People of the Deer (8 page)

Until the first fall of winter snow the northward drift continues. But on a certain day, winter gives its brief warning before it roars down out of the darkening arctic and the coming of the first snow fills the deer with panic.

A frenzy seizes them and they turn as one animal, coalesce into immense frantic herds, and pound toward the south again. Herds run into herds until the concentration is so complete that all the animals throughout the land may be together in one single mighty wave which plunges wildly down upon the shelter of the southern forests.

In the fall of 1947, I met that panic-stricken wave of fleeing deer. One day the country stretched endlessly northward and was empty of all motion, save where a raven soared in lazy circles against a faded sky. But with the following dawn the land came alive. From a high hill beside the river I could see nothing but the backs of deer. The river seethed with the multitudes swimming its rapid width, and the clicking of the countless feet was more persistent than the cries of crickets on a warm summer evening in the South. But three days later that same land was dead again. A single wolf, following leisurely over the corroded muskeg, was all that moved upon the plains.

The winter Barrens seem empty of all living things, but there are still a few isolated little herds of deer, widely dispersed, sheltering in the islands of scrub spruce on the white plains. These deer are so few that their presence often remains unnoticed except by those white shadows which are the foxes and the wolves. Cut off from the forest herds by the arrival of full winter, the isolated ones find a precarious living in the Barrens by digging for lichens through the snow. It is no easy life, for the drifts are sometimes many feet in thickness and packed by the winds to the consistency of wood. Nevertheless, the dangers they face are as nothing to the dangers which beset the main herds sheltering inside the timber line.

I once met an old white man who had trapped for many years by the lakes in the wooded country of Northern Manitoba where many of the great herds winter. On an October day he took me to look at the narrow neck connecting his lake with an adjoining one. The ice was clear and free of snow and as I looked downward I could see that the floor of the narrows consisted of a chaotic tangle of bones that seemed to reach within inches of the surface. The antlers alone, in that vast boneyard, could have been counted only in the tens of thousands, and the deer that had contributed their bones to the charnel collection must have totaled many times that number.

After I had seen the narrows the old man told me the story of the days when he first built his cabin near the lake. In those days the deer, arriving from the North, were funneled by two parallel lines of hills into the narrow channel where the boneyard lies. He told me that the press of deer was sometimes so great that fawns were swept off their feet and crushed by the animals around them. He told me that this solid river of deer flowed for as much as two weeks without a slackening of the pressure. Perhaps he exaggerated, for an old man's memory is often greener than the event. And yet there were the bones under the ice.

I asked about the channel cemetery, and he went on to tell me how it came about. He spoke of how the
Idthen Eldeli
Indians—Eaters of Deer, their name means—came every fall to the narrows between the lakes, and each man brought with him at least a case of ammunition for his .30-30 rifle. The Indians remained until the ammunition failed or until the deer were past. Those that
did
pass. By the time the Indians were gone, the new ice of the narrows and the lakes was creaking with the weight of the dead deer that pressed it down.

In the spring the ice dropped its weight of bodies into the deep water, and most of those deer were untouched by man except for the bullet holes which scarred their carcasses and except that all had their tongues removed for a reason that I speak of later. In the course of six decades the deep channel became so clogged with bones that a canoe could not safely be paddled through it.

Now, in the fall, only a trickle of the great rivers of the deer flow past that place. The deer have not changed their routes—they have simply gone. And the rifles that destroyed the deer also destroyed the Indians who held the rifles, as surely as if men had turned the muzzles on themselves. For not even those immense herds could withstand the slaughter they were subjected to, and as the deer's ranks thinned, so were the ranks of the Idthen Eldeli thinned by the meat starvation which was the aftermath of the great slaughter.

It is almost the same tale throughout the entire wooded winter range of the deer. At Reindeer Lake, in the late '30s, the annual kill of deer was somewhere in the vicinity of fifty thousand animals. Now there are not that many living deer in all the Reindeer Lake district and in all the lands about the great lake that was named for them. In a little while the name will be an empty thing and men will forget why that name was given to the lake.

Still, no one but a fool will blame the Idthen people. Theirs was always a hard and dangerous life. Always the deer were their sole bulwark against starvation and oblivion. Through the long winters, the deer alone made existence in the thin forests possible for these Indians, even as the deer alone made life possible for the Eskimos in the Barrens. Both races were, in fact, Peoples of the Deer, and before the coming of white men, both races lived in balance with the animals who gave them life.

But when the trading posts began to spread into the Northern forests the rifle rapidly replaced the old weapons of the people. This was perhaps a good thing while those rifles were single-shot muzzle loaders. But profits from the sale of lead and powder were not high enough, and progress called the people through the voices of the traders. The magazine rifle usurped the scene. And a race of men who had devoted all the centuries of their history to the killing of deer with weapons that were efficient only when used with great skill, and when used unrelentingly, were now presented with a weapon that could destroy without restrictions and without the need of skill.

You have heard all this before. Possibly you heard it in connection with the buffalo and the Southern Plains Indians, but that was a century ago. That was in the time of your father's father. Listen to what I tell you anyway, for I am speaking of what happened in your time, and is still happening.

The trading firms grew wealthy and still grow wealthier. As recently as the 1920s, one outpost of a world-famous trading concern actually encouraged the sale of tremendous quantities of ammunition to the Northern Indians by offering to buy all the deer tongues that were brought in! Many thousands of dried deer tongues passed through that post, while many thousands of carcasses, stripped only of their tongues, remained to rot in the spring thaws. I hardly think it just to lay too great a blame upon the Indians.

The Idthen Eldeli went out to their winter hunting grounds, every hunter carrying a case of shells (a thousand rounds) and often enough they were back at the post before spring for more. The profits mounted pleasantly, so pleasantly that a recent suggestion that the sale of ammunition be limited for the good of the purchasers and of the game was denounced as interference with the liberty of men. It was interference, I suppose, interference with the free rights of men to destroy themselves through ignorance.

The slaughter of the deer and the destruction of the Deer People had gone on, is going on, and all that has been done to halt the twin massacres is this: agents of the government have been sent out to tell the survivors of the Idthen Eldeli that they must learn the arts of “conservation.” The Idthen People listen to this strange, foreign talk, but in the privacy of their own tents they recall how the white trappers who have encroached upon their lands kill the migrating deer without compunction and without restraint. Then the Idthen People remember that the deer belong to them—to them alone—and have belonged to them for all eternity.

There is right on their side and more than a little truth. I have part of an actual diary kept by a young white trapper on the edge of the Barrens, and this diary was kept with great exactitude, no detail of his daily life being omitted. In the fall of 1939, when the deer came south through this man's territory, he went with his rifle to secure his winter supply of meat for himself, for his dogs, and for trap-bait. The deer that he killed for bait were shot all over his area and simply left lying in the open. No attempt was made to protect them from the many scavengers. Instead the man shot enough deer so that when the scavengers were through, he would still have enough carcasses left to set his traps upon. The part of the diary that I have runs only for five weeks, but it lists 267 deer killed in that period and this particular trapper considers his kill to be conservative. I think the Idthen Eldeli have reason to reject the pious “conservation” talk of the agents who are sent to succor them.

Words alone are sent to halt the slaughter, not only of the deer but also of the People. The few hundred survivors of the Idthen Eldeli, who in 1900 numbered nearly two thousand souls, are to be protected from the folly of white men by the good advice of those set in authority above them. But in a few more years they will need no more advice, and they will no longer be an embarrassment to those who must minister to their needs.

But I should not be fair if I did not speak of the single “constructive” thing the government has done to save the caribou. I have neglected to tell you of the “real culprit” in the destruction of the deer. He is the oldest scapegoat in man's history—the wolf. It is the almost unanimous opinion of white traders, trappers and “sports” in the North that the tremendous decrease in the numbers of the deer has come about solely because of the bloodthirsty ravages of that insatiable killer, the arctic wolf. There is no doubt about it. A white trapper who does not kill more than five hundred deer a year himself will go into a perfect paroxysm of fury as he tells you how the wolves are slaughtering the deer by the tens of thousands. He has no proof, of course; but then, who needs proof against the wolf?

The voices of these men make a loud and useful noise. Under cover of the cries set up against the wolf the real faults lie deeply buried out of the public sight. Government joins the cry, accepts it joyfully, and pays a bounty of $25 on the head of each wolf killed. Government is active and the public interest, should it unhappily be aroused to awareness of the situation, is laid to rest again.

Cry wolf, you men of little conscience! Ignore the fact that while there have been deer there have always been wolves, and that until your coming, wolves, men and deer lived in mutual adjustment with each other for more centuries than we can count. Cry wolf! No one will give you the lie. The wolves cannot answer. The last survivors of the Peoples of the Deer can-not reply.

As for the deer themselves—in the spring, when the first thaws are still to come, the anxious does move northward and the great herds form. They are still great, and when they pass by, the talk of their destruction seems insane. Yet now they pass along one route where once they moved by many mighty roads.

Out on the frozen plains the Ihalmiut wait with famine in their low-domed homes. And they know fear, for they can no longer tell if the remaining herds will pass within reach of their camps or whether they will pass a hundred miles away and bring no hope to those who starve and die. On the narrows between the two lakes in the wooded country the bones of the deer mount upward to the surface of the waters. And along the frozen rivers of the Barrens, the new rock graves of men mount upward through the drifts.

5. Under the Little Hills

Summer, which follows spring so closely that the two are almost one, was upon us before it was possible to travel to the shores of Ootek's Lake and meet the People. I had arranged with Franz to take me there while Hans and the children were to remain at Windy Bay to feed the dogs we left behind, and to care for the camp.

As Franz and I prepared for the journey north, I was excited and at the same time depressed. Much as I wished to meet the Ihalmiut in their own land, the fragmentary glimpses of their lives that I had from Franz had left me with a strong feeling of unease at the prospect of meeting them face to face. I wondered if they would have any conception as to how much of their tragedy they owed to men of my color, and I wondered if, like the northern Indians, they would be a morose and sullen lot, resentful of my presence, suspicious and uncommunicative.

Even if they welcomed me into their homes, I was still afraid of my own reactions. The prospect of seeing and living with a people who knew starvation as intimately as I knew plenty, the idea of seeing with my own eyes this disintegrating remnant of a dying race, left me with a sensation closely akin to fear.

We could not make the journey northward by canoe, for the raging streams which had cut across the Barrens only a few weeks before were now reduced to tiny creeks whose courses were interrupted by jumbled barriers of rock. No major rivers flowed the way we wished to go, and so the water routes were useless to us. Since the only alternative was a trek overland, we prepared to go on foot, as the Ihalmiut do.

But there was a difference. The Ihalmiut travel light, and a man of the People crossing the open plains in summer carries little more than his knife, a pipe and perhaps a spare pair of skin boots called
kamik.
He eats when he finds something to eat. There are usually suckers in the shrunken streams, and these can sometimes be caught with the hands. Or if the suckers are too hard to find, the traveler can take a length of rawhide line and snare the orange-colored ground squirrels on the sandy esker slopes. In early summer there are always eggs, or flightless birds, and if the eggs are nearly at the hatching point, so much the better.

Franz and I, on the other hand, traveled in white man's style. We were accompanied by five dogs and to each dog we fastened a miniature Indian travois—two long thin poles that stretched behind to support a foot-square platform on which we could load nearly thirty pounds of gear that included bedrolls, ammunition, cooking tools and presents of flour and tobacco for the Eskimos. With this equipment we were also able to carry a little tent, and food for the dogs and ourselves: deer meat for them, and flour, tea and baking powder for us. We had more than the bare essentials, but we had to pay a stiff price for them.

Equipped with pack dogs, it took us better than a week to cover the same sixty miles that the Ihalmiut cross in two days and a night. I shall not soon forget the tortures of that march. While the sun shone, the heat was as intense as it is in the tropics, for the clarity of the arctic air does nothing to soften the sun's rays. Yet we were forced to wear sweaters and even caribou skin jackets. The flies did that to us. They rose from the lichens at our feet until they hung like a malevolent mist about us and took on the appearance of a low-lying cloud.
Milugia
(black flies) and
kiktoriak
(mosquitoes) came in such numbers that their presence actually gave me a feeling of physical terror. There was simply no evading them. The bleak Barrens stretched into emptiness on every side, and offered no escape and no surcease. To stop for food was torture and to continue the march in the overwhelming summer heat was worse. At times a kind of insanity would seize us and we would drop everything and run wildly in any direction until we were exhausted. But the pursuing hordes stayed with us and we got nothing from our frantic efforts except a wave of sweat that seemed to attract even more mosquitoes.

From behind our ears, from beneath our chins, a steady dribble of blood matted into our clothing and trapped the insatiable flies until we both wore black collars composed of their struggling bodies. The flies worked down under our shirts until our belts stopped them. Then they fed about our waists until the clothing stuck to us with drying blood.

The land we were passing over offered no easy routes to compensate for the agonies the flies inflicted upon us. It was rolling country, and across our path ran a succession of mounding hills whose sides and crests were strewn with angular rocks and with broken fragments filling the interstices between the bigger boulders. On these our boots were cut and split and our feet bruised until it was agony to walk at all. But at that the hills were better walking than the broad wet valleys which lay in between.

Each valley had its own stream flowing down its center. Though those streams were often less than five feet in width, they seemed to be never less than five feet in depth. The valley floors were one continuous mattress of wet moss into which we sank up to our knees until our feet found the perpetual ice that lay underneath. Wading and stumbling through the icy waters of the muskegs, floundering across streams or around the countless ponds (all of whose banks were undercut and offered no gradual descent), we would become numbed from the waist down, while our upper bodies were bathed in sweat. If, as happened for three solid days, it rained, then we lived a sodden nightmare as we crossed those endless bogs.

I am not detailing the conditions of summer travel in order to emphasize my own discomforts but to illustrate the perfectly amazing capacity of the Ihalmiut as travelers. Over sixty miles of such country, the People could move with ease, yes, and with comfort, bridging the distance in less than two days of actual walking. And they, mind you, wore only paper-thin boots of caribou skin on their feet. It is not that they are naturally impervious to discomfort, but simply that they have adjusted their physical reactions to meet the conditions they must face. They have bridged the barriers of their land not by leveling them, as we would try to do, but by conforming to them. It is like the difference between a sailing vessel and one under power, when you compare an Ihalmio and a white traveler in the Barrens. The white man, driven by his machine instincts, always lives at odds with his environment; like a motor vessel he bucks the winds and the seas, and he is successful only while the intricate apparatus built about him functions perfectly. But the Barrens People are an integral part of
their
environment. Like sailing ships, they learn to move with wind and water; to mold themselves to the rhythm of the elements and so accomplish gently and without strain the things that must be done.

By the time we were in sight of the Little Lakes I was aware of a desperation not too far from madness. I cursed the land and the ephemeral dreams which had brought me to it. I cursed Franz and the poor dogs, whose eyes were swollen almost shut by the constant assault of the insatiable flies. I was so tired that I did not greatly care whether or not I survived—if only those bloodthirsty legions of winged horrors would let me die in peace.

On the last day Franz was in the lead, followed by three dogs, while I trailed a half-mile behind trying to force my dogs to efforts beyond their powers. I heard Franz call and when I looked ahead I saw three human figures where before there had been only one. Franz stood on the crest of a ridge and beside him were two other men, all three gesticulating and shouting at me down the slope.

The sight of strangers seemed to offer some kind of hope and I abandoned the plodding dogs and ran heavily up the hill, slipping and falling among the boulders. When I reached the crest, Franz and the other two men were sitting cross-legged on the rocks and a little breeze was playing along the ridge to cool them off, and to hold back the flies.

One of the strangers was manipulating a little drill which looked rather like a bow and arrow, with the arrow pointed down into a piece of wood upon the ground while the bow, with its string wound twice around the arrow's shank, was being pushed back and forth parallel to the ground. From the spinning tip of the drill rose a little curl of yellow smoke and I realized that the fur-clad man was making fire.

Our matches had long since been ruined when the top of the can in which they were carried came off during a river crossing. For three days we had had neither a smoke nor a mug of tea—two things that just barely make life endurable for white men in the Barrens. Now I stood panting on the hill and watched an Eskimo casually producing fire as our distant ancestors had produced it in their time. The man looked up at me and smiled, a transfiguring smile which spread like the light of fire itself over his face.

Franz motioned me to sit down while he got out the pail and the packet of sodden tea. Now the second Eskimo, a short and solid figure of a man, stepped forward, took the pail and with a broad grin ran down the slope to fetch us water from a tundra pool. Franz nodded his head after the water-getter.

“Ohoto,” he said. “One of the best of them. And this one over here is Hekwaw, the biggest hunter of the bunch.”

It was again a succinct introduction, typical of Franz. It was so brief because from his long contact with the People he had come to see them with straight eyes and could not understand how weird and curious they would appear to me, who saw them with the oblique gaze of a man of civilized experience.

However, if Franz would tell me no more than their names, I could at least appraise them for myself. Both were dressed in
holiktuk
—parkas—of autumn deerskin with the fur side turned out. The parka of Hekwaw, the firemaker, was decorated with insets of pure white fur about the shoulders and by a fringe of thin strips of hide around the bottom edge. Ohoto's was even more dressy, for it had a bead-embroidered neck and cuffs. But despite the beads and insets, the general appearance of both men was positively scruffy. Great patches of hair were worn off the garments and rents and tears had been imperfectly mended, evidently by an unpracticed hand. Food juices and fat drippings had matted the thick hair that remained, the dirt from unidentifiable sources had caked broad patches of the fur.

Below these heavy parkas, which the two men were wearing next to their skins, were short fur trousers called
kaillik,
and these were met, above the knee, by the yellow translucent tops of the skin boots.

My first reaction as I saw and smelled these men was one of revulsion. They seemed foul to me and I felt the instinctive surge of white man's ego as I wondered why the devil they couldn't find clean clothes to wear. That was, of course, the superficial thought of one who had no knowledge, but it typifies the conclusions drawn by most white men, particularly missionaries, when they view the “savage in his abhorrent state of nature.”

But on that summer day in the Barrens I wasn't so interested in dress as it may seem. My curious glance at the men's clothing was perfunctory, for I was fascinated by the men themselves.

Hekwaw—the Bear, the others called him—was a mountain of a man, but a scaled-down mountain. His muscles bulged and flowed under the loose sleeves of his old parka and the rhythm of the spinning fire drill was reflected in the pulse of tendons in his short and massive neck. Sweat beaded up steadily under his lank black hair, then growing into drops it rolled down the oblique slant of his low forehead, ran along the deep seams of his skin until it found an outlet and, bypassing the broad planes about his half-hidden eyes, fell clear from the sprawling nostrils of his flattened nose. His broad and sensuous mouth with its wide, swollen lips worked in the same rhythm as the drill, and the half-dozen grizzled hairs that were his beard wagged to the same quick tempo.

It was a parody of a face, a contorted parody which was meant for comedy but which had a wild essential quality that restrained my desire to laugh. There was a deep intelligence where one might expect to see only brute instinct, and there was humor and good nature that belied the weathered hide crinkling, apelike, on the brow and on the flat-planed cheeks.

Hekwaw removed the drill and shook a little pinch of smoldering ash from the fire board onto a pile of dry and brittle moss. Then he knelt before it and his cheeks swelled while his eyes disappeared altogether under their taut folds of skin. He blew, and the fire caught, giving birth to a minute greenish flame.

Ohoto returned with the water and with a great armful of green willow twigs, none bigger in circumference than a lead pencil. Franz took our precious “tea-stick” from one of the dog's packs and jammed it into the moss so that the pail hung suspended from it over the tiny fire. And the day was so brilliant that the sun obscured the flames and only a twist of smoke from the green wood showed that the water was slowly being brought to the boil.

Now I had opportunity to see Ohoto. His was a young face, still rounded and without the crevassed wrinkling of old Hekwaw's. His hair had been roughly cut so that it hung like the uncouth tonsure of some pagan priest, and it was as coarse as the hair of the deer. The cut hair disclosed a high, broad forehead and the eyes below it had not yet retreated into caves to escape the glare of winter snows. They were black and very bright, with the alert curiosity of a muskrat. Ohoto had an empty stone pipe clenched between his immense and regular white teeth, and I was not too slow to take the hint. I pulled out a bit of plug, damp and covered with debris, and when Ohoto saw it, he beamed broadly.