Snow Walker

by Mowat, Farley;

  Konala’s face came into focus as she nudged the tin against his lips. She was smiling and Lavery found himself smiling weakly back at this woman who not so long before had roused his contempt and anger.

  They camped on the nameless ridge for a week while Lavery recovered some of his strength. At first he could hardly bear to leave the shelter because of the pain in his feet. But Konala seemed always on the move: gathering willow twigs for fires, collecting and cooking food, cutting and sewing a new pair of boots for Lavery from the hides she had brought with her. She appeared tireless, but that was an illusion. Her body was driven to its many tasks only at great cost.

  Time had telescoped itself so that Lavery would wake from sleep with shaking hands, hearing the engines of the Anson fail. It would seem to him that the plane had crashed only a few minutes earlier. It would seem that the terrible ordeal of his march south was about to begin again and he would feel a sick return of panic. When this happened, he would desperately fix his thoughts on Konala for she was the one comforting reality in all this alien world.

  He thought about her a great deal, but she was an enigma to him. Sick as she was, how had she managed to follow him across those sodden plains and broken rock ridges… how had she managed to keep alive in such a country?

  After Konala gave him the completed skin boots carefully lined with cotton grass, he began to find answers to some of these questions. He was able to hobble far enough from camp to watch her set sinew snares for gaudy ground squirrels she called hikik, scoop suckers from a nearby stream with her bare hands, outrun snow geese that were still flightless after the late-summer moult, and dig succulent lemmings from their peat bog burrows. Watching her, Lavery slowly came to understand that what had seemed to him a lifeless desert was in fact a land generous in its support of those who knew its nature.

  Still, the most puzzling question remained unanswered. Why had Konala not stayed in the relative safety of the aircraft or else travelled north to seek her own people? What had impelled her to follow him… to rescue a man of another race who had abandoned her?

  Toward the end of their stay on the ridge, the sun was beginning to dip well below the horizon at night—a warning that summer was coming to an end. One day Konala again pointed north and, with a grin, she waddled duck-like a few paces in that direction. The joke at the expense of Lavery’s splayed and painful feet did not annoy him. He laughed and limped after her to show his willingness to follow wherever she might lead.

  When they broke camp, Konala insisted on carrying what was left of Lavery’s gear along with her own pouch and the roll of caribou hides which was both shelter and bedding for them. As they trekked northward she broke into song—a high and plaintive chant without much melody which seemed as much part of the land as the fluting of curlews. When Lavery tried to find out what the song was all about, she seemed oddly reticent and all he could gather was that she was expressing kinship for someone or for something beyond his ken. He did not understand that she was joining her voice to the voice of the land and to the spirits of the land.

  Retracing their path under Konala’s tutelage became a journey of discovery. Lavery was forever being surprised at how different the tundra had now become from the dreadful void he had trudged across not long since.

  He discovered it was full of birds ranging from tiny longspurs whose muted colouring made them almost invisible, to great saffron-breasted hawks circling high above the bogs and lakes. Konala also drew his attention to the endless diversity of tundra plants, from livid orange lichens to azure flowers whose blooms were so tiny he had to kneel to see them clearly.

  Once Konala motioned him to crawl beside her to the crest of an esker. In the valley beyond, a family of white wolves was lazily hunting lemmings in a patch of sedge a hundred feet away. The nearness of the big beasts made Lavery uneasy until Konala boldly stood up and called to the wolves in their own language. They drew together then, facing her in a half circle, and answered with a long, lilting chorus before trotting away in single file.

  Late one afternoon they at last caught sight of a splash of brilliant colour in the distance. Lavery’s heartbeat quickened and he pushed forward without regard for his injured feet. The yellow-painted Anson might have been spotted by a search plane during their absence… rescue by his own kind might still be possible. But when the man and woman descended the esker to the shore of the pond, they found the Anson exactly as they had left it. There had been no human visitors.

  Bitterly disappointed, Lavery climbed into the cockpit, seated himself behind the controls and slumped into black depression. Konala’s intention of travelling northward to rejoin her own people on the coast now loomed as an ordeal whose outcome would probably be death during the first winter storm… if they could last that long. Their worn clothing and almost hairless robes were already barely adequate to keep the cold at bay. Food was getting harder to find as the birds left, the small animals began to dig in and the fish ran back to the sea. And what about fuel when the weather really began to turn against them?

  Lavery was sullen and silent that evening as they ate boiled fish but Konala remained cheerful She kept repeating the word tuktu—caribou—as she vainly tried to make him understand that soon they would have the wherewithal to continue the journey north.

  As the night wind began to rise he ignored the skin shelter which Konala had erected and, taking one of the robes, climbed back into the plane and rolled himself up on the icy metal floor. During the next few days he spent most of his time in the Anson, sometimes fiddling with the knobs of the useless radio, but for the most part morosely staring through the Plexiglass windscreen at a landscape which seemed to grow increasingly bleak as the first frosts greyed the tundra flowers and browned the windswept sedges.

  Early one morning an unfamiliar sound brought him out of a chilled, nightmarish sleep. It was a muffled, subdued noise as of waves rolling in on a distant shore. For one heart-stopping instant he thought it was the beat of an aircraft engine, then he heard Konala’s exultant cry.

  “Tuktoraikayai—the deer have come!”

  From the window of the dead machine Lavery looked out upon a miracle of life. An undulating mass of antlered animals was pouring out of the north. It rolled steadily toward the pond, split, and began enveloping it. The rumble resolved itself into a rattling cadence of hooves on rock and gravel. As the animals swept past, the stench of barnyard grew strong even inside the plane. Although in the days when he had flown high above them Lavery had often seen skeins of migrating caribou laced across the arctic plains like a pattern of beaded threads, he could hardly credit what he now beheld… the land inundated under a veritable flood of life. His depression began to dissipate as he felt himself being drawn into and becoming almost a part of that living river.

  While he stared, awe-struck and incredulous, Konala went to work. Some days earlier she had armed herself with a spear, its shaft made from a paddle she had found in the Anson and its double-edged blade filed out of a piece of steel broken from the tip of the plane’s anchor. With this in hand she was now scurrying about on the edge of the herd. The press was so great that individual deer could not avoid her. A snorting buck leapt high as the spear drove into him just behind the ribs. His dying leap carried him onto the backs of some of his neighbours, and as he slid off and disappeared into the ruck, Konala’s blade thrust into another victim. She chose the fattest beasts and those with the best hides.

  When the tide of caribou finally thinned, there was much work for Konala’s knife. She skinned, scraped and staked out several prime hides destined for the making of clothes and sleeping robes, then turned her attention to a small mountain of meat and began slicing it into paper-thin sheets which she draped over dwarf willow bushes. When dry this would make light, imperishable food fit to sustain a man and woman—one injured and the other sick—who must undertake a long, demanding journey.

  Revitalized by the living ambi
ence of the great herd, Lavery came to help her. She glanced up at him and her face was radiant. She cut off a piece of brisket and held it out to him, grinning delightedly when he took it and tore off a piece with his teeth. It was his idea to make a stove out of two empty oil cans upon which the fat which Konala had gathered could be rendered into white cakes that would provide food and fuel in the times ahead.

  Several days of brisk, clear weather followed. While the meat dried on the bushes, Konala laboured on, cutting and stitching clothing for them both. She worked herself so hard that her cheeks again showed the flame of fever and her rasping cough grew worse. When Lavery tried to make her take things a little easier she became impatient with him. Konala knew what she knew.

  Finally on a day in mid-September she decided they were ready. With Lavery limping at her side, she turned her back on the white men’s fine machine and set out to find her people.

  The skies darkened and cold gales began sweeping gusts of snow across the bogs whose surfaces were already crusting with ice crystals. One day a sleet storm forced them into early camp. Konala had left the little travel tent to gather willows for the fire and Lavery was dozing when he heard her cry of warning through the shrilling of the wind.

  There was no mistaking the urgency in her voice. Snatching up the spear he limped from the tent to see Konala running across a narrow valley. Behind her, looming immense and forbidding in the leaden light was one of the great brown bears of the barrenlands. Seeing Lavery poised on the slope above her, Konala swerved away, even though this brought her closer to the bear. It took a moment for Lavery to realize that she was attempting to distract the beast, then he raised the spear and flung himself down the slope, shouting and cursing at the top of his lungs.

  The bear’s interest in the woman shifted to the surprising spectacle Lavery presented. It sat up on its massive haunches and peered doubtfully at him through the veil of sleet.

  When he was a scant few yards from the bear, Lavery tripped and fell, rolling helplessly among the rocks to fetch up on his back staring upward into that huge, square face. The bear looked back impassively then snorted, dropped on all fours and shambled off.

  The meeting with the bear crystallized the changes which had been taking place in Lavery. Clad in caribou-skin clothing, a dark beard ringing his cheeks, and his hair hanging free to his shoulders, he had acquired a look of litheness and vigour—and of watchfulness. No longer was he an alien in an inimical land. He was a man now in his own right, able to make his way in an elder world.

  In Konala’s company he knew a unity that he had previously felt only with members of his bombing crew. The weeks they had spent together had eroded the barrier of language and he was beginning to understand much about her that had earlier baffled him. Yet the core of the enigma remained for he had not found the answer to the question that had haunted him since she brought life back to his body on that distant southern ridge.

  For some time they had been descending an already frozen and snow-covered river which Konala had given him to understand would lead them to the coast. But with each passing day, Konala had been growing weaker even as Lavery regained his strength. At night, when she supposed him to be asleep, she sometimes moaned softly, and during the day she could walk only for short distances between paroxysms of coughing that left blood stains in the new snow at her feet.

  When the first real blizzard struck them, it was Lavery who set up the travel tent and lit the fire of lichens and caribou fat upon which to simmer some dried deer meat. Konala lay under their sleeping robes while he prepared the meal, and when he turned to her he saw how the lines of pain around her mouth had deepened into crevices. He came close and held a tin of warm soup to her dry lips. She drank a mouthful then lay back, her dark eyes glittering too brightly in the meagre firelight. He looked deep into them and read the confirmation of his fear.

  Keeping her eyes on his, she took a new pair of skin boots from under the robes and slowly stroked them, feeling the infinitely fine stitching which would keep them waterproof. After a time she reached out and placed them in his lap. Then she spoke, slowly and carefully so he would be sure to understand.

  “They are not very good boots but they might carry you to the camps of my people. They might help you return to your own land… Walk well in them… my brother.”

  Later that night the gale rose to a crescendo. The cold drove into the tent and, ignoring the faint flicker of the fire, pierced through the thick caribou robes wrapped about Konala and entered into her.

  When the storm had blown itself out, Lavery buried her under a cairn of rocks on the high banks of the nameless river. As he made his way northward in the days that followed, his feet finding their own sure way, he no longer pondered the question which had lain in his mind through so many weeks… for he could still hear the answer she had made and would forever hear it: Walk well… my brother…

  The White Canoe

  _______

  Desolation enveloped the tundra. The treeless plains stretching to an illimitable horizon all around me seemed neither land nor water but a nebulous blend of both. No birds flew in the overcast skies and no beasts moved on the dun-coloured waste of bog. A grey cloud scud driving low over gravel ridges bore the chill of snow. All visible life seemed to have fled, as I too was fleeing, before the thrust of approaching winter.

  I had already been travelling for three weeks down the River and had seen no sign of any other human beings. Fear that I might never escape from this uninhabited wilderness grew as my battered canoe leapt and writhed in the torrent as if afflicted with its own panic. The River was one long sequence of roaring white water that had early taken toll. My rifle, pack and winter clothing together with most of my grub had been lost in the first furious rapids four hundred miles to the westward.

  Half starved, with no more than a few handfuls of wet flour remaining for my body’s sustenance, and soaked by spume and spray, I was sinking into apathy from which, on some wild rapid still to come, I might not be able to rouse myself in time.

  The River whipped me around one of its angled bends to face a mighty ridge rising powerfully out of the sodden tundra like an island in a frozen sea. It should have been visible from many miles upstream yet I had seen nothing of it until the current flung me up against its flank. I had an overwhelming desire to feel its solid stone beneath my feet. Thrusting my paddle against the oily muscles of the current, I came panting to the shore.

  When I reached the top of that great mound, I halted abruptly. Before me lay an immense white canoe upended on a bed of frost-shattered granite and shining like a monument of quartz. It had been so placed to leave a narrow opening between the gunwale and the bed rock. Kneeling, I peered into the gloom and could just make out the outlines of many shapes and bundles. Joyfully I thought, and perhaps spoke aloud, “It’s got to be a cache!” My strength was just sufficient to lift the gunwale a few more inches and wedge it up with a fragment of rock so I could reach one arm underneath.

  The first thing I touched and drew toward me was a .50 Sharps rifle swathed in rotted deerskins and so well coated in hardened tallow that there was not a speck of rust on it. Further scrabbling produced two boxes of shells, their brass cases green with verdigris, but their powder dry; a gill net complete with floats and sinkers; and a bleached wooden box holding several pounds of tea and half a dozen plugs of tobacco.

  There were also fish spears, steel traps, snowknives, cooking pots and other implements of an Eskimo household, together with a number of nameless packages which seemed to have succumbed to mildew and decay and which I assumed held bedding and clothing of caribou and muskox fur.

  I had no hesitation in taking the things I needed. It seemed clear enough that the Eskimo who had made this cache had done so long ago and had never returned to it nor ever would.

  The gifts of the white canoe included the knowledge that my escape from the void of the barrenland plains wa
s now reasonably certain. Where this great craft, coming inland from the coast, had been able to ascend against the River, there my canoe could surely descend. The sea—deliverance—must be close. Yet when I walked to the eastern end of the ridge and looked eagerly beyond it, I could see nothing except the cold undulations of that same sodden plain in which I had been imprisoned for so long. Escape still lay somewhere beyond a grey horizon blurring into darkness under an onslaught of driven rain.

  I carted my loot back to the river edge, set the net in a backwater and returned to shore to make a little fire of willow twigs on which to brew up a huge pail of tea. As I sat by the minute flames, I mused upon the presence of the white canoe, invisible now in the darkness looming over me.

  That it had lain on the ridge for decades past I could not doubt. The decay beneath it, and the way the meagre lichens had grown around it, proved this must be so. Yet the canoe itself seemed to have denied the years. Its flanks were smooth, unmarred by summer rains or winter gales. Its wood was sound and as dry and hard as iron. It was of a sea-going type built especially for the Hudson’s Bay Company trade and much favoured by Eskimos along the arctic coasts. But what was it doing here?

  Rain hissed over the roiling waters and winked out my fire. I crawled into my robes, pulled a canvas tarp over me and went to sleep.

  In the icy dawn I lifted the net and found it heavy with trout and grayling. After cooking my first real meal in many days, I committed myself to the River again.

  For five more days I travelled down that watery slope, portaging or running rapids, always straining toward the sea. On the first day I saw a lone caribou on the bank, a straggler left behind by the southbound migrating herds. The old Sharps roared like the voice of doom, nearly knocking me out of the canoe; and that night I gorged on fresh and bloody meat.