People of the Deer (30 page)

Kakumee now squatted on his hams and spread the gifts out under his parka skirts, then stood up to reveal that the objects had vanished. It was simple conjuring, and not very effective, but it was obviously only part of a ritual which must be undergone before the shaman could get down to serious work.

Kakumee's next step was to borrow a rifle from me and make a great show of loading it with an empty shell. Then he closed the breech, stepped to the door, pointed the gun into the darkness and pressed the trigger. The Eskimos knew what was coming, but we didn't, and the blast of a very live shell caused us to leap several inches into the air, to the great satisfaction of Kakumee and the other Ihalmiut.

This ended the preparatory part of the show. Kakumee now drew his knife—a long ugly weapon—and stepped outside.

He was gone for a good half-hour. Occasionally we could hear him muttering in an incomprehensible jargon. At last he returned and calmly announced that he had met two Inua—not just one—and had done them to death, killing one with the knife and strangling the other. There was great jubilation, but somehow the whole affair didn't seem to ring true. It was a good enough show, but it lacked telling effect. Some weeks later Ohoto admitted it was all a put-up job to satisfy the curiosity of the white men! As Ohoto told me, it would not do to fool about with a real visitation simply for our amusement, so the Eskimos had thoughtfully provided a synthetic example of ghost-hunting which would show us the ropes but involve no one in danger.

The tools of the shaman are simple almost to the point of nonexistence. He has a staff, a short clublike length of wood with a
tapek
tied to its middle; and he has something that is known to native races all over the world. Scientists call it a “bull-roarer” and the Ihalmiut call it a
memeo.
It is an oval blade of thin wood with notched edges and a cord tied to one end. Whirled rapidly over one's head, it gives off a deep-throated, mumbling roar which has the quality of ventriloquism about it, for from a few yards away it is impossible to locate the source of the sound. It is used primarily in connection with the driving out of evil from the body of a man who is afflicted with illness, or who has broken a serious tabu and feels himself in danger.

Amongst the many Ihalmiut tabus are the laws which prohibit the making of skin clothing when there is no snow on the ground; a prohibition against working with iron after a thunderstorm; the law which says no food may be eaten for twenty-four hours after a ghost has been seen, and numerous tabus covering the activities of a pregnant woman and governing the conduct in the camps when a death has occurred. A surprising number of these apparently senseless restrictions have a sensible basis in reality, and are not simply the rituals of the supernatural.

One particularly valuable possession of the Ihalmiut is a stock of potent spirit songs called
Irinjelo.
These are passed down from parent to child and their ownership is jealously guarded, though they may be used to aid any man in the camps. Most of them are specifics to aid in the cure of certain ailments believed to be caused by ghosts of evil intent toward man.

On one of my trips with Ootek out into the Barrens, I developed severe cramps in my stomach and became deathly sick. I was afraid of appendicitis, but there was nothing I could do to help myself except lie quietly in my tent and try not to groan with pain. Ootek was concerned. He brought me hot tea every few minutes and constantly inquired how I was feeling. Yet he seemed preoccupied and shy. It was only after some hours of indecision that Ootek could finally bring himself to speak of the point which was bothering him. Then, very tentatively, he asked me if he could try the effect of his own personal Irinjelo for stomach ailments on me. He had hesitated because he was afraid I would scorn his offer—being a white man and therefore a master of superior charms. Actually I had no faith in his charm, but I did not wish to repulse his kindness, and so I told him that I would be grateful.

He took a tin cup filled with fresh water and, holding it carefully in front of him, began to walk slowly around the outside of the tent where I lay. As he walked he sang his Irinjelo, a monotonous dirge in a minor key. At intervals he ceased singing and addressed himself to the cup of water, urging the evil to leave me and the good to come in. All this was continued for perhaps five or ten minutes. Then Ootek returned to the tent, gave me the water, and told me to swallow it down.

Though I was sick, I could see that he was almost abjectly afraid that I would laugh or toss the water away. He wanted very greatly to help me, but he was also deeply afraid that he was exposing both himself and his beliefs to my ridicule.

Well, I took the water, with all proper solemnity, drank it, and was at once seized with a violent urge to urinate. I barely got out of the tent in time and the urine was so hot and painful I was almost convinced Ootek had added some irritant to the water. Still, I had not seen him do it, and anyway I could not understand how any irritant could have functioned so quickly.

While I was engrossed in this problem, and with the burning in my loins, it suddenly dawned on me that my belly pains had vanished. Ootek was standing, watching me from the door, with a strained smile on his face. I gave him an answering grin, and he promptly beamed like an idiot and rushed off to cook me some supper.

I suppose it was just a happy coincidence—for it was certainly not faith that cured me... not mine, at any rate. When I thanked Ootek for his aid, I also asked him what had happened, and he replied with beautiful simplicity that the good had come in with the water, and the bad had gone out with the water!

Later that day he again showed the half-furtive attitude which had preceded my cure. This time I asked him what was the trouble, and he sheepishly told me I must on no account shoot a deer for five days, or I would myself experience the same agony as a deer that had been shot in the belly. Fortunately, no need to kill a deer arose during the next five days, and I did not feel much like putting Ootek's injunction needlessly to the test.

Now in this chapter I have hardly begun to delve into the spiritual beliefs of the Ihalmiut. There is a great deal more, and the whole forms a closely knit pattern which is intricately entwined with the everyday life of the People. What I
have
told you—seen out of the context by the eyes of strangers, and skeptical ones—may understandably have given the impression that the beliefs of the Barrens People form an incubus that overshadows their lives.

But at no time did I feel they were haunted by devils and spirits, the products of their primitive minds. The closer I came to understanding and to a unity with the People, the more idiotic such rational conclusions would have become. It must always be remembered that the People are of
their
world and know nothing of us and ours, and so what seems like gross unreality to us can remain unassailably real to them. Their beliefs are a product of long centuries, and they fit the needs of their life and the shape of the land they live in.

They believe!
That is the point. And it is a point we seldom consider when we decide to force our religions upon native peoples.

I knew an old white trapper who once lived on Southampton Island in the heart of the arctic. He is dead now, and probably rotting in hell, but I recall a remark of his when the question of converting the Eskimos to our religion was being discussed.

“God damn it!” he cried with quite unconscious blasphemy. “What the hell good do these sky pilots do anyhow? First they smash up the Huskies' religion, then they feed 'em a damn great Book we've been arguing and fighting over for about two thousand years. And what's the result? Why the poor buggers wind up hanging on to the worst of their heathen beliefs mixed up with the worst part of ours, and the outcome is they don't believe nothing at all, and understand less!”

Perhaps my foul-mouthed old friend has no right to be heard on a matter of religion. But I think the Eskimos themselves have that right.

Here is what a coast Eskimo said of our religion after he had spent a week under the ardent tutelage of a missionary. The remarks were made in an honest, if puzzled, spirit to the local trader, an intelligent man in sympathy with the natives.

“What a life you must lead! The
iqalua
—the priest—has spoken to me for hours of the things you believe, your God, these devils with wings, these ghosts and spirits who live in the sky and under the ground. Truly I am amazed, and afraid. It must be only because you are a white man and gifted with great strength and wealth, that you can survive all the terrors your beliefs put upon you! These laws of your gods take no heed of the hearts of their people; these devils and spirits who watch each thing you do and judge you by the terrible standards of death; these things make me shudder with horror! Yet, though I am afraid of these things, I can be sorry for you who must live under such shadows, for you also are the sons of the Woman, and the brothers of the Innuit. I wish you well in your struggles to escape from the place you call hell!”

The trader remembered that conversation in detail. He was not particularly pleased to find himself pitied by a heathen.

If you feel that neither the pagan Eskimo nor the heretical trapper has any right to be heard, then you can at least listen to the words of a missionary who represents a very great faith and who spent fifty-two years of his life in the midst of an Indian people who were pagan when he first arrived.

I came to know him well, to respect him and to feel a great fondness for him, since he was, above all things, an upright man and an honest man, and he worked as I have never seen any man work for the glory of God and of his Church.

When I knew him, his life was near its end and he died a few months after I left his little settlement. He had labored hard, with love, with belief and with severity, to accomplish his task. Now the task was done. All the Indians in his area came regularly to the Church and called themselves Christians. But in the fifty-odd years when he was the real power in the land, the old man watched a virile tribe of nearly three thousand people shrink to a passionless remnant of less than two thousand. Those who remained were lazy, shiftless, mentally and physically disabled men and women who lived in squalor and died in filth.

His task was done. On a midnight just before the celebration of Christmas, I was sitting in his little log home. Our talk had come to an end. The old man stared past me out the dark windows, and down his cheeks that had been tortured by frost and wizened by sun over the long painful years of his labors, tears fell slowly.

The silence was a palpable thing and I was desperately uncomfortable. Earlier that evening I had come to his house with a bitter anger against him in my heart, having spent that day in a hogpen of the people of the place, and having heard some tales that I do not care to repeat.

I had spoken bluntly and cruelly to the old man, and I had been both unfair and thoughtless. Yet he had not reproached me. He had not flung texts in my face and sent me away. He had listened quietly to my angry words of condemnation and when I was done he had talked, ramblingly and without evident purpose, of his life in the land. He had spoken, using an old man's disconnected words, of the memories of his long life. Then he had ceased talking, and now he wept.

I wanted to leave, for I felt sick with shame at what I thought I had done by my violent attack on the work of his years, but before I could go, his voice came stealthily back into the room. It was soft, yet older than any voice I have heard.

“It was better then?” he asked gently—“It was better that I had not come to this place—that these people I loved had not heard my voice and I had never come? You think that. And I? What do I think? I think sometimes that it was a bad thing for these people when I was sent to this place...”

I left him then, left the old man with the reward of his lifetime of labor. Age and the sure face of death had left him no need to lie to himself or to me. Yet I wished desperately that he had lied, and that I had aided and abetted his lie.

17. Ohoto

During our days at Angkuni Lake, and while we were traveling north and west on the Kuwee, Ohoto had been an incomplete man. He had been under the shadow of a great apprehension, greater than the depression we two white men felt at the sight of the empty tent circles and the scattered rock graves. That we had seen no deer and had found only their old tracks meant more to Ohoto than a temporary absence of the beasts from this land. He felt that he had been transported into a sort of Ihalmiut hell, a hell of the worst possible kind where there were no deer and never would be any deer.

The hell and the heaven of the Ihalmiut are real places that co-exist in this world. Thus “heaven” might be likened to the land where the deer may always be found whenever man has need of them. An actual glimpse of this paradise is vouchsafed to the People in the days when the great herds pass through their country. So “hell” is the place that knows nothing of the deer, and it too is present in reality during those times when there are no deer on the plains.

Inevitably Ohoto confused the nebulous concept of the Ihalmiut hell with the unreality of the Angkuni country. The impact of this lifeless land was therefore much greater on him than it was on us—and
we
felt it strongly enough. We shared his sensation of existing as disembodied nonentities. We felt, at times, as if all reality were escaping from us. We two white men were irritatingly aware of moving through an imponderable void which became more and more oppressive.

All this, I think, helps to explain two shocking things which happened to Ohoto during our voyage of exploration into the north and the west.

During our trip up the Kuwee, Ohoto developed an abscess on his cheek. With each passing day it grew deeper and angrier, but he was so engrossed in the gloom of his own thoughts that he seldom complained about it. I dressed it a few times, and after the fourth day it had become so ugly that we took a chance and lanced it. But still it persisted. At first I thought the presence of the sore was probably due to a nutritional upset, since Ohoto had never before gone without meat or existed on the devitalized foods of white men for so long a time.

By the time we reached the headwaters of Kuwee, the abscess had grown so deep and so large that Andy and I became seriously disturbed about it, and even the stoical Eskimo began to show signs of physical reaction to it. His appetite began to fail, and this is the most serious symptom an Innuit can betray, for food means more to him than almost anything else.

We made a good camp not far from the place where Kuwee left the unknown lake, and here we decided to stay until the sore began to show some signs of healing. Ohoto accepted our gesture with evident disinterest. He set up his little travel shelter, crawled into it and showed no further signs of life until darkness had come. We were all tired with the long fatigue which comes from hard travel on empty stomachs, and I fell asleep as soon as I had crawled under my fly net.

About midnight I was awakened by blood-chilling screams. They were inhuman sounds, far beyond the power of mere pain to induce, for they carried an overtone of such abject terror that I broke into a sweat without any knowledge of what had induced those fearful cries.

I lay there for a moment, but the shrieks were so penetrating they could not be ignored. Andy was sitting up in his bedroll, and he called out to me.

“Good God! What the hell is that?”

“Ohoto, I think,” I replied. Then, without bothering to put on any clothes, I crawled stark-naked from under my net, grabbed a rifle, and ran out over the broken rocks toward the tiny shelter where Ohoto lay.

The screams ceased before I got there. Instead my ears were assailed by a gurgling whimper, as if the man's voice had been overcome by sheer terror, leaving him with only an animal echo of sounds. I flung open the door flap of his tent with such vehemence that I ripped it and part of the wall clean off the poles. Ohoto was crouched inside, his body nearly filling the tiny space of the shelter, and he was staring at one of the slim poles with eyes as empty of all expression as those of a dead ox. His lips hung slack and his great white teeth shone eerily in the light of the stars.

I shouted his name, but the cringing thing on the rug paid no heed to me. Whimpers of fear still bubbled out of his throat. I became conscious of a feeling of panic, for
I
could see no sign of a danger capable of instilling such a fear in a man. For a moment I thought Ohoto had gone mad, and was perhaps in the grip of the dread arctic hysteria which makes insane murderers out of sane men. The potentialities of being stranded in this empty wilderness with a mad Eskimo came unpleasantly to my mind.

I acted by instinct. Dropping the rifle, I grabbed Ohoto by the hair and shook him so violently that he fell over and crashed into the frail wall of his tent. Then to my relief he made a tremendous effort, straightened up so that he was resting on his knees, and pointed a shaking hand at the blank stretch of canvas behind one of the poles of his shelter.

The gesture was a mute appeal to me, and his eyes were fixed on my face. But where he pointed I could see nothing at all except the discolored canvas and the smooth peeled surface of the sapling pole.

I still had no idea what was causing his terror. Finally, and with no coherent reason, I picked up the rifle and swung the butt as hard as I could against the slender tent pole. It was, for me, only a release of tension, but by the luck of fools and of white men I unwittingly had done the right thing.

Ohoto relaxed with the abruptness of a deflating balloon. His eyes closed and his erratic breathing sank to a long, deep rustle. He curled up like a dog, and in a moment the anticlimax of the night's work was on me. Ohoto began to snore loudly!

He snored and snored. I became aware of the multitudes of mosquitoes clinging to my naked flesh and went hurriedly back to my bed and gave a garbled account of what I had seen to my anxious companion. Then for hours I lay, and could not sleep, while the echo of Ohoto's snores sounded like a mocking denial of what had happened.

But it
had
happened, and it was no nightmare of the sleep-drugged mind but a nightmare in reality. When dawn came we got dressed and went to see Ohoto. He was sleeping gently and I nudged him with my foot until he woke, dazed by the depths of his slumber. This was itself odd, for during the previous week he had not slept except in brief naps, for the pain in his face had banished sleep.

He lay still for a moment, then his eyes widened again and stared as they had stared at me during the night. His mouth drew back in a grimace and I thought, “Oh, Lord! Here we go again!” But he only rolled over so that he could see the tent pole against which I had driven my rifle butt. Then he spoke.

“The Ino!” he cried. “Now it is gone!”

He got up then, scrambling out of the wreck of his tent, and as he turned sideways to us, we both saw with a distinct shock that his abscess was almost healed! What had been a draining wound the night before was now dry and scabbed with the healthy look of growing skin. Ohoto carefully touched the hole in his cheek and, for the first time in many days, he smiled.

“Look!” he said, turning to us. “Now that the Ino is gone the pain has left this thing in my face! Soon this will heal and I will forget it as I have already forgotten the pain!”

It seemed to be a time for explanations. I asked my questions and Ohoto readily answered them, for it appeared that he owed me a debt of gratitude. I listened to what he told us and I was of two minds about it. Under the bright morning sun, it sounded like so much supernatural gibberish, yet I could not deny the evidence of my eyes as they dwelt on that inexplicably dried-up sore. I listened and could not tell what was real and what was sheer fantasy.

The abscess had been the work of a devil—that was the first thing. This visit of a malignant Ino—and Ohoto was specific about him, telling us that it was the spirit of a man who had not been buried, and whose body had been eaten by wolves—had brought on the running sore as the first step in the destruction of Ohoto. But the devil chose to dally, and it was not until the night before that it decided to finish its job. It came with darkness. When Ohoto looked up from his pain-ridden sleep, he saw it clinging to the pole of the tent, grinning evilly down upon him.

Ohoto thanked me profusely for my intervention. According to him, it was my haphazard swing of the rifle, coupled with some blasphemy I had not realized I was uttering, that convinced the Ino I was more than a match for it. It fled. The pain in Ohoto's face vanished on the instant, and by morning the abscess was well on the way to being cured.

I must admit quite frankly I don't believe what Ohoto believed. And yet I know that in three days the abscess vanished, and that is an incredibly short length of time for natural healing to do its work.

Less than a week after the Ino trouble, Ohoto's prophecy about his father's return, made when we first saw Angkuni Lake, came true. Elaitutna returned, to the vision and hearing of Ohoto, and spoke to his son.

For a few days after his abscess cleared up, Ohoto's natural cheerfulness revived, but it was short-lived. When, day after day, we still failed to meet the deer, his mood grew dark again.

Slowly we coasted along the northern shore of the unknown lake, staying timidly under the lee of towering rock dikes which the ice had gouged up and flung along the shores, for we had not forgotten the mysterious and malignant wind that had almost destroyed us early in the trip. The surrounding country was so low-lying and shielded by continuous dikes that we could not see it from the lake. Low islands swung over the horizon and tantalized us with the belief that they were mainland, before they blended with and disappeared into the rock wall which hemmed us in. The canoe was like a minute protozoan wandering in a vast saucer, aimlessly active, and blind.

Our horizon was either water or the rocky rim of the saucer. We crawled blindly along under the dubious shelter of the dikes and prayed we would not be forced to land except at places of our own choosing, for any attempt at beaching the canoe along most of that formidable coast, except in a dead calm, would have resulted in the canoe's being smashed to bits.

During three days' travel we found only five places where we could safely get ashore. From these places we could look inland and our eyes recoiled from what we saw. Beyond the dikes lay an endless cone of gray distance, a drowned and sodden land. It was a desperate sight and its most frightening aspect was the almost complete absence of deer trails. It was completely free of the intricate network of such trails which marks almost all of the Barrenlands. Only a faint depression here and there might have been made by the feet of Tuktu, a long long time ago.

After a few days of this, Ohoto was sunk into a depression that nothing could relieve. We had not only passed out of the realms of living men, but, so far as he could see, we had passed completely out of the world as he knew it. This he was certain of, for there were no deer here, and never had been any deer.

One night we found a rare shingle beach, a few yards long, crowded into a gap in the rock barriers along the shore. Gratefully we beached the canoe and made camp—without a fire, for there was no wood. Ohoto was silent during our meal, and we too were under such tension that we made no effort to speak to him or to try to break the mood which had been obviously growing over him for days. When the meal was over, the Eskimo came to me and quietly asked me for my rifle.

I knew there was no game about that he could hunt, and anyway it was growing dark, for in late summer the nights are already long. I asked Ohoto why he wanted the gun and he answered, saying: “Give me your gun—and in the morning think of the things that I have done for you. I know you will give my body what it demands, for you know the things which must be done; nor will you leave me for the foxes and wolves—for you are a man of the Ihalmiut!”

Andy exploded. “Suicide!” he shouted. “That's all we need to make this picnic really happy!”

Certainly death filled Ohoto's thoughts, and as I realized the fact, the long tension of our journey seemed to reach an unbearable climax, and I gave way to livid anger.

I told the Eskimo that he would have no gun, and I told him to wipe the idea from his mind or I would do it for him. He walked away from us and sat down on the rocks by the shore while my companion and I rounded up the rifles, the hatchet and all the knives—even Ohoto's—and hid the lot under the bedrolls in our tent. We were bitter against the man, for it was as if he had deliberately added this last unbearable weight to the heavy uncertainty which already clouded the outcome of our journey into nowhere. We were so burdened by the strain of this uncertainty that our nerves were worn to the thin, ragged edge, and our thoughts were no longer wholly rational. We told each other we did not give a damn what happened to Ohoto, that we were angry only because we did not relish having a dead man on our hands. After we had hidden the weapons, I went to Ohoto and I beat him with words as brutally as I could in the Innuit tongue. He did not look up or answer me. After a while I felt a sense of pettiness and self-disgust. I knew dimly that this man needed what sympathy and understanding we could give him, for if we were alone in emptiness, then he was trebly alone. I caught my rage and squeezed it back into my heart, and spoke gently to Ohoto, trying to make amends and to persuade him he must not die.