The People of the Deer

by FARLEY MOWAT

1

ON a morning in May of 1947 I boarded the train to Churchill, the only place in the arctic I knew, and gave myself up to the demands of the fever that was in me. Churchill lay on the edge of the Barrens and I hoped that when I reached there I would stumble on some means for completing my journey into the interior. My preparations for the trip were simple in the extreme. A visit to a War Assets store had provided me with an assortment of old army clothing and a cheap sleeping bag. I already owned a camera of the snapshot variety and this, together with my binoculars and a dozen rolls of film, completed my scientific equipment. For weapons I took only the American carbine I had carried all through the war.

My actual plans were almost as shadowy as my equipment, for though I knew to within a few thousand square miles where I wanted to go, I still had only the vaguest ideas of how to get there.

The port of Churchill was a miserable conglomeration of cowering shacks half-buried under great drifts. The stained snowbanks pushed tightly up against the slab-sided and scrofulous shanties. The freezing mist from Hudson Bay did its best to soften the ugliness and hide the monolithic bulk of the huge concrete grain elevator that gives Churchill its sole reason for existence. For Churchill is nominally an ocean port, despite the fact that it is only for a few brief weeks each year that hardy freighters can dare the passage of Hudson Straits to enter the Bay and take on cargo. In May of 1947 that “ocean port” was the ultimate desolation of man’s contriving.

Shouldering my kit bag, I trudged up the frozen ruts of Churchill’s only road and found my way to the beer parlor. In a few minutes I was sitting comfortably close to the stove while a morose bartender brought me a bottle of sad ale — sans glass. As I drank the thin brew I looked out the dirty window at a clay-cold array of rusted boilers, abandoned donkey engines, and dead construction machinery. And I wondered just how the devil I was going to find my way out of this scrap heap of ruined ambitions and into the Barrens.

Then the door swung open with a gusty crash and a massive Scandinavian rolled into the room. His eyes lit up with a quick gleam of recognition as he saw me, and in an instant the gloom of Churchill was dispelled. “So you come back!” he boomed. “Ja! I thought maybe you would!”

This was John Ingerbritson, and I had last seen him when, as a boy of fifteen, I had gone to look at his ship in the harbor at Churchill. Many years earlier, when he had been living at The Pas, the call of John’s Norwegian blood became too strong to deny and so he built a seagoing vessel there in his back yard, 500 miles from the sea. When all 40 feet of the Otto Sverdrup was completed, she was loaded on a flatcar and taken north to salt water. Her full tale is a Norse saga that began when John announced that he intended to fish the treacherous Bay waters. The scientists told him bluntly that there were no food fish to be had in Hudson Bay, but John set his nets anyway, and each week he shipped a fine cargo to the markets in distant Winnipeg.

After hoisting a few for old times’ sake, John took me to his home, where Mrs. Ingerbritson welcomed me into her brilliantly clean little house and filled me with good food. Then, over coffee, and surrounded by the ebullient offspring of John and his wife, I explained why I had come back to Churchill and where I wanted to go.

When I finished, John suggested that I should charter a plane, but I was doubtful about the idea. For one thing, the cost of flying in the arctic can be prohibitive. For another thing, a pilot needs a clear-cut objective, and I had none in mind.

While we were talking, a lanky, dark-eyed young man had come quietly into the room and was introduced as Johnny Bourasso, former Royal Air Force Pathfinder pilot, at present the captain and crew of an ancient twin-engined Anson aircraft that made a precarious living for her owner by flying improbable tramp-freighting runs over the top of the world. Bourasso was at once dragged into the discussion, and I got out my maps.

I told him of the old government report I had read by James Burr Tyrrell, and of Tyrrell’s fantastic explorations through the central Barren Lands of Keewatin in the 1890s. Tyrrell had been the first — and the last — man ever to traverse the full breadth of the Barrens from south to north.

He wrote of seeing what may have been the greatest single herd of caribou ever to be seen by a white man — a herd so vast that for many miles the surface of the land was obscured beneath a blanket of living beasts! He mentioned a “People of the Deer.” Out in those endless spaces, along the river he called Kazan, Tyrrell had found a race of men where it was thought that no men could live. These men, who had remained completely cut off from the world’s knowledge until the day of Tyrrell’s coming, were living the same lives they had led before the Viking longboats first discovered the eastern shores of North America.

I asked John what he knew about the mysterious Eskimos that Tyrrell had seen. Surprisingly, John knew quite a lot, though it was all hearsay, of course. He told me that in the boom days of the twenties a trading post had actually been established on the southern borders of the Keewatin Barrens, not far from the headwaters of the Kazan where Tyrrell had first met the inland dwellers. While fur prices were soaring this isolated outpost did well, despite the fact that 700 miles of canoe route separated it from the nearest point of supply at The Pas.

Then the fur market collapsed and the post no longer paid a big enough profit. So it was closed, and the brief contact with the inland Eskimos would have been lost again had it not been for a German immigrant, married to a Cree woman, who doggedly persisted in the attempt to keep an independent trading post going. Off and on, over the years, this man did keep contact with the Barrens Eskimos; and though he was no longer in the land himself, it was rumored that he had left a son on the edge of the Barrens, who was believed to make his living by trapping white fox and by occasional trading deals with the natives.

John pointed out the site of the abandoned trading post on the map, at a place called Windy River — a river that flows into a vast body of water named Nueltin Lake.

Nueltin itself was almost a legendary place, still unsurveyed and largely unknown in 1947. Yet from the rough dotted outline assigned to it on the map, it was obviously a truly great lake, at least 120 miles long, with half of its length inside the forests while the other half stretched northward into the open plains of the Barrens.

I decided that Nueltin should be my immediate goal. If I was lucky I might find that young halfIndian, half-German youth who was believed to be still living there. And with his aid, I might hope to realize my dreams; whereas alone I might only add another unpleasant paragraph to the grim tales that are told of the men who have challenged the Barrens and failed.

Nueltin, then, was the logical choice, but there remained the slight problem of how to cross the intervening 350 miles of frozen plains to reach it. I looked wistfully at Johnny Bourasso and wondered how much he would charge for such a flight. There didn’t seem to be much point in asking, for he had just canceled a trip to Chesterfield Inlet on the advice of the weather men, who had warned of the imminent approach of the spring thaws. When the spring thaws come to the North, all flying ceases for at least a month and there are no exceptions. But I had nothing to lose by asking. “Johnny, would you lake a chance on a trip to Nueltin tomorrow ? ”

He lifted his eyes from the map and took a long moment to think; then, “We’ll give it a try,” he said. He would charge me only $200 for the trip, phenomenally cheap for Barrens flying, which normally has the highest rate on the continent.

2

WHEN it was full morning the next day we hurriedly loaded my gear and slogged through the already softening drifts to Landing Lake, where the Anson stood waiting. What had been a light weight outfit designed for easy travel, when I left the South, had grown monstrously during my brief stay at Churchill. The Canadian Army authorities there, worried about my survival and about the possibility of having to come to my eventual rescue, had loaded me down with such items as a hundredpound crate of smoke generators (presumably to use in communicating with distant Eskimos since no aircraft fly over the central Barrens), army winter clothing of unbelievable awkwardness and bulk, and a case of complicated meteorological instruments with which (it was hoped) I would make careful surveys of weather conditions at Nueltin Lake. Politeness forced me to accept all these things though I had no use for them and I was already grossly overequipped as a result of my purchases in the Hudson Bay Company store at Churchill.

Johnny had aided in saddling me with an unnecessary amount of freight by remarking that he might very well fail to pick me up before freeze-up, in which case I would have to live on my fat until late December when ice conditions were again suitable for ski landings.

In consequence I had bought about a quarter of a ton of assorted foods, the bulk of which consisted of flour, lard, sugar, tea, baking powder, bacon, and salt pork. In addition there was a fair leavening of dehydrated fruits and vegetables, plus — and how the old arctic-hands stared when they heard about it — a case of fruit juices.

My outfit was further increased by 500 pounds of freight which had been consigned to the young fellow at Nueltin the previous fall and which had been moldering in a warehouse awaiting the day when some means of transportation might turn up. With the usual haphazard methods employed in arctic transport, this was all turned over to me on the chance that I could deliver it.

All of this gear was stacked aboard the Anson; and after a startled look at the looming bulk of the load, Johnny turned quickly away and started up the engines. As the overburdened plane lumbered down the lake the homemade skis flung driving slush outward and upward, enveloping us in chill spray. Then we were air-borne and we swung back over the forlorn desolation of Churchill so that the Ingerbritsons could wave a farewell. The Anson turned northward up the icebound coast. I looked out to sea, over the pack ice, and when I again turned to look inland the thinning trees had vanished and the aircraft was swinging westward, away from the sea and into the Barrens.

The Anson grumbled forward on her quest. Johnny held a map before him on his knees, and over its expanse of vagueness he had drawn a straight compass course to where Windy River should be. But above his head the compass flickered and gyrated foolishly, for in such close proximity to the magnetic pole a compass is, at best, but a doubtful tool. Yet there were no other aids to navigation, for when we left the coast we also left the sun behind us —obscured by a thick overcast of snowladen clouds.

For a hundred miles there was no change and the monotony began to dull my senses. I tried to fix my gaze on something definite in the blankness that lay below. About noon I saw, with profound gratitude, the faint smear of a horizon. Slowly it took on strength, grew ragged, and at last emerged as a far-distant line of hills. It was the edge of the great plateau which cradles Nueltin and the Kazan.

I edged forward to the cockpit, Johnny’s face was strained and anxious. In a few minutes he pointed to the flickering needles of the gasoline gauges, which showed that half our gas was gone, and then I felt the aircraft begin to bank! I watched the compass card dance erratically until our course was south, then east — and back toward the sea.

The overcast had been steadily lowering, and as we turned eastward we were flying at less than 500 feet. At this slim height we suddenly saw the land gape wide beneath us to expose a great valley walled in by rocky cliffs and snow-free hills. And in that instant I caught a fleeting glimpse of something. “Johnny!” I yelled. “Cabin . . . down there!”

He wasted no precious gas on a preliminary circuit. The sound of the engines dulled abruptly and we sank heavily between the valley walls. Before us stood a twisted, stunted little stand of spruce; a river mouth, still frozen; and the top foot or so of what was certainly a shanty roof, protruding slyly from the drifts. We jumped stiffly down to the ice and shook hands, for there was no doubt about this being my destination.

There was no sign of life about the cabin. We slipped and stumbled helplessly on the glare ice, and our exhilaration at having found our target against heavy odds was rapidly being diminished by an awareness of the ultimate desolation of this place. The leaden skies were closing in and the wind was still rising; there was time only to dump my gear onto the ice. Johnny stood for a long moment in the doorway of the plane, then waved his hand and vanished into the fuselage. In a moment the Anson was bumping down the bay and I was alone.

3

I MADE for the half-hidden cabin. The doorway was snowed-in to a depth of several feet, and when I had dug my way through, I found only a log cavern in the drifts — dank and murky and foul-smelling. Against one wall was a massive stove. But it did nothing to cheer me up, for as far as I could see there was no fuel for its great maw. The wind outside, and the chill damp inside, made the thought of a fire like the dream of a lovely woman — irresistible, and quite unattainable.

The walls of the cabin were finished in fur. Wolf and arctic fox pelts, all as white as the snows of early winter, were spread over the log walls to dry, and by their simple presence showed that the place was not completely deserted after all. During the next week I came to regard them with affection, for they were the link with the unknown man who had brought them in and who, I sincerely hoped, would come himself before too long.

There was quite enough to do during the days of waiting. All my gear had to be hauled in from the ice of Windy Bay, and for the balance of the daylight hours I amused myself by wading hip-deep, and sometimes shoulder-deep, through the jealous drifts that guarded the puny treelets near the camp. Three hours’ hard work would yield only enough green spruce and tamarack twigs to let me build one little cooking fire, but in the process of gathering fuel I grew as warm as if I had been able to luxuriate before a roaring blaze.

The storm that had heralded my arrival lasted for three full days, but on the fourth day the weather changed abruptly and the arctic spring exploded in a violent eruption. On June 1 the sun shone down upon me with a passion that it hardly knows even in the tropics. And it kept on shining for eighteen hours out of every twenty-four.

I climbed a ridge beside the cabin on the second day of spring and I was awed by what I saw. Thin sheets of water were sliding out from under all the mighty drifts along the shore, and there were already telltale mumblings from under the river ice. Above the ice a good-sized stream was bawling down upon the bay and spreading a lake above a lake, which was soon too deep to wade across.

In half a day the snow that lapped my observation ridge retreated a dozen feet, leaving the exposed gravel and dead moss to steam away like an overanxious kettle. It was a queer thing to see, and I felt as if I were sitting on the summit of a frozen world that inexplicably, and with an unbelievable swiftness, had decided to collapse and melt away.

On June 4 I climbed a long, rocky slope behind the cabin for a glimpse of the lands that lay beyond the camp. I was sitting in the lee of a great boulder, avoiding the hot glare of the sun, when I heard the cries of dogs from far up the half-frozen river. I listened until the dogs came into view — nine immense beasts hauling a sled that dwarfed them, for it was over 20 feet in length. Two massive runners with sparse crossbars supported a pile of deerskins, and on the skins was the figure of a man.

The team drove along the river’s edge to avoid the thaw stream on the surface and the sodden drifts on shore. When it was opposite to me and I could see that the driver was no Eskimo, the dogs swung inshore and halted in the cabin yard. I watched as the man got slowly from his sled and stood beside it, staring intently at the cabin door.

If his arrival had been a shock to me, it was at least an anticipated one. To him, the shock of arriving home and seeing that someone had been living in his camp must have been tremendous. He stood quite still for several minutes. Then he leaned over the sled and withdrew his rifle from its case. He walked forward to where my ax was lying and picked it up, staring at it as if it had been some object fallen from the skies.

With his rifle in hand he opened the cabin door and stepped inside. The litter of my belongings, much of it foreign to him, must have baffled him completely, but he stayed inside, and I chose that time to descend from my hill.

The dogs saw me at once, and before I had reached the sled their hysterical outcry brought the man to the door with rifle crooked over his arm and his face blank and expressionless.

It was a tense and uneasy meeting. I set about explaining myself and my presence at the cabin as best I could, and the words sounded rather lame.

Franz gave me no help at all, though he showed visible relief when he discovered that I had come by air. After I had said my piece, he stood for a good five minutes staring stolidly at me without uttering a word, and I had ample time to study him.

He was still very young, but with an unkempt air about him that made him seem much older in my sight. He was not tall, but slender with a lithe, wild look. He wore an unidentifiable hodgepodge of native skins and white man’s clothes, and on his head he wore a tattered aviator’s helmet of the sort that children wear about our city streets. The helmet peak was down and half obscured his face. Black eyes were in its shadow, and below them a prominent and uncompromisingly Teutonic nose set on the smooth, Asiatic background of an Indian face.

His unblinking scrutiny was rapidly unnerving me, and then I had an inspiration. Remembering what I had always heard about the North, I made a stumbling appeal for hospitality. Blankness faded from his face; he smiled a little and stepped into the cabin, beckoning me to enter.

I felt that I needed a stiff drink, so I burrowed in my kit and produced a bottle. Without asking Franz, I poured a drink for each of us. He gulped it down, and as he coughed and wiped tears from his eyes his frozen taciturnity began to thaw, then melted with the same untrammeled rush that the snows had shown in the first spring sun. He began to talk — stiffly at first and in awkward monosyllables that slowly grew together and became coherent. Eskimo and Cree words were mixed with English, but as his conversation reached full flow, the native words dropped out and his facility with a language that he had little call to use returned.

Oddly enough he asked no questions and betrayed no curiosity about me after the initial explanations had been made. Instead he talked of the long trip that he had just completed, and from that point his talk worked backward through the winter, into the years before.

His father, Karl, had come to Canada from Germany, three decades earlier. The immigrant brought with him some of the memories of a cultivated man, but for reasons of his own he shunned the semicivilized South of Canada and wandered to the North. Here, in due time, he found a wife among the mission-trained Cree Indians who live on the south verges of the high northern forests. Karl’s wife was a good woman and she was a good mother to his children, bringing them the best of the Cree blood, which is not inferior to that of any race.

About 1930, the trading company at Nueltin Lake asked Karl to be their manager there. He accepted, and after a three weeks’ canoe trip north from Brochet, the family arrived at Windy Bay. But it was a somber arrival, for the log building of a departed rival trader which Karl had hoped to use had been burned to the ground. And so, with autumn already bloodying the dwarf shrubs of the plains, Karl and the seven children had to build a winter home out of the meager trees that could be found.

When the one-room shack was finished and roofed with caribou skins, Karl was ready to do business. He anticipated no opposition in dealing with the Eskimos, for he was the only trader within 200 miles. It must have been a strange childhood for Franz and his brothers and sisters. They kept aloof even from the Eskimos. And the tiny outpost was visited only once each summer from “outside” when a canoe brigade arrived from Brochet to bring in the winter stock and carry out the season’s fur. For the rest of the long months that stretched into years, only the deer kept Karl and his family company.

In the thirties the People of the Barrens were still numerous enough so that nearly forty huntersall heads of families — could come to trade their fox pelts at the little post. But as the years passed, so passed the hunters. Their names upon the “Debt books" of the post were lined out one by one, and there were few new ones to take their places. The price of pelts on the world’s markets fell and so the profits of the post fell off. At last the company decided to withdraw, and in due course that message came to Karl. He received it gratefully, for during the winter of that year his wife had died, and this man who had never been able to put away his fears of the land now felt desperately alone.

When spring came, Karl prepared to leave the land forever. His two sons, Franz and Hans, were unwilling to go south, and in the end he left them behind, confident that they would continue to make a good catch of foxes every year. Karl took the freight canoe towards the South, carrying the younger children and the season’s furs.

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. 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.

Among the Eskimos Franz came to be considered as one of the band, and yet not quite of it, for 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 that he could wander over new lands, farther and farther from the post at 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.

4

AFTER his first outpouring Franz had become silent, speaking only in monosyllables and evading the questions that were constantly occurring to me. 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.

On the third morning Hans arrived. Before I had time to receive more than a brief impression of his shadowed face, two bundles erupted from the sled and one of these took form as a bounding mite of fur-clad child that 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 litlle more restraint, stopping abruptly as it saw me standing there. This was a boy, perhaps ten 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, 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. 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. When he spoke 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 were 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 how he found Kunee and her brother Anoteelik.

5

SOME 60 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 which we call the Kazan but which the Eskimos, who call themselves Innuit, named Innuit Ku — the River of Men. This little group of lakes has for some centuries been the center of the inland culture. It was from this place that the people spread up and down the river until their camps stood on each lake and river in the rolling plains. And it is from the mounded hills which lie about the Little Lakes that this branch of the Innuit took their local name— Ihalmiut, the People of the Little Hills.

In all the time that the Ihalmiut have known the land and roamed its endless spaces, they have had no ties to any plot of ground for long. And yet the Little Lakes that lie beside the wide Kazan have exercised a hold upon the People, for it was from these lakes that men set out to permeate the plains with human life. 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 the place from which they had once eddied out over the land. By 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 Anektaiuwa — his wife, called Utukalee, and his two children, Kunee and Anoteelik. Utukalee 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 while fox furs she held against her mouth. Anektaiuwa 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.

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 mother to gather willow twigs for fuel, or else drew water from the lakes, or watched the cooking fires when Utukalee was too ill.

The igloo of Anektaiuwa 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 Anektaiuwa’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, Anektaiuwa 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. Franz 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 also knew that the People do not steal unless death has come close enough to make a mockery of morals.

On this midwinter visit, Ootek and Anektaiuwa 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.

The winter months dragged slowly by and there came no more cries for help. Early in March, Franz traveled northward to his most distant trap line and once again found that many of his meat caches had been robbed.

It was just after dawn on a day in April when Franz reached Ootek’s Lake on the return trip from his trap lines. 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, 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 Anektaiuwa.

Franz feared the dead, for his Indian blood runs strongly through the imagery of his white man’s mind. He did not touch the frozen corpse, but turned his dogs back until he came to the igloo of Anektaiuwa. The passageway was open, though only a narrow cleft remained free of drifts. Fearful of what lay under the still dome, Franz called aloud, but got no answer. He would have turned and fled from the place then, but faintly he heard a sound, as of an animal that has been maimed and left for dead.

Franz tied his dogs. Then, summoning all his courage, he wormed his way down the long passage that was nearly filled with drifted snow. The children were both awake, and waiting, for they had found their father gone. Now dimly they saw that he returned, and the whimpers of the little girl grew louder.

Franz covered the dead body of the mother Utukalee with some skins taken from the ledge and then fed the two bony things he had found on soup, cooked on his primus stove — and he waited patiently while the children retched it up again. He continued feeding them soup until their rebellious stomachs would accept the nourishment. He kept the tiny stove going at full heat until the igloo’s dull walls brightened and filmed with ice, as the temperature rose rapidly. The little girl held out her hands to him, trembling little talons that were while with frost, and Franz massaged them gently till some warmth returned.

By the next day the children were already displaying the incredible resilience of the young. Franz did not dare linger, for he had no dog feed on his sled, and little enough food for himself.

He unloaded and cached the frozen corpses of a dozen while foxes from his sled, and in their place he spread out his own robes and wrapped the two children carefully among them. Then he drove south from Ootek’s Lake and in two days was lighting a wood fire in the stove by Windy Bay.

On the day following the arrival of Hans and the children, I was awakened by the sound of heavy firing. I hurriedly pulled on my clothes and went out into the June morning. Franz, Anoteelik, and Hans were sitting on the ridge above the cabin and they were steadily firing their rifles across the river. On the sloping southern bank nearly a hundred deer, all does, were milling in stupid anxiety. I could see the gray bursts of dust as bullets sang off the rocks, and I could hear the flat thud of bullets going home in living flesh.

The nearest animals were waist-deep in the fast brown water and could not return to shore, for the press of deer behind cut off retreat. The does that were still on land were running in short, futile starts —first east, then west again — and it was some time before they began to gallop with long awkward strides, along the riverbank. Their ponderous bellies big with fawn swung rhythmically as they fled upstream, for their time was nearly on them.

When the last of the straggling herd had passed out of range beyond the first bend of the river, a great new herd of does came up to the stream. Heavy as they were, they swam powerfully, so that they made the crossing without losing time and landed literally in our own front yard. The dogs became insane and threatened to tear their tethering posts out of the frozen ground, but the deer paid them, and us, little heed. Splitting into two groups, they flowed past the cabin, enveloping it in their midst. In less than an hour I saw so many deer that it seemed as if the world were full of them.

That night I sat for a long time on the ridge behind the cabin, smoking and thinking. I knew little of the People of the Deer as yet; and now that I had seen the herds, I was aware that I knew nothing of the deer themselves. The People and the deer fused in my mind, an entity. I found I could not think of one without the other, and so by accident I stumbled on the secret of the Ihalmiut before I had even met them. I believe it was this vague awareness of the indivisibility of the Barrens People and the caribou that made my later attempts to understand the Eskimos yield fruit.

(To be continued)