The Snow Walker

by Farley Mowat

  Calling the dogs the shepherds moved homeward over the darkening moors, and each one wrestled with his doubts in silence.

  There was no policeman at Taransay, and no one offered to carry a message to the nearest constable across the mountains to distant Stornaway. Macrimmon put the feelings of all the men into words when he was being questioned about the event by his wife and daughters.

  “What’s done is done. There’s no good to come from telling the wide world what’s to be found on the moors, for they’d no believe it. Best let it be forgotten.”

  Yet Macrimmon himself could not forget. During the next two days and nights he found himself haunted by the memory of that alien voice. Up on the inland moors sloping to the mountain peaks, the wind seemed to echo it. The cry of the gulls seemed to echo it. It beat into the hard core of the man and would not be silenced and, in the end, it prevailed.

  On the third morning he stood once more at the edge of the cliff… and cursed himself for a fool. Nevertheless, that dour and weatherbeaten man carefully lowered himself over the cliff edge. His dog wheened unhappily but dared not follow as his master disappeared from view.

  The tide was driving out and the shingle glistened wetly far below him, but the shepherd did not look down. He worked his way skillfully, for in his youth he had been a great one at finding and carrying off the eggs of the cliff-nesting gulls. However, he was no youth now and before he had descended halfway he was winded and his hands were cut and bruised. He found a sloping ledge that ran diagonally toward the beach and he was inching his way along it when he passed close to a late-nesting gannet. The huge bird flung herself outward, violently flailing the air. A wing struck sharply against Macrimmon’s face and involuntarily he raised a hand to fend her off. In that instant the shale on which his feet were braced crumbled beneath him and he was falling away toward the waiting stones.

  Unseen on the cliff top the dog sensed tragedy and howled.

  The dog’s howl awakened Nakusiak from fevered sleep in the protection of the little cave which had been his first sanctuary. Here, on a bed of seaweed, he lay waiting for his body to heal itself. His swollen shoulder throbbed almost unbearably but he stolidly endured, for it was in his nature to endure. All the same, as he waited for time to work for him, he was conscious that there was nothing ahead in this alien world but danger and ultimate destruction.

  When the dog’s howl woke him, Nakusiak shrank farther into the recesses of his cave. His good hand clutched the only weapon left to him… a lump of barnacle-encrusted rock. He lifted it and held it poised as the rattle of falling stones mingled with a wailing human shout outside his cave.

  His heart beat heavily in the silence that followed. It was a silence that reminded Nakusiak of how it is when an ermine has cornered a ground squirrel in a rock pile and waits unseen for the trapped beast to venture out. Nakusiak was aware of anger rising above his pain. Was he not Inuk—a Man—and was a man to be treated as a beast? He changed his grip on the rock, then, with a shout of defiance, stumbled out of his sanctuary into the morning light.

  The sun momentarily blinded him and he stood tensely waiting for the attack he was sure would come. There was no sound… no motion. The glare eased and he stared about him. On a thick windrow of seaweed a few yards away he saw the body of a man lying face down, blood oozing from a rent in his scalp.

  Nakusiak stared at this, his enemy, and his heart thudded furiously as the inert body seemed to stir, and mumbled sounds came from its mouth. In an instant Nakusiak was standing over the shepherd, the lump of rock raised high. Death hovered over Angus Macrimmon, and only a miracle could have averted it. A miracle took place. It was the miracle of pity.

  Nakusiak slowly lowered his arm. He stood trembling, looking down at the wounded man and the trickle of blood from the deep wound. Then with his good arm Nakusiak gripped the shepherd, rolled him over, and laboriously dragged his enemy up the shingle to the shelter of the cave.

  a search party found the dog on the cliff edge the next morning and guessed grimly at what had happened. But the searchers only guessed a part of it. When a couple of hours later six of them, all well armed, reached the beach in a fishing skiff, they were totally unprepared for what they found.

  A thin curl of smoke led them directly to the cave. When they came to peer fearfully into the narrow cleft, guns at the ready, their faces showed such baffled incredulity at the scene before them that Macrimmon could not forbear smiling.

  “Dinna be frighted, lads,” he said from the seaweed mattress where he lay. “There’s none here but us wild folk and we’ll no eat you.”

  Inside the cave a small driftwood fire kindled by Nakusiak with Macrimmon’s flint and steel burned smokily. The shepherd’s head was bound with strips of his own shirt, but his bruised back with its broken ribs was covered with the fur parka that had been on the back of the sheep stealer not long since. Beside him, staring uneasily at the newcomers, Nakusiak sat bare to the waist, hugging his wounded shoulder with his good arm.

  The Eskimo glanced nervously from Macrimmon’s smiling face to the blob of heads crammed into the cave entrance, then slowly he too began to smile. It was the inexpressibly relieved grin of one who has been lost in a frightful void and who has come back into the land of men.

  for many days Nakusiak and Macrimmon lay in adjoining beds in the shepherd’s cottage while their wounds healed. Macrimmon’s wife and daughters gave the Eskimo care and compassion, for they acknowledged their debt to him. For his part, he entertained them with songs in Eskimo, at which the good wife muttered under her breath about “outlandish things,” but smiled warmly at the stranger for all of that.

  As he was accepted by the Macrimmons, so was he accepted by the rest of the villagers, for they were kindly people and they were also greatly relieved that they did not have to bear the sin of murder. Within a few weeks the Eskimo was being referred to with affection by all and sundry as “the queer wee laddie who came out of the sea.”

  Nakusiak soon adjusted to the Hebridean way of life, having accepted the fact that he would never be able to return to his own land. He learned to speak the language, and he became a good shepherd, a superb hunter of sea fowl and grey seals, and a first-rate fisherman as well. Three years after his arrival at Taransay, he married Macrimmon’s eldest daughter and started a family of his own, taking the Christian name of Malcolm, at the insistence of the young local clergyman who was one of those who particularly befriended him. During the long winter evenings he would join the other men at the Crofter’s Dram and there, sitting before the open fire, would whittle his marvellous little carvings as a way of describing to his companions the life he had known in the distant land of the Innuit.

  So Nakusiak, the man who had come so far in space and time from the Walrus Place to a strange destiny in an alien world, lived out his life in Taransay. But it was no exile’s life. Long before he died at the end of the century and was buried in the village churchyard, he had become one with the people of that place; and his memory remains a part of their memory still.

  One summer afternoon in our time, a young man who is Nakusiak’s great-grandson knelt to read the inscription written by the Eskimo’s clergyman friend and carved into one of the twin stones that stand over the graves of Malcolm and his wife. There was pride in the young man’s face and in the set of his shoulders as he read the words aloud:

  Out of the sea from what lands none can tell,

  This stranger came to Taransay to dwell.

  Much was he loved who so well understood

  How to return for evil a great good.

  The Iron Men

  _______

  As I sat in the doorway of my tent watching Hekwaw at work, my glance travelled from the quick motions of his lean hands, sending a knife blade gleaming over white wood, to his rapt face. Black hair hung long and lank over his brow, shadowing his eyes.

  Dreaming over his ta
sk, he seemed neither to see nor hear the world around him—a world of rolling tundra, of looming hills, of rushing rivers and still lakes; a world of caribou, white wolves, black ravens and a myriad birds. The world that we, in our ignorance, chose to call the Barrenlands. It was Hekwaw’s world but for the moment he was unaware of it, intent on giving new life to a memory out of another age.

  The long arctic sun was lying on the rim of the horizon before he rose and came toward me carrying the product of memory. It was a thing made of antler bone, black spruce and caribou sinew… and it had no place upon those northern plains. It was a crossbow, a weapon used by the Scythians in Asia Minor three thousand years ago and one that dominated the medieval battlefields of Europe until the age of gunpowder.

  Some days earlier Hekwaw had been recalling stories from the ancient times of his people and he had spoken of a weapon I did not recognize. I questioned him until he drew a picture of it in the sand. I could not believe what he showed me, for it seemed impossible that his ancestors, isolated in the central arctic, could have discovered a weapon known to no other native American people. I asked him if he could make one of the weapons and he nodded. Now the crossbow was a reality.

  Laying an unfeathered wooden bolt in the groove, he drew back the sinew string with both hands and lodged it in a crossways slit. On the shadowed river a red-throated loon dipped and swam. There was a sudden, resonant vibration on the still air. The bolt whirred savagely over the river and the loon flashed its wings in a dying flurry.

  Hekwaw lowered the bow, placed it carefully beside him and squatted on his heels to light his stained old soapstone pipe. He did not wait for my questions but began a tale which had been called back to life across many centuries by the vibrant song of the crossbow.

  AI-YA! But this is a weapon! It came to us in distant times but I keep the memory of it because my fathers’ fathers were men to whom it was given to remember. So it is that I can speak of the Innuhowik.

  They were beings who seemed more than human, yet death could fell them. They were bearded, but their beards were not black like those of the Godbringers—they were yellow and sometimes brown and looked as bright as copper. The eyes of some were brown also, but most were of the colour of the eastern sky just before sunrise, or the deep ice of the winter lakes. Their voices boomed and rumbled, and they spoke no words my people understood.

  We never knew what land they came from, only that it lay eastward beyond salt waters which they travelled over in boats many times the length of a kayak.

  In those days my people lived, as they had always lived, far inland and so they did not witness the arrival of the Innuhowik. The tents of my forbears stood along the shores of Innuit Ku, River of Men, which flows north out of the forests. My people avoided the forests for these belonged to the Itkilit, the Indians as you call them. In spring when the caribou migrated north out of their lands, the Itkilit sometimes followed, and when they came upon one of our camps there would be fighting. Afterwards they would withdraw into the shelter of the trees. We feared them, but the tundra plains were ours by right, as the forests were theirs by right, and so our southernmost camps stood only a few days’ journey from the place where Innuit Ku emerges from the shadows of the trees.

  One late-summer day when the leaves of the dwarf willows were already darkening, a young boy lay on the crest of a hill close to the most southerly Innuit camp. It was his task to give warning if the canoes of the Itkilit should appear. When he saw something moving far to the south he did not wait to be sure what it was. He came running like a hare over the rocky plain and his cry pierced into the skin tents of the families who lived at that place.

  It was past noon and the men were mostly resting in the cool tents, but at the sound of the boy’s cry they ran out into the blazing light. Women clutched their babies and quickly led the older children into the broken hills beyond the River.

  The people had chosen the site of that camp with care. A little distance to the south of it the River roared through a narrow gorge, tossing great plumes of spray high into the air. Neither canoe nor kayak could pass through unless it stayed close to the cliffs on the western side. And men lying on top of these western cliffs could look directly down upon the only safe channel. It was to this gorge that the Innuit men hurried when the boy gave the alarm. Beside each man was a pile of frost-shattered rocks, jagged edged and as heavy as one man could lift. These were the best weapons we could muster against the Itkilit, for in those times my people had not good bows because the only wood available to us was of a kind too weak and too soft.

  The men atop the cliff had not long to wait before something came into sight far up the River. As it plunged toward them they stared fearfully, but they were perplexed too. It was a boat they saw—not a canoe—and one such as no Innuit had ever imagined. It was as long as three kayaks, as broad as the length of a man, and built of thick wooden planks. The beings it carried were stranger still. All save one sat with their backs to the front of the boat and pulled at long paddles set between wooden pins. There were eight of them, sitting in pairs. The ninth stood in the back facing the rest and holding another long paddle thrust out behind. He held the gaze of my people for he wore a shining metal cap on his head and under it his face was almost hidden by a long yellow beard. Polished iron sheets on his breast caught reflections from the swift waters and sent lights into the eyes of the men on the cliffs.

  These strange ones were almost upon the Innuit, but my people were so bewildered they did not know how to act. Were these men below them? Or spirits? If they were spirits they could not be killed. They could, however, be angered, then there would be no way of knowing what they might do.

  The big wooden boat swept into the gorge and was steered into the western channel by the tall man at the stem whose bellowing voice could be heard even above the roar of the waters. From the cliffs high above, my people watched… and did nothing, and the strangers passed on down the River.

  As the Innuit began to rise to their feet, one of them yelled, and they all looked where he pointed. Three long, bark canoes had appeared upriver, and this time there was no doubt who came into our lands. They were Itkilit, dressed in scraped hides and wearing the faces of death, and driving their canoes as swiftly as wolves racing after a deer.

  There was barely time for my people to snatch up the sharp rocks lying beside them. As the canoes flew past below, they came under a hail of boulders that smashed bark boats and men’s bones. Two of the canoes broke apart like the skulls of rabbits under the blows of an axe.

  The River was red that day; but from out of the spray of the gorge, one canoe emerged. The Innuit men ran to the shore, tossed their swift kayaks into the stream and gave chase.

  Great falls block the River only a few miles downstream from the gorge, and it was toward the falls that the last canoe, holed by stones and with some of its men wounded, was being driven. When the funnelling current above the falls was reached, the Itkilit saw death ahead and knew death was behind them. At the last moment they turned out of the current and drove their sinking canoe ashore. They leapt up the bank toward a ridge of rocks from whose shelter they hoped to defend themselves from the Innuit.

  They did not reach that ridge. It was already held by the iron-clad strangers who had also been warned by the current and by the roar of falling water and had gone to the shore. These strange ones rose up from behind the rocks of the ridge and charged down upon the Itkilit roaring like bears, thrusting with great long knives, and slashing with iron axes. Only a few Itkilit got back to the River. They flung themselves into it and were swept over the falls.

  The strangers—they whom we later called Innuhowik, Iron Men—stood watching the kayaks where they hovered in the current. Perhaps my people seemed as terrifying to their eyes as they had seemed to ours, but they were brave. One of them came slowly to the shore carrying no weapon in his hands. At his approach the kayaks nervously moved out of the backw
ater and away from the land. The yellow-bearded leader of the Innuhowik came to the water’s edge, and my people wondered at his size for he stood a head taller than any of them. They watched as he drew a short knife from his belt and held it out, handle first, toward the kayakers.

  It was a man named Kiliktuk who paddled cautiously toward the spot and, reaching out his long, double-bladed paddle, touched the handle of the knife. The stranger smiled and laid the knife on the paddle blade so Kiliktuk could draw it to him without touching shore.

  Soon all the kayaks were beached and the men who were my forefathers were crowded around the Innuhowik fingering their tools and weapons. It was clear the strangers were not ill-disposed to the Innuit, so they were brought back to the camp. Far into that night the song-drums sounded while Innuit and Innuhowik sat together by the fires and feasted on caribou meat and fish. It is remembered that the strangers ate like men—like hungry men—and that they looked at our women with the eyes of men.

  As to what happened after, the stories speak of many things. They tell especially of the strength of the Innuhowik, and of the wonderful tools and weapons they possessed. These were mostly of iron, which was unknown to the Innuit except as hard, heavy stones which sometimes fell from the skies.

  After they had been in the camp for a few days, the Innuhowik began asking questions by means of drawings in the sand, and by signs, and the people understood that they wished to know if Innuit Ku led to the sea in the east. When they had been made to know that it did not, but led instead to the northern seas from which the ice seldom passes, they became unhappy. They talked with one another in loud voices, but at last came to an agreement and let us understand they wished to remain with us for a time.