People of the Deer (22 page)

Children alone are permitted brief outbursts of temper, for a child is not held responsible for its actions. But when a man gives way to anger it is something of the deepest shame to the beholders, for anger is the only really indecent thing in the land.

And so it is that a man who breaks the law is never punished in anger. The man who refused meat to his fellow may visit the camp of the aggrieved one, if he wishes, and he will be well received. The resentment felt against him will not be allowed to appear naked, and so provoke an outburst of physical violence.

However, methods of punishment do exist. Should a man continuously disregard the Law of Life, then little by little he finds himself isolated and shut off from the community. There can be no more powerful punishment in the lonely wastes of the Barrens, and in fact it is a punishment which can easily be fatal in a world where man must work closely with man in order to live. A small dose of ostracism usually brings the culprit to an acute awareness of his defects and he ceases to transgress the law. Thus while there is no overt act of justice or of social revenge, nevertheless the object is achieved and the wrong-doer almost invariably returns into the community once again, with no permanent stigma attached to his name. The law does not call for an eye for an eye. If possible the breaker of law is brought back to become an asset to the camps. His defection is tacitly forgotten, and to all intents and purposes it never happened at all.

Such is the punishment for most major offenses. Minor offenses are dealt with by employing the powerful weapons of ridicule, and the Ihalmiut are masters of that art. A man capable of doing his own hunting, but whose family must be fed by other hunters because he is lazy or simply indifferent, is made the subject of the drum-dance song and an object of biting laughter. Only a very callous man can face that sharp laugh for long. However, he knows that when he returns to his duties, the songs about him will disappear, and in time all memory of the incident will be washed from the minds of the People by common consent.

On the other hand, if a man is prevented from doing his work because he has been crippled, or because he is one of those natural incompetents who botches whatever he puts his hand to, then the Law makes an exception. In our society, such unfortunates may become embittered, or may even grow dangerous as a result of the treatment meted out to them. In the Ihalmiut camps, those who are physically or mentally unable to cope with the problems of living are treated with inexhaustible patience and understanding. Poor, dull-witted Onekwaw, for instance, never managed to succeed in a single deer hunt during all the time I knew him. He tried hard enough—but it was always someone else who had to keep Onekwaw's family from starving. And yet, as far as I know, no one ever seriously rebuked Onekwaw for being a burden to his People. True, everyone made fun of his efforts to be a great hunter, but this was good-natured fun and Onekwaw joined in it himself. He even seemed to extract some sort of compensation from being able to provide a source of amusement for the other men. He was the butt of innumerable good-humored jests—but he was never exposed to the bitter ridicule which is the punishment of those who are capable of obeying the law, but who refuse.

The only physical punishment in the Barrens is death, but the death penalty is not the same as with us. It is not intended as an act of social revenge or even as a warning to other potential wrong-doers. It exists only as a means of releasing a man who cannot live in the land he has defied, or as a means of releasing the People from an added danger to their lives.

When a man becomes mad (and only a madman kills, according to the beliefs of the People) and murders or threatens to murder those who live about him, then, and then only, the sentence of death is invoked. There is no trial, no official passing of judgment. Perhaps three or four men, usually those most closely related to or most closely concerned with the murderer, meet and speak indirectly of the problem which faces the entire community. One of their number is usually designated as the executioner. But he is not an instrument of justice as we know it, for his task is not to punish, but to release the soul of the madman from a physical life which can only end in agony of the flesh if it is prolonged. The executioner does his duty quickly and humanely—for the idea of physical or mental torture is simply not known to the Ihalmiut. When the deed is done, the executioner obeys the spirit laws and begs forgiveness from the ghost of the dead man. If he is lucky and the white men do not hear of it, that is the end of the matter. But in not a few cases Eskimos who have had the terrible task of destroying brothers, fathers, or sons, so that the rest may survive, have been brought to the bar of white man's justice and rewarded for the mental sufferings that they have endured by being hanged by the neck until they were dead.

12. Kakumee

Partly because the story of his life outlines in minuscule the tale of his People, and partly for other reasons, I give Kakumee,* the old shaman of the Barrens, a greater place in this book than I give to any other man. His story is one of disintegration and of degradation and this is also the tale of his People. His life is bitter and tragic, the more so because it is not his alone, but also the tragedy of his race.

It was a long time before I came to know much of his story, for the name of Kakumee is an anathema in the mouths of the Ihalmiut. When they can be brought to speak of him they speak shortly and with the bridle of fear on their tongues.

Even Ootek, who was my song-cousin, spoke of Kakumee only when I begged him to speak and he grew visibly uneasy whenever I mentioned the name of the old shaman. Ohoto too, that brash man who claimed to fear nothing, would not tell me much of Kakumee but would deftly switch the subject and talk instead of the deer or of the land.

Franz had known him well, yet even in the stories Franz told I detected an undercurrent of tension and of uneasiness. Eventually it dawned upon me that Franz, who believed he was gifted as white men are with superiority over the primitive natives—Franz too was afraid of Kakumee!

Because I could at first gather only vague clues to the reasons which led the Ihalmiut to fear the old man, my curiosity grew. In the early summer of 1948 I even began to prepare for a journey northward to the shores of Kakumee Kumanik, where the two tents of the shaman stood apart from the rest of the People. The preparations were needless, for this man who had brought a great fear into the land had heard much of Andy and me from some of the other Ihalmiut, and had developed plans to bring us into the orbit of his influence.

One summer day I looked casually from the window of Windy Cabin and saw a stranger approaching. He came up and stood by the door, not offering to enter unbidden, as the other Eskimos always did. So I went out to meet him.

He was not a tall man, yet he was even more massively built than old Hekwaw. His great legs were bowed slightly apart, supporting a square body almost as broad as it was high. But it was his face that caught and held my attention. I shall never forget the face of Kakumee.

When I think of him, I remember those magnificent yet hideous masks the Iroquois used to carve to portray the faces of their devils. Kakumee's face was like a masterful devil-mask that had weathered and cracked through the centuries under the storms and the sun. It was ancient, not in terms of mere years, but ancient in time long since forgotten by men.

Two or three clumps of straggling hairs hung from his pointed goat-chin in the shadow of a bulbous lower lip. That great lip splayed downward to expose a broken, outpointing row of dark-colored teeth, each as massive as the tooth from the jaw of a fossil. A sparse fringe of hairlets was permanently cemented to his upper lip by an unchecked dribble of mucus. His eyes were tiny black marbles sunk deeply under the thrust of his brow and folded under taut curtains of skin, yet they glistened out from their crevices as the black eyes of great spiders shine from their shadowed caves under rocks. His forehead was itself a great rock, cut by ten thousand crevices left by the weather. Above his face was a wild mane of rough, graying hair knotted and twisted in confusion.

That was our first meeting, but many more followed as Kakumee sought by all the cunning he knew to turn Andy and me against the rest of the People.

He was the first Eskimo I had met who deliberately lied, and for a while I almost believed the slanderous stories he told us about Ootek and the others, for I was not prepared to find an Ihalmio who did not speak the truth. Kakumee did more than try to alienate us from the others with lies—he threatened them directly, and us indirectly; and it was only because we refused to be intimidated, and so set ourselves up against him, that the other men dared to remain our friends. Kakumee wheedled me, bribed me, lied to me, threatened me, and revolted me. Yet despite it all I grew fascinated by the character of the man, and increasingly covetous of the incredible store of knowledge he possessed of days lost to all memory but his.

He was a master of indirection, and his subtlety was often too much for mine, but after a while I began to understand him a little. In time, too, I managed to get at some of the stories about him which were known to the rest of the People.

Kakumee was born on the River of Men not far above the Little Lakes where the People now live. His father was Ajut, a shaman whose fame had spread beyond the limits of the plains and who was known even to the distant folk dwelling by the sea. In these days of his childhood, Kakumee was one of more than a thousand Ihalmiut who lived along the banks of the river and on the lakes thereabout.

Ajut's three wives had given him other sons and of these the eldest was Kakut, who lived to be a great man and the enemy of Kakumee. When Kakumee was born, about 1880, no white man had yet entered the land of the People. But in the spring of 1894 two canoes came down the river from the south bringing the first white stranger into the land. This man was Tyrrell, and though Kakumee was but a youth at the time, he can still recall every detail of that visit.

Tyrrell stayed only a day at the camp, because he was anxious about the future, and he did not know where the river would lead him. As a good host, Ajut undertook to accompany Tyrrell downriver and show him the way out of the Ihalmiut country. When the canoes moved off, they were accompanied by the kayaks of Ajut and of his eldest son, Kakut.

When Ajut and Kakut returned to their home, nearly a month later, they brought extravagant tales of what they had seen of the fabulous things the white man carried in his canoes. Kakumee listened avidly to these tales of the wealth of the stranger, and he harbored them in his mind.

All of the Ihalmiut spoke of these things with much wonder, but though they saw and appreciated the worth of Tyrrell's belongings, they did not envy the white man. The People were not greedy for change and so remained content with the life they had always known by the River of Men. In a few years the little gifts Tyrrell had made to them were lost or broken and the memory of the white man's wealth grew dim. It was this way with all of the Ihalmiut save one alone.

Kakumee did not forget. He remembered the goods of the white man as if they had been, in fact, the goods of Kakumee. He dreamed vivid dreams and these remained in the daytime to haunt him. He was filled with a great longing he could not describe, for there were no words in the language of the Ihalmiut to describe the insatiable yearning that had come over him to possess material things. But he kept his dreams to himself, for he knew they were evil according to the Laws of Life in the land. So he spoke no word of the visions which were hidden deep in his mind.

In the winter of the year when Tyrrell passed down the river, Ajut decided his two eldest sons had crossed the threshold from childhood to manhood. During that winter both Kakut and Kakumee began to receive instruction in the shaman's secrets known to their father, for long ago it had been decided that these two sons of the shaman would follow in the path of old Ajut.

Ajut revealed to his sons all that he himself knew of the spirits of the land, and taught them the magic spells which are spoken in an ancient language. He explained the manner of calling on Kaila, the Wind of the Sky and the great God of all men. He warned the youths of the dangers of Paija, Apopa and other inimical spirits, and explained how they could master these beings.

Before the coming of spring there came a time when Ajut could teach his sons nothing more. Now it was left to them to find their own way. It is the custom for a youth who wishes to become a shaman to seek out seclusion far from all other men and there know such suffering that he may meet a
Tornrak,
a good spirit, who will speak to the novice as he lies or sits in a trance. This Tornrak then becomes the guiding spirit of the new shaman and is the strongest and most potent force the shaman can call on for aid in the future.

Kakut, being the eldest, was the first to set out alone from the camps. He was gone nearly two weeks and he carried no food for his trip nor did he eat during that time. It was a period of great storms, and though he had no shelter from the driving winds, Kakut survived to return to the camp of his father and to tell of what he had found.

Five days out from the camp he had been halted by a blizzard and had squatted in the lee of a rock which thrust out from the snow. Here he stayed for a week or more—he could not tell how long it was—and he did not move nor did he eat. About the fifth day he thought he had died, yet in death he beheld a huge crooked stick pushed out of the snow at his feet. He listened with terror while the stick spoke strange words. Then it grew arms, long knotty arms, and from its lower end thrust out a spidery tangle of legs. Kakut was filled with fear, but all the same he drew out his snow knife and made a lunge at the Thing. His knife was twitched from his hand, so he flung himself on the being and grappled with its twisting body of wood until at long last he subdued it. Then he rose to his feet and said:

“Kaitorak—you, the Spirit of Forests! Now you are mine! You shall do my word in all things, and never again go free in the forests far to the south of this land!”

Kakut broke a twig from the back of the spirit and sewed it into his amulet belt, and then he came back to the camp. Thus it was that Kakut found his Tornrak.

It was Kakumee's turn then, and this is the tale that he tells of his search for the Tornrak:

I went forth from the camp in the morning before it was light, and I walked into the north. It was cold but I felt nothing of that. I was hungry yet I felt nothing of hunger. I was alone after a time in a place where not even a fox track crossed the snow. I came to a frozen lake and in the middle of it I built a half-shelter of snow and sat down to wait.

Nothing came for many days but the wind, then on a night there was a great crashing noise from deep under the ice. I thought at once of the Great Fish which is said to live in the lakes and I got up to run to the shore, but my legs were so stiff and cramped they refused to obey me. So I fell on the ice and lay as one who is dead.

The ice under me crashed and muttered and splintered until the cold water surged up through the cracks and filled my mouth and my nostrils. Still I could not move from that spot and at last the ice under me sank into the water and carried me down.

All was dark in my eyes and then slowly a thing began to take shape in the green mist of the water. It was no fish, but the head of a man with no body and with arms and legs springing right out of the head. But the strangest of all things was that this was the head of a white man, though not the one I had seen on the river the previous summer.

It was a strange face, heavily bearded and with cold eyes the color of sky. I knew I was drowning, and I struggled against the grip of the water and all the time that great head swam about me and laughed, making a horrible bubbling sound in my ears. I knew it was a Tornrak, and that I should grapple with it and conquer it so that it would help me in the future, but the cold water was filling my lungs and I was drowning.

I do not know how long I struggled under the ice but I believed I was dying, for all things faded from my mind. When I recovered myself, I was lying on top of the ice by a great black hole filled with water which did not wish to freeze. But my water-soaked garments had frozen hard to the ice underneath them. I was bitterly cold. I fought my way out of the clothing and it was hard as new iron. I tore flesh from my hands and my body, wriggling out of the ice-hard furs, but at last I was free and ran naked over the lake, and the frost did not touch me.

Later the People told me they followed my tracks for a full day's journey over the plains, and my bare footprints were clear in the snow. They came to the lake and saw the great hole, and my frozen clothes that looked like a dead man lying out there on the ice. But they did not go close, for no one could say how that hole had been opened through ten feet of hard winter ice.

When Kakumee told this story to Ajut, his father, the old man was greatly afraid. He could not understand what it meant. He knew only that Kakumee had failed to subdue the spirit he had seen and he may have feared that instead the spirit had captured Kakumee. But he could not be sure, and so he said nothing at all to the youth, and he told the People he believed Kakumee had captured a wonderful Tornrak.

In the summer of that year, Ajut died and was buried under rocks in the land where the frost does not leave the ground. He took with him his bow, his stone pipes and his shaman's staff—but his magic he left to his sons.

Kakut was satisfied with his inheritance and after a little while he began to fill the place of his father. To him came those who suffered ills of the mind or of the body. Some he healed and some died, but Kakut's reputation grew steadily all through the land and he was known as a good man and as a great worker of magic.