by Farley Mowat
The bucks turned their heavy heads and their ears flopped anxiously until their eyes found the pups scampering back and forth far over their heads. They continued to watch the young foxes, and so they did not see the boy move rapidly closer.
The hard twang of the bow and the heavy thud of an arrow striking into flesh came almost together. The deer leapt for the precipitous slope leading to the lake, but one of them stumbled, fell to his knees and went sliding down on his side. In a moment Angutna was on him. The boy’s copper knife slipped smoothly between the vertebrae in the deer’s neck, and the buck lay dead.
The curiosity of the pups had now passed all bounds. One of them hung so far out over the ledge that he lost his balance. His hind legs scrabbled furiously at the smooth face of the rocks while his front feet pushed against air. The rocks thrust him away and he came tumbling in a steep arc to pitch into the moss almost at Angutna’s feet.
The pup was too stunned to resist as the boy picked him up by the tail. Angutna put a tentative finger on the small beast’s head, and when it failed to snap at him he laughed aloud. His laughter rang over the hills to the ears of the mother fox far from her den; it speeded the flight of the two surviving bucks, and rose to the ears of a high-soaring raven.
Then the boy spoke to the fox:
“Ayee! Kipmik—Little Dog—we have made a good hunt, you and I. Let it be always this way, for surely you must be one of the Spirits-Who-Help.”
That night in his father’s skin tent Angutna told the tale of the hunting. Elder men smiled as they listened and agreed that the fox must indeed be a good token sent to the boy. Tethered to a tent pole, the pup lay in a little grey ball with his ears flat to his head and his eyes tightly shut, hoping with all his small heart that this was only a dream from which he would wake to find solace at the teats of his mother.
such was the coming of the white fox into the habitations of men. In the days that followed, Angutna shared most of his waking hours with Kipmik who soon forgot his fears; for it is in the nature of the white fox to be so filled with curiosity that fear can be only a passing thing.
While the pup was still young enough to risk falling into the lean jaws of the dogs that prowled about the camp, he was kept tethered at night; but during the days, fox and boy travelled the land and explored the world that was theirs. On these expeditions the pup ran freely ahead of the boy over the rolling plains and hills, or he squatted motionless on the precarious deck of a kayak as Angutna drove the slim craft across the shining lakes.
Boy and fox lived together as one, and their thoughts were almost as one. The bond was strong between them for Angutna believed the fox was more than a fox, being also the embodiment of the Spirit-Who-Helps which had attached itself to him. As for Kipmik, perhaps he saw in the boy the shape of his own guardian spirit.
The first snows of the year came in late September and soon after that Kipmik shed the sombre grey fur of youth and donned the white mantel of the dog fox. His long hair was as fine as down and the white ruff that bordered his face framed glistening black eyes and the black spot of his nose. His tail was nearly as long and as round as his body. He was small compared to the red foxes who live in the forests, but he was twice as fleet and his courage was boundless.
During the second winter they spent together, Angutna came of age. He was fifteen and of a strength and awareness to accept manhood. In the time when the nights were so long they were almost unbroken, Angutna’s father spoke to the father of a young girl named Epeetna. Then this girl moved into the snowhouse of Angutna’s family and the boy who was now a man took her to wife.
During the winters, life was lived without much exertion in the camps of the barrenland people for the deer were far to the south and men lived on the fat and meat they had stored up from the fall slaughter. But with the return of the snowbirds, spring and the deer came back to the plains around the Big Hungry and the camps woke to new and vigorous life.
In the spring of the first year of his marriage, Angutna went to the deer-hunting places as a full-fledged hunter. With him went the white fox. The two would walk over the softening drifts to reach rocky defiles that channelled the north-flowing deer. Angutna would hide in one of the ravines while the fox ran high up on the ridges to a place where he could overlook the land and see the dark skeins of caribou approaching the ambush. When the old doe leading a skein approached the defile she would look carefully around and see the little white shadow watching from above. Kipmik would bark a short greeting to Tuktu, and the herd would move fearlessly forward believing that, if danger lurked, the fox would have barked a cry of alarm. But Kipmik’s welcoming bark was meant for the ears of Angutna, who drew back the arrow on the bent bow and waited.
Angutna made good hunts during that spring and as a result he was sung about at the drum dances held in the evenings. The fox was not forgotten either, and in some of the songs the boy and the fox were called the Two Who Were One, and that name became theirs.
In the summer, when the deer had passed on to the fawning grounds far to the north, the fox and the boy sought other food. The Two Who Were One took the kayak down the roaring rivers that debouched over the scarred face of the plains, seeking the hiding places of the geese that nested in that land. After midsummer the adult geese lost their flight quills and had to stay on the water, and at such times they became very shy. The kayak sought out the backwaters where the earthbound geese waited in furtive seclusion for the gift of flight to return.
While Angutna concealed himself behind rocks near the shore, Kipmik would dance on the open beach, barking and squealing like a young pup. He would roll on his back or leap into the air. As he played, the geese would emerge from their hiding places and swim slowly toward him, fascinated by this peculiar behaviour in an animal they all knew so well. They had no fear of the fox for they knew he would not try to swim. The geese would come closer, cackling to one another with necks outstretched in amazement. Then Angutna’s sling would whir and a stone would fly with angry hiss. A goose would flap its wings on the water and die.
It was an old trick Kipmik played on the geese, one used by foxes since time began… but only Kipmik played that game for the benefit of man.
so the years passed until there were two children in the summer tent of Angutna—a boy and a girl who spent long hours playing with the soft tail of the fox. They were not the only young to play with that white brush. Every spring, when the ptarmigan mated on the hills and the wild dog foxes barked their challenges as an overtone to the sonorous singing of the wolves, unrest would come into the heart of the fox that lived in the houses of men.
On a night he would slip away from the camp and be gone many days. When he returned, lean and hungry, Angutna would feed him special tidbits and smilingly wish good luck to the vixen secreted in some newly dug den not far away. The vixen never ventured into the camp, but Kipmik saw to it that she and her pups were well fed, for Angutna did not begrudge the fox and his family a fair share of the meat that was killed. Sometimes Angutna followed the fox into the hills to the burrow. Then Angutna might leave a fresh fish at its mouth, and he would speak kindly to the unseen vixen cowering within. “Eat well, little sister,” he would say.
As the years slipped by, stories of the Two Who Were One spread through the land. One of them told of a time when Angutna and his family were camped alone by the lake called Lamp of the Woman. It was a very bad year. In midwinter there was an unbroken month of great storms and the people used up all the meat stored near the camp but the weather was too savage to permit the men to travel to their more distant caches. The people grew hungry and cold, for there was no more fat for the lamps.
Finally, there came a day without wind. Angutna hitched up his team and set out for a big cache lying two days’ travel to the west. The dogs pulled as hard as their starved muscles would let them while the fox, like a white wraith, flitted ahead, choosing the easiest road for the team. The sl
ed runners rasped as if they were being hauled over dry sand, for the temperature stood at or fifty or sixty degrees below freezing.
On the second day of the journey the sun failed to show itself and there was only a pallid grey light on the horizon. After a while the fox stopped and stared hard into the north, his short ears cocked forward. Then Angutna too began to hear a distant keening in the dark sky. He tried to speed up the dogs, hoping to reach the cache, which lay sheltered in a deep valley, before the storm broke. But the blizzard exploded soon after, and darkness fell with terrible swiftness as this great gale, which had swept a thousand miles south from the ice sea, scoured the frozen face of the plains. It drove snow before it like fragments of glass. The drifting granules swirled higher and higher, obscuring the plodding figures of man, fox and dogs.
Kipmik still moved at the head of the team but he was invisible to Angutna’s straining, snowcaked eyes, and many times the anxious white shadow had to return to the sled so that the dogs would not lose their way. Finally the wind screamed to such a pitch that Angutna knew it would be madness to drive on. He tried to find a drift whose snow was firm enough for the making of a snowhouse, but there was none at hand and there was no time to search. Turning the sled on its side facing the gale, he dug a trench behind it with his snowknife—just big enough for his body. Wrapping himself in his robes he rolled into the trench and pulled the sled over the top of the hole.
The dogs curled abjectly nearby, noses under their tails, the snow drifting over them, while Kipmik ran among them snapping at their shoulders in his anxiety to make them continue on until some shelter was found. He gave up when the dogs were transformed into white, inanimate mushrooms. Then the fox ran to the sled and burrowed under it. He wormed in close, and Angutna made room so that he might share the warmth from the little body beside him.
For a day and a night nothing moved on the white face of the dark plains except the snow ghosts whirling before the blast of the gale. On the second day the wind died away. A smooth, curling drift shattered from within as Angutna fought free of the smothering snows. With all the haste his numbed body could muster, he began probing the nearby drifts seeking the dogs who were sealed into white tombs from which they could no longer escape by themselves.
He had little need of the probe. Kipmik ran to and fro, unerringly sniffing out the snow crypts of the dogs. They were all uncovered at last, and all were alive but so weak they could barely pull at the sled.
Angutna pressed on. He knew that if no food was found soon, the dogs would be finished. And if the dogs died, then all was lost, for there would be no way to carry the meat from the cache back to the camp. Mercilessly Angutna whipped the team on, and when the dogs could no longer muster the strength to keep the sled moving, he harnessed himself into the traces beside them.
Just before noon the sun slipped over the horizon and blazed red on a desolate world. The long sequence of blizzards had smoothed it into an immense and shapeless undulation of white. Angutna could see no landmarks. He was lost in that snow desert, and his heart sank within him.
Kipmik still ran ahead but for some little while he had been trying to swing the team to a northerly course. Time after time he ran back to Angutna and barked in his face when the man persisted in trudging into the west. So they straggled over that frozen world until the dogs could go no farther. Angutna killed one of the dogs and fed it to the others. He let them rest only briefly, for he was afraid a new storm would begin.
The sun was long since gone and there were no stars in the sky when they moved on; therefore, Angutna did not notice as, imperceptibly, Kipmik turned the team northward. He did not notice until late the next morning when the dawn glow showed him that all through the long night they had been travelling into the north.
Then Angutna, who was a man not given to rage, was filled with a terrible anger. He believed it was all finished for him and his family. He seized his snowknife from the sled and with a great shout leapt at the fox, his companion of so many years.
The blow would have sliced Kipmik in two but, even as he struck, Angutna stumbled. The blade hissed into the snow and the fox leapt aside. Angutna stayed on his knees until the anger went from him. When he rose to his feet he was steadfast once more.
“Ayorama!” he said to the fox who watched him without fear. “It cannot be helped. So, Little Pup, you will lead us your way? It is a small matter. Death awaits in all directions. If you wish, we will seek death to the north.”
It is told how they staggered northward for half a day, then the fox abandoned the man and the dogs and ran on ahead. When Angutna caught up to Kipmik it was to find he had already tunnelled down through the snow to the rocks Angutna had heaped over a fine cache of meat and fat in the fall.
a year or so later a great change came to the world of the plains dwellers. One winter day a sled drove into the camps by the Big Hungry and a man of the sea people came into the snowhouses. Through many long nights the people listened to his wondrous tales of life by the salt water. They were particularly fascinated by his accounts of the wonders that had been brought to that distant land by a white man come out of the south. Their visitor had been commissioned by the white man to acquaint the plains people with the presence of a trading post on the eastern edge of the plains, and to persuade them to move close to that post and to trap furs for trade.
The idea was much talked about and there were some who thought it would be a good thing to go east for a winter, but most of the people were opposed. By reason of his renown as a hunter, Angutna’s opinions carried weight and one night he spoke what was in his mind.
“I think it is to be remembered that we have lived good lives in this land, knowing little evil. Is it not true that Tuktoriak has fed and clothed us from before the time of the father’s fathers? Eeee! It is so. And if we turn from the Deer Spirit now to seek other gifts, who can say what he may do? Perhaps he will be angry and speak to his children, the deer, and bid them abandon our people. And then of what value would be the promises made by this man on behalf of the Kablunait?… Those promises would be dead sticks in our hands.”
So spoke Angutna, and most agreed with him. Still, when the stranger departed, there were two families who went with him. These returned before the snows thawed in the spring and they brought such wealth as a man could hardly credit: rifles, steel knives, copper kettles and many such things.
But they also brought something they did not know they were bringing.
It was a sickness that came into men’s lungs and squeezed the life from their bodies. It was called the Great Pain and it flung itself on the plains people like a blazing wind. In one season it killed more than half of those who lived in that land.
Panic struck many of the survivors who, believing the land was now cursed, fled to the east to seek help from the white man. From him they learned a new way of life, becoming trappers of fur and eaters of white man’s food. And, instead of Tuktu, the beast they now pursued was Terriganiak—the white fox. During all time that had been, the plains people had known the white fox as a friend in a land so vast and so empty that the bark of the fox was often the only welcoming sound. Since time began, foxes and men had shared that land and there had been no conflict between them. Now men turned on Terriganiak and lived by the sale of his skin.
For a time Angutna and a few other men and their families tried to continue living the old life in the old places, but hunger came more often upon them and one autumn the deer failed to appear at all. Some said this was because of the great slaughter of deer resulting from the new rifles in the hands of all northern people, Indian and Innuit; but Angutna believed it was due to the anger of Tuktoriak. In any event, the last few people living on the inland plains were forced to follow those who had already fled to the east and become trappers of fox.
When the survivors of that long trek came to the snowhouses which stood a few miles away from the house of the trader at the mout
h of the River of Seals, they expected to be greeted with warmth and with food, for it had always been the law of the land that those who have food and shelter will share with those who have not.
Disappointment was theirs. White foxes, too, were scarce that winter and many traps stood empty. Those people who had chosen to live by the fox were nearly as hungry as the people who journeyed out of the west.
Angutna built a small snowhouse for his family, but it was a dark place filled with dark thoughts. There was no fuel for the lamps and almost no fuel for the belly. Angutna, who had once been such a great hunter was now forced to live on the labours of others because, even if he had so wished, he could not have trapped foxes. He could not have done so because Terriganiak was his Spirit-Who-Helps and for him, the lives of all foxes were sacred. Other men went to their traps and, when they were lucky, caught foxes whose pelts they bartered for food. Sometimes a portion of that food was given to Angutna’s wife; but Angutna had nothing to give in return.
The new way of life was as hard for Kipmik as for Angutna. The fox who had always been free now lay, day and night, tethered to a stick driven into the floor of the snowhouse. All around that place steel traps yawned for his kind and there were many men with rifles who, to help feed their families, would not have hesitated to put a bullet through him, for although Kipmik was growing old, his pelt was still thicker, softer and longer than that of any fox that had ever been seen before.