People of the Deer (5 page)

On this midwinter visit, Ootek and Angleyalak had told Franz the deer had left the land, and that unless the spring came early, the People too would be gone before the warm suns brought the deer back again.

Franz had listened to this prophecy and in his heart anger almost outweighed pity. It was an anger that he should feel a duty and a responsibility toward these “savages,” and an anger that they should be so foolishly improvident, failing to look to and prepare for the distant future as he, a white man, did. There was anger, too, that they had robbed his caches and so made it more difficult for him to travel around the trap lines on which his livelihood depended. And yet perhaps the thing which angered the young trapper most of all was the insistent feeling that his very presence in the place had helped to bring about the fatal misery of the People.

His father, and the other traders who had once brought furs from the Ihalmiut, had shown the People that pursuit of fox pelts was more desirable than pursuit of meat. And so, in a few decades, the People had learned to neglect the caches of good meat, which they had been used to making every fall. Instead they learned to trap the white fox and to trade the pelts for flour, shells and guns. As far as the Ihalmiut could discern, it was a satisfactory change, for they were able to meet their simple needs with much less labor, after the traders came.

But when trading ceased to pay the high profits always required of it, the great company withdrew its post and the new way of life that had been taught to the People in their innocence now became death. Men who were once great hunters of the deer had become instead great hunters of the fox, but men cannot eat fox pelts. The People could not change their ways again. “Surely,” they thought, “if we trap fox this winter and take the pelts south, we shall find the trader has returned.” But when the hunters traveled south, the trading post stood empty and decayed as it had stood for many hungry years.

The traders came, stayed briefly while their profits warranted, then left the land, abandoned it, and thought no more of the destruction they had wrought. Franz lived there still. And he could not drive out the hidden knowledge of the fault. Perhaps it was because of this that when Ootek and Angleyalak went almost empty-handed back to the Little Hills, Franz thought of them almost with anger in his heart.

The winter months dragged slowly by and there came no more cries for help. At last, early in March, Franz traveled northward to the Ihalmiut camps and stayed a day in the igloo of old Hekwaw. Here Franz ate his share of the communal food as he had always eaten it, but that share did not even take the edge off his healthy appetite and he quickly made his excuses and left the camp. He traveled north to his most distant trap line and once again found that many of his meat caches had been robbed by men.

It was mid-March and Angleyalak had returned from a futile hunt during which he carried no gun, but only a crude bow that served him little better than a toy serves a child; for the men of the Ihalmiut had forgotten how to make cunning bows of horn, during the long years when they had no need of bows, and the bright guns and shells were to be had in return for pelts. Angleyalak returned to the tent bringing with him two ptarmigan, and these winter-starved birds were to be all the food that five people and three dogs would have till the time came when many of them would have no further need of food.

For a month before that final hunt of Angleyalak's there had been no more than a mouthful of food for each person on each day, and this hunt had been a last desperate effort to halt the slow attrition of the gut. The hunt had failed, as it was bound to fail, and now the course of things followed an inevitable pattern which the hunter could no longer break, no matter how he tried. Death was upon the camp and all that the people there could do was to channel the approach of death so that the least important of the living might go first.

There was no open mention of the problem, for none was needed. While Angleyalak still lived there was still hope. But should he, the hunter, die, then the family must perish even though the deer returned in numbers to the Little Hills.

Next to him stood the children, Kunee, Pama and Anoteelik, who were the visible expression of the Ihalmiut's waning will to live. Behind the children was Iktuk, wife, mother and source of new life—yet her work was nearly done, for the children were old enough to live without her aid.

Then came the dogs, the precious dogs, the three survivors of a once good team. These three scrawny things were treasures and irreplaceable. Mobility was their potential in the family, and without their power to move across the frozen land, not even a great hunter could survive for long.

That was the family then—except for the old woman, Epeetna. What was her place? Nothing more secure than the niche that love and filial affection could ensure for her, and these emotions die readily enough when hunger closes its inexorable jaws.

On the night after Angleyalak's return with the two birds, the old woman did not sleep. It was her time, and she had waited for it through too many starving years. She had looked forward with a hard relief to death and this night her seeking ended in a wall of snow. Yet now that it was time, fear rose within her—the fear that is so strong in the old, and which makes the terror of young men in danger look pallid and a sham.

It was not long before the members of her family took refuge from their bellies' agony in sleep. But the old woman sat on and stared unseeingly over their quiet forms. She heard the whimpers of little Kunee and the uneasy mutters of the man, her son. But most clearly did she hear the whisper of the sand-like snow as the never-ending winds drove it along the polished curve of the igloo's dome. The harsh rustle filled her hearing until she was no longer conscious of the little human sounds. The snow noise rose in gradual ascension and, as it grew, so grew her fear of death.

The long night was nearly over when the skeletal guardians of the passageway, the dogs, lifted gaunt heads and cowered against the snow blocks to leave the passage free for her. And the old woman passed out of the igloo into the darkness. The ground drift of driving snow enveloped her and the darkness grew about her. She stood naked but for her fur trousers, and now she loosened these and they slipped soundlessly into the drifts. The wind whined like a beast in pain, and the darkness drew about her frail and tortured form.

When morning came, no one in the family spoke of her. Not even the child Kunee made reference to the missing face. But later, when the brief half-light of day was upon them, Angleyalak went out alone into the snow, and he stood facing the wind with his amulet belt wound tightly about his waist. And then he spoke the words that he had learned as a child in the great and populous camps of the People, he spoke the phrases that he had been taught to say over the newly dead.

That was in mid-March. It was the time when the days grow slightly longer and when the eternal winter winds usually drop and die away for days on end. Yet on this year the winds forgot their place and mounted steadily, until the whole world that was the Barrens became a single roaring wind without cessation.

Had there been game to hunt, no man could have ventured out to hunt that game. In the igloo of Angleyalak, the family huddled under the skin robes upon the sleeping bench— and waited.

By day there was a faint pallid glow to lighten the still gloom of the snow house. By night there was nothing, for there was no deer fat to burn in the little lamp. The wind rang on the snow walls with such devilish persistence that its voice at last ceased to be heard and became one with a growing silence. The dogs no longer stirred, but lay in tightly curled, half-frozen balls, with noses under tails, sleeping the unconscious sleep of those who near the end of hunger.

The two birds were eaten. The children had the balance of their meat, but Angleyalak had a small share. The guts and feathers went to the dogs and only Iktuk ate nothing. Her husband tried to make her eat his own slim portion but she turned from him coughing blood, and would not eat.

A week after the old woman had left the place, Iktuk could no longer stir except to cough. It was at this time that Angleyalak went to the igloo of Ootek, which stood only a few hundred feet away, and he had trouble finding that igloo because the ground drift—the never-ending ground drift—obscured the way like a thick mist.

In Ootek's igloo there were the man, his young wife, Howmik, and a child who was still nursing at her dried-up breasts. Ootek himself had eaten nothing for twelve days, and the scraps of old robes that had been boiled over the last handful of willow twigs had gone to the two who could not live without each other. This was the third child of Ootek, and the first one that had lived a full year's span. Hunger had taken the others in their time, and now Ootek was prepared to disregard the law which says that first the hunter must be fed.

Angleyalak spoke to Ootek and they debated, quietly and with long intervals between their words, some course of action they might take. They knew Franz was away on his distant trap lines and they knew that he might not return to his camp for a month or more. And that would be too late. But now Ootek remembered hearing of a white man who had recently built a tiny trading post some ten days' journey to the east, in order to trade with the coastal Eskimos who sometimes wintered inland from the sea. It seemed to Ootek that they should forsake the Little Hills and make their way eastward, seeking to escape from death. Yet when Angleyalak heard this suggestion he could not agree to it. He knew that he could not join Ootek and the rest, for Iktuk could no longer walk and Angleyalak had no dogs with strength to pull the sled.

A week later there were still four igloos on the shores of Ootek's Lake, but only one of these held human life. The People from the other three had set out toward the east in a forlorn and nearly hopeless struggle for survival, with the inexorable presence of destruction close upon their wavering trail.

In the remaining igloo, Iktuk wakened suddenly from a long sleep, and she would have screamed in terror at what she saw, but her thin blood ran backward down her throat and choked the scream. The others slept beside her and did not stir, for only Iktuk had glimpsed the devil who had come for her.

Struggling terribly, she gained a brief control of her choking lungs and in a wild paroxysm, she forced the life-giving fluids from her chest. The hemorrhage flowed heavily from her gasping mouth, dripped over the edge of the sleeping ledge, fell, and froze instantly upon the floor.

In the middle of the day which followed, Angleyalak awoke and found his wife's body frozen in a grotesque contortion on the snow below the ledge. He tried desperately to drag it out of the igloo before the children woke but he could not bend the legs and arms that had been flung out from the body in the last convulsive efforts of its life. He could not move his wife and so, for the little time which remained to him, he could look down upon the bloody face of one whom he had loved so greatly that he had dared remain on at this place, instead of following the faint hope that had taken all the other People to the east.

A dog had also died that night, so it was eaten. The children ate the dry and bitter meat of the dog that died of hunger, and Angleyalak ate just enough to keep his strength in hand for what remained. A week passed and the other dogs were killed before they grew so thin that they became completely useless to the living. March passed into April and at long last the winds retired and in the daytime the sun shone clearly, growing higher in the winter-faded sky.

The last of the dog meat was eaten and one morning Angleyalak took his old rifle and crawled out the door tunnel into the light of day. The hunter was going hunting once again. Dragging the rifle behind him, he crawled weakly over the ice-hard snow and he had gone perhaps a hundred yards, his eyes half-blinded by the glare, when he saw movement on a ridge ahead of him. Trembling with weakness and with hope, he raised his ancient gun, steadied it briefly and fired at the miraculous vision of the caribou that stood watchfully before him.

The children, huddled together in the igloo, heard no shot for none was fired. They ate no meat that day—for there had been no deer. And in the white brilliance of the day, the thing that was Angleyalak grew stiff, beside the old and useless gun which still pointed to the unblemished drifts where the hunter had seen the last of all his deer.

It was just after dawn of the following day when Franz reached Ootek's Lake. He made at once for Ootek's igloo, but when he found its tunnel drifted in with snow he knew the People had gone elsewhere, perhaps to Halo's Lake, and so he prepared to travel south again to his own distant camp. He swung his dogs along the shore, but when one of them raised its head and howled, Franz glanced off to the side and saw a brown, shapeless hummock on the snow. At first he thought it was a wolverine and he slipped his rifle free of its case. But the brown thing did not stir and when Franz reached it, he recognized the man.