The Snow Walker

by Farley Mowat

  One thing alone I would not do. I would not condemn my wife and her people for what they believed. I would not disavow their beliefs. How could I do that? It would have been to make mockery of Nuljalik’s death… of the gift she had made. No! Though he demanded it of me for the fifty years we were together, sometimes shouting that I was an unredeemed sinner and a heretic in my heart, I would not bend to his will.

  That struggle between us remained unresolved until death stood beside him. His breathing had quieted and I knew that he lived only because of the faint warmth on the hand I laid on his face. It may be I felt rather than heard his last words:

  “… it would have been… a far greater sin… if you had denied her who gave you your life…”

  Stranger in Taransay

  _______

  The village of Taransay straggles along a bleak piece of craggy shore on the outer Hebrides—those high-domed sentinels that guard the Scottish mainland coast from the driving fury of the Western Ocean. The few strangers who visit Taransay remember the acrid smell of peat smoke on the windswept hills, the tang of the dark local ale, and the sibilant patter of the Gaelic tongue spoken by the shepherds and fishermen who gather during the long evenings under the smoke-stained ceiling of the Crofter’s Dram.

  It is the only public house for many miles, and it holds within its walls the beating heart of Taransay, together with many of its memories. Strange objects hang from the narrow ceiling beams or crowd the shelves behind the bar—remembrances of ancient wrecks, flotsam of the northern seas, the trivia of time. Amongst them is a collection of tiny figures delicately carved in white bone. These are ranged in the place of honour on a centre shelf where they catch the eye and stir the mind to wonderment. There are narwhals, long-beaked and leaping from an ivory sea; walrus thrusting tiny tusks through a miniature kayak; three polar bears snarling defiance at a human figure whose upraised arm holds a sliver of a spear; and a pack of arctic wolves poised in dreadful immobility over a slaughtered muskox.

  There is an alien artistry about those carvings that never sprang from the imagination of an island shepherd, yet all were carved in Taransay. They are the work of a man named Malcolm Nakusiak who was a voyager out of time.

  nakusiak’s odyssey began on a July day in the mid-1800s, under a basalt cliff in a fiord on the eastern shore of Baffin Island. To the score or so of people who lived there, it was known as Auvektuk—the Walrus Place. It had no name in our language for no white man had ever visited it although each year many of them, in stout wooden vessels, coasted the Baffin shores chasing the Bowhead whale.

  These great whales were no part of men’s lives at Auvektuk. For them walrus was the staff of life. Each summer when the ice of Davis Strait came driving south, the men of Auvek- tuk readied spears, harpoons and kayaks and went out into the crashing tumult of the Strait. On the grinding edges of the floes they stalked obese, ton-weight giants that were armoured with inch-thick hide, and armed with double tusks that could rend a kayak or a man.

  Of all the Auvektuk hunters, few could surpass Nakusiak. Although not yet thirty years of age, his skill and daring had become legendary in his own time. Young women smiled at him with particular warmth for Eskimo women do not differ from their sisters the world over in admiring success. During the long winter nights Nakusiak was often the centre of a group of men who chanted the chorus as he sang his hunting songs. But Nakusiak had another skill. He was blessed with fingers that could imbue carvings made of bone and walrus ivory with the very stuff of life. Indeed, life was a full and swelling thing for Nakusiak until the July day when his pride betrayed him to the sea.

  On that morning the waters of the Strait were ominously shrouded with white fog. The hunters had gathered on the shore, listening to the ludicrous fluting voices of the first walrus of the season talking together somewhere to seaward. The temptation to go after them was great, but the risk was greater. Heavy fog at that time of the year was the precursor of a westerly gale and for a kayaker to be caught in pack ice during an offshore storm was likely to be fatal. Keen as they were for walrus meat, courageous as they were, these men refused the challenge. All save one.

  Gravely ignoring the caution of his fellows, Nakusiak chose to wager his strength—and his luck—against the imponderable odds of the veiled waters. The watchers on the shore saw his kayak fade into obscurity amongst the growling floes.

  With visibility reduced to about the length of the kayak, Nakusiak had great difficulty locating the walrus. The heavy fog distorted their voices and confused the direction, yet he never lost track of them and, although he had already gone farther to seaward than he had intended, he still refused to give it up and turn for home. He was so tautly concerned with the hunt that he hardly noticed the rising keen of the west wind…

  some days later, and nearly two hundred miles to the southeast, a Norwegian whaler was pounding her way southward through Davis Strait. The dirty, ice-scarred wooden ship was laden to her marks with oil and baleen. Her crewmen were driving her toward the hoped-for freedom of the open seas, all sails set and drawing taut in the brisk westerly that was the last vestige of a nor’west gale.

  In the crow’s nest the ice-watch swung his telescope, searching for leads. He glimpsed something on a distant floe off the port bow. Taking it to be a polar bear he bellowed a change of course to the helmsman on the poop. Men began to scurry across the decks, some running for guns while others climbed partway up the shrouds to better vantage points. The ship shouldered her way through the pack toward the object on the ice and the crew watched with heightened interest as it resolved itself into the shape of a man slumped on the crest of a pressure ridge.

  The ship swung into the wind, sails slatting, as two seamen scampered across the moving ice, hoisted the limp body of Nakusiak in their arms and danced their way back from floe to floe, while a third man picked up the Eskimo’s broken kayak and brought it to the ship as well.

  The whalers were rough men, but a castaway is a castaway no matter what his race or colour. They gave Nakusiak schnapps, and when he was through choking they gave him hot food, and soon he began to recover from his ordeal on the drifting ice. All the same, his first hours aboard the ship were a time of bewilderment and unease. Although he had seen whaling ships in the distance, and had heard many barely credible stories from other Eskimos about the Kablunait—the Big Ears—who hunted the Bowhead, he had never before been on a ship or seen a white man with his own eyes.

  He began to feel even more disturbed as the whaler bore steadily toward the southeast, completely out of sight of land, carrying him away from Auvektuk. He had been hoping the ship would come about and head north and west along the coast into the open water frequented by the Bowheads, but she failed to do so, and his efforts to make the Kablunait realize that he must go home availed him nothing. When the ship reached open water, rounded Kap Farvel at the south tip of Greenland and bore away almost due east, Nakusiak became frantic. Feverishly he began repairing his kayak with bits of wood and canvas given to him by the ship’s carpenter, but he worked so obviously that he gave away his purpose. The newly patched kayak was taken from him and lashed firmly to the top of the after hatch where it was always under the eye of the helmsman and the officer on watch. The whalers acted as they did to save Nakusiak’s life, for they believed he would surely perish if he put out into the wide ocean in such a tiny craft. Because he came of a race that accepted what could not be altered, Nakusiak ceased to contemplate escape. He had even begun to enjoy the voyage when the terrible winds of his own land caught up to him again.

  The whaler was southeast of the Faeroe Islands when another ice-born nor’west gale struck her. She was a stout ship and she ran ably before it, rearing and plunging on the following seas. When some of her double-reefed sails began to blow out with the noise of cannon fire, her crew stripped her down to bare poles; and when the massive rollers threatened to poop her, they broke out precious cases of whale o
il, smashed them open and let the oil run out of the scuppers to smother the pursuing graybeards.

  She would have endured the storm had not her mainmast shrouds, worn thin by too many seasons in the ice, suddenly let go. They parted with a wicked snarl and in the same instant the mainmast snapped like a broken bone and thundered over the lee side. Tethered by a maze of lines, the broken spar acted like a sea anchor and the ship swung inexorably around into the trough… broached, and rolled half over.

  There was no time to launch the whaleboats. The great seas tramped over them, snatching them away. There was barely time for Nakusiak to grab his knife, cut the kayak loose, and wriggle into the narrow cockpit before another giant comber thundered down upon the decks and everything vanished under a welter of water.

  Washed clear, Nakusiak and the kayak hung poised for a moment on the back of a mountainous sea. The Eskimo held his breath as he slipped down a slope so steep it seemed to him it must lead to the very bowels of the ocean. But the kayak was almost weightless, and it refused to be engulfed by the sucking seas. Sometimes it seemed to leap free and, like a flying fish, be flung from crest to crest. Sometimes it flipped completely over; but when this happened, Nakusiak, hanging head down beneath the surface, was able to right his little vessel with the twisting double paddle. He had laced the sealskin skirt sewn to the cockpit coaming so tightly around his waist that no water could enter the vessel. Man and kayak were one indivisible whole. The crushing strength of the ocean could not prevail against them.

  The bit of arctic flotsam, with its human heart, blew into the southeast for so long a time that Nakusiak’s eyes blurred into sightlessness. His ears became impervious to the roar of water. His muscles cracked and twisted in agony. And then, as brutally as it had begun, the ordeal ended.

  A mighty comber lifted the kayak in curling fingers and flung it high on the roaring shingle of a beach where it shattered like an egg. Although he was half stunned, Nakusiak managed to crawl clear and drag himself above the storm tide line.

  Hours later he was awakened from the stupor of exhaustion by the cries of swooping, black-backed gulls. His vision had cleared, but his brain remained clouded by the strangeness of what lay around him. The great waves rolled in from the sounding sea but nowhere on their heaving surface was there the familiar glint of ice. Flocks of sea birds that were alien both in sound and form hung threateningly above him. A massive cliff of a dull red hue reared high above the narrow beach. In the crevices of the cliff outlandish flowers bloomed, and vivid green turf such as he had never seen before crested the distant headlands.

  The headlands held his gaze for there was something on them which gave him a sense of the familiar. Surely, he thought, those white patches on the high green places must be scattered drifts of snow. He stared intently until fear shattered the illusion. The white things moved! They lived! And they were innumerable! Nakusiak scuttled up the beach to the shelter of a water-worn cave, his heart pounding. He knew only one white beast of comparable size—the arctic wolf—and he could not credit the existence of wolves in such numbers… if, indeed, the things he had seen were only wolves, and not something even worse.

  For two days Nakusiak hardly dared to leave the cave. He satisfied his thirst with water dripping from the rocks, and tried to ease his hunger with oily tasting seaweed. By the third day he had become desperate enough to explore the cliff-locked beach close to his refuge. He had two urgent needs: food… and a weapon. He found a three-foot length of driftwood and a few minutes’ work sufficed for him to lash his knife to it. Armed with this crude spear his courage began to return. He also found food of sorts; a handful of shellfish and some small fishes that had been trapped in a tidal pool. But there was not enough of these to more than take the edge off his growing hunger.

  On the morning of the fourth day he made his choice. Whatever alien world this was that he had drifted to, he would no longer remain in hiding to endure starvation. He determined to leave the sterile little beach and chance whatever lay beyond the confining cliffs.

  It was a long and arduous climb up the red rock wall and he was bone weary by the time he clawed his way over the grassy lip to sprawl, gasping for breath, on the soft turf. But his fatigue washed out of him instantly when, not more than a hundred paces away, he saw a vast assemblage of the mysterious white creatures. Nakusiak clutched the spear and his body became rigid.

  The sheep, with the curiosity characteristic of members of their family, were intrigued by the fur-clad figure on the rim of the cliff. Slowly the flock approached, led by a big ram with black, spiralled horns. Some of the ewes shook their heads and bleated, and in this action the Eskimo saw the threat of a charge.

  The sheep bleated in a rising chorus and shuffled a few feet closer.

  Nakusiak reached his breaking point. He charged headlong into the white mob, screaming defiance as he came. The sheep stood stupidly for a moment, then wheeled and fled, but already he was among them, thrusting fiercely with his makeshift spear.

  The startled flock streamed away leaving Nakusiak, shaking as with a fever, to stare down at the two animals he had killed. That they were mortal beings, not spirits, he could no longer doubt. Wild with relief he began to laugh, and as the sound of his shrill voice sent the remaining sheep scurrying even farther into the rolling distance, Nakusiak unbound his knife and was soon filling his starving belly with red meat—and finding it to his taste.

  The strange scene under the pallid Hebridean sky had been witnessed by the gulls, the sheep… and by one other. Atop a ridge a quarter mile inland a sharp-faced, tough-bodied man of middle age had seen the brief encounter. Angus Macrimmon had been idly cleaning the dottle from his pipe when his practised shepherds’ glance had caught an unaccustomed movement from the flock. He looked up and his heavy brows drew together in surprise as he saw the sheep converging on a shapeless, unidentifiable figure lying at the edge of the cliff. Before Macrimmon could do more than get to his feet he saw the shape rise—squat, shaggy and alien—and fling itself screaming on the flock. Macrimmon saw the red glare of blood against white fleece and watched the killer rip open a dead sheep and begin to feed on the raw flesh.

  The Hebrideans live close to the ancient world of their ancestors, and although there are kirks enough on the Islands, many beliefs linger on that owe nothing to the Christian faith. When Macrimmon watched the murder of his sheep, he was filled not only with anger but with dread, for he could not credit that the thing he saw was human.

  Cursing himself for having left his dog at home, the shepherd went for help, running heavily toward the distant village. He was breathless by the time he reached it. Armed with whatever they could find, a dozen men were soon gathered together, calling their dogs about them. Two of them carried muzzle-loading shotguns while another carried a long-barrelled military musket.

  The day was growing old when they set out across the moors, but the light was still clear. From afar the shepherds saw the white flecks that were the two dead sheep. Grouped close, they went forward cautiously until one of them raised an arm and pointed, and they all saw the shaggy thing that crouched beside one of the sheep.

  They set the dogs on it.

  Nakusiak had been so busy slicing up meat to sun-dry in the morning that he did not notice the approaching shepherds until the frenzied outcry of the dogs made him look up. He had never before seen dogs like these and he had no way of knowing that they were domestic beasts. He sprang to his feet and stood uncertainly, eyes searching for a place of refuge. Then his glance fell on the grim mob of approaching shepherds and he sensed their purpose as surely as a fox senses the purpose of the huntsmen.

  Now the dogs were on him. The leader, a rangy black-and-brown collie, made a circling lunge at this strange-smelling, strangely clad figure standing bloody handed beside the torn carcasses. Nakusiak reacted with a two-handed swing of the spear-haft, striking the bitch so heavily on the side of her head that he broke her
neck. There was a hubbub among the shepherds, then one of them dropped to his knee and raised the long musket.

  The remaining dogs closed in again and Nakusiak backed to the very lip of the cliff, swinging the shaft to keep them off. He lifted his head to the shepherds and in an imploring voice cried out: “Inukuala eshuinak! It is a man who means no harm!”

  For answer came the crash of the gun. The ball struck him in the left shoulder and the force of the blow spun him around so that he lost his balance. There was a shout from the shepherds and they rushed forward, but they were still a hundred yards away when Nakusiak stumbled over the cliff edge.

  There was luck in the thing, for he only fell free a few feet before bringing up on a rocky knob. Scrabbling frantically with his right hand he managed to cling to the steep slope and slither another yard or so past a slight overhang until he could lie, trembling and spent, on a narrow ledge undercut into the wall of rock.

  When the men joined the hysterical dogs peering over the cliff edge, there was nothing to be seen except the glitter of waves on the narrow beach far below and the flash of gulls disturbed from their resting places.

  The shepherds were oddly silent. They were hearing again that despairing cry, instantly echoed by the shot. Whatever the true identity of the sheep killer might be, they knew in their hearts that he was human, and the knowledge did not sit easily with them.

  They shifted uncomfortably until the man who had fired spoke up defiantly.

  “Whatever ‘twas, ‘tis gone now surely,” he said. “And ‘tis as well, for look you at the way it tore the sheep and killed the dog!”

  The others glanced at the dead dog and sheep, but they had nothing to say until Macrimmon spoke.

  “Would it not be as well, do you think, to make a search of the beach?”

  “Ach, man, don’t be daft!” the gunner replied irritably. “‘Twould be the devil’s own job to gang down there… and for what? If that thing was alive when it fell, then ‘tis certain dead enough now. And if ‘twas never alive at all…” He let the sentence lie unfinished.