People of the Deer

by Farley Mowat

  Deserted and empty as they were, the Angkuni plains did give me one rare gift and that lay in the opportunities I found for long talks with Ohoto. As our enforced idleness dragged on, Ohoto became almost garrulous and I had the unusual good sense to take advantage of it.

  Just before dusk one day a strong south wind sprang up. Ohoto and I sallied gratefully out from our prison and climbed the crest of a high hill to scan the distant plains for deer. As usual we saw no sign of Tuktu, but it was a pleasant evening so we sat amongst the broken rocks of the hilltop, smoked our pipes and waited for the low sun to pass from sight. It was then Ohoto told me the Ihalmiut story of genesis and something about the early days of men.

  “Things were not always as you see them now,” Ohoto began, then paused to drag furiously at his pipe...

  In the beginning there was no sun in the sky, and the land of those far times was warm and dry. No snow lay on it and no rain fell. And it was so when Kaila, he who is Thunder in gray skies, knew it was time to bring life into the land.

  First, Kaila made the hare and ptarmigan and sent them down through darkness and bade them multiply until their tracks covered all hills and valleys of the dark and hidden world. So the ptarmigan and the hare went into darkness and did as they were told.

  There came the time when they were many, and Kaila saw that they were many, and he knew the land was ready. And Kaila took the first woman and the first man, and these two he sent into the world which lay ready to receive them.

  Yet Kaila, who sees without eyes, in darkness as in light, forgot that men see nothing in the dark. But it was so, and the man could not see, and hunger came upon the first man and woman, for though the hares and ptarmigan were many, the first hunter could not see to make his kill.

  Then the woman stood on a high place and cried out to Kaila, begging for his aid. And Kaila heard, and he sent fire into darkness, and then there was both light to see by, and heat to cook upon.

  It became the woman’s task to keep the fire alive, for it had been her gift from Kaila. But the man thrust his forefinger deep into the coals so that it caught fire and became a flaming torch. Then with this torch to light his way, the first man roamed the hills, and many were the hares and ptarmigan that fell beneath his hand.

  So for a long time the man and woman lived in peace, and with full bellies. But at length hares and ptarmigan grew wary of the hunter’s torch and they fled into ground and into air. Hunger came again to the first man and woman. Once again the woman stood on a high hill and cried her sorrows, and once more Kaila heard and answered her. He heard, and spoke, telling her to dig a great hole in the ground, so deep that none might see its bottom.

  When the hole was dug, Kaila bade the woman make a strong line from the plaited sinews of many hares, and a sharp hook from the wing bones of the ptarmigan. And this too was done as Kaila said that it must be.

  Then Kaila bade the woman try her skill with the hook and line, in the deep hole that had been dug. The woman sat beside the hole, holding her line, while the man stood beside her letting the flame of his great torch send shadows dancing into the hole. Then came a sudden tug on the line. Quickly the woman hauled it up and dragged the first wolf from the bowels of the earth. But the wolf was an eater of meat, and no giver of meat, and so the woman cast him loose, bidding him multiply and to become many over all the land. The wolf heard the woman, and obeyed her words.

  Again and yet again the woman flung her hook into the hole and always when a weight came on it, she drew it up. In this way she caught all the beasts of land: Amow the white wolf, Kakwik the gray wolverine, Akla the great brown bear, Hikik the red-haired squirrel, Omingmuk the shaggy muskox—and all other beasts which walk the world. And yet it happened that none of these was what the woman desired, and after speaking to each as she had spoken to the wolf, she freed them all, and cast her line again.

  After the land beasts came the beasts of air: Tingmea the white goose, U-ulnik the long-tailed duck—and all the lesser beasts of air. But none of these was what the woman sought and so she freed them into darkness, speaking to them as she had spoken to the wolf.

  After the beasts of air there came the beasts of water: Ichloa the red trout, Atnju the soft sucker—and all the lesser beasts of water. But still not one of these was what the woman sought, and so she freed them into lakes and rivers, speaking always as she had first spoken to the wolf.

  Now came a time when no new weight fell upon the line, and the man grew weary of his vigil by the hole. He would have slept, for the world was filled with many kinds of game, and he was satisfied. But the woman rebuked him, for she was as stubborn as all her daughters have been ever since—and she had still not caught the one thing which she sought.

  We do not know how long the woman lingered by the hole, for then there was no winter and no summer, no day or night. But in the end there came a great jerk on the line so that it was almost torn from the woman’s hands. The man sprang to help her and together they pulled the sinew rope out of the pit. It was a mighty struggle, and yet man and his woman triumphed and so they at last beheld the antlered crown of Tuktu—first of all the deer!

  The woman cried out with joy and flung her hook away, and the deep hole closed up and vanished. Then the woman spoke to the first deer, saying:

  “Go out over the land and become as many as all other things which live in water, land or air—for it is you and your kind who will feed me and my children and my children’s children for all time that there is yet to come.”

  The first deer heard, and heeded what the woman said, and so it came about that there were many deer...

  Ohoto ceased his tale, and together we looked out over the broad isthmus where the gravels and lichens bore the trails of many deer. Those trails were so many they were like a close-knit web covering all the land. We looked in silence, until at last I asked, “What of the first woman, and her man?”

  For longer than I know [Ohoto continued], the first man and woman lived in the dark world. Yet though Tuktu was there and hunger had been banished, still the man’s loins stayed dry and the woman’s womb was empty as an ancient skull. So might it always have remained had not it been for Hekenjuk the sun, the giver of new life. And Hekenjuk came to us because of a great battle fought between the wolf and the wolverine in times long past.

  Of all beasts in the land, Kakwik the wolverine is strongest and most cunning. Because of his great cunning, Kakwik learned to hunt in darkness. But Amow the wolf could never learn and often enough he blundered into rocks while the deer he chased so blindly laughed at him and fled away.

  In those times Kakwik and Amow lived together in a cave sunken deep into the rocks, and once when they were digging at the back of the cave they chanced to uncover the bright face of Hekenjuk, who had been buried by Kaila at the first of things.

  Amow was happy then, and cried, “Let us free the sun, for then there will be light in darkness, and I shall see to make a mighty hunt!” But Kakwik had no desire to see the wolf become a hunter of great skill, and he would not agree with the white wolf, but kicked the dirt back over the gleaming sun.

  This was the beginning of the battle, but in those days all animals spoke the same tongue with man and when they fought, they fought with words alone. So Kakwik fought with the first wolf, and the sound of battle echoed over all the hills and was as loud as thunder. Amow was clever, yet Kakwik was more clever; and so at length the wolf was beaten and fled back into the cave, while Kakwik went out to hunt.

  But when Kakwik was gone, Amow quickly uncovered Hekenjuk and freed him from the grip of rocks. Flaming, the sun rose to the peak of the black sky and all darkness vanished. Kakwik was filled with rage, a rage so great that even high Hekenjuk trembled; and to placate the wolverine, the sun agreed to go back into hiding for part of every day. And thus it is we have the change from night to day.

  With the coming of the sun, the seasons
came, and now in the summer, when the hunting is not hard, the wolf grows strong and so the days are longer. But in winter, when the hunting of the deer is hard, Kakwik is stronger and the sun must hide, so that the days then are short.

  Now when Kaila saw that Hekenjuk the sun had been freed without his knowledge he was mightily enraged. His lightning shattered the sky, and his storms blew over the breadth of the land. The skies grew as angry as foam at the foot of the rapids, and Nipello the rain first fell over the world. So also came Aput and Hiko, the snow and ice, and also the blizzards which live in the long winter nights.

  And because of these things, Kaila is known to this day as the God of All Weather. Even today his anger lives, and our world is only a toy for his anger to crush.

  Ohoto paused again. In the evening sky the dark rage of Kaila was massing and the sun was shrinking before it. Flames roared down from the zenith, to lose themselves in the angry black clouds which poured up from the horizon like coils of thick smoke, and spread out over the pallid face of the sky. Then somewhere in the storm-darkened hills a white wolf howled sadly, and the echoing cry wavered over the lake like the voice of the first of all wolves, bewailing the loss of the sun. The long echoes shattered and died as Ohoto once again took up his tale.

  After a time the woman grew big in the belly for with the coming of Hekenjuk, the Giver of Life, the loins of the man had grown heavy with seed. The woman gave birth to her children, and these were not men as we know them—but dogs!

  From her womb came forth litters of dogs. Yet in those times all things spoke the same tongue with man, and so all things were brothers, even with man, and the dogs were man’s brothers too.

  Now in those days the man and woman lived in a camp by a vast inland sea which lies far off to the west. But soon that camp by the sweet-water sea was filled with the children the woman endlessly bore. At last there were so many the man could not hunt for them all. He grew weary and even the woman, their mother, grew weary. So on a day she took off her deerskin boot and blew into it, and by her magic it became a great boat. Then she launched the boat on the waters of the sweet-water sea, and in it she placed most of the children she had borne. When the wind came out of the north, the woman pushed the boat free, and the wind took it southward until it was gone from her sight.

  The boat sailed on into the south until it passed from the lands of our people into the deep, hidden lands where the forests cover the world. Here the boat entered the mouth of a river and ran aground on a shoal.

  Many of the dogs in the boat were hungry and were sick of the water, so some of them swam to shore and entered the forests, and here they have lived ever since, for they became Itkilit—the Indian peoples.

  But still the wind blew from the north and at last the boat slipped free of the shoal and drifted on to the south. How far—no one knows. When it at length came to rest, the remainder of the dogs entered into an unknown land, and here they became Kablunait—the fathers and grandfathers of you and your kind.

  Not all of the dogs were sent away in that boat, for some remained in the camp by the inland sea, and these were the ones the woman favored over all of the others. After a time these became the fathers and grandfathers of me and my kind, for they were the first Innuit—the first Men.

  As Ohoto finished speaking, the sullen darkness of the storm swept in over the Great Lake and the long moan of the coming wind rose above the cry of the distant wolf.

  All along the stark and rocky shores which lay beneath us were the old camps of the Innuit, and they were as silent as the dead soul of the land. Dimly I saw the stone circles which marked the places of tents, with the lichens growing high amongst them. Beyond the stone rings, up on the ridges where the frost-shattered rocks of the slope stood upended like tombstones disordered by earthquakes, there were the people.

  Little rock mounds rose above the stone surface like gray boils on the bones of the land. All along the darkening shores the little mounds rose. And under each of them slept a son of the woman, with the tools he had used in his life by his side.

  15. From the Inland Sea

  The succeeding days at Angkuni brought no sign of the deer. While we waited impatiently for their arrival, I took advantage of the windy days to explore the high plateau north of the lake, and in many places among the mounded gravel ridges I found further traces of the men who were gone. One day I picked up an oddly shaped fragment of wood, and when I asked Ohoto to identify it, he replied that it had been part of a crossbow.

  Now this was a startling discovery because, as far as I knew, no Eskimo people had ever used this weapon. When I questioned him more closely, Ohoto told me that the Ihalmiut of the previous generation regularly made crossbows from the springy horn of the muskox, and used them extensively in hunting Tuktu. The remnants of the bow by Angkuni Lake were proof of the truth of his words, but to this day the Ihalmiut occasionally make crossbows of spruce for the children to use in hunting ptarmigan and small animals.

  There could be no doubt that the crossbow was as old as the People, but where, I wondered, had they acquired the art of making such a weapon? Was it on the far steppes of Asia? And if so, why had the Ihalmiut retained this art, which had evidently been lost to all other Eskimo peoples?

  The ancient history of the Ihalmiut is shrouded in mystery, but the legend of genesis which Ohoto told me has in it many hints about the nature of that mystery. Ohoto’s curious reference to the “inland sea,” where the first woman lived, probably applies to the real inland sea we know as Great Bear Lake. There are many things in the folklore of the Ihalmiut to indicate that Great Bear was once the home of the People; and there is nothing at all to indicate that the Barrens race ever dwelt by the ocean. The whole spoken history of the Ihalmiut belongs exclusively to a people who have not the faintest folk memory of life beside the salt water. The language and customs of the inland men give further evidence of a broad and ancient split in the proto-Eskimo race, for almost all the religious and magical tabus of the Ihalmiut deal uniquely with an inland culture based solely on Tuktu the deer. The language, too, is widely divergent from that used by the sea peoples. It differs not only in minor ways, but it lacks the very words which are specifically related to knowledge of the sea.

  Knud Rasmussen, leader of the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921 to 1924, who was himself half Eskimo, guessed the probable meaning of this chain of differences between the coast Eskimos and the plains dwellers. Rasmussen traveled a little way up the River of Men, from its mouth at Baker Lake, and he encountered an inlying group of former coastal Eskimos who had met and assimilated a small remnant of the inland people who had been driven north by the plague. The culture of this bastard group was predominantly coastal in folklore, though inland in practice. However, Rasmussen, who was an observant man, detected signs of an unusual antiquity of race in them which went far beyond anything to be found among other Innuit. From his brief but intense contact with this group, he concluded that they represented the last surviving link with the proto-Eskimo stock from which all modern Eskimos are descended. But Rasmussen never met the Ihalmiut, and never even suspected their existence.

  Let me turn back the blank pages of a history which will never be written, and tell you how I would explain the coming of the crossbow to the great ridge beside Angkuni Lake.

  In an age long forgotten, thousands of years before Christ, a new movement among the constantly shifting races of northeastern Asia brought an irresistible pressure against the men who were then living in the eastern peninsula of Siberia. The pressure was applied slowly, but it was inexorable, and the men who were to be the fathers of the Innuit were forced ever east and north. Some of them perhaps emerged on the Arctic Coast of Siberia, for there, to this day, lives a race of men, the Chukchee, who are much like our own coast Eskimos.

  However, the balance of the fugitive Asians, who had continued eastward, at length found themselves hemmed in on the narrowing apex
of land which is now the Chukchee Peninsula. There may well have been a complete land bridge to North America in those days, but this is of no importance, for there was certainly a chain of islands crossing the Bering Strait, and it would have been easy then, as it is now, to go from Asia to Alaska by island-hopping. The spreading pressure area in Siberia now forced the fugitives to cross the continental strait.

  Probably the new land of Alaska was already occupied by the forebears of the Indians, and its coasts may even have been in the hands of the Asiatics who had earlier been forced to the Siberian coast, and who had there developed a sea culture and spread eastward. The new migrants from the west would thus have been forced to move through the interior until they found unoccupied land. Probably they worked through the Brooks Mountain barrens in northern Alaska—a devilishly inhospitable area—until they reached the true, flat Barrens, near Great Bear Lake. These rolling plains would have been like home to the wanderers, for the tundra to the north and east of Great Bear is very similar to the northern treeless plains of Siberia. On their American Barrens these peoples from the west would have found a familiar world of rocks, muskegs and lichens. And not only the land, but its beasts too would have been familiar. The white fox, the lemming and the wolf, as well as many other animals, are virtually identical in both Siberia and Northern Canada. As for Tuktu the deer—in those distant ages mighty herds of both wild and tame reindeer roamed the Asiatic plains, even as their close relatives, the caribou, roamed the Barrens of North America. Thus, an immigrant race who had lived on reindeer would find no serious difficulty in building a new life about the caribou. They would naturally use the same weapons and much the same techniques that they had learned in Asia—and the crossbow was originally an Asiatic weapon.