People of the Deer (4 page)

She traveled in an immense curve, south and away from safety. She walked until fatigue threatened her with the sleep that ends in freezing death. When that danger came, she stopped and rested cautiously. Sometimes she scrabbled through the drifts on hilltops and found a few wizened bearberries or a handful of rock-tripe, a kind of moss. When she felt strong enough she picked up her robe and walked on to the south, knowing that she had missed the Bay of Nueltin, but knowing also that to stay still was to die. She was lost in an area of nearly fifty thousand square miles, and she might have been almost anywhere in that vast area for all she knew. Yet still she did not quit.

She walked the entire length of Nueltin Lake, more than a hundred miles, and at last she came out on the south bay of that lake. But Stella did not recognize it, did not even know that it was water she was walking over, for the snow and ice lay deep that year. She saw timber ahead then, timber on an island, as it happened, and with her last strength she reached the edge of the spruce bush and then she slept—and would have slept forever but for a miracle.

By the barest of chances the trapper who once a winter came this far north drove his dogs around that wooded island on that day. He was the only living soul within a radius of better than a hundred miles and his team drove straight to the body of the girl. He found her within an hour of her arrival, and he carried her to his travel camp and there he cared for her.

But the incredible part of this tale is yet to come: after a single day Stella was fit, yes, and eager to travel home. On the sixteenth day of her disappearance she was heading north, warmly wrapped in the cariole of the half-breed trapper, and on the seventeenth day she was at home on Windy Bay. Old Karl shed tears to see her. The boys also shed tears, but they had been shedding them for days, and not only because of grief, for they were suffering the excruciating agony of snow blindness after two weeks of futile searching in the empty plains.

When spring came, Karl prepared to leave the land forever. He spoke to Franz and Hans, but they were unwilling to go south, and in the end he left them behind, for he was aware that they would continue to make a good catch of foxes every year. Karl took the freight canoe toward the south, carrying the younger children and the season's furs. Hans and Franz remained behind, Franz because he could not face the return south, and Hans for some inscrutable reason of his own.

In the distant world beyond, the war drove on to its appointed end, but in the silence of the Barrens even its muted echo did not intrude. The years passed, until in 1947 I unexpectedly descended on Windy Bay, and in those intervening years the pattern of life there had undergone no change. Once each year the boys loaded their canoe and traveled as far south as the nearest outpost of trade; and here, quickly, they disposed of their furs, bought what they needed for the year, and fled back through the forests to the arctic plains. For the rest of the year they roamed the Barrens, by dog team in winter, and on foot or with pack dogs in summer.

Oddly enough, each lived his life apart. Hans grew desperately quiet and often spoke no words for days on end. Each had his own trap line in a different area, and during the winter the brothers were often absent from the cabin in different directions for an unbroken month. They sometimes returned at the same time but more often they missed each other during their brief visits to the cabin. The pressure of loneliness weighed on them always, but Franz, with a legacy of strength from his Indian mother, and with his increasing intimacy with the Barrens People, managed to hold this loneliness partly at bay, and so escaped the madness that seeps into the spaces in the brains of lonely men. He built and ramified his own protective shield and it enabled him to hold his own against the impersonal animosity of the plains.

Among the Eskimos he came to be considered as one of the band, and yet not quite of it, for even when all other human contacts were denied to him, he still held the crumpled ramparts of his pride of race. Still, the People were his sole bulwark against the destroying loneliness, and so Franz compromised his pride. He was with but never of them, and as a result he was never quite beyond the reach of loneliness. It was a driving but controlled hunger which was in him, and it took the form of an endless restlessness that became anguish. He tried to solace it by expanding his hunting range so he could wander over new lands, farther and farther from the post in Windy Bay.

But Franz's restless thrusting into the distance brought him no comfort because he never understood his trouble. He did not know that though he had learned to live in the land and had established an uneasy armistice between himself and the hostility of rocks and elements, yet for all this, he remained— an intruder.

3. The Children

After his first outpouring Franz became silent, speaking only in monosyllables and evading the questions that were constantly occurring to me. Perhaps he was ashamed of his outburst on the first night, as a sober man is ashamed of a drunken episode when he has revealed too much of himself to a stranger. Or perhaps he was engrossed only by the delayed arrival of his brother.

Each morning he left the cabin to climb the lookout hill near camp where he spent the hot hours of the spring days staring over the rotting surface of the ice-covered bay to the southeast. Hans was long overdue. Earlier in the spring he had made a trip to the south end of Nueltin Lake, a hundred miles away, to rescue a winter cache which had been left on a little islet. Now Hans had only a scant few days in which to make his return, before the ice passed completely from the bay and dog travel would be no longer possible.

On the third morning of our vigil together it began to rain, and it rained as it did all things in this land—with overwhelming violence. Franz and I were driven into the leaking cabin. As we sat listening to the sodden drumming of water on the caribou skins of the roof, we both suddenly became aware of a new sound that had insinuated itself into the muffled thunder of the rain. I listened tensely until I recognized it as only the murmur of snow water flowing down above the ice of the river. It was a sound I knew, but there was a changed depth to its voice. The murmur seemed to swell, to become resonant, then in an instant's time it was transformed into a heavy-throated roar. The cabin shuddered and the tin plates on the table slid and rattled as if they danced to the erratic rhythm of an earthquake.

Heedless of the driving rains, Franz ran outside and as I followed him I caught a terrifying glimpse of an immense cake of ice, at least ten feet in thickness, rearing out of the river not more than twenty paces from our door. The great cake stood briefly on end like a gigantic tombstone, then it toppled forward and as it fell a gray geyser of tormented water flung itself high above the shifting ice. The river, so long contained, was surging up between the shattered floes, and in a few minutes had climbed the slopes below us and was lifting the debris about the cabin door.

I watched the cataclysm through the gray lens of the rain, while the rising waters lapped about my feet. The sound that had first given us warning of what was about to happen now moved up the river like the roll of a giant drum. As it passed, a thunderous and violent cacophony came into being as the great cakes shattered and moved ponderously down toward the frozen bay.

The momentum of that movement seemed irresistible. Yet where the river joined the bay there was resistance, and on a mighty scale. Along its forward edge the bay ice took the full onslaught of the river floes and shattered with such pressure that the air above the battleground was filled with a fine dust of ice crystals that defied even the down-driving rain. Floe cakes the size of buildings were ground out of existence in mere moments, to be instantly replaced by others which drove the stubborn barrier of the bay ice slowly backward from the river mouth.

At last, the bay ice would give no more, and the lumbering pans came down the river and were held. Behind them, the water rose so rapidly that it was soon knee-deep in the cabin, while the river was no longer fifteen but thirty feet in depth. Great cakes strayed in the eddies behind the ice dam, and one of them nuzzled the log walls of the cabin, as a bull elephant might try his strength against a standing tree. Franz and I had fled to the ridge and we were filled with a mounting excitement that gave us no time to worry about the possible loss of the cabin and all our belongings.

The dam across the narrow river mouth was steadily enlarging and it shuddered and rumbled wickedly as a constant succession of new blocks crashed into its upstream side and were thrown high to reinforce the crest. And then, when it seemed that nothing could save the cabin from the insane river, the dam began to give. Moving as an entity, it slid out over the yet unbroken ice of the bay. Ten thousand tons of obstacle slowly gave way before the power of that unleashed river.

The dam dissolved so easily that it gave the impression of a gentle and effortless decomposition. But the measure of its true ferocity appeared when a single cake of ice, the size of a small house, was suddenly flung clear and, like a curling stone, was shot for nearly half a mile across the creaking ice of Windy Bay. Spinning over that black, rotting surface, the great cake came to rest at last against the rocks of a small reef, and there it sat through the succeeding days until the sun at last destroyed it. While it remained, it was a fitting token of the forces which the land contains.

Both Franz and I were so engrossed in the sound and fury of the battle that we did not hear the approaching dogs as they climbed our ridge. Not until the wooden sled had rasped over the gravel and stood beside us did we see it.

The dogs sat back in their traces and I guessed that the slim boy who stood beside the leader was Hans. Before I had time to receive more than a brief impression of his shadowed face, two bundles erupted from the sled and one of those took form as a bounding mite of fur-clad child who rushed upon Franz and flung itself ecstatically into his arms. The second bundle detached itself from the nondescript baggage and came over to us with a little more restraint, stopping abruptly as it saw me standing there. This was a boy, thirteen years of age, clad in deerskins. He stood awkwardly beside Franz and his smile grew until his upper lip curled up over his flattened nose, almost obscuring it from view. His big even teeth glistened at me and I stared back at him in complete fascination, for I saw that these were children of the People I had come to find.

The little girl in Franz's arms was chattering and squirming, unable to contain her pleasure at seeing the man again. And as for Franz—there were tears in his black eyes. At length he put the child down, and I saw that she was no more than five, and small even for that age. She joined the boy and for the first time she noticed me. Her exuberance vanished at once, leaving her like a small graven image on the hill.

“Kunee,” Franz said, pointing to her, “and Anoteelik”—pointing to the boy. It was a skimpy introduction, but I had to be content with it for the moment. As we all trooped down the hill to the cabin to assay the damage and clean up the mess, I wondered if Kunee could be Franz's child.

The sight of me had made the children shy enough, but on Hans my presence placed an intolerable restraint. He had long since withdrawn so far within himself that he could barely suffer even the rare contacts with his brother Franz. With me, white and an incomprehensible stranger, Hans's withdrawal was complete. He would speak no words to me at all, but sat alone in a dark corner of the cabin, staring at me as he might have stared at some dangerous denizen of his own bleak land. His skin was dark, much darker than his brother's, and it was stretched too tightly over the narrow, fragile bones of his thin face. His eyes were empty things—blank, still depths that shifted from my face no more than the eyes of a trapped fox shift from the face of its approaching nemesis.

But the shyness of the children was, after all, only the shyness of children. In a little while they were hustling about the cabin, evidently quite oblivious of me as they traded muted grins with one another. Anoteelik quickly got a fire going in the wet stove, while Kunee, that minuscule model of a woman, ran to the river's edge, got water, and in a few minutes had a brew of tea ready for all of us.

After it was poured into the tin mugs, she made herself comfortable on Franz's knee and proceeded to roll a competent cigarette. Franz gave her a light and she smoked happily while he crooned to her in the manner of a father talking to his child.

And now my curiosity could be contained no longer.

“Franz,” I said, “is she—yours?”

Franz nodded slowly though he did not look up at me.

“Yes,” he replied and his voice was almost hostile and very different from the friendly voice that he had used to me before. “Yes, she's mine, I found her out there in the north, and she's all mine!”

There was a positiveness, almost a fierceness at the end, as if he was daring me to argue with his right to this incredible child. Then surprisingly, and with no further prompting, he began to tell me something of the finding of Kunee and of her brother Anoteelik. And later I was to hear more details from the Eskimos themselves.

Some sixty miles due north of Windy Bay, across the sodden plains and gravel ridges, there is a nest of Little Lakes huddled close up against the banks of the river we call Kazan but which is properly
Innuit Ku
—the River of Men. (
Innuit
is the People's own name for their race. Translated it means simply Mankind. The term “Eskimo” is not used by them but is a tag applied by the Indians, meaning Eaters of Raw Meat.) The waters of the Little Lakes flow into the Innuit Ku not far from its beginning at Lake Ennadai and for some centuries this little group of lakes and the surrounding Little Hills have been the center of the inland culture. The People spread up and down Innuit Ku until their camps stood on each lake and river in the rolling land. They called themselves
Ihalmiut
—which means The Other People—as distinct from those Eskimos who lived at the coasts and possessed a sea culture.

In all the time that the Ihalmiut have known the land and roamed its endless spaces, the Little Lakes that lie beside the wide Kazan have exercised a special attraction. So it was natural enough, when the tide was turned against them by powers greater than even those the Barrens know, when plague and starvation struck their blows against the camps, that as the Ihalmiut retreated they should fall back upon this place.

By the year 1940, the last of the outlying camps had been broken. Those few of the People who survived the dissolution of the inland race returned to live once more, as their ancestors had before them, about Ootek, Halo and Kakumee Lakes under the Little Hills. That place became the last stronghold held by living men throughout the land, and it was under siege. It was a fortress without walls, with only the impalpable defenses that a fading will to live could raise against the overwhelming weight of the grim siege which had been laid upon it. The enemies were many, but foremost in their ranks were famine and diseases, and these were both strangers to the land and so were more frightful than the elemental antagonists that the Ihalmiut had long since learned to circumvent. By late autumn of 1946, the remnants of the People were clustered about the bleak shores of the Little Lakes, to stand off the never-ending sallies of these enemies as best they could.*

Among the People at that place there was the family of Angleyalak, and in his tent lived his mother, who was very old, his wife, called Iktuk, and his three children, Kunee, Anoteelik and Pama. Iktuk was a good mother to her children and a good wife to her husband, though her strength was often drained away by long coughing spells, which ended only when her bright blood dyed the white fox furs she held against her mouth. Angleyalak was a good hunter, yet his efforts were too often brought to nothing, for his old gun could not bring down its game when there was no charge of shot, no powder for its long brass cartridges. As for the old woman, she had outlived three hundred younger members of her race and now she waited, almost impatiently, for the erratic glance of death. Each winter she did not hope to see the spring, and yet each spring she lived to see another winter come.

Kunee and Anoteelik were but small children still, though Anoteelik was old enough to go with his father on the long hunting trips that so often ended with no more than tales of vanished game with which to fill the bellies of the family. Kunee, at four years of age, was already deeply serious about her duties as a woman of the camp. She helped her old grandmother to gather willow twigs for fuel, or else drew water from the lakes, or watched the cooking fires when her mother had bled too freely from the mouth and could no longer stand.

The igloo of Angleyalak stood on the north shore of Ootek Kumanik—meaning Ootek's Lake—and near it stood three other camps. On other lakes within a few miles of Angleyalak's there were eight more igloos, and these completed the short roster of the homes of the surviving People.

In the late winter of 1946, Angleyalak and his neighbor, Ootek, went out together on a hunting trip, for even then the food at the igloos under the Little Hills was growing scarce. The two men took only one sled, pulled by three dogs, for dog feed was also scarce; and they traveled southward to Franz's cabin. In all that broad sweep of land, they saw no deer, nor yet the tracks of any deer, and they were frightened men.

By chance Franz was at home when they arrived and the two visitors stayed overnight with him. In the morning they departed, carrying with them the few food supplies that Franz had been able to spare from his own scanty stocks. But after they had gone, Franz thought about the things they had told him, and in his mind there was a mixed foreboding. He knew that the camps of the Ihalmiut must be nearly empty of deer meat, for he knew that the fall kill had been a meager one. And on his own most recent trips through the Ihalmiut land, he had missed several deer carcasses which he had cached the previous autumn for dog feed; he was aware that this meat must have gone into human bellies. He was also aware that the People do not steal unless death has come close enough to make a mockery of morals.