People of the Deer (10 page)

I had not realized that I was being closely watched. Hekwaw, who sat a little behind me, had been peering intently over my shoulder. At first he was baffled, but suddenly the full humor of a caribou that smoked a pipe struck him with the force of a physical blow, and before I knew what was happening, he had rolled off the bench, quite literally, and was in the grip of a first-class attack of hysterics.

Startled, I thought he had gone mad or had had a seizure. Both Franz and I jumped to our feet in real consternation. The little notebook fell face upward on the floor, where it was pounced on by Ohoto, who took one quick look and burst into wild guffaws. The book was snatched from his hand and passed around the circle of eager faces, and with the rapidity of chain lightning the laughter spread and grew wilder until it engulfed the tent in one insane pandemonium.

Very slowly it dawned on me that this was neither a war dance nor a mass attack of zaniness, but a tribute to my wit. I grinned self-consciously at those about me who were shrieking and weeping with completely uninhibited mirth. Then I rescued my book, which was about to disappear out the door in the hands of a howling small child. I looked at my drawing. Oddly enough it struck me, too, as being hilariously funny, and with no regard for propriety I began to bellow with laughter at my own feeble joke. The thing was now quite out of control. Hekwaw had a choking fit and someone hauled him outside for treatment. One old crone lost her balance and fell against the tent. The taut skin burst with a great boom and she sprawled, still shrieking like a demented thing, on the sharp rocks outside.

I began to worry. Really, I knew I couldn't have been as funny as all that. But mass hysteria had seized the People, and nothing seemed capable of stopping it. Nothing, that is, except food.

Howmik appeared in the doorway, looking properly curious and bearing a big wooden tray heaped high with steaming chunks of deer meat. The steam struck the roisterers and as if by magic the rich aroma quelled their mirth. Hekwaw, still a little shaky, came back into the tent, followed by the old woman, and everyone sat down and stared expectantly at the meat tray.

6. Feast and Famine

I sat down, or rather squatted down, to eat my first meal with the People. Howmik placed the great tray on the floor of the tent and we five men grouped ourselves around it. That tray was a magnificent piece of work, nearly four feet long by two feet wide with upcurved ends and sides. It had been constructed, with what must have been heartbreaking labor, from little planks hand-hewn from the tiny dwarf spruce of the southern Barrens. At least thirty small sections of wood had been meticulously fitted together and bound in place with mortised joints and pegs of deerhorn. The seams had then been tightly sewn with sinew so that the whole tray was waterproof.

The tray was magnificent, but its contents were even more impressive. Half a dozen parboiled legs of deer were spread out in a thick gravy which seemed to be composed of equal parts of fat and deer hairs. Bobbing about in the debris were a dozen tongues and, like a cage holding the lesser cuts of meat, there was an entire boiled rib basket of a deer.

There were side dishes too, for Howmik made a trip to a cache outside and returned with a skin sack, full of flakes of dry meat, which she unceremoniously dumped on the cluttered floor beside me. Nor was that all, for Hekwaw's wife fetched a smoking bundle of marrowbones as her contribution to the feast. These had been neatly cracked so that we would have no trouble extracting the succulent marrow.

I was very hungry, yet the sight of this vast array of meat left me a trifle weak. But it was evident that I was the only one to suffer any qualms of stomach. The others were waiting impatiently for me, as the major guest, to make the first move. The etiquette of the situation eluded me. I took my sheath knife and cautiously sawed off a good-sized chunk of leg meat, scraped the encrustation of hairs from it, and cuddled it in my lap since there was nothing else that could serve as a plate.

Now Franz and the three Ihalmiut men tusked in—I use that word advisedly—and Ohoto seized an entire leg. Sucking the gravy from it with appreciative lips, he sank his teeth into the tough muscle while with his left hand he held the joint away from his face, and with his right hand made a quick slash at the meat with his knife. I watched in horrified fascination. The sharp blade no more than cleared the tip of his broad nose, and he made his cut without even bothering to look where it was going. But the nose survived; the mouthful of meat was severed at the joint and was chewed a time or two and quickly swallowed.

Hekwaw seemed to prefer the soup. He dipped his cupped hands in it and then sucked up the greasy fluid with gusty relish, taking time out now and again to chew at a deer's tongue which he dropped back into the soup to keep warm between bites.

It struck me that I was being a little prissy. So I put my knife back in its sheath, took a deep breath and, seizing my meat in both hands, began to gnaw away on it. It was delicious.

Then Ootek, beaming with the pride of a good host, pressed me to try a marrowbone and showed me how to tap it with a little rock so that the long, jelly-like piece of marrow dropped out intact. I know I was in no position to be an epicurean judge, and you can doubt me if you wish when I tell you that I have never tasted anything quite as good as that hot marrow. Fat, but not oily, it did not compare at all with the insipid beef marrow we know. In fact it beggars all description, and it was wonderful!

By this time I had begun to understand why the Ihalmiut parkas were so badly matted, for they were pressed into service as table napkins and as bibs. A steady stream of juice and gravy trickled from Hekwaw's massive chin and was absorbed by the fur of his
holiktuk.
Try as I might, I couldn't entirely restrain a minor stream that was quickly saturating my flannel shirt. After a while I thought, “The devil with it!” and gave up any efforts to divert the flood.

Howmik, who seemed to be constantly on the run, now reappeared lugging the great iron cooking pot I had seen outside. Only it was no longer filled with meat. The dinner having been cooked, the pot was now doing duty as a tea “billy,” without benefit of an intervening washing. We supplied the tea, of course, and the canny Ihalmiut had sought out the biggest vessel they owned to brew it in. Had there been a bathtub handy the tea would have been brewed in it, for if the People have one uncontrollable vice, it is tea drinking.

That tea was blacker and solider than any I have ever seen and it was also fortified with the inevitable scum of deer hair and with odd bits of meat. But it was popular enough. Ootek, who is a rather little man, filled and drank three pint mugs of it, stopping only for a burp or two between mugfuls. Then he ate a tongue and drank three more pint mugs of tea.

Everyone else was just as thirsty and the big pot only lasted about twenty minutes before it was sent back for a refill, with the old tea leaves left in it to help strengthen the new brew.

Naturally such a tremendous fluid intake had its inevitable results and the dinner guests were constantly leaping to their feet and dashing out behind the tent—all save Hekwaw, who was too old and dignified a man to dash on such a trivial errand. He solved the problem by making use of a large can standing near the bed. He simply reached for it when it was needed. As it grew full—and it did frequently—his elderly wife removed and emptied it.

It wasn't long before I was too full to tackle even one more marrowbone. Franz felt the same, but the other men continued their attack on the heaping mound of meat until it was all gone, to the last drop of gravy. Then while they sat back and burped with prolonged fervor, Howmik took the tray away, refilled it, and the women had their meal.

That was my first dinner with the Eskimos but not, as may have seemed inevitable, my last. Five times each day we sat down to a new meal, and in between we had light lunches. While there is food in the Ihalmiut camps, five meals a day is considered barely adequate, though on the trail a man must manage to subsist on three.

The cooking varied somewhat, but the food did not. The rule was meat at every meal and nothing else but meat, unless you could count a few well-rotted duck eggs which served as appetizers. To satisfy my curiosity I tried to estimate the quantity of meat Hekwaw put away each day. I discovered he could handle ten to fifteen pounds when he was really hungry—though otherwise he probably subsisted on somewhat less.

This tremendous intake of protein probably explains the Eskimo thirst for tea or, if no tea is available, for water. The toxic wastes from such quantities of meat would strain the best of human kidneys, and only by drinking several gallons of fluid every day can the Ihalmiut manage to adjust to their amazing diet. Their bodies seem to have undergone some physical modifications as well, for when you see an Ihalmiut naked—as a visitor sees them every night—you notice that their body thickness, back to front, looks as great as their body width, both measurements taken at the waist. This typical shape presumably results from the enlarged liver needed both to store glycogen against lean periods and to deal with the completely protein diet. It most certainly is not a sedentary “pot.”

The words “food” and “deer” are practically synonymous throughout the Barrenlands, but though there is a certain monotony in the choice of food, there are many ways of preparing it. First there is the natural style, and I have eaten my meat this way and found no complaint with it, except perhaps that raw meat is singularly tasteless. If the Ihalmiut hunter shoots a deer for food when he is on a trip far from the camps, he seldom bothers to go to the trouble of building a fire. Usually his first act is to cut off the lower legs of the deer, strip away the meat, and crack the bones for marrow. Marrow is fat, and an eternal craving for fat is part of the price of living on an all-meat diet.

With the marrow disposed of, the hunter may slit the animal's throat and catch a cup of blood, for while the People do not know the use of salt, they do seem to crave it and to satisfy their craving with blood, where the saline concentration is very high.

Now having satisfied some of his specific cravings, the hungry hunter slices through the flank of the beast and carefully picks off the bits of suet clinging to the entrails. If he is still hungry—and he usually is—the hunter may also cut off part of the brisket if the animal is fat. Before leaving the carcass he takes out the tongue and sometimes the kidneys, and these he carries with him until he can find time and fuel to light a fire.

All the parts that I have so far mentioned can be eaten cooked, of course, and when it is possible they
will
be cooked, for the Ihalmiut do not eat raw meat from choice. When only an open fire is available, cooking methods are delightfully simple. The roast is simply shoved into the coals and left there until it is well charred on the outside. Pulled out and scraped, the inner core is found to be well cooked to a depth of an inch or so, and this part is eaten, then the roast is again pushed into the fire and the process repeated until the bone itself is reached and the hot marrow is ready for extraction.

When meat is cooked at camp it is usually boiled, if fuel permits, for the soup is greatly loved by everyone. Originally, and not so many years ago, the Ihalmiut used great square-cut stone pots made of a kind of soapstone. These were filled with water and chunks of meat, then hot pebbles were added to the water to bring it to a boil. It was a slow chore, and parboiling was usually chore enough, but now iron pots have been obtained in trade from the coastal Eskimos, and boiling meat is easier than it once was.

Amongst the special boiled delicacies I must mention fawn's head. Any deer head is good when boiled, but the heads of fawns are best of all. They are sometimes skinned before cooking, more often not, but the meat from them is the most delicious from the animal and the fat behind the eye is the best part of the head. Incidentally, when occasional fish are speared in summer, the boiled heads are again considered to be the choicest part.

Nearly all of the caribou is eaten, one way or another. But as you may have noticed, the steaks and roasts that we prefer don't often appear on the Ihalmiut menu. Usually the dogs get the rumps and thighs, for these parts of the caribou seem to be lacking in the specific nutriments that a meat-eating man requires. The Ihalmiut believe that only by eating all parts of the deer can they achieve a satisfactory diet. So the heart, kidneys, intestines, liver and other organs are greatly esteemed and often eaten.

There is a third way of using deer meat, and this is by preparing
nipku,
or dried meat. The Ihalmiut make this dish because it is a variation of an otherwise monotonous diet and because it can be easily stored to tide them over times when the deer are not about. Nipku is made by slicing muscle tissue paper-thin, then spreading it to dry on willow bushes near the camps. It looks, and tastes, like cardboard sparsely sprinkled with icing sugar, and it is as tough as blazes, but an excellent trail food since it equals five times its weight in fresh meat. I liked nipku, finding it as good as most Ihalmiut dishes, though I must admit to a certain indignation when Ohoto gave me a bag of it that was already in the possession of a lively collection of fly maggots.

Undoubtedly the most important item of Ihalmiut food is fat. Amongst the coastal Eskimos the supply of fat is limited only by the number of sea mammals that are killed, and blubber, that grossly overworked arctic word, is obtained in immense quantities from seals, walrus, narwhals and other aquatic mammals who build thick blankets of fat as an insulation against the cold of the arctic seas. The coastal people have so much fat and oil available that they can meet all their dietary needs and have enough left over to heat and light their igloos, and to cook upon. Well, they are lucky. The inland people of the plains must depend for fats on what they can obtain from the deer, and the caribou is no substitute for a seal as a source of oil.

In the fall of the year, just before the rutting season for the bucks and just after for the does, the deer are in their best physical condition and this is the only time of the entire year that fat can be obtained from them in any quantity. Buck deer, killed in the autumn, may carry thirty pounds of pure white suet under their hides, and though this sounds like a lot, when it is rendered down it gives a much smaller quantity. It takes a great many fat buck deer to equal one seal in the production of oils.

During the fall hunt the Ihalmiut must collect sufficient fat to meet the year's needs, but there is never enough to provide fuel, food, and heat together. As a result the winter igloos generally remain entirely unheated, and almost without artificial light during the interminable winter darkness. Yet the People manage to survive temperatures of fifty degrees below zero in their winter homes because fat
is
being burned—within their bodies. Each man is his own furnace, and as long as there are enough blocks of deer fat to last until spring, the People manage to stay alive under conditions which seem completely inimical to the maintenance of human life. Enough fat is the answer, and the sole answer, to winter survival in the Barrens.