People of the Deer

by Farley Mowat

  Yet if men could not follow, words could. Early the next day the word began to pass up and down the length of the river, as dog teams drove out from the camps of Kakut. “Kakumee, son of Ajut, has come back to the land—and he is filled with the madness!” These words branded the shaman as an outcast. A wave of uneasiness swept through those camps where there dwelt over a thousand men, women and children who now heard of Kakumee’s return, and feared for the evil that he might do.

  It was barely two weeks before those fears were realized. A strange sickness broke out in the camp of Kakut. Three women sickened at once, complaining of a Great Pain that sat on their chests and denied them air for their lungs. The magic of Kakut was helpless against this new evil and in a little time those women died. Then the Great Pain, as it was called, swept on up the river, into the hidden camps by the lakes, and all over the face of the land.

  Before the end of that spring more than a third of the People were dead, and the disease had broken the People. In many camps by the river no living men were left to bury the dead. The wolverines, foxes and even the dogs which had been abandoned by death grew fat on the flesh of the Ihalmiut. Only small, fleeing groups of living men remained, and those were scattered out over the length and breadth of the plains in their attempts to escape from the killer against which they had no defense. In those isolated places, cut off from their fellows by fear, the survivors waited for death and cursed the name of Kakumee.

  The winter before the coming of the Great Pain had been a hard one, for it had been long protracted. But there had been no deaths from hunger that winter, though the Ihalmiut had been weak and lacking in strength, when the coming of spring, and Kakumee, brought the plague to their land. The killer which Kakumee had brought with him from the place of the white men, perhaps even from that little cabin where he had believed he looked on the frozen face of his devil, struck down the hungry folk of the Barrens.

  When summer was old, the land was not as it had been in the first days of spring. The River of Men was deserted, and only hasty graves on its banks remained to mark the habitations of men. In the years to follow, the river never again saw the great camps of the Ihalmiut, for now it had changed its nature, and had become the River of Ghosts.

  Though men sickened and died in all the camps, Kakumee, who had brought the Great Pain, did not sicken, for he was well fed and lacked for nothing. When he saw what had happened and knew that all living men laid the blame at his feet, then he was filled with the savage pride of a man who knows he is a master of life. He came out of hiding and passed through the tents of the dying like a spirit himself. He went without fear into those camps where the stench of death filled his nostrils, and as he passed, he took all things he desired, even unto the belongings of the dead which had been placed on the new graves by the survivors. He took three women, and these came with him without struggle, for their fear of the man stifled all thoughts of resistance. His wife, who had gone to Kakut, had been one of the first to die of the disease, and Kakumee was glad it was so and to his new wives he sang songs of the power of the devil who was his Tornrak.

  That year, just after the turn of the century, was the most evil year in all the time of the Ihalmiut, nor will it be forgotten while men still live in the Barrens. Yet it does not stand alone, for, in the years which followed, disaster after disaster came to the People who had survived the Great Pain.

  Along Tulemaliguak Ku, a little river which leads into the immense Lake of the Heaped-Up Rib Bones, were five igloos in the third winter after the plague; but by spring all five of those igloos were empty, for the deer had not come that way in the fall. It is told how a man came there in the days before spring to visit his brother. He found only naked, frozen bodies of the people he sought, and these were scattered far out from the igloos. This happened because of a merciful madness which sometimes intervenes to bridge the last gap between starvation and death. Then the dying ones tear off their clothing and, with the last of their strength, run into the snows that their death may be quick and the long agony ended.

  This one episode was repeated year after year over the face of the plains, for the People were separated from one another, and one camp could not extend aid to another which was in peril, for often they did not know of the peril until it was too late to help.

  But despite famine and plague, the Ihalmiut nevertheless slowly began to recover their numbers. They might have made good their losses in the time to come had not the fates seemed angered to see their resurgence.

  Although Kakumee never returned to the trading post, his visit was not forgotten. The traders remembered, and they thought of the untapped wealth of the Barrens as miners think of a rich lode hidden deep in the mountains. So the traders pushed to the north. Slowly their posts crept up to the edge of the Barrens, and here at last they renewed the lost contact with the Eskimos of the plains.

  It was in the second decade of this century that a band of the Ihalmiut, driven south to the edge of timber in search of the deer, came on the most northerly outpost of the traders.

  Now the contact was renewed and expanded and trade with the People began. Many of the men procured guns and bought flour and lard and for a while all those who went to the tiny outposts of the traders were secure from famine—though not from the hidden starvation and so also disease, which became increasingly virulent as their contacts with white men increased.

  In the years which preceded the first Great War of the white races, the value of white fox pelts shot rapidly upwards, and the trading concerns did their utmost to encourage the Ihalmiut into an almost exclusive pursuit of fur. Then the war came, and with it there came a drop in the value of fox, and an abrupt discontinuation of the activity of the traders on the borderlands of the Barrens. With the sudden withdrawal of the white traders and the cutting off of supplies of ammunition, the brief rally of the Ihalmiut came to an end.

  By 1926 only three hundred of the Ihalmiut were left alive. One by one the little camps had disappeared. Year by year the number of new graves increased while the number of children born in the starvation camps grew fewer. As the survivors failed, year after year, to meet the grim challenge, so failed their hearts and so failed their will to survive.

  At last loneliness drew the handful of living People together in the age-old heart of the land under the Little Hills. The great loneliness grew more oppressive until even Kakumee came back to the lakes of the Ihalmiut, and established his camp a few miles away from the remnants of the race he had helped to destroy.

  But in the postwar boom years, in London, Montreal and New York, the price of white fox fur rose again, and this time soared to a new record of value. The traders again remembered the People who dwelt in the plains, and they returned. From 1926 until 1930, no less than seven fly-by-night trading posts operated for varying periods of time on the edges of the Barrens. Once again the traders handed out rifles and shells, flour and tea to the Ihalmiut. Once again the little band of survivors did as the traders desired.

  This time the blow fell quickly. The traders withdrew once again, and by 1938 barely a hundred survivors were left in the camps of the People, and in 1947 only forty-six still remained.

  This was the pattern of life and death from the day of Kakumee’s return to the land from the South. During all of this time the Ihalmiut received no more aid from us than we might extend to rats haunting a refuse pile. Not until the year 1947 was any real effort made to investigate or to alleviate the conditions which prevailed in the Barrens. Not until 1947 was any step taken to forestall the inevitable end of death’s labors in the camps of the People. Not until 1950 did we really attempt to rectify our remissness, and that attempt was short-lived. Now, when less than twoscore of the People exist and when there are all too few women left of an age to give new life to the Ihalmiut, we say we are ready to redeem our sins of omission, though in fact as I write this we have still done little but talk of what we will d
o for the Ihalmiut.

  I do not know why we waited so long. It was not that we had no word of the existence of the Ihalmiut. Tyrrell, who was an employee of the Canadian government, had told us about them in 1894. Traders have permits, and permits are issued by the government, so the authorities must at least have known of the existence of the Ihalmiut as early as 1912. Certainly many people, both white and native, who lived along the coast had heard of the presence of the scourge which was sweeping men from the Barrens. As early as 1921 a coastal missionary at Churchill reported rumors of the death of nearly five hundred men, women and children in the interior during the course of one winter, but his report sank into limbo and was ignored. No, those who were responsible for the welfare of the Innuit could hardly have been completely unaware of the facts, even though these were so long hidden from the general sight of the world.

  In the black years following the coming of the Great Pain, men had many things to contend with in the Barrens, and not least of these was Kakumee the shaman.

  During the times of famine, Kakumee always had food, rifles and shells. If it did happen that he ran short of meat, then he drove his dog team to the camp of some fortunate man who had made a lucky hunt and took what he wanted. No one could resist. How does a man resist another who is not of this world but of the world of devils and spirits?

  Although Kakumee had several wives and he fed them all well, they gave him no children of his own, and so he knew the savage despair of one who believes he is impotent. Bitterness lived in his loins, and this bitterness added new strength to his devil, so that he even stole children and called them his own. A few times starving men came to the place of Kakumee and, humbling their pride and bridling their fears, asked him for meat. But this son of Ajut knew nothing of giving. He turned the starving ones away, and they made their ways back to their camps or died on the trail. After a time no one came near his camp and Kakumee was alone with the women and children he had stolen; hated and feared by all those who still lived.

  Kakumee not only stole for pleasure or need, but from malice as well. I have heard a tale of a time when a man whom we shall call Anga set out in winter to go to the coast hoping to obtain a rifle and shells. He was a brave Ihalmio and a stubborn one, and he would not bow to the dictates of fate, so he made the long trip, taking nearly two months to complete it. He brought back a rifle and two cases of shells and, for a season, his family and all the families under the Little Hills had meat in plenty. Then one day in the winter, Kakumee drove his dogs to the house of Anga, and entered the igloo. He spoke no words to those who were huddled within but picked up the precious rifle and disappeared into the darkening snows.

  The next day Anga, despite the pleas of his wife and the advice of his neighbors, set out for the shores of Kakumee Kumanik. He swore that when he returned he would bring his rifle safe on his sled.

  The day was dark, for snow fog was lying low over the hills. Anga and his dogs vanished quickly from the sight of those who stood outside their igloos to bid him good luck. The wife of Anga wept, and let her hair down from the tuglee as women do when they mourn for the dead.

  When spring came Anga was found. His body lay in a crevice of a rock near the south end of Kakumee Kumanik, and it was said he had been killed by the she-devil, Paija. But—there was a bullet through the bones of his chest.

  In the later days of my last year in the country, Kakumee became my frequent companion, for he believed that the prestige of showing himself to be at least my equal would strengthen his hold on the Ihalmiut. But perhaps more important to him was the irresistible fascination our belongings had for the devil who dwelt in his heart. One day Ohoto warned Andy and me that we too courted death from the hands of the devil Paija because of the riches we owned. But that was not true, for though Kakumee might have welcomed our deaths, he would hardly have had the courage to kill us.

  I did not repulse him, partly because I never quite mastered the cold chill I felt in his presence, but mainly because he was a rich source of stories about the Ihalmiut. However, in the last few weeks of our stay in the land, we visited his camp and what we saw there changed my relationship with old Kakumee.

  His two tents—one for himself and a young wife, and one for an old wife and two adopted, or stolen, children—were enormous, but filthy, and in a poor state of repair. We were invited into the main tent and its contents were as unbelievable as if we had found a pawnshop dropped down in the heart of the Barrens. The place was packed with rusted and useless items of white men’s goods. There were parts of at least a dozen rifles and shotguns, all heavy with rust except for one or two kept in use. There were countless tin cans, an old cast-iron stove with no bottom or top, tin pails which could no longer hold water, boxes of scrap bits of metal and clothing, an ancient Edison gramophone with one cylindrical record, rusted and broken tools and an endless profusion of other things, most of them ruined by time and neglect. There was also a great collection of tools, weapons and even toys made by the People.

  I was appalled, for it was not simply the material wealth of one man I saw, but the wealth of a race, piled there to decay and to pass into dust that one man’s passion might be well fed. Useless junk, most of it, that in its time might well have helped the Ihalmiut to delay their progress to extinction. The tents of Kakumee were filled with the sterile wealth of his race while the tents of that race were silent, and empty of men.

  A few weeks later Kakumee came to see me at Windy Cabin, for he knew we would soon depart and he wanted to take possession of anything we might be persuaded into leaving behind. I was not glad to see him, for at last I was sickened by the incredible greed which had made him prey on his People even in death. I ordered him away, and told him bluntly not to come back. I spoke in the presence of other men of the People and the blow to Kakumee’s prestige must have been severe. However, he went only as far as his travel tent, pitched a few hundred yards away, and there he remained while our preparations to leave were completed.

  But on the last day of my stay, I began to see Kakumee with a clearer perspective. At last I began to understand something of the tragedy which underlay and partly explained the apparent malice of the man. Now that my anger was gone, I was aware of the unexpected presence of pity. The curtain of evil, which hung around Kakumee like a cloak, became threadbare, for I had begun to see the depth of the calamity which had long ago come upon him. So I went to his camp, and from his parting words I learned what I should have guessed long before.

  Kakumee was squatting on his sleeping robes in the gloom of the tent. When at last he spoke, his head was turned from me and his eyes fixed on a slit of white light showing along one of the seams of the tent. He spoke strongly, and savagely, of the days when his People had been happy, and many. Then he faced me.

  “Now where are my People, you white man? When you went down the banks of the River of Men, did you not see my People? Did you not see the graves of the dead on every side of the land until the graves were as many as the hills that rise from the plains? And did you not listen—and hear the voices of the People, as they spoke of how it was that they died?

  “Those ghosts speak much of the Kablunait, the white men, who have all things in this world, but being greedy for more, took also the deer who were our life—and gave us back only the Great Pain which sits in our chests till we die!

  “You are rich! You are very rich, white man! Richer in tea, and in rifles and shells than we of the People. And yet we too are rich! Richer in graves, and in ghosts—and this is your doing.”

  These were the last words I heard from the lips of the son of Ajut. And only then did I understand the full powers of the devil of Kakumee and know the immensity of the deception it had practiced upon him. I left his tent knowing what the old man himself will never know, such is the cunning of the devil who drove him: that the evils which were the gifts of the white men had been brought to the land and to the People in the body and
in the mind of a man of the Ihalmiut.

  14. Stone Men and Dead Men

  The end of June in 1948 saw the last stragglers of the spring deer migration passing out of the Windy River country, thereby bringing Andy’s caribou studies to a temporary halt. We decided to follow the deer into the northern Barrens, and our choice of a destination was Angkuni Lake.* Angkuni—the Great Lake—lies halfway down the River of Men and we chose it for two reasons. In the first place it was once the scene of the greatest deer concentrations known to the Ihalmiut, which would make it rewarding for Andy. And in the second place it lies in the very heart of the interior plains and thus it offered us an excellent base from which I could continue my investigations into the history of the inland people.

  * * *

  * Angikuni on current maps. I have used the original Eskimo version of the name.

  Tyrrell was the first white man to reach Angkuni, and since his visit in 1894 it has been seen by only two or three other white men. Very little of its contorted shoreline has been mapped and no one knows the lake’s true extent, though I should think it must be at least forty miles in length.

  When Tyrrell passed across the lake he saw, but did not visit, one camp which may have held two hundred Eskimos—and this was only one of many camps along the bays and inlets. From stories told to me by Hekwaw and Ohoto I knew that somewhere near the turn of the century Angkuni had probably been the site of the largest Eskimo encampments ever known throughout the arctic regions. Those camps are all empty now and no man lives beside Angkuni’s shores, but I hoped a visit to the lake might still reveal the answers to many unsolved riddles about the old days of the People.

  With much hesitation Ohoto had agreed to accompany us as guide, but his emotions as he contemplated the trip were mixed. In more than thirty years no Ihalmio had visited the Great Lake nor had anyone dared travel down the river, for these waters no longer knew the tents of living people. Only shallow graves and restless spirits remained along their shores. Ohoto and his dead father, Elaitutna, had been born in one of the largest camps of the Angkuni group and so the land was dear to Ohoto’s youth and he felt drawn to it, though at the same time he was repelled by his fears of a dead land and its unseen inhabitants.