Lost in the Barrens (8 page)

 

CHAPTER 14

Camp at the Deer Fence

D
URING THE NEXT WEEK THE BOYS
found so many urgent jobs that they had little time for worrying. The weather was changing, and there was clear indication that summer days were done. There was heavy frost almost every night, and in the morning half an inch of ice lay on the tundra pools until the noonday sun melted it away.

Luckily the sun was still bright, and in three days the meat laid out on the willow scrub had dried. Jamie collected it carefully and packed it away in rough bags made from some of the “green,” or untreated, caribou hides.

The main problem now was to keep warm. The makeshift tent, supported only by low scrub, was full of gaps. Their clothing was thin and their footgear almost worn out. After one particularly miserable night when they lay sleepless and shivering in their tent, Jamie decided to do something about the shelter problem. “We'll have to build some kind of house, Awasin,” he said. “Maybe we could make a sort of igloo out of rocks. If we stuffed all the chinks with moss and covered the whole thing with deer hides it ought to be fairly warm.”

“We must do something!” replied Awasin, still shivering from the night's chill. “You go ahead on the house. I'll see what I can do about some clothes.”

Jamie set about housebuilding. There were plenty of flat rocks nearby and he gathered a pile of these at a spot beside the fire. Then he marked out a circle on the sand about five feet in diameter. Using the broad forehead antler from an old caribou skull, he dug out the sand inside the circle until he came to solid rock about a foot below the ground level. Next he began a circular wall, laying flat stones one on top of the other. At one point he placed a long, narrow stone across two others set upright in the wall. This was to be the door—a low, narrow entrance through which a boy, on hands and knees, could crawl.

It was ticklish work. Since there was no mortar to hold the stones, they had a tendency to topple inward and knock the whole thing down. When the wall was three feet high, it became so tottery that Jamie did not dare build it any higher.

His next problem was a roof. After much thought he placed the broken paddle across the top, like a rafter. Then he gathered armfuls of the longest willows he could find, and made a crude thatch that rested on the rock wall and on the shaft of the paddle. Over this he stretched a number of fresh caribou hides, with the fur side down. He arranged the skins in such a way that they sloped out toward the edge of the wall, so they would carry off the rain and melting snow.

His next task was to gather sphagnum moss and chink the many gaps in the wall. Then he hauled several loads of moss through the door and spread the spongy stuff on the floor as a kind of mattress. The house was done.

It did not look like much—in fact, from the outside it looked like another pile of rocks in a rocky world. But inside it was fairly snug and warm, and when Jamie hung a piece of deer hide over the doorway the little stone igloo was almost comfortable, even though there was no room to stretch out or stand up.

Meanwhile, Awasin had been hard at work trying to improvise new moccasins. Though he had often seen his mother and other Cree women making footgear, he had never before tried his hand at it.

He went at the job doggedly, determined to do well. The first task was to prepare the hide, and this he did by choosing three of the best deerskins and sinking them in a tundra pool, where he left them for two days. At the end of this time the hair had loosened and he was able to scrape it off with the blade of his knife. Next he cut out the
leg sections of the hides, and the piece of skin which covers the caribou's forehead. These pieces were yellow, almost transparent when wet, and looked rather like parchment.

Awasin knew that the skin should be tanned, but this was a long and difficult business and he did not feel confident of success, so he decided simply to smoke the hides instead. He hung the skins over a fire smothered with wet moss, and every now and then he moistened the hides with water. After several hours the skins had turned to a dirty brown color, and Awasin judged they were ready to use.

Cutting the moccasins was easy. He took one of his own tattered moose-hide moccasins, slit the seams, and laid it out flat on the deer hide as a pattern. Some careful work with the knife gave him the rough material, cut out to shape. The Cree moccasin is designed in such a way that almost the whole thing can be cut from a single piece of hide. Then the seams are sewn together. It is not really difficult—with needles and thread. Awasin had neither, but like all those who live in the far north, he planned to make what he did not have.

He searched through the deer bones near camp until he found the shoulder blade of a young deer that had been killed by Denikazi's hunters. The flat center section was only about an eighth of an inch thick, and from this section Awasin chopped out a piece about as big as a playing card—and almost as thin. Then, using his knife as a splitting tool, and a stone as a hammer, he carefully sliced the bone into a number of slivers. They were the size of toothpicks. Sharp at one end, they were flexible enough to be
bent double without breaking. But they had no holes for the thread.

Awasin considered the problem for a while, and then he got the fishhook. Using the sharp point, he scraped away at the thick ends of his needles until he had made small holes right through the bone. He ruined half his needle supply in the process, but he ended up with five bone needles that—despite their thickness—looked serviceable.

The thread problem was simpler. Taking down one of the hanks of sinew, Awasin soaked this bone-hard strip in warm water for a few minutes until it became as soft and pliable as silk. Then, with his knife, he split off single threads, each about three feet long.

Now he was ready for work upon the moccasins. First using the fishhook to make the holes, he began sewing up the seams. At first his stitches were clumsy and too far apart, but Awasin was clever with his hands and soon he did a neater job.

He had used the leg hide of the caribou for the moccasins, since this is tougher and more durable than the body hide. All the same, the soles were thin, for caribou skin is not nearly so thick or tough as the moose hide which the Crees normally use. Awasin solved this problem by cutting extra soles from the very tough hide found on the forehead of the deer, and he sewed these to the bottom of each moccasin.

The finished moccasins were not things of beauty, but they would do. Jamie laughed when he saw them, but
he was glad enough to pull on a pair in place of the tattered footgear he had been wearing.

The boys' socks had long ago been worn through, but by placing layers of soft grasses in the bottom of each moccasin they found they could keep their feet warm and comfortable. There was only one serious drawback. Being made of untanned hide, the moccasins would dry as hard as cardboard when they were not being worn. So each morning the boys had to fill them with water for a while before pulling them on. They were cold and clammy at first, but soon warmed up, and—better still—they were almost watertight.

His success with the moccasins encouraged Awasin to try making winter parkas. He had no good hides for this purpose, so he and Jamie agreed to use the two blankets they had brought with them. But Awasin soon found that a tailor's task is much more difficult than it looks. In the end he had to content himself with two capelike garments that could be pulled over the back and around the chest, but that had no arms. For the moment they would do. But when winter came, Awasin knew he would have to tackle the problem again.

By the time they had been a week in the camp by the deer fence, the boys had accomplished minor miracles. Not only had they provided themselves with the essential things they needed, but the very acts of building, and making, had filled them with a new self-confidence. They looked over their achievements with real pride. There was the “house” there were moccasins, coats, and a hundred
pounds of dry deermeat that would keep indefinitely and was equal to five hundred pounds of fresh meat. It was a lot of meat, but as Jamie looked at it the thought struck him that the winter meals were going to be monotonous.

“How about catching some fish?” he suggested one day. “When I was getting water this morning at the lake I saw plenty of grayling running. If we could just figure some way to set our net we could catch all we need.”

Of course they had fished with nets before, but always from canoes. Setting a net from the shore is a very different proposition.

Their net was thirty feet long and four feet deep. Wooden floats were attached to one edge, and small lead weights to the other. Once in deep water it would float in an up-and-down position—but getting it into deep water without the use of a boat would be difficult.

“We can't set it in the lake,” Awasin said, “but we might find some way to use it on the river. Let's walk down and see.”

Carrying the net, the fishline, and the fifty-foot length of light rope, they set off along the shore of the lake to the point where the river began. It was half an hour's walk to the river mouth. Here they found a rapid, and just below it a tiny bay that had been cut into the bank by an eddy of the current. As they looked down into its cold, clear waters they could see the silvery shapes of lake trout, and the flickering shadows that were fat arctic whitefish.

“If we could just stretch the net across this bay we'd
catch all the fish we could use,” said Jamie wistfully. Then an idea struck him. “Hey!” he yelled. “Get out the fishline!”

Awasin produced the line from his carrying bag.

“You stand on this point of land,” Jamie ordered, “and I'll go round to the point on the other side of the bay, with the fishline. I'll tie a rock to one end and heave it over to you. Then you tie the rope to your end, and I'll haul the rope back so that it stretches right across. Then all we have to do is tie one end of the rope to the net, heave away, and we'll have it set in the mouth of the bay!”

Awasin was enthusiastic. “Go on!” he cried. “Let's see how it works!”

Jamie raced around the tiny bay to the far point, where he picked up an apple-sized rock and tied it to one end of the line. It was an easy throw, and the rock splashed into the water at Awasin's feet. Quickly he grasped it, took off the rock, and attached an end of the light rope. “All right!” he yelled.

Jamie began drawing the line across, and as the rope paid out at Awasin's end he made ready to fasten the net to it. At last the net itself began to move into the water and in a few moments it was set across the mouth of the little bay and anchored to shore at both ends.

Walking back to join Awasin, Jamie looked proudly out over the swirling waters where the line of the submerged net could be dimly seen.

Lazily the boys relaxed on the soft moss beside the river and enjoyed the warmth of the sun. Below them on the
rapids, hundreds of fish fought their way upstream, splashing and struggling to climb the waterfall.

“Even the fish are going south,” Jamie said a little sadly.

“But not for long,” Awasin answered cheerfully. “They only go upstream to spawn. In a few weeks they'll head north again to the Great Frozen Lake to spend the winter deep down under the ice. And if fish can spend the winter out here—we can too. Come on, let's see what we've caught.”

Jamie ran around and untied his end, then he rejoined Awasin. Together the boys pulled the net into the shallows, and their excitement rose to fever pitch as they caught glimpses of great silvery shapes twisting and fighting in the net. The surge of the struggling fish yanked the net sideways and it took their full strength to drag it in.

“Look at that one!” Jamie yelled in wild excitement. “Looks like a whale!”

The first fish to lie flapping and leaping in the shallows was a monster, a lake trout almost five feet long. Its great mouth gaped and shut with a ferocious click and its rows of needlelike teeth sheared through the net as if it had been a spider web. Expertly Awasin leaped into the shallows and killed the giant with one blow on its head.

When the net was finally pulled out it held so many fish that it took an hour to untangle them all. Laid out on the moss, they made an imposing sight. There were fifteen lake trout, ranging from two to five feet in length. There were two dozen grayling—a kind of arctic trout—each about three or four pounds in weight. Most important of
all, there were thirty-seven plump whitefish, the king of all arctic fish when it comes to filling human stomachs.

Jamie's mouth watered with anticipation as he and Awasin cleaned and cut up their catch. Then, having piled rocks over what they could not carry, they shouldered a full load and set out for home.

As the crisp night air fell over the camp, it carried away with it the rich smell of frying whitefish. Beside the fire the two boys lay in complete contentment. Jamie sighed and said, “The way I feel right now I could live out here forever, and love it too!”