People of the Deer (23 page)

It was otherwise with Kakumee. The restless and nameless desire of his childhood had become an irresistible curse since his novitiate on the ice of the lake. His strange dreams grew more vivid and so oppressive that even the familiar spirits at his command could give him no surcease. Often he thought of calling on the bodiless head of the white man who lived under the lake, but he was afraid, for he did not know if he could control it, and he feared that it might seize him and carry him back under the waters to die.

Kakumee's hunting did not prosper, nor did anything he attempted to do. He lost patience with his fine muskox horn bow one day when he was hunting, for he had tried to make it kill a deer at three hundred paces, an impossible range, and so he flew into a rage at it and smashed it on a rock. He did not know why he did this. He did not know that he was remembering the rifle of the white visitor which could kill at three hundred paces.

He was content with nothing made by the People, with none of the tools or weapons, and he showed his discontent more and more as the years slipped away. Had he not been a shaman he would have been held up to ridicule, for it is often the excuse of a poor hunter that his weapons are inadequate to the task. But fear of the man was growing steadily in the hearts of the People.

This was the way of things until the fifth winter after the death of Ajut. Then came a time when Kakumee took a bride, and this was strange, for he was now twenty-two and long past the age when most Ihalmio men seek out a woman. He had been too obsessed by his dreams to want women. Now he took a young girl to wife and if reports speak truly, he loved her and found in her some measure of release from the frustration which tormented his hours. He loved her and so one night as they lay naked on the sleeping ledge of the igloo he told her the truth about his fight with the white devil he had met under the lake. She was young, not much more than a child, and she listened without comprehension to the tale and to the illusions of great wealth that Kakumee disclosed to her in his effort to rid himself of the weight of his dreams. She listened but could not understand, and one day she turned on her husband when others were near and openly ridiculed him in their hearing.

“You are a dreamer of dreams!” she cried. “But I am heavy with child, and I cannot suckle a child on the dream-stuff that fills your head and your heart. Give me something to fill these soft breasts of mine that I may know I married a man and a hunter.”

Who knows what happened then in the mind of Kakumee? I think the love for his wife died as a hare dies when an arrow splits it from end to end. But before dawn came again to that winter encampment, Kakumee had vanished out of the land. By morning the ceaseless swirl of the drifts had filled up the tracks of his dog sled so that no one even knew which way he had gone. He had told no one of his plans, for not even his wife would have believed he was mad enough to set out alone to seek the place where the white men dwell beyond the frozen wastes of the plains.

The place of the white man, of the traders, was unknown to the Ihalmiut men at the turn of the century. It was as distant and unreal a place as the bland surface of the white moon. The People knew of the white men only through Tyrrell's visit and through the magnified and distorted tales of a man called Angyala who had once passed through their land, and who had lived on the coast and knew something of the white man by hearsay. He spoke of the place called Iglu Ujarik (which means Stone House), where the white traders lived.

Iglu Ujarik is Churchill, and it takes its Eskimo name from the sullen piles of gray rock which are all that remain of the fort built by Samuel Hearne in the days of the arctic wars with the French. And Iglu Ujarik was the goal of Kakumee as he drove his long sled to the south, though he had no notion of how far it was.

It was an epic journey. Three days of hard traveling took him out of the land of the Ihalmiut, into the forests. These lands are forbidden to the men of the People, because they are the homes of the hostile Indians who have held a blood feud with the inland Eskimos since time beyond knowing and because the country of forests is filled with demons and spirits who side with these Indians.

Nevertheless Kakumee left the hard-packed snows of the plains and entered the forests and now his long, narrow-runnered sled so well suited to the icelike snows of the Barrens became an encumbrance to him. In the soft drifts under the black roof of the spruces the sled sank to its crossbars and the dogs could not pull it until he had gone on ahead and broken a trail.

Snowshoes were unknown to Kakumee for there was no need of them out on the hard snows of the plains, but in the forest a man breaking trail for his dogs must wear snowshoes. Now here is the measure of the tenacity and intelligence of Kakumee: it usually takes a race of primitive people many long generations to evolve and perfect a new piece of equipment, yet Kakumee not only solved the problem of snowshoes, but in a single day he constructed a pair that, while they were rough, were adequate to his purpose. They served, these hooplike things he had made, and so the heavy sled with its load of deer meat for the dogs and the man drove on deeper into the forests.

The forests are believed to be evil, and it is thought by some of the Ihalmiut men that the trees themselves live, and resent the presence of Eskimo men. If an Innuit must travel and sleep in the forests, he has a grace of five days during which he is safe, but should he linger longer under the shadow of trees, the trees will conspire to destroy the intruder.

Kakumee had now been in the forests for almost five days, and only the compulsion which drove him enabled him to bear the mounting terror the forests brought to his heart. On the afternoon of the fifth day he came to a great lake with many rocky islets which were free of trees, and on one of these islets Kakumee made his camp for the night. There was no wood for a fire so he sat in the shelter of a low wall of snow blocks. He shivered with fear and with cold, and a desperation began to possess him. At last he sprang to his feet and cried wildly on the spirit he had met in the waters under the distant lake on the Barrens.

For Kakumee was lost in space and in terror. His supply of deer meat was nearly exhausted and he was afraid to go on, but he could not turn back. He feared many things, but most of all he feared the Indian devil called Wendigo who eats the flesh of travelers. The ghosts and demons of the land had voices that came through the darkness out of the forests surrounding the lake. The five days were done, and to Kakumee it seemed as if the black spruces had begun to grow more closely together, obstructing his terrified path. He thought that in the course of another day they would have grown so close he could not pass between them, and they would not let him withdraw, so that he would be held like a beast in a deadfall until Wendigo claimed him.

He did not know how far or in what direction lay Iglu Ujarik, and he did not know when he might come unexpectedly upon a camp of the Indians—who would probably murder him.

All these things passed through his mind as he stood shivering by his sled and screamed a summons into the darkness to the spirit he had once seen under the water. There was no answer, but the aurora flickered with sudden violence, bathing the desolate land in a violet light, and Kakumee took this as a sign.

He had no fire that night and yet he was able to sleep alongside his sled with only the dogs, curled up against his back, for warmth and protection.

A lesser man—or perhaps a saner man—would have turned back. Only a brave man or a madman, inexorably driven, would have continued into the unknown which stretched darkly ahead. Before dawn on the sixth day in the forests, Kakumee hitched up his dogs and drove southward again.

Though he could not know it, he was now two hundred miles off his track. Iglu Ujarik lay far to the east, and to reach it he should long since have swung eastward along one of the mighty rivers which run to the sea. But his track had been too far inland and so he had missed these waters, and now he came instead to a great frozen river that ran to the south into the forests. He could only travel where the rivers ran, for the forests were too thick to admit his long awkward sled, even had he dared the ominous darkness under the trees.

On the afternoon of the tenth day he rounded a bend in the river and came unexpectedly on the log shanty of a white man. It was no more than ten feet square, yet to Kakumee it seemed immense and pregnant with menace.

The place was silent and the snow about it unbroken. No smoke came from the tin pail which served as a chimney. Only the thunderous roll of the frost-riven ice splitting on top of the river could be heard. Kakumee halted his starving dogs and fingered his amulet belt as he looked fearfully at the cabin. At last he walked stiffly forward on foot, came up to the door and found it swinging ajar.

Snow had banked thickly into the windowless shanty, but on one side of it a high wooden bunk was above the reach of the snow. Kakumee saw that something rested silently there. His heart was a tremulous thing in his chest, but his courage had not yet come to its end. He walked into the cabin, staring with wide, frightened eyes, and beheld a horrendous sight.

He looked down upon the bearded, frozen face of a white man, and into ice-cold eyes like the blue of the sky.

To Kakumee's overwrought mind his face seemed to be one with the face he had seen during his novitiate. He could not believe that the thing he was looking at was a mere corpse. He saw it instead as the spirit he had called upon, by the shores of the lake. Though he was horribly frightened, he nevertheless saw in this macabre encounter a second chance to grapple with the Tornrak who had once eluded him.

Words came to his lips, garbled, gibbering words. He leaped forward and seized the head by its still, frosty hair. Now he grappled with the spirit, seeking to master it. The room roared with sound. Dimly Kakumee heard his own voice screaming questions at the thing he fought with, as it lifted and wavered in front of his staring eyes. The thunder of nameless noises seemed to take on a palpable form until the room became darker than darkness and suddenly vanished from the Eskimo's sight. The head of the white man grew larger until it was as large as the world, and suddenly its frozen lips parted and the cataclysmic sound split and shattered into words!

Kakumee heard, without hearing through ears, the words of his Tornrak, and they told him that he must travel on into the south, into the forests. They told him no more, and there is nothing else of that day in the memory of Kakumee. He knows only that he found himself lying on his sled while the dogs labored along the rough ice of the river. He was never to know the truth that the Tornrak he saw was no more than the corpse of a young white trapper—a man still remembered at the trading post—who was the first to enter this region, and who had died of disease during the winter.

Kakumee has little memory of the rest of the journey. Only dim flashes remain, until the day when his sled swung out on the bay of a huge lake. Across the bay, in the distance, many dogs broke into voice, and Kakumee saw the smoke of wood fires and the outlines of many buildings and tents.

His journey was done. Before him lay what was then the most northerly interior outpost of white men in that part of the arctic. Already his strange sled had been seen and men ran down the high bank of the shore to receive him.

Of those who witnessed the arrival of Kakumee, an Indian and two white men are still alive. One of the whites is a priest and the other a trader, long since retired, who lives now only in the days that are dead.

But the Indian and both these white men remember Kakumee. The white men speak with awe of his journey, for he had come through the heart of the Indian country where he would probably have been shot at once had he been seen.

The priest and the trader each had his motives for making much of the stranger who had arrived from the unknown lands to the north. The priest looked upon Kakumee as a contact with men who had not yet heard the call of the Lord. The trader quickly grasped the fact that in the desolate depth of the tundra there lived a hitherto unknown race of Eskimo hunters whose land was filled with the fabulously valuable white arctic fox.

Both of these men wanted Kakumee to make a safe return to his People and persuade them to visit the post, or at least they wanted him to act as a liaison agent between the post and the Barrens. The trader had once lived on the coast, and knew a smattering of the Innuit tongue. Now he took great pains to learn the strange dialect of Kakumee. Also he feted the Eskimo. Taking him into his own cabin, he gave Kakumee many valuable presents, and so at last the nebulous dreams which for so long had tormented the Eskimo were brought to fruition.

The trader allowed Kakumee to wander at will through the store and the storehouse, where he displayed a never-ending succession of marvelous things before the gleaming eyes of the man from the North.

The priest also worked on Kakumee. Though he could not speak the tongue of the Innuit, he too made gifts of small images which the Eskimo took to be amulets of great power and tied to the sorcerer's belt at his shoulder.

Now the winter was drawing to its close, and there was a long road ahead of Kakumee. Both the priest and the trader were anxious to see him start north.

Kakumee was called into the storeroom again and was given a large quantity of trade goods. The things he was given made him sick with desire, yet he was told they were not his own but were to be traded for furs with his People. It was made clear to him that when he returned with the furs on the following winter, he would receive for himself much more than lay on his sled.

On the books of the trading post the name “Kah-Koom-ee” was written and after it the words “Engaged as native trader to the Eskimo lands.” And in the mind of the priest was engraved the name of Kakumee and the thought “This is the first of my converts amongst the many poor heathen children who live to the north.”

Both white men had worked hard, with good plans to work from. But this time the plans failed, for though they had reckoned with Kakumee the man, they had not reckoned with the devil of Kakumee the shaman.