People of the Deer

by Farley Mowat

  It would be tedious to write at length about the river above the Great Lake, for graves, rapids and falls are all of a kind, even when they stretch for two hundred miles. I shall begin the story of our visit to Angkuni on the day when our canoe came in sight of the famous hill called Kinetua, which guards the western entry to the lake. Ohoto was in the bow that day and when he identified the looming majesty of the great hill we knew we had achieved our goal, in space at least. We bore down on Kinetua and the river flung us angrily from side to side in a rocky gorge before it gave up the war it had waged against us and the mutter of its tormented waters ceased.

  The current sank away and dissipated its strength in the still waters of Kinetua Bay. Kinetua itself hung over us and cut off the sinking sun so that we moved in shadow, although on the distant north shore the sun still flung a clear yellow light over the old encampments of the Kinetuamiut—as the Angkuni group of the Ihalmiut had been called. The long hills rolled up green from Angkuni Lake, which stretched to the horizon ahead of us. The canoe drifted idly on still waters and nothing in all that vast world moved or lived save we three intruders and a white-winged gull. The Kinetuamiut were gone; the living men were gone; and yet the land was not quite so deserted as it seemed.

  We landed at the foot of Kinetua and climbed its receding slopes until we stood on the bank of the mounded giant. From the crest we looked far out over the sodden muskegs; past ridges, eskers and little lakelets, and as far as the most distant glitter of the Great Lake’s southern bays. We looked out over a dead land—but not a deserted one, for our eyes quickly discovered the shapes of men standing in monumental immobility on every side of us.

  They were men. But men of stone! Insensate little pillars of flat rocks piled precariously atop each other, they stood on every hill, by every lake and river, as they have stood throughout the long ages of the People who created them and called them Inukshuk (semblance of men). They are such puny monuments, these lone inhabitants of emptiness, it seems inevitable that they must topple into the anonymity of the rocky slopes from which they sprang. And yet they will not fall. They stand immutable, contemptuous of the winter gales and of the passing years, imbued with an essential quality that belies their faceless forms and gives to them more than a semblance of reality as men. More real, more vital, are these shapeless things than the cold-eyed statues of our great museums. This is because they were not built to keep some memory green, nor to express the hidden passions of a sculptor’s hands. The Inukshuk have being because they were created as the guardians of living men against a loneliness which is immeasurable.

  When the first man came this way, restlessly probing into unknown lands, he paused upon some hill before he ventured further into the obscurity ahead, and here he raised the figure of an Inukshuk. Then, as he went forward into the boundless distances, he retained a fragile link with his familiar world as long as he could still discern the dwindling figure of the man of stone. Before it disappeared behind him, the traveler paused to build another Inukshuk, and so another and another, until his journey ended and he turned back, or until he no longer needed the stone men to bind him to reality and life. The Inukshuk are not signposts, just simple landmarks as most white men have thought. They are—or were—the guardians who stolidly resisted the impalpable menace of space uncircumscribed, which can unhinge the finite minds of men. From the crest of Kinetua we looked out and saw these lifeless beings and were comforted to see them standing there.

  For a long time we three were silent as we gazed out over the Angkuni hills studded with their motionless sentinels. The light was going and the bay lay motionless below us when at last Ohoto broke into our thoughts.

  “This is the place,” he said. “Here stood my father’s camp—and it will not be strange if he should come to me and if I again hear his voice that has been silent for two winters past.”

  It was a true prophecy he made, but on that evening Andy and I paid it little heed. Descending the hill then, we paddled across the bay of Kinetua and pitched our tents on a sloping shelf along the northern shore. Andy and I were very tired, but there was little rest for us that night. We lay sleepless for hours, listening to the voice of Ohoto as he sat in the darkness outside and chanted the thin, lugubrious songs which are sung only for dead ears.

  In the morning our little travel tents were filled with a fresh and boisterous breeze. The mood of the previous night had vanished. I stood outside the tent and looked at the spacious and aloof beauty of the country as it lay revealed under a brilliant sun. Northward the great bare hills rolled into a white sky only faintly touched with an ephemeral blue. The soft and flowing colors of the lichens and the grassy swales seemed to assume the properties of motion as the wind hurled itself up the valleys and over the far crests. The wind brought a measure of life to a lifeless land; and while the wind blew, the loneliness was held at bay.

  Below our camp the clear waters of Angkuni flickered under the wind’s touch as the seas built up and drove toward a dim line of ridges on the southern shore. At our feet was the broad low path of a huge isthmus cutting across the lake to lose itself in the bright distance.

  There were no trees nor other ragged, upward shapes to break the smooth contours of the land—the swollen continuity of curving space. But hidden in some favored valleys were a few tiny “forests,” each consisting of a dozen or so scrawny spruces, none of which stood more than a yard high. Poor, ugly little things, they thrust their heads upward until they were on a level with the shoulders of the shallow valleys, then they were caught and cut down by the scythe of the winds. Held down by that invisible barrier of air they spread outward, growing like plants beneath a pane of glass.

  The wind is master in that land, but we blessed it for its simple presence since while it blew, the haze of flies was held impotent in the shelter of the lichens. Breakfast was mercifully free of flies on our first day at Angkuni, and afterwards we took advantage of the wind’s kindness and went exploring. Ohoto was the first to leave the camp and he went inland, ostensibly to scan the wastes for signs of deer. I watched him idly as he grew smaller in the distance and then I saw him pause. Lifting my binoculars I watched while he heaped up a little pile of rocks upon a ridge. In a few moments it was done and Ohoto passed out of sight over the rise, leaving yet another Inukshuk to stand against the Barrens’ sky.

  We had brought with us a copy of Tyrrell’s sketch map, the only existing map of Angkuni, and while Andy went to examine and measure the antlers of some long-dead deer, I set off along the shore of Kinetua Bay to try to find the Eskimo campsites Tyrrell had seen and recorded fifty years before. Half a mile away I came to a rocky point which was labeled “Eneetah’s Camp” on Tyrrell’s map. Little triangles printed on the sheet indicated that three tents had stood here in Tyrrell’s time.

  I cast about and at last came upon three circles of boulders, half hidden in the moss and lichens. I walked into the center of one of these tent rings, for such they were, and found the hearth and in it the blackened embers of a fire which looked to be so recent it startled me. For a brief moment I almost believed this camp had been deserted only yesterday and that its owners might return at any moment. I raised my eyes and searched the glittering surface of the water, but nothing moved and the illusion passed.

  Only then did I remember that decay and rot are almost strangers to the Barrenlands. In this world of clean sun and wind both wood and things of bone seem to possess a strange immortality so that after centuries they still retain the form they had when they were first brought to rest amongst the boulder heaps. I particularly remembered finding a roll of birchbark some three hundred miles north of the forests where the last birch trees grow. That bark, intended for the repair of some Indian canoe, had faced the hunger of the years for at least three generations, and when I found it, it was still sound and untouched by rot. This relative absence of decay is an important thing to men who are driven to pry into times long past. Th
e tent- and igloo-dwelling Barrens peoples left little enough to mark their passing, but because of this victory of matter over dissolution, what little did remain has been miraculously preserved to tell its tale with a clear tongue.

  Examining Eneetah’s camp more closely, I came upon part of a human skull lying in a little bed of dark, coarse hair which had once cushioned the skull from snow and sun, and which now cushioned it against the weight of years. There was no grave nearby and so the skull suggested that when death came to this camp he took all men, leaving none to obey the law which says men must have a sufficient burial. There was further evidence of sudden tragedy, for near at hand were the precious poles which had once held up the tents. The tents themselves had long since vanished into the bellies of mice and wolverines, but the poles remained; and tent poles in that land of “little sticks” are not abandoned unless no man still lives to use them any longer.

  The thick moss within the boulder rings veiled other things as well: a copper fishhook, a ladle of muskox horn—and a wooden spool which had once held white man’s thread. The spool alone was of our time, and may have been one of the gifts Tyrrell left with the people whose fleets of kayaks welcomed him under Kinetua. All of these things that I had found, mute in themselves, created voices in my mind. They told me that death had struck Eneetah’s camp after its first visit by a white man, but before the goods of traders became common in the land. The sun-whitened cylinder of wood, and the fragments of tools, told me who Eneetah’s killer was, for I knew that the Great Pain of Kakumee’s bringing had come into the land less than two decades after Tyrrell—and before the Innuit met the traders on the borders of the Barrens.

  I left Eneetah’s camp and walked westward along the shore, passing rows of miniature Inukshuk set up by children at their play—pathetic little products of dead hands. After a time I came to a shallow inlet backed by a massive cliff and in this sheltered place I found a soft green swale running down to the only sand beach I saw on the Great Lake. It was an oasis; a warm and gentle place, and on that grassy meadow I found the tent rings of a mighty camp.

  There were perhaps thirty rings scattered here and there and at least eighteen of these had been in use when last the site was occupied by man. But like Eneetah’s place, this site had also been deserted suddenly. In and around the rings I found the tools of Ohoto’s people. Here was a wooden tuglee from a woman’s hair—this precious ornament discarded in the moss. There lay a section of a bow with a good spring still retained in its ancient fibers. Nearby was a stone meat cache filled with the bones and hair of many deer which had been left to rot away, unused. Down by the sandy shore immense square blocks of stone had been upended to form winter resting places for kayaks where they would be secure from the ever-hungry dogs. No dogs had found them—but time had taken them instead. The frail bones of the little vessels were complete and only the skin coverings had vanished, leaving the naked frames to look like the skeletons of slim and graceful beasts, denuded of all flesh.

  The sunlit meadow seemed to darken as I walked among these somber relics of an unknown tragedy. I seemed to hear the echoes of that fatal tale, and a confused babble of soundless voices filled my ears, trying desperately to tell me of what had come to pass in this lovely and hidden place. They spoke of the nemesis which had fallen upon this camp with such savagery that men gave no heed to their most precious possessions as they fled. But—had they fled? What terror could have made a woman abandon this elaborately carved meat tray—a thing of enduring value—to split and whiten under the long summer suns? And how could men flee when their kayaks and winter sleds remained in the deserted camp?

  At its last life the camp must have held many people, for the tents had been immense, many of them twenty feet across the base. Most of the present tents of the Ihalmiut are dwarfed little cones, half that size, and yet they shelter families of seven or eight, and sometimes more. The great tents by Angkuni could each have held a dozen people comfortably, and this one camp may have contained a hundred souls who appeared to have mysteriously vanished out of time. Vanished, yes— but where?

  The question was soon answered. A few hundred feet behind the camp there was a broken outcropping of black rock—and here I found the people whom I sought. Each lay in an igloo-shaped stone crypt; each in his ageless home, surrounded by some few tools which he had used in life. The graves were so closely crowded, in the limited space suitable for making tombs, that many overlapped and some had been forced to house more than one occupant. I counted thirty-seven in one place, that had all been built hurriedly and at the same time—or at least within a few weeks of each other. The scanty nature of those structures and the paucity of tools within them proclaimed that death had allowed no time for careful ceremony. Evidently whole families had perished at one time, and the few tools and weapons belonging to the family had been thinly divided amongst many souls who would have need of them in the world of Kaila—God of the Skies.

  Not yet surfeited with horror, I searched farther afield, and beyond the main graveyard I found where the dwindling survivors of the terror had abandoned all efforts to give the dead their due. Here the bones lay in shallow hollows scraped in the moss and no one had bothered to provide these ghosts with the tools they would need on their eternal journey. The terror must have been nearing its peak when these naked ones were buried, and the camp must have been all but deserted then. Certainly if any had still lived on they would have been quick to move away as the graves multiplied, for it is an inflexible rule amongst the people that tents must not be pitched near where the dead lie at rest. The dead had come to occupy the place and the camp was given over to them, while the few surviving Kinetuamiut attempted their escape.

  Before I left that camp the dead spoke to me and told me of the terror. Though there was no other sound than the harsh piping of the wind, the voices spoke in such a way that I could not misunderstand. I knew how the Kinetuamiut had died. It was not from starvation, for there had been funeral presents of deer quarters on many of the graves. It was not from violence, for the bones of the dead were unscarred and whole. The Kinetuamiut died because they had received our gift. It was the Great Pain of Kakumee’s tale.

  Perhaps, I thought, a few had escaped; but where had they gone and what was their ultimate fate?

  I found the answer to those questions, too, as I walked away from the sunlit meadows, out into the browning plains which stretched away inland. A few miles from the shore I stumbled on a tiny tent ring consisting of half a dozen stones, barely sufficient to anchor the flimsiest shelter; and in this circle lay one who had fled the terror. The wolverines had given him what burial he needed. Twice in the next mile I found rock crevices into which men’s bodies had been roughly stuffed to find what protection there might be from the weather and the beasts. These were the men who had fled the camps beside Kinetua Bay—and they had not escaped.

  I walked back to the shore and followed it to the mouth of the river, a distance of ten miles. And I found three other great camps that had died under the plague. Beyond the last of these was an ancient burial ground which had existed long before the Great Pain came, and in it I saw the manner in which the Kinetuamiut cared for their dead when death gave them the time. A tall gray pole marked one burial mound whose roof had been constructed of the owner’s long winter sled. The openings had been neatly filled with rocks and thatched with willow, and the whole was so well made that the crypt had remained almost intact. Beside the grave were deer spears, a snow knife, bow drills, arrows and a stone lamp containing five wonderfully made stone pipes and many other needful things to show that this man had left the world well prepared to face the next. This was a peaceful grave, and it was in startling contrast to the ones near the plague camps.

  When I turned back I found myself hurrying and I felt an almost hysterical desire to see living men again. I almost ran the last few yards to camp, where I was greeted by Ohoto, and in turn greeted the Eskimo with an e
ffusiveness which startled him. Ohoto told me he had found no deer, but he said the land to the north appeared to have been one of the greatest highways the deer had ever used. This was small comfort, for we had expected to find the deer themselves at Angkuni and we had counted on stocking up with meat so we could continue our explorations into the unknown lands to the northwest. Our food supplies brought from Windy Camp were almost exhausted and we did not care to risk missing the deer by starting off to a distant part of the Barrens which the deer might never visit.

  So we began a period of waiting that stretched into days, then into weeks. As patiently as possible we waited for the deer, but patience was soon exhausted by the hordes of flies which also waited hungrily, but that were willing to accept us as substitutes until the deer did come. For days on end we three were forced to stay in our tents while viscous masses of mosquitoes and black flies hung like living tapestries on the outside of our mosquito nets. We partially escaped the blood-hungry throngs by keeping inside, but we had other tortures to contend with, for the sun was without pity and the tiny cube of motionless air enclosed by our tent was often heated to the point where our water bucket grew surprisingly hot. Those were not pleasant days, but perhaps one day in three would bring a wind and then, as if by some benevolent sorcery, the flies would vanish and our imprisonment would be briefly broken. On one of these days I wandered for almost twenty miles along the shores of Angkuni looking for signs of living things; and I saw not a bird nor an animal. On another day I did manage to surprise a covey of half-grown ptarmigan in a swale and once I saw a single gyrfalcon, a great, gray-winged shadow that swept low over the crest of a hill, cried piercingly, and vanished swiftly. But there were no deer, no arctic hares, no ground squirrels, no foxes, and almost no other birds.