The Curse of the Viking Grave (9 page)

 

CHAPTER
9

The Ihalmiut Camps

P
EETYUK'S SLED WAS THE FIRST TO
reach shore and it was immediately surrounded by such a throng of men, women, children and dogs that both it and Peetyuk seemed to disappear under a heaving brown mass. Having regained control of their own excited dogs Jamie and Awasin halted their teams a hundred yards away from the camp. Standing with Angeline between them, they observed Peetyuk's noisy reception, but made no move to join him.

Something more than shyness held them back. It was not exactly fear, for they knew they had nothing to fear from the Eskimos. Rather it was as if they had come out of one period in time and into another; rolled back innumerable centuries to enter a world and to encounter a people of unimaginable antiquity.

They had known before they started north that the inland Eskimos were an extremely isolated people who had never had more than peripheral contact with the world of white men. According to Peetyuk, only a handful of strangers had ever visited the Ihalmiut (People of the Little
Hills), as they called themselves. It was true that a few of the most intrepid Eskimos occasionally undertook the long journey to a trading post and, as a consequence, they had a few rifles and other trade goods. But for the most part the Ihalmiut lived as they had always lived, much as their ancestors had lived in times when Europe itself was a forested wilderness inhabited only by wandering hunters.

The sensation of having stumbled into an ancient and alien world was so strong that Angeline and the two boys had no idea how they should act, or what they should do. They might have stood out on the ice like statues for hours if Peetyuk had not pulled himself free of the yelling, laughing crowd and turned toward them.

“Why you stop?” he shouted. “You afraid Innuit? Foolish! Come quick and meet my people!”

Considerably embarrassed, Awasin and Jamie took hold of the traces of their lead dogs and led them toward the shore. Angeline followed so closely on Awasin's heels that she almost tripped him. To make the moment of meeting even more difficult, the assembled Eskimos became dead quiet, standing in a straggling row watching intently as the strangers slowly approached them.

Peetyuk ran forward calling to two Eskimo lads to join him. Putting one of the youths in charge of each team (so that a fight with the free-roaming Eskimo dogs would not develop) he grabbed Angeline by one hand and Jamie by the other and almost dragged them up to where the Eskimos stood waiting.

He took them straight to a bear-shaped, long-haired old
man whose broad, deeply seamed face was split by an immense smile showing the well-worn stubs of his brown teeth.

“This Kakut,” Peetyuk said. “Like father with me after my father die.”

Jamie grinned self-consciously and thrust out his hand, a gesture which clearly puzzled the old Eskimo. Obviously, he did not know what to do about that outstretched hand, and Jamie let it fall to his side. He blushed.

“I remember him from last winter,” he said almost brusquely. “How do you do, Mr. Kakut?”

Peetyuk howled with mirth, bending almost double as he tried to control himself. When he straightened up he cried:

“Kakut he not big white man! He Eskimo! Not shake hands, not say ‘How do.' Rub nose together! Like this.”

Whirling Angeline around he thrust out his face and rubbed his nose back and forth against hers, whereupon a roar of laughter erupted from the watching people. The tenseness vanished and all the Eskimos pushed forward, milling around the strangers. Men and women touched them on the hands, patted their shoulders, laughed and gabbled until the noise was deafening.

“My gosh,” Jamie muttered to Awasin. “How excited can you get?”

“They are going to scare Angeline to death, I think,” Awasin replied. “Look, she has hold of Peetyuk like a drowning woman!”

The travelers were borne away toward the largest of the tents. It was made of scraped caribou skins sewed together
in patchwork fashion and hung on a frame of light poles. Cone-shaped, it was about twenty feet in diameter at the base and stood about twelve feet high. The boys and Angeline were half escorted and half pushed through the door opening to find themselves in a roomy interior well lighted by the yellow glow of sunlight coming through the caribou hides. Caribou robes, fur side up, formed a thick mattress across the back half of the enclosed space. Pieces of skin clothing, caribou antler tools, a bow and arrow, and many unidentifiable objects hung from the supporting poles or littered the floor.

“Sit down,” Peetyuk invited his friends. “Now big feed come. Always big feed for visitors, then much talk.”

“Where is your mother, Peetyuk?” Awasin asked.

“She at camp on Kakut Lake,” he replied, and went on to explain that the People were living in three separate camps at strategic points between Halo Lake and the Kazon River, which the Eskimos called Innuit Ku—the River of Men. The reason for this dispersal was so they would be stretched across the path of the northbound deer herds, and would thus have better opportunities to make a good kill.

“Have no bullets for guns,” Peetyuk explained. “Must hunt with spear and bow. Not easy kill enough. People much hungry this winter.”

He was interrupted by the appearance of a round-faced, smiling woman of middle age whose black hair was drawn back from her broad forehead and held in place by a gleaming copper ornament. She carried a deep wooden tray filled with soup, in which brown objects bobbed
about. She set the tray in front of them and withdrew. The doorway was instantly filled by the heads of at least a dozen children, solemn-faced, round-eyed, and fascinated.

“Boiled deer tongues,” Peetyuk explained. “We must eat all. This best food in camp. Give all to us. Eskimos sad if we not eat.”

The tongues were delicious and the party was hungry, so there was no problem about obeying Peetyuk's instructions. But before the tray was empty two other women appeared. One carried an old pail and the other a tray. The pail was full of fishheads whose hard-boiled eyes gazed up smokily from the water they floated in. On the second tray was a heaping mound of roasted deer ribs.

“Ye gods!” Jamie exclaimed. “Do they expect us to eat all
that?
”

“Must eat,” Peetyuk replied, “Eskimos give all food they have. Not want make Eskimos sad, Jamie.”

“It'll make
me
sad, or dead. There's enough here for an army. And I wish those fish would shut their eyes. I hate being stared at when I eat.”

Half an hour later, stuffed to the bursting point, Awasin, Jamie and Angeline gave up and leaned back on the caribou robes, gasping for breath. But not Peetyuk. Cleangnawed caribou ribs continued to fly from his right hand to the door, where the watching children ducked to let them pass and the dogs pounced on the bones and carried them away.

The people of the camp now began to drift into the tent in ones and twos. Soon Peetyuk was too busy talking to continue with his feast. He had much to tell the Eskimos,
and they had much to tell him, for it had been nearly six months since he had left them to journey south with Jamie and Awasin to the forest lands.

Jamie, Awasin and Angeline were left out of it for the moment—which suited them very well. The respite gave them time to adjust to the strangeness of the Eskimo camp.

Meanwhile, a relay of women kept bringing iron kettles full of tea. This tea, supplied by Peetyuk, was the first the Eskimos had tasted in over a year. Tea is the one luxury which Eskimos love above all others and that evening the assembled crowd must have drunk ten gallons of it.

Occasionally Peetyuk turned to his companions and explained something of what was being said.

Much of the talk concerned what had happened to individuals that winter; but there was general talk about the decrease in the number of deer, about the near-starvation winter just finished, and about the “old days” in the Barrens.

“Long time ago,” Peetyuk told his friends, “Ihalmiut live more north at big lake called Angikuni. Those times, many more Eskimos. Have great camp there, maybe fifty tents. When Kakut little boy, white man come down river in canoe and big sickness come to that camp. Most people die…”

Here he was interrupted by some of the Eskimos. For a time he had no further chance to talk to his friends. Finally there came a pause in the spate of conversation.

“Have party now,” he told them. “Eskimo party. Big fun. You watch!”

It was growing dark outside and one of the women began lighting a number of soapstone lamps, shallow stone dishes filled with rendered deer fat. The wicks were twists of the silky blooms of cotton grass, which grows everywhere on the arctic plains. The lamps burned with a clear, bright flame, lighting up the circle of dark, smiling faces which now almost filled the tent.

Old Kakut now produced a wooden hoop about three feet in diameter, over which a piece of caribou membrane had been tightly stretched.

A murmur of anticipation greeted the appearance of this drum and the Eskimos began to crowd back against the walls of the tent leaving a clear space in the center. The tent was growing hazy with tobacco smoke, for Peetyuk had distributed plugs of tobacco to all the men and
women, and they had begun to light up tiny soapstone pipes.

Kakut shuffled into the middle of the tent looking even more like an amiable bear in his fur trousers and parka. Holding the drum in his left hand he began to twirl it, at the same time striking the rim with a stick held in his right hand. When the tempo had been set he bent over the drum and began to sing, while shuffling his feet in time to the music.

It was a weird, high-pitched song consisting of many short verses, after each of which the whole assembly joined in the chorus, wailing “
Ai-ya-ya-ya-yai, ai-ya-ya, ai-yai-a-ya…
”

It was so strange that at first Jamie could feel his back hair begin to prickle. However, after a while the rhythm of the drum began to affect him and he even found himself joining the chorus. He noticed that Awasin and Angeline were watching Kakut intently, and that they too were singing the refrain.

When the song ended, Kakut handed the drum to another man who also sang a song. So it went until all the men had done a turn. Between songs the tea went down at an alarming rate. Tobacco smoke rolled up thicker and thicker until one of the women lifted a side wall of the tent to let in some air, revealing a solid row of children lying on their tummies listening to their elders.

There came a pause in the singing and Peetyuk turned to his guests. “Now,” he said sternly, “your turn. Make music for Eskimo.”

“Oh no! Not me!” Jamie cried, but Awasin made no de
mur. Gravely the Indian boy got to his feet, stepped into the center of the tent and began to sing. It was a song Jamie had never heard before. It was wild and barbaric and it too had a wailing unearthly quality that seemed to speak of other ages, other races of mankind.

The Eskimos listened in dead silence, but when Awasin was done they shouted wildly and enthusiastically, even though they had not understood a word of it. They had no need to know the words; the music spoke to them of things they understood—of the immensity of the northern wilderness, of strange beings white men do not know, of tragedy and happiness, of love and death.

“What
was
that song?” Jamie asked urgently when Awasin rejoined him. “I never heard any Cree sing a song like that before.”

Awasin smiled in some embarrassment. “An old song of the old people, Jamie. We do not sing such songs to white men, for they do not understand. They only hold their ears, and sometimes they laugh. But these people—they understand.”

Jamie was hurt that he should have been considered too dull to understand, and when Peetyuk again insisted that he must do his part, he got to his feet and scrambled shyly into the center of the tent.

All eyes were on him as he took a deep breath, pinched his nose between finger and thumb of one hand, and clutched at his windpipe with the other hand.

Then the silence was broken by a sound as eerie as anything which had preceded it. A shrill, quavering whine filled the tent. The Eskimos sat as if petrified while from
the darkness outside the lugubrious howling of sled dogs rose and fell almost in unison with the outlandish music Jamie was producing.

At last Jamie's hands fell to his sides and he went back to his place. The silence was complete. For a long minute no one even coughed. Then Peetyuk gave a great shout of applause and the rest of the Eskimos joined in.

“What was
that
noise?” Awasin cried in Jamie's ear. “You even frightened me! I never knew white men could make a noise like that!”

Jamie grinned, well satisfied with the effect his solo had produced.

“You Crees and Eskimos aren't the only ones can make wild songs,” he explained proudly. “That was the bagpipes. Or at least it was an imitation of them. My father taught me how to do it when I was just a kid. I never did it in front of you before, because, well, because I thought
you'd
laugh at
me!
”