People of the Deer

by Farley Mowat

  When we left Angkuni and traveled up Kuwee, Elaitutna was near, and as we went from the place of graves, it seemed that the spirit of my father grew in strength until at times I believed I heard the distant sound of his remembered voice. Thus it was that when we stood on the shores of this nameless lake at last, it was Elaitutna who whispered the words I said to you, saying that we should turn back from the emptiness which stretched ahead.

  You would not turn back, and so we went on into the strange land of water and it happened that Elaitutna lost his powers, for this was a land where he did not belong. He could do nothing for me when the devil who haunted this river came into my face and would have destroyed me but for your magic. Still you would not turn back, though now the voice of Elaitutna was strong, and so I knew that I was passing into his world—the world of spirits. All day I heard his voice and for long hours my father spoke to me, telling me the tales of his youth and of the youth of this land.

  Elaitutna spoke of the time when the tents of the People were as many as clouds on a day when the white spirits roll over the sky. My father told me of the time when the deer were so many that the Ihalmiut had no use for the word “hunger.” He spoke also of the days when the great fleets of kayaks made the long journey north to the meeting place called Akilingnea, the high ridge where the Innuit of the coast came to the edge of our land to gather wood and to trade with us.

  The memory of my father stretched farther back in time, and he spoke of the days when all the People who became the Ihalmiut lived fifty days march to the west, by the shores of a truly mighty lake such as we have never seen. Elaitutna told me how the Itkilit came on that lake from the south and west and attacked the Innuit there, and the survivors fled into the east, and over the lifetimes of many men they journeyed slowly eastward to escape the Itkilit raids, until at last they found this land of the Ihalmiut.

  But most of all, Elaitutna spoke of the deer. He spoke of the days when the deer needed a full month to pass by the famous crossing places. And as my father talked, I looked out from your canoe and saw no living thing in all the land, and my heart grew weak, and I grew dazed and could not tell if I had died and was already in the place where no deer are, and where the hungry spirits whine over the plains seeking the deer that are not there.

  I heard Elaitutna’s voice grow steadily in strength, but it was not until we reached this camp that I saw my father once more. He stood by me near the shore. You who are Kablunait could not see him, though he saw you, as you walked to and fro.

  It was then, and in this place, that Elaitutna spoke the words which made me want your rifle, that I might seek out my rest. My father spoke no more of the old times, but spoke instead of the People, and of the land as it is now. He talked of Hunger, and of the Great Pain. He spoke of the lesser killers, and of the blood-spitting which comes upon the women and children. He bade me look at you, and he said:

  “See, Ohoto, these are the Kablunait who were also the sons of the first woman, even as we also came from her womb. Yet she sent them from her, and from this land which was theirs as well as ours. She wronged them in that ancient time, but they did not forget, nor did they forget that we were the favored ones of our common mother. They returned again. They returned for their revenge, and in their train they brought the Great Pain and the blood-spitting. They took the deer and hid them from us so that we knew the meaning of famine. They are clever and they have come to claim the land which once was ours.

  “And you, my son? Now you are here with me in the land of the dead, and that is well. In the tents you left behind upon the shores of the Little Lakes there is only evil and perhaps there will be no people left to greet you when you return. Even should those faces that you know still smile to see you come, yet remember that their time is short and I speak the truth. The day will come when there are no more faces left to greet you, when you come in from your fruitless hunts.

  “I am Angeokok—a shaman, Ohoto, and a ghost who can see all that your eyes cannot see. What were the People in my youth but a great People who filled all the wide plains with the voices of men? You know what the People are now. But what will they be at the end of the winter which stretches ahead? A few new graves by the rivers that flow through the land.

  “And Ohoto, my son, where will he be in those times? While the Kablunait remain, he too may remain, but when they are done with his help, where will he go? A time will come when he will die, and there will be no man of his People left to bury his bones. The wolves will have what is left of my son, and his spirit will find no peace in all of the world.”

  So spoke Elaitutna, my father. And I knew the truth of his words and wished to borrow your gun and make an end to the waiting.

  But the guns were hidden, and when I came to look for my knife, it too was gone. So I went and sat by the shore, in the darkness, and sang the songs of the dying—believing the power of Elaitutna, my father, would bring me to death. Yet before morning he left me, and when I searched for him by the rocks he was gone and I was alive.

  Then I had no heart left in me; and I fell in the moss and I wept, knowing that I was alone.

  18. Days of His Father

  On the day after Ohoto’s decision to die, we went on from the night camp and the land changed its face. The sun rose high in a translucent sky and soon we beheld the lift of hills rising over the dikes which had enclosed our world for so long. Massive hills rose to the west and to the south. The shore now curved into the south so that we knew we had come to the end of the nameless lake.

  The sight of those distant hills was like the sight of friends on the quay, at the end of a voyage, and we paddled toward them with a new strength. Ohoto was the first to see dark patches clinging in the folds of the ragged slopes on the far ridges, and through my glasses I saw, with a lifting heart, that the patches were trees.

  As we swung to the south, the rock dikes crumbled and sank and were gone. Now land, real land, sloped quickly up from the shore to a line of low ridges. As we paddled under their flanks we saw with a childlike delight that they were reticulated and patterned with the myriad trails of the deer.

  In the low valleys which cut into the hills were many thickets of spruce, and so we went to shore several times that morning, simply for the pleasure of building fires. Though we had nothing but a little flour to eat, we were merry as we sat near the great pyres and laughed as the mosquitoes and flies incinerated themselves.

  As we sat by one of these fires, a gray, nebulous haze swept suddenly in over the lake and in an instant obscured the bleak desolation of the way we had come. The haze lasted only a minute or two, but before it had passed, a most perfect rainbow was born—grew up to the zenith and fell to the other side of its sphere so that it spanned, with one magnificent arc, from the north to the southern shore of the lake. It was only a rainbow, yet Ohoto swore it was a sign. When we pushed off into the nameless lake once more he sat in the bow of the canoe, sniffing the little wind as a dog sniffs the breeze for knowledge of what lies ahead.

  We coasted along the shore until we came opposite an abrupt gap in the line of the hills. As we looked through this gap we felt a weird sensation as if this low-lying saddle was all that separated us from the actual edge of the world. From the canoe we could see, at eye level, over the flat breadth of the col, and there was nothing beyond it. Now neither the stone dikes nor the hills hemmed us in. We looked through a hole in the skin of the world, and it seemed as if we were looking out into infinite space.

  We were not frightened, for around us the land had become friendly and warm. So we landed, and walked westward into the gap. Then we saw why it had seemed that the world ended here. The line of hills under which we had been paddling formed the spine of a causeway which divided our lake from an even greater one to the west. The hills ran down from the north and, as they came, they were funneled into a narrowing ribbon of land. At the point where we stood, the land was constricted to
perhaps a quarter of a mile in width, and at this narrowest part the hills ceased for a while. To the south of us they rose up again, and, gaining strength, broadened the causeway until it again became a great funnel of land spreading out to the south.

  We crossed the narrow neck of the isthmus and were amazed to find no connection between the two lakes. The uncanny sensation which we had felt, of coming to the end of the world, was explained by the fact that this new and mightier lake lay a good thirty feet below the level of the one we had traversed.

  As we stood gazing out to the limitless west over the ice-blue water of the new inland sea, Ohoto seemed to be searching for something in the depths of his mind and in the depths of the lake. There was a startling tint to the waters, a pellucid lapis lazuli, such as I have seen in no other lake. Ohoto was remembering that tint, for the Innuit have delicate methods of finding their ways over the plains. At length he spoke.

  “This is the lake called Tulemaliguetna. The waters which lead to Tulemaliguak—the greatest of all inland waters—and the way to the ice sea in the north!”

  We questioned him and it appeared that Ohoto had never seen this lake himself; nevertheless he knew the subtle distinctions which told him its name, for such things are part of the common legend of travel that still lives on in the remaining tents of the Ihalmiut. Ohoto was right. This was indeed Tulemaliguetna, and the narrow causeway on which we stood was all that divided the two major water systems of the whole central Barrens.

  Innuit Ku—the Kazan—and Dubawnt River, each of them well over three hundred miles in length, run their own ways through the plains until they make a common meeting in Kaminikuak Lake (Baker Lake, we call it) at the edge of salt water. But here where we stood, in the very heart of the Barrens, the two river systems came within a stone’s throw of one another, before veering off again on their separate ways northward.

  Thus, from the east shores of Angkuni Lake to the west shores of Tulemaliguetna, there is an east-and-west water barrier on the migration route of the deer which is nearly one hundred miles in width, pierced only by this quarter-mile bridge of land.

  As we walked over the causeway on our return to the canoe, we saw on the ground at our feet so many deer trails inscribed on the gravel that not even the hardy lichens and mosses had been able to live. Over the years, millions of deer must have converged on this little isthmus during the northward and southward migrations of spring and autumn. Here was the Deer’s Way, the greatest of all roads of the deer. And, from the signs, it was clear that the deer had gone northward by this path in the spring of the year.

  We also discovered a row of stone men running diagonally across the isthmus, aligned as neatly as soldiers on parade. Each man stood apart from his neighbors by the length of a canoe, and they formed a continuous front, as if to guard the isthmus against an invasion from the north; though—as we were to discover—their intended duties were quite different. Each Inukshuk was about three feet in height and wore on his head a patch of brown moss. They stood guard over the causeway, these squat gray figures surmounted by their brown, hairy heads, and they bore mute witness to the fact that we were not the first men to come to this place.

  Ohoto smiled broadly at sight of the stone men. He knew that somewhere to the north the flood of Tuktu was even now converging, to be inexorably funneled over the narrow Deer’s Way. He was a happy man when he went to bed that night, nor was he displaying any impatience about the coming of the deer. It may be that he knew when they would come, for the People who live by the deer can sense things about Tuktu which are hidden from us.

  We slept on the east shore of the Deer’s Way that night, but our sleep was cut short at the dawn by the hoarse voice of Ohoto.

  “Tuktu! They have come!” he muttered. And as we rolled sleepily into the dawn, Ohoto had vanished.

  It was a miracle of accidental timing that we should have arrived at the isthmus only a day before the deer came. We had traveled many miles through a dead land, searching for them, but not until we had reached the western limits that time and food had placed on our travels did we find that which we sought.

  As we crawled out of the tent we could see the silhouettes of the Inukshuk against the uncertain light. Now they seemed to be imbued with a tense expectancy. As the first rising breath of the morning wind played over the dry moss on their heads, it was as if they were stirring after a long trance.

  Ohoto was not in sight, so we moved to the center of the isthmus a half-mile south of the stone men. The light was growing so quickly that we could begin to see a flowing shadow far to the north, on the downslope of the hills. We sat on the rocks and waited while the light quickened and the shadows took on substance until we could pick out the clubbing, velvet-covered antlers of the deer against the pearl-white sky.

  They approached slowly and easily, for they had passed this way every year of their lives, and in their time had met no enemy on the Deer’s Way. The light strengthened in uneven bursts until I could see the leader, a young buck, come slowly along one of the paths until he was only a few yards from the nearest stone man. The breeze blew a quick gust, and the moss on the Inukshuk’s skull came to life and twisted briefly in the grip of the wind. The buck stopped abruptly, planted his forelegs wide apart and stared at the stone thing. The wind was to the deer, and it brought him no scent of danger; nor did the strange shape move again, or threaten him further.

  But the buck was cautious now, and alert. Stepping high over the shattered rocks, he picked his way to the east of the stone guardians and began making his way parallel to the diagonal line of the Inukshuk—but keeping his distance, for he was obviously uneasy about them.

  The rest of the herd, a few dozen bucks, followed carelessly after. Halfway down the line, the leader stopped and browsed a little, then—suddenly aware that the stone men had been almost imperceptibly closing in on him—he broke into a trot. As his tail lifted, the other bucks caught the white flash which spells trouble, and they also ran.

  Now the little herd was galloping over the stony trails and in a moment the long line of stone men came to an end, leaving a twenty-foot gap between the last of them and the lake. The herd bunched into the gap, heedless of anything now but escape from the Inukshuk on their flanks; and then, as they passed through into safety, Ohoto’s rifle spoke from a well-concealed stone blind near the opening.

  There were three shots, and the three largest bucks came crashing into the moss and the rocks, while the young leader led the survivors in a fantastic flight over the boulders and up the slope of the southern ridge that marked the end of the isthmus.

  Ohoto jumped from his hiding place and ran over to the kills. We joined him quickly, and in a few minutes all three of us were hurrying back to camp and to a fire, laden with the meat for which our bellies yearned.

  In the following days, the flow of deer over the isthmus grew heavier until it merged into one continuous stream, more concentrated and therefore more impressive than the herds I had seen crossing the Ghost Hills at Nueltin Lake. At the narrow isthmus they were so closely pressed together that even the “deer fence” of Inukshuk could no longer channel their flow, and from the main flood that followed the ambush road, other streams burst out between the guardian watchers.

  With the coming of the deer there came to the land the transformation from death to life which I had seen on a much smaller scale at Windy Bay. The pallid skies that had been empty of living wings were now flecked across their endless breadth by the dark, labored flight of the ravens. The black birds did not come in ones and twos, but in long skeins of dozens and they shared the pale spaces with hawks that materialized suddenly out of the northern horizon. Three great gyrfalcons flew low over the isthmus one morning, barely clearing the huddled backs of the deer. After they had passed, a slow procession of rough-legged hawks beat lazily southward high over the tide of Tuktu. The flanks of the herds were whitened by the flocks of gulls
that kept pace with the trek, waiting to play the carrion role of vultures.

  On land, the yelping of dun-colored arctic foxes was a light echo of the voices of the white wolves moving wraithlike through the eddying masses of deer. Even the gaudy ground squirrels seemed to emerge suddenly out of the sandy drumlins, as if from a long hibernation, and their plaintive whistling resounded from the long ridges and from the hills. Terriganiak the weasel came to chatter his inane defiance from the rock piles near the shore; and Kakwik the wolverine plodded deliberately along in the van of the migrating herds.

  But the transformation extended beyond the country itself, for it also came to the heart of Ohoto. On the first day of the deer, as we sat about the fire and hungrily waited for the blackening chunks of fresh meat to roast on the little red coals, Ohoto showed us the face that we knew—yes, and loved. And the change in him was not simply due to the prospect of gorging on meat. Rather it was as if the endless lines of the deer imparted to Ohoto something of their own immeasurable vitality. It was borne in upon me again that the affinity between the Ihalmiut and the deer was more than a merely physical tie. It was as if the People were required to eat of the spirit of Tuktu, the ephemeral presence which comes when the deer are in the land, and vanishes when the deer vanish.

  Now that spirit was with us, and the bleak savagery of the lands we had seen no longer filled Ohoto with dread. When he and I stumbled on an old tent circle on the isthmus, Ohoto did not sink back into the mood of depression which had been his at the deserted camps on Angkuni Lake. He talked constantly now, of every subject under the sun, and when he was not talking he was laughing, or he was complaining that I did not laugh enough, but had too long a face. He spent hours clowning for our entertainment. With consummate cleverness he mimicked us white men, and the other men of the Ihalmiut, until we laughed so immoderately that the deer crossing the isthmus turned curious faces and stared in the direction of our camp. As for the ghosts—even Elaitutna and his dire predictions and warnings were not mentioned again.