People of the Deer

by Farley Mowat

  “It was better then?” he asked gently—“It was better that I had not come to this place—that these people I loved had not heard my voice and I had never come? You think that. And I? What do I think? I think sometimes that it was a bad thing for these people when I was sent to this place...”

  I left him then, left the old man with the reward of his lifetime of labor. Age and the sure face of death had left him no need to lie to himself or to me. Yet I wished desperately that he had lied, and that I had aided and abetted his lie.

  17. Ohoto

  During our days at Angkuni Lake, and while we were traveling north and west on the Kuwee, Ohoto had been an incomplete man. He had been under the shadow of a great apprehension, greater than the depression we two white men felt at the sight of the empty tent circles and the scattered rock graves. That we had seen no deer and had found only their old tracks meant more to Ohoto than a temporary absence of the beasts from this land. He felt that he had been transported into a sort of Ihalmiut hell, a hell of the worst possible kind where there were no deer and never would be any deer.

  The hell and the heaven of the Ihalmiut are real places that co-exist in this world. Thus “heaven” might be likened to the land where the deer may always be found whenever man has need of them. An actual glimpse of this paradise is vouchsafed to the People in the days when the great herds pass through their country. So “hell” is the place that knows nothing of the deer, and it too is present in reality during those times when there are no deer on the plains.

  Inevitably Ohoto confused the nebulous concept of the Ihalmiut hell with the unreality of the Angkuni country. The impact of this lifeless land was therefore much greater on him than it was on us—and we felt it strongly enough. We shared his sensation of existing as disembodied nonentities. We felt, at times, as if all reality were escaping from us. We two white men were irritatingly aware of moving through an imponderable void which became more and more oppressive.

  All this, I think, helps to explain two shocking things which happened to Ohoto during our voyage of exploration into the north and the west.

  During our trip up the Kuwee, Ohoto developed an abscess on his cheek. With each passing day it grew deeper and angrier, but he was so engrossed in the gloom of his own thoughts that he seldom complained about it. I dressed it a few times, and after the fourth day it had become so ugly that we took a chance and lanced it. But still it persisted. At first I thought the presence of the sore was probably due to a nutritional upset, since Ohoto had never before gone without meat or existed on the devitalized foods of white men for so long a time.

  By the time we reached the headwaters of Kuwee, the abscess had grown so deep and so large that Andy and I became seriously disturbed about it, and even the stoical Eskimo began to show signs of physical reaction to it. His appetite began to fail, and this is the most serious symptom an Innuit can betray, for food means more to him than almost anything else.

  We made a good camp not far from the place where Kuwee left the unknown lake, and here we decided to stay until the sore began to show some signs of healing. Ohoto accepted our gesture with evident disinterest. He set up his little travel shelter, crawled into it and showed no further signs of life until darkness had come. We were all tired with the long fatigue which comes from hard travel on empty stomachs, and I fell asleep as soon as I had crawled under my fly net.

  About midnight I was awakened by blood-chilling screams. They were inhuman sounds, far beyond the power of mere pain to induce, for they carried an overtone of such abject terror that I broke into a sweat without any knowledge of what had induced those fearful cries.

  I lay there for a moment, but the shrieks were so penetrating they could not be ignored. Andy was sitting up in his bedroll, and he called out to me.

  “Good God! What the hell is that?”

  “Ohoto, I think,” I replied. Then, without bothering to put on any clothes, I crawled stark-naked from under my net, grabbed a rifle, and ran out over the broken rocks toward the tiny shelter where Ohoto lay.

  The screams ceased before I got there. Instead my ears were assailed by a gurgling whimper, as if the man’s voice had been overcome by sheer terror, leaving him with only an animal echo of sounds. I flung open the door flap of his tent with such vehemence that I ripped it and part of the wall clean off the poles. Ohoto was crouched inside, his body nearly filling the tiny space of the shelter, and he was staring at one of the slim poles with eyes as empty of all expression as those of a dead ox. His lips hung slack and his great white teeth shone eerily in the light of the stars.

  I shouted his name, but the cringing thing on the rug paid no heed to me. Whimpers of fear still bubbled out of his throat. I became conscious of a feeling of panic, for I could see no sign of a danger capable of instilling such a fear in a man. For a moment I thought Ohoto had gone mad, and was perhaps in the grip of the dread arctic hysteria which makes insane murderers out of sane men. The potentialities of being stranded in this empty wilderness with a mad Eskimo came unpleasantly to my mind.

  I acted by instinct. Dropping the rifle, I grabbed Ohoto by the hair and shook him so violently that he fell over and crashed into the frail wall of his tent. Then to my relief he made a tremendous effort, straightened up so that he was resting on his knees, and pointed a shaking hand at the blank stretch of canvas behind one of the poles of his shelter.

  The gesture was a mute appeal to me, and his eyes were fixed on my face. But where he pointed I could see nothing at all except the discolored canvas and the smooth peeled surface of the sapling pole.

  I still had no idea what was causing his terror. Finally, and with no coherent reason, I picked up the rifle and swung the butt as hard as I could against the slender tent pole. It was, for me, only a release of tension, but by the luck of fools and of white men I unwittingly had done the right thing.

  Ohoto relaxed with the abruptness of a deflating balloon. His eyes closed and his erratic breathing sank to a long, deep rustle. He curled up like a dog, and in a moment the anticlimax of the night’s work was on me. Ohoto began to snore loudly!

  He snored and snored. I became aware of the multitudes of mosquitoes clinging to my naked flesh and went hurriedly back to my bed and gave a garbled account of what I had seen to my anxious companion. Then for hours I lay, and could not sleep, while the echo of Ohoto’s snores sounded like a mocking denial of what had happened.

  But it had happened, and it was no nightmare of the sleep-drugged mind but a nightmare in reality. When dawn came we got dressed and went to see Ohoto. He was sleeping gently and I nudged him with my foot until he woke, dazed by the depths of his slumber. This was itself odd, for during the previous week he had not slept except in brief naps, for the pain in his face had banished sleep.

  He lay still for a moment, then his eyes widened again and stared as they had stared at me during the night. His mouth drew back in a grimace and I thought, “Oh, Lord! Here we go again!” But he only rolled over so that he could see the tent pole against which I had driven my rifle butt. Then he spoke.

  “The Ino!” he cried. “Now it is gone!”

  He got up then, scrambling out of the wreck of his tent, and as he turned sideways to us, we both saw with a distinct shock that his abscess was almost healed! What had been a draining wound the night before was now dry and scabbed with the healthy look of growing skin. Ohoto carefully touched the hole in his cheek and, for the first time in many days, he smiled.

  “Look!” he said, turning to us. “Now that the Ino is gone the pain has left this thing in my face! Soon this will heal and I will forget it as I have already forgotten the pain!”

  It seemed to be a time for explanations. I asked my questions and Ohoto readily answered them, for it appeared that he owed me a debt of gratitude. I listened to what he told us and I was of two minds about it. Under the bright morning sun, it sounded like so much supernatura
l gibberish, yet I could not deny the evidence of my eyes as they dwelt on that inexplicably dried-up sore. I listened and could not tell what was real and what was sheer fantasy.

  The abscess had been the work of a devil—that was the first thing. This visit of a malignant Ino—and Ohoto was specific about him, telling us that it was the spirit of a man who had not been buried, and whose body had been eaten by wolves—had brought on the running sore as the first step in the destruction of Ohoto. But the devil chose to dally, and it was not until the night before that it decided to finish its job. It came with darkness. When Ohoto looked up from his pain-ridden sleep, he saw it clinging to the pole of the tent, grinning evilly down upon him.

  Ohoto thanked me profusely for my intervention. According to him, it was my haphazard swing of the rifle, coupled with some blasphemy I had not realized I was uttering, that convinced the Ino I was more than a match for it. It fled. The pain in Ohoto’s face vanished on the instant, and by morning the abscess was well on the way to being cured.

  I must admit quite frankly I don’t believe what Ohoto believed. And yet I know that in three days the abscess vanished, and that is an incredibly short length of time for natural healing to do its work.

  Less than a week after the Ino trouble, Ohoto’s prophecy about his father’s return, made when we first saw Angkuni Lake, came true. Elaitutna returned, to the vision and hearing of Ohoto, and spoke to his son.

  For a few days after his abscess cleared up, Ohoto’s natural cheerfulness revived, but it was short-lived. When, day after day, we still failed to meet the deer, his mood grew dark again.

  Slowly we coasted along the northern shore of the unknown lake, staying timidly under the lee of towering rock dikes which the ice had gouged up and flung along the shores, for we had not forgotten the mysterious and malignant wind that had almost destroyed us early in the trip. The surrounding country was so low-lying and shielded by continuous dikes that we could not see it from the lake. Low islands swung over the horizon and tantalized us with the belief that they were mainland, before they blended with and disappeared into the rock wall which hemmed us in. The canoe was like a minute protozoan wandering in a vast saucer, aimlessly active, and blind.

  Our horizon was either water or the rocky rim of the saucer. We crawled blindly along under the dubious shelter of the dikes and prayed we would not be forced to land except at places of our own choosing, for any attempt at beaching the canoe along most of that formidable coast, except in a dead calm, would have resulted in the canoe’s being smashed to bits.

  During three days’ travel we found only five places where we could safely get ashore. From these places we could look inland and our eyes recoiled from what we saw. Beyond the dikes lay an endless cone of gray distance, a drowned and sodden land. It was a desperate sight and its most frightening aspect was the almost complete absence of deer trails. It was completely free of the intricate network of such trails which marks almost all of the Barrenlands. Only a faint depression here and there might have been made by the feet of Tuktu, a long long time ago.

  After a few days of this, Ohoto was sunk into a depression that nothing could relieve. We had not only passed out of the realms of living men, but, so far as he could see, we had passed completely out of the world as he knew it. This he was certain of, for there were no deer here, and never had been any deer.

  One night we found a rare shingle beach, a few yards long, crowded into a gap in the rock barriers along the shore. Gratefully we beached the canoe and made camp—without a fire, for there was no wood. Ohoto was silent during our meal, and we too were under such tension that we made no effort to speak to him or to try to break the mood which had been obviously growing over him for days. When the meal was over, the Eskimo came to me and quietly asked me for my rifle.

  I knew there was no game about that he could hunt, and anyway it was growing dark, for in late summer the nights are already long. I asked Ohoto why he wanted the gun and he answered, saying: “Give me your gun—and in the morning think of the things that I have done for you. I know you will give my body what it demands, for you know the things which must be done; nor will you leave me for the foxes and wolves—for you are a man of the Ihalmiut!”

  Andy exploded. “Suicide!” he shouted. “That’s all we need to make this picnic really happy!”

  Certainly death filled Ohoto’s thoughts, and as I realized the fact, the long tension of our journey seemed to reach an unbearable climax, and I gave way to livid anger.

  I told the Eskimo that he would have no gun, and I told him to wipe the idea from his mind or I would do it for him. He walked away from us and sat down on the rocks by the shore while my companion and I rounded up the rifles, the hatchet and all the knives—even Ohoto’s—and hid the lot under the bedrolls in our tent. We were bitter against the man, for it was as if he had deliberately added this last unbearable weight to the heavy uncertainty which already clouded the outcome of our journey into nowhere. We were so burdened by the strain of this uncertainty that our nerves were worn to the thin, ragged edge, and our thoughts were no longer wholly rational. We told each other we did not give a damn what happened to Ohoto, that we were angry only because we did not relish having a dead man on our hands. After we had hidden the weapons, I went to Ohoto and I beat him with words as brutally as I could in the Innuit tongue. He did not look up or answer me. After a while I felt a sense of pettiness and self-disgust. I knew dimly that this man needed what sympathy and understanding we could give him, for if we were alone in emptiness, then he was trebly alone. I caught my rage and squeezed it back into my heart, and spoke gently to Ohoto, trying to make amends and to persuade him he must not die.

  If he heard me he gave no sign, and now my rage flared up anew. I stalked back to the tent, cursing him in English as I went.

  Andy and I went to bed, both of us filled with a tight anger against the Eskimo. I tried to put him out of my thoughts, but neither sleep nor forgetfulness was possible.

  We had not been in the tent many minutes when a pair of yellow-billed loons pierced the heavy silence with their frenetic cries. They were the first living things we had heard for days. But instead of relieving the tautness in us, they only intensified it, for their lunatic babble was not what one expects from creatures of flesh and blood.

  Hardly had they begun their wailing refrain when Ohoto’s voice joined them. The sounds of the loons became a maniac chorus for Ohoto’s voice as he intoned the high-pitched and monotonous chant which is peculiar to the Ihalmiut who know they are about to die!

  The song went on, endlessly, into the night, until I clutched the sleeping bag so tightly that my nails cracked against the rough canvas. Exhaustion eventually overcame me, and I slept, to grapple with hideous nightmares, until just before dawn I awoke. I lay there for a long time, staring up into the white mist of my net, before I realized that the singing had stopped. Then I felt sick. Nausea rocked me, as I lay there believing that Ohoto was gone.

  When it was full dawn I went over to Ohoto’s shelter. He was not there. I began searching, and as I failed to find him, I grew frantic and ran, stumbling among the boulders of the dike. At last I found him, lying face downward in the thick moss near the beach.

  For a long time I stood over his still form, hesitating to touch the ragged fur of his old parka, but as I looked down upon him the light grew stronger and I saw that his parka was lifting and falling in the shallow, regular rhythm of sleep.

  The relief I felt was utterly magnificent! I shouted at him, and when he sat up and began rubbing his eyes, I tossed him my tobacco pouch and my own pipe. If he had been standing I would have thrown my arms around his neck.

  It was a penitent but subdued Eskimo who had his breakfast with us that morning. We, on the contrary, were so relieved to have him still with us that we were cheerful and even voluble. However, unlike the time he had been troubled by the Ino, Ohoto was n
ot at all anxious to explain what had underlain his suicidal mood of the previous night. But we had forgiven him and so we felt it was our right to know the story.

  Several days elapsed before we heard it all. I repeat it now. The continuity is mine but the content is Ohoto’s.

  When I was nutarik [but a child] my father often traveled on the River of Men. My father, Elaitutna, used to venture far down the river even as far as the lake called Hicoliguak, for he knew the land well, having lived at the Angkuni camp in the days before disaster came to that place. My father was a shaman, though only a little one. Still he had less fear of the spirits than most men have, and that was why he continued his journeys on the river for many years after men had deserted its banks. My father almost alone of the Ihalmiut visited Angkuni after the great dying there.

  He had a love for the land about the Great Lake; and that love was only tempered by fear of the empty tent rings and the full graves. Many a time Elaitutna swore he would return to Angkuni, where he had seen his first deer as a child, and where his spirit would remain for all time to come.

  When he died, in my tent at the trader’s lake far to the east of here, I placed all things needful for a journey on his grave, for I knew he would take those things and go from the foreign place where he died, and return again to the camps which lie under Kinetua.

  It was because I knew this that I spoke of Elaitutna when we first climbed Kinetua and looked out over the dead land about the Great Lake. I knew that hill; I knew that place. And I knew also that, somewhere near, the ghost of Elaitutna lingered. That knowledge gave me a happiness which was not unmixed with fear, for though I loved Elaitutna, I do not love ghosts.

  We had been camped on the shores of Kinetua Bay only a few days when I knew that Elaitutna had discovered me. I could neither see nor hear him then, but I knew he was there, and his presence brought me both fear and comfort as I walked over the lands of the dead.