People of the Deer (17 page)

“Who but a madman would raise his hand against blood of his blood?” he asked me. “Who but a madman would, in his man's strength, stoop to strike against the weakness of a child? Be sure that I am not mad, nor yet is Howmik afflicted with madness!”

There was something that might have been contempt in his voice as he spoke, and I never again raised that question.

So the children live their lives free of all restraint except that which they themselves impose; and they are at least as well behaved as any child anywhere. For three years after birth a child is suckled and by the time it has been weaned it is already aware of the general pattern of its life. I told you of Kunee, who, at the age of five, was already an accomplished woman of the People, yet Kunee had never been taught what she must do. She was simply observant and imitative, as most children are, and she saw what others did and longed to do as well by herself.

The children's work is also their play. At night, when the adults are asleep or resting on the ledge, no voice is raised to chide the girl children, who remain active until the dawn, keeping the fire alive under the cooking pot and concocting broths and stews, not with toy things, but with the real equipment which will be theirs in maturity. No regimen or hard routine is laid upon them. When they are sleepy, they sleep. When they are hungry, they may always eat, if there is food. If they wish to play, no one will halt them and give them petty tasks to do, for in their play they learn more of life than can be taught by tongues and by training.

Suppose a youth, a ten-year-old boy, decides he will become a great hunter overnight. He is not scolded and sent sulkily to bed for his foolish presumption, nor do his parents condescend to his childish fantasy. Instead his father gravely spends the evening preparing a miniature bow which is not a toy, but an efficient weapon on a reduced scale. The bow is made with love and then it is given to the boy and he sets out for his distant hunting ground—a ridge, perhaps a hundred yards away—with the time-honored words of luck ringing in his ears, which are the same words spoken by the People to their mightiest hunter when he sets out on the two-month trip northward for muskox. There is no distinction, and this lack of distinction is not a pretense, it is perfectly real. The boy will be a hunter? Very well then, he
shall
be a hunter—not a boy with a toy bow.

If the child is brave enough he may search the ridges and valleys through the hours of summer twilight which span the interval from dusk till dawn. When he returns at last with hunger gnawing at his stomach, he is greeted as gravely as if he were his father. The whole camp wishes to hear of his hunt, and he can expect the same ridicule at failure, or the same praise if he managed to kill a little bird, which would come upon a full-grown man. So he plays, and learns, under no shadow of parental disapproval, and under no restraint of fear.

The evenings are the best times in the summer camps. The men return from hunting over the plains, from building a new kayak, or perhaps from spearing lake trout at the rapids on the river. Hunger is satisfied. The old ones sit in the place of honor about the fires with the willow sleeping mats beneath their bony hams. Husbands and wives speak of the day's events. The children drift in from the outlying shadows hoping to hear the tales that may be told of other times.

Here is Atnalik, who has learned a new “string-figure”—“cat's cradle,” we should call it—during the day, and now he must show it to his family. He fumbles it, knots the string by accident, and joins in the general good-natured laughter at his clumsiness. But everyone has caught the infection now and lengths of sinew appear in everyone's hands. The space about the fire becomes a flashing spiderweb of thin gut strings as young and old hands play at the ancient game. Now Howmik makes the figure of the Two Fighting Wolverines. All the rest of the company stops to watch the battle of the two wolverines in the figure and Ootek provides a realistic two-way sound effect to make the fight all the more vivid. At last a loop collapses, one of the figures vanishes, and the victorious wolverine slides down the string and also disappears.

Ootek goes on to relate the story of the Ground Squirrel That Slept as it is recorded in the stylistic figures of the shapes he weaves from string. Even old Kala bends her stiff fingers painfully to create the figure of Kumanik Angkuni, the Great Lake. The figures go on endlessly, and there is shouting when a new one appears, and laughter when an old one is fumbled.

Suddenly the three dogs that have been watching the proceedings with puzzled interest break into high-pitched and puppyish howls, announcing the coming of old Hekwaw. Howmik stirs up the fire so the soup will heat, for a visitor, even if he comes only from the next tent, must always be fed at once.

It is a rare night when someone does not come to visit. Often the entire population crowds around one fire and at such a time perhaps Hekwaw will heed the patient pleading in the black eyes of silent children and will begin a tale:

This is Kiviok I will tell you about, and Kiviok was a wandering man. He was the grandson of Tuktoriak, the Spirit of the deer, and that is why he was a wandering man.

It is told that Kiviok once lived far to the west of here, somewhere by a great lake that even I have never seen. Kiviok was a young man then, and he lived with his parents, but one day when Kiviok was away hunting muskox,
Ejaka,
the half-men from the Northwest, came on the camp and cut the life from his mother and father and left him alone in the land.

So Kiviok took his kayak and paddled south down the shores of the lake until he came to a channel between two great mountains. When he drew close, he saw that these were not mountains but the two jaws of a gigantic bear, and the jaws opened and shut without ceasing, and the crash of the enormous white teeth was as loud as the thunder of Kaila. But Kiviok was not afraid, and he waited until the jaws just started to open, then he dashed his kayak through the channel. The big jaws of the bear closed at once and they chopped off the stem part of the kayak, but Kiviok escaped.

Now Kiviok came to a new land in the South and there he found a tent with a woman and her daughter Ularik. Kiviok slept with the daughter and she was his wife and for a time all went well. But it came about that the old woman grew jealous and wished Kiviok was
her
husband. She waited until Kiviok had gone off on a hunt. Then she offered to braid her daughter's hair. She pretended to fix the
tuglee,
the wooden ornaments, in the hair of her daughter, but instead she wound the hair around the girl's throat and choked her to death. Then she took her sharp
ulu
and skinned the girl's face, and pulled the skin right over her own ancient head.

When Kiviok came home from his hunt he went to bed with the old woman, thinking she was his wife, but as it happened he had got wet during the day, and the moisture shrunk the false skin on the old woman's face so that it all split and came off. When Kiviok saw how he had been tricked, he jumped into his kayak and fled.

He came to a place where there was a muskox who talked like a man, and the muskox offered Kiviok his daughter, if the man would stay with him and defend the muskox from the wolves. But Kiviok said, “Your daughter is too hairy to come into my bed!” And he fled away in his kayak again.

Kiviok traveled on and many strange things happened to him and he saw many strange things, but all at once he found himself back on the great lake where his parents had lived, and he saw that a party of Ejaka stood on the shore waiting for him to land so they could kill him.

Kiviok stayed in the kayak and he called out, “Hey there! You half-men! Come into the water and fight!”

The Ejaka were so angry that they swam out into the lake, but Kiviok dived into the water and swam underneath them, stabbing them all in the bellies so that they died.

That is the story of Kiviok the wandering man, and of his fight with the Ejaka. I don't know any more about him.

After Hekwaw has finished, there will be other tales by other people. Old Kala may tell her favorite story, of the man who had five wives who turned into lemmings one winter night... And so it goes, for there are hundreds of these tales in the minds of the People and, though they have been told many times, the listeners never grow weary of hearing them yet again.

If several visitors come of an evening, then Ootek will take his great hoop-drum down from the poles of the tent, and after holding it over the fire so that the gut will be stretched taut by the heat, he will offer it to one of the visiting men. The men are modest and the drum will be passed from one to the other until at last one of them, Ohoto perhaps, will take it. He gets up from the squatting circle of People and walks to the center of the group, hard by the fire.

For a while he stands there, embarrassed, and the audience shouts and argues about what song he should sing. At last Ohoto says, “Very well then, all you with big noisy voices, I will sing my own song, the one I composed in honor of myself as a hunter.”

He holds the drum by a handle and twirls it around and around, striking it lightly along the edge of the hoop with a stick. The tempo begins as a slow rhythmic beat, and Ohoto begins to shuffle about looking like a trained bear at a circus. He bends sharply forward from the waist and suddenly he begins singing his song. It goes something like this:

Oh indeed I am a mighty hunter of deer!
Out on the plains where the rocks are.
But with my little eyes, like the lemming's,
I can hardly tell the deer from the rocks.
And with my weak arms, like a snowbird's,
I cannot shoot an arrow straight from my bow,
Out on the plains where the rocks are.

Nevertheless I go out on the plains,
Out on the plains where the rocks are.
And I shoot my arrows into the rocks,
For someday one of the rocks may be a deer.
Then indeed will I be a great hunter,
Out on the plains where the rocks are.

At the end of each verse the audience takes up the time-honored chorus, and the listeners sway in their places with their eyes tightly shut as they cry out the chant:

Ai-yai-ya-ya ai-ya-ya ai-ya-ya-ya...

Ohoto shuffles about more and more quickly. The sweat pours from his face as the dim glow of the little fire sends his distorted shadow slithering in and out among the rocks by the fireplace. The tempo increases and when all the verses of the song have been sung, Ohoto collapses limply in his place and the drum is taken up by another.

The songs go on for hours. Most are songs of self-derision or perhaps sarcastic songs directed at a notorious coward or a lazy hunter. No man praises himself, and when he sings of himself, he always appears in the song as a fool, or as a man who is inadequate in the ways and skills of a hunter, or of a lover. Even ten-year-old Atnalik has invented his own song and he is encouraged to sing it, while his elders chant the chorus with particular gusto, and loudly applaud him when he is done.

Only the women do not sing their songs, for this is tabu while there are men present, but they carry the burden of the chorus and their high-pitched voices chant in the darkness like the unearthly voices of spirits.

The night passes quickly. Games, songs and stories fill the hours until the sun is again on the upsweep of its course in the round white belly of the dawn sky. The People eat a little and then go to sleep, all together up on the willow mats of the ledge.

In winter, the great length of the nights passes in the same pleasant manner. This is the time when the almost continuous darkness and cold could well drive men mad, but it is also the time of the greatest song feasts. Then song-cousins visit each other's camps and they give valuable presents and receive presents as valuable in return. Song-cousins contest with good-natured rivalry in the singing of songs to the accompaniment of the drum. Many new songs are composed and sung in the igloos in winter.

But songs alone do not fill the nights. There is a wide variety of games and of these the gambling games are the most interesting. The favorite gambling sport of the Ihalmiut is, like so many things in their culture, almost indistinguishable from an Indian counterpart. To play it, two men or two teams of men face each other over the expanse of a robe. The “dealer” has a stone or some other small object concealed in his hand and very rapidly he places that hand under the robe, then under his backside as he squats on the ground, then behind his back, and finally he holds the clenched fist up in full view of his opponent. Instantly the second man must indicate where he thinks the object is—in the hand, under the buttock, behind the back or under the robe. When, and if, he guesses correctly by putting his own hand in the corresponding spot, he becomes the dealer. The odds against him are three to one, and he may lose just about everything he owns before he gets a chance to carry the ball, but then he usually wins everything back again, with interest. The game is played with such speed that it is almost impossible to follow the motions of the players and, if nothing else, it makes for a remarkable quickness of eye.

In other days the Chipewyans used to hold gambling contests with their blood enemies, the Ihalmiut, on the narrow strip of land which divides their territories. I have heard the tale of one such game which lasted for two days and two nights without a break. The particular tournament I speak of ended with the Eskimos holding the entire wealth of the Indians, and they had to level their rifles and spears at the losers to prevent what threatened to become a sanguinary battle.

Among themselves, the Ihalmiut gamble with an eye to reality. They are well aware that a man who loses his rifle or his team of dogs will probably die of starvation. So it is the custom for the winner to return most of what he has won at the conclusion of the game. Thus the loser suffers no hardship. He may even have the dubious pleasure of losing the same rifle five times over, in the course of one evening of gaming.

These are but a few of the pleasures which belong to the days of the People. Their most lasting pleasures come from the labors of creation. Old Hekwaw at work on a new kayak is a man who is lost in his task. He knows the exquisite pleasure of creating a thing he can love. He knows all of the subtle joys of a fine craftsman as he delicately shapes the slender ribs of his craft. And it is only because he is in love with his labors that he can bring to completion this vessel, so light and graceful. He has only tools that he makes for himself. Using a bow drill constructed of a small bow, a wooden rod and a fine point of metal, he drills tiny holes in the willow ribs of the kayak and laces them firmly to the frame with delicate lashings of rawhide. He prolongs the easy sweep of the little craft into a long fragile beak supported by longitudinal stringers composed of dozens of short sections of spruce which have been intricately mortised and fitted together to make a piece of the requisite length. When the kayak frame has been finished, it looks like the exquisitely delicate skeleton of a great fish. It is a true work of art. Later, when it is covered with hides, Hekwaw paints a brilliant design on its decks with colors he grinds from stone and mixes with the fat of the deer. At length the kayak will take to the water, it will live under the hand of old Hekwaw and give him joy.