemed preoccupied, so I did not press the question.

  At the cabin I unpacked half a dozen mice and lemmings from my specimen bag and laid them out on the table while Ootek watched me with a puzzled frown on his face. At last I inquired whether anything had been caught in his share of the traps. He came to life suddenly, pulled open his sack and after delving into its murky depths for a moment or two produced a little bundle carefully wrapped in moss. This he handed to me without comment and watched intently as I unrolled it. The bundle contained a single mousetrap lying on a large piece of chocolate-colored peat which bore the clear and unmistakable imprint of a wolf’s foot.

  Somewhat taken aback, I turned to Ootek and asked him what this odd combination was supposed to mean. But Ootek became dreadfully embarrassed and refused to open his mouth. When I tried being stern, he began to stutter and at last he turned and fled to his tent.

  Later on, Ohoto, always the most direct and unabashed of the Ihalmiut men, paid me a call. I showed him Ootek’s strange trophy and asked him to explain its significance. He too seemed to have some difficulty in finding his tongue, but at last he told me what I wanted to know.

  It was a shining example of the “oblique mind of the Eskimo,” if you want to put it that way. But to me it was a prime example of the tremendous delicacy the Innuit can show when they feel called upon to give advice to a white man who, poor fellow, has more wealth than sense. Ootek had looked at my mousetraps and it had been painfully obvious to him that I was not going to catch any foxes or wolves. And not even in his most lurid dreams had he thought that white men put value on lemmings and mice or that I would deliberately try to catch these little beasts. So it seemed to Ootek that I was just incredibly naive in the arts of a trapper. Being my song-cousin, he felt it was his duty to show me the futility of my trapping methods but in such a manner that I would feel neither resentful nor foolish. Ootek hoped that when I saw the big wolf’s track beside the frail little trap, I would get the point without any words being spoken.

  When Ohoto explained all this I was annoyed, for I felt I was being treated as a somewhat backward child. Calling Ootek to the cabin I went to great lengths to explain why I wanted mice, not wolves; and Ootek, sensing my indignation, listened with grave concentration as I tried to explain about museums, and science, and other inexplicable phenomena of the white man’s way of life.

  When I finished, Ootek picked up a bundle of my traps and walked off with them into the Barrens. The next morning there were five mice laid out on my skinning table, but Ootek never again spoke of my mousetrapping, nor did he show any further interest in improving my trapping technique. In interfering— no matter how hesitantly—with what I was doing, he had contravened a basic code of his People, and it may be he was ashamed of what he had done.

  This is the first great law of the land: that a man’s business is sacred unto himself, and that it is no part of his neighbor’s duty to interfere in any way unless the community is endangered. However, this does not mean that assistance is withheld in cases of need. In fact, the second and perhaps the most important law of the land is that while there is food, equipment, or bodily strength in any one of the tents, no man in another tent shall want for any of these.

  This belief has led to a communization of all material things in the most real and best sense of the word. Nevertheless, individual ownership still exists in the camps, and this paradox may seem hard to grasp. Put it this way: every item of equipment is the personal property of one person, or of a family group. But if a stranger in need of a spear should come to the place, any spear is his for the taking. He does not necessarily need to ask permission of the owners, though he usually does, and no direct recompense is expected or offered. He may or may not return the spear when he is finished, for the spear is now his property, and is not just something he borrowed.

  Obviously the system is not abused. Used with discretion and only under pressure of real need, it has greatly assisted in making men’s existence possible in the Barrens. The man who requires a spear will always, if he has time and materials, make one for himself. However, the man who needs a spear urgently takes one from a neighbor, and it is given to him with good will.

  This unusual approach to the problem of ownership was a source of annoyance to me until I grasped its significance. When I first came among the Ihalmiut, they, with their limited knowledge of white men, treated me as they would treat one another. They were not aware of the gap in law and usage which separated us. For instance, I had a rifle, a souvenir picked up during the war, which I treasured. It was an excellent deer gun and it went with me wherever I went and at night it stood close beside me. I seldom used it, for I do not shoot for amusement, or sport, and the occasions when Andy and I needed meat were few, since the Eskimos kept us well supplied.

  One day a party of five Ihalmiut men walked down from the Little Hills country to visit us at the camp by Windy River. The weather had been exceptionally bad and the trip took nearly three days. These men had not brought rifles, for they had no ammunition. During the three days of the march they had existed on two little suckers they caught with their hands in a stream. After some sixty miles of the most devilish walking in all the world, they arrived at our camp, thoroughly tired and hungry, and yet they did not ask us for food.

  To ask outright would have been a breach of good manners. One does not ask for food in the Barrens; it is automatically offered to a visitor on his arrival. But I was busy with some trivial chore. I greeted the visitors abstractedly and went back to my job while the five hungry men sat and waited with the most perfect patience.

  Then Owliktuk saw a deer on the slope across the river from camp and he at once seized my rifle from its place by the side of the cabin and ran off to intercept the animal. He was gone well over an hour and long before he returned I had missed the rifle. Without thinking, I flew into a rage and stormed over to the waiting Ihalmiut demanding the instant return of my gun. It must have seemed like an incredible display of bad manners and infantile rage to those men, but they humored me. Ootek smiled reassuringly and explained that Owliktuk had only borrowed the rifle to kill a deer with, because they were all very hungry. Then, believing he had adequately explained things, he began to chat cheerfully about the bad weather. I was not in a mood for amiable chatter. I was bad weather myself, for I was thrice damned if any Eskimo who felt a casual urge was going to trot off with my treasured rifle under his arm.

  Owliktuk came back at last, using the rifle as a shoulder stick on which to sling most of the edible portion of the deer he had shot. The barrel was drenched in blood and the stock was scratched where it had banged against rocks. Owliktuk flung his load to the ground and came into the cabin carrying the tongue and the brisket—the choice parts of the deer. He leaned the rifle against the door, handed me the meat and smiled pleasantly. And then I blasted him.

  Poor Owliktuk! During all the rest of the time I knew him he was never again fully at ease in my presence. After that day, he approached me as if I were a potentially dangerous animal to be humored and placated constantly. Later on I did my best to remove the bad impression I had made, but I never succeeded completely. Now, when I remember how the Ihalmiut feel about these little things, I can understand why I failed.

  The Ihalmiut forgave me, or rather they never judged me for my infantile outburst of selfishness. But in the future it was understood that I was an unfortunate barbarian who was as wildly jealous of his possessions as a wolf
bitch is of her cubs. There was no retaliation, and I was at liberty to borrow, and keep, any possession of the People that I might fancy I needed. If I didn’t care to play the game as it was played in the Barrens, that was my privilege and I was not to be penalized for it.

  The two unwritten laws I have mentioned are loosely combined with all other laws of the land into a code of behavior known as the Law of Life. All of the delicately balanced minor and major restrictions which go to make up the law are flexible, and yet they impose barriers beyond which an Ihalmio does not dream of stepping. Very probably it is the flexible nature of the laws, their openness to individual interpretation, and their capacity to adjust to individual cases, that accounts for the remarkable absence of what we know as “crime” in the camps of the Ihalmiut.

  Of all the stories written about the Innuit, as a whole, the majority have dwelt with a morbid and smug satisfaction on the Eskimo deviations from the moral codes we white men have developed. Tales of cannibalism, wife-sharing, murder, infanticide, cruelty and theft appear with monotonous frequency in arctic stories, where they not only serve to supply a sensational element, but also provide the popular justification for the intrusion of the self-righteous white men who would destroy the laws and beliefs of the People in order to replace them with others which have no place in the land.

  Take murder as an example. If you examine the Royal Canadian Mounted Police reports for the last twenty years, and compare the number of murders committed by Eskimos with the number of murders recorded in a corresponding numerical segment of any Province of Canada, or any State of the Union, you will discover that murder is a rarity in the Innuit camps, a phenomenon. Furthermore, many of the so-called Eskimo “murders” were not murders at all, but mercy killings dictated by dire necessity. Of the homicides which remain, the balance are concerned with the killing of white men when the murderers were under implied or direct threats from the visitors, threats which brought an unreasoning fear to the Innuit, for they were threats which could not be understood by the Eskimo mind. I do not know of an authentic case of an Eskimo killing a white man for motives of revenge or of gain, but only from motives of self-defense, mistaken or real. The basic motivation of such killings has always been fear.

  There are other causes for the rare murders which are committed, and of these blood revenge must be mentioned, though there are only a very few authentic cases of it in all the annals of the North. There is, too, the case of the “amok” killer in the grip of a strange malady called “arctic hysteria.” This form of temporary insanity is, of course, not restricted to the Eskimos. In the past few years there have been numerous “amok” killings in the United States and Canada, and in many cases these resulted from a religious mania. However, such derangements among Eskimos are seldom traceable to the native religious beliefs of the Innuit. The most notorious case of a mass killing among the Eskimos followed hard on the visit of a missionary to a native village. When the RCMP investigated rumors of murder in this village they found that one man who had been impressed and frightened by dimly conceived and misunderstood aspects of our Christian dogma had become extremely morose and had finally gone mad. He believed that he was the reincarnation of Christ, and when he announced this fact, a wave of hysteria swept his village. The madman murdered several people before he was finally executed by an old Inuk who, almost alone, had remained aloof from the white man’s religion—and so, in this case, had alone managed to remain sane enough to deal with the murderer.

  The point I wish to make is that murder for motives of gain, or for other cold-blooded reasons of self, is foreign to the mind of the Ihalmiut. With them the killing of a man may be sanctioned only as a solution to a situation where other men’s lives are threatened. In all the folk history of the Ihalmiut there exists only a handful of memories of homicide, and most of these were brought about as the sole possible means of removing internal dangers which threatened the People. There is, for example, the case of one man who became mad during the long arctic night and killed two of his brothers, who he believed were plotting against his life, then threatened all those in the camp. He was a victim of arctic hysteria and he was himself killed only after a consultation of all the remaining men had resulted in the decision to destroy him, for the good of the group.

  Infanticide is another favorite bogey of the missionaries and a standby of sensationalist writers. The tragedy is that it most certainly does occur, and will continue to occur while there is need for it. That is the point—there is an inescapable need for it at times, and nothing we can say will change the need; nothing we can preach to the Innuit will alleviate that tragic necessity.

  The need for infanticide produces the most terrible situation an Eskimo can be forced to cope with, for all Eskimos—and the Ihalmiut in particular—are passionately fond of their children. Their young ones receive more deep-rooted affection, and are shown more tolerance and kindness than many of the children of our homes ever know. To have children and to raise them to maturity is a passion even stronger in the Ihalmiut than in us, because the People are much closer to the primeval drive toward reproduction of the species than we are. But despite the love they bear for their offspring, and despite this consuming desire to see children grow into men of their blood, there are times when a more desperate emotion overwhelms the parents.

  To understand what infanticide really means in the Barrens, you must first understand that in those hard lands all human life is valued according to a fixed-priority system that may seem callous to us who can afford to oppose sentimentality to reality. The unwritten order of survival places the man, the hunter, at the head of the list as the most indispensable member of the family group. He is the provider and should he die it does not greatly matter whether or not the rest of his family lives through the immediate crisis, since they cannot live for long afterwards without a hunter’s help.

  Next to the man stands his wife. If there is more than one wife, the youngest stands next to the man. From her womb the continuity of new life will be maintained. Yet even she is not irreplaceable, for there is a surplus of women in this land where many men lose their lives simply in the course of their everyday efforts. Old wives quickly lose their priority, for their wombs become sterile and they can give little more to their race.

  The children must stand below both the man and his wife. This is a cruel thing indeed, but the cruelty is not the work of the parents. It weighs more heavily upon them than it does on the children. But new birth can replace sons and daughters and so their loss is tragic only in terms of emotions; for while wombs remain fertile and loins remain potent, children may be born again.

  The old people stand at the lowest point of the scale. The men whose arms are no longer strong and the women whose wombs are no longer fecund—these live on the thin edge of time, with death always before them. When the choice of living and dying comes upon a camp of the People, when starvation announces the coming of death, then the aged ones must be prepared to go first, to seek death voluntarily so that the rest of the family may cling a little longer to life. The old ones seldom die a natural death and often they die by their own hands. Suicide is not lawful in our eyes but as it comes to the People it is a great, and a very heroic, sacrifice—for it is the old who fear death most and who find it the hardest to die.

  Put coldly like this, the value placed on the lives of men, women and children seems like a harsh, unnatural thing, but there is nothing else to be done. Who can care for helpless old people when their sons and daughters are gone? Who but the wolves? Who can care for children who have not yet been weaned, when the mother is gone? Only the wind and the snow. What can the wife feed her family when there is no man to bring in the meat of the deer? Only tears and the hard taste of dying.

  The logic of the order of death in the Barrens is more inexorable than death itself, and as inescapable. Yet there are few of the People who, when the time of decision is on them, do not try desperately to escape
the horror of seeing a loved one go into the night of the winter. Love overcomes logic. Many families have perished because love was too strong to let logic save the lives of all but a few.

  Yes, infanticide happens. I have seen Ootek with his fourth child, Kalak, and I knew his other three children did not live their first year to its end. I have seen the overmastering devotion Ootek feels for Kalak, and I have seen the frantic desperation which fills him when danger threatens the child. But I should not like to know or feel what Ootek felt as he watched his first children die, unable to help them in the face of the grim trickery death played upon him.

  Let the moralists peddle their wares to those who would think of the Innuit as barbaric and bestial people who destroy their own children. Let them preach the white man’s love which must be brought into the dark, savage hearts of the Innuit. But let them keep their sanctimonious mouthings from the ears of Ootek and those of his race, who alone know what it is to assist death in his work.

  There is a place in the great plains called the Lake of the Dead Child, and on a promontory of this lake stands a small cairn of stones. Through the interstices of the rocks you can see the tiny bones of a child, and on the grave are the decayed remnants of many things, robes of the best deerhide, gifts of meat, toys carved from scraps of wood, and kamik-boots sewed for a child’s foot with infinite care. There are all things needful for the living—or for the dead.

  The story of that grave concerns a family of three who lived alone by the lake during a winter long past. On a certain year the father was stricken down with a strange illness so that he was unable to complete his fall hunt and did not make a large enough kill to last through the winter. It is told how the blizzards came early and hunger followed. It is told how the dogs were eaten and how, at last, the woman understood that only if she made her way for ten days’ travel on foot over the winter Barrens, to the camps of her kinsfolk, could her family survive.