People of the Deer (25 page)

This one episode was repeated year after year over the face of the plains, for the People were separated from one another, and one camp could not extend aid to another which was in peril, for often they did not know of the peril until it was too late to help.

But despite famine and plague, the Ihalmiut nevertheless slowly began to recover their numbers. They might have made good their losses in the time to come had not the fates seemed angered to see their resurgence.

Although Kakumee never returned to the trading post, his visit was not forgotten. The traders remembered, and they thought of the untapped wealth of the Barrens as miners think of a rich lode hidden deep in the mountains. So the traders pushed to the north. Slowly their posts crept up to the edge of the Barrens, and here at last they renewed the lost contact with the Eskimos of the plains.

It was in the second decade of this century that a band of the Ihalmiut, driven south to the edge of timber in search of the deer, came on the most northerly outpost of the traders.

Now the contact was renewed and expanded and trade with the People began. Many of the men procured guns and bought flour and lard and for a while all those who went to the tiny outposts of the traders were secure from famine—though not from the hidden starvation and so also disease, which became increasingly virulent as their contacts with white men increased.

In the years which preceded the first Great War of the white races, the value of white fox pelts shot rapidly upwards, and the trading concerns did their utmost to encourage the Ihalmiut into an almost exclusive pursuit of fur. Then the war came, and with it there came a drop in the value of fox, and an abrupt discontinuation of the activity of the traders on the borderlands of the Barrens. With the sudden withdrawal of the white traders and the cutting off of supplies of ammunition, the brief rally of the Ihalmiut came to an end.

By 1926 only three hundred of the Ihalmiut were left alive. One by one the little camps had disappeared. Year by year the number of new graves increased while the number of children born in the starvation camps grew fewer. As the survivors failed, year after year, to meet the grim challenge, so failed their hearts and so failed their will to survive.

At last loneliness drew the handful of living People together in the age-old heart of the land under the Little Hills. The great loneliness grew more oppressive until even Kakumee came back to the lakes of the Ihalmiut, and established his camp a few miles away from the remnants of the race he had helped to destroy.

But in the postwar boom years, in London, Montreal and New York, the price of white fox fur rose again, and this time soared to a new record of value. The traders again remembered the People who dwelt in the plains, and they returned. From 1926 until 1930, no less than seven fly-by-night trading posts operated for varying periods of time on the edges of the Barrens. Once again the traders handed out rifles and shells, flour and tea to the Ihalmiut. Once again the little band of survivors did as the traders desired.

This time the blow fell quickly. The traders withdrew once again, and by 1938 barely a hundred survivors were left in the camps of the People, and in 1947 only forty-six still remained.

This was the pattern of life and death from the day of Kakumee's return to the land from the South. During all of this time the Ihalmiut received no more aid from us than we might extend to rats haunting a refuse pile. Not until the year 1947 was any real effort made to investigate or to alleviate the conditions which prevailed in the Barrens. Not until 1947 was any step taken to forestall the inevitable end of death's labors in the camps of the People. Not until 1950 did we really attempt to rectify our remissness, and that attempt was short-lived. Now, when less than twoscore of the People exist and when there are all too few women left of an age to give new life to the Ihalmiut, we say we are ready to redeem our sins of omission, though in fact as I write this we have still done little but talk of what we will do for the Ihalmiut.

I do not know why we waited so long. It was not that we had no word of the existence of the Ihalmiut. Tyrrell, who was an employee of the Canadian government, had told us about them in 1894. Traders have permits, and permits are issued by the government, so the authorities must at least have known of the existence of the Ihalmiut as early as 1912. Certainly many people, both white and native, who lived along the coast had heard of the presence of the scourge which was sweeping men from the Barrens. As early as 1921 a coastal missionary at Churchill reported rumors of the death of nearly five hundred men, women and children in the interior during the course of one winter, but his report sank into limbo and was ignored. No, those who were responsible for the welfare of the Innuit could hardly have been completely unaware of the facts, even though these were so long hidden from the general sight of the world.

In the black years following the coming of the Great Pain, men had many things to contend with in the Barrens, and not least of these was Kakumee the shaman.

During the times of famine, Kakumee always had food, rifles and shells. If it did happen that he ran short of meat, then he drove his dog team to the camp of some fortunate man who had made a lucky hunt and took what he wanted. No one could resist. How does a man resist another who is not of this world but of the world of devils and spirits?

Although Kakumee had several wives and he fed them all well, they gave him no children of his own, and so he knew the savage despair of one who believes he is impotent. Bitterness lived in his loins, and this bitterness added new strength to his devil, so that he even stole children and called them his own. A few times starving men came to the place of Kakumee and, humbling their pride and bridling their fears, asked him for meat. But this son of Ajut knew nothing of giving. He turned the starving ones away, and they made their ways back to their camps or died on the trail. After a time no one came near his camp and Kakumee was alone with the women and children he had stolen; hated and feared by all those who still lived.

Kakumee not only stole for pleasure or need, but from malice as well. I have heard a tale of a time when a man whom we shall call Anga set out in winter to go to the coast hoping to obtain a rifle and shells. He was a brave Ihalmio and a stubborn one, and he would not bow to the dictates of fate, so he made the long trip, taking nearly two months to complete it. He brought back a rifle and two cases of shells and, for a season, his family and all the families under the Little Hills had meat in plenty. Then one day in the winter, Kakumee drove his dogs to the house of Anga, and entered the igloo. He spoke no words to those who were huddled within but picked up the precious rifle and disappeared into the darkening snows.

The next day Anga, despite the pleas of his wife and the advice of his neighbors, set out for the shores of Kakumee Kumanik. He swore that when he returned he would bring his rifle safe on his sled.

The day was dark, for snow fog was lying low over the hills. Anga and his dogs vanished quickly from the sight of those who stood outside their igloos to bid him good luck. The wife of Anga wept, and let her hair down from the
tuglee
as women do when they mourn for the dead.

When spring came Anga was found. His body lay in a crevice of a rock near the south end of Kakumee Kumanik, and it was said he had been killed by the she-devil, Paija. But—there was a bullet through the bones of his chest.

In the later days of my last year in the country, Kakumee became my frequent companion, for he believed that the prestige of showing himself to be at least my equal would strengthen his hold on the Ihalmiut. But perhaps more important to him was the irresistible fascination our belongings had for the devil who dwelt in his heart. One day Ohoto warned Andy and me that we too courted death from the hands of the devil Paija because of the riches we owned. But that was not true, for though Kakumee might have welcomed our deaths, he would hardly have had the courage to kill us.

I did not repulse him, partly because I never quite mastered the cold chill I felt in his presence, but mainly because he was a rich source of stories about the Ihalmiut. However, in the last few weeks of our stay in the land, we visited his camp and what we saw there changed my relationship with old Kakumee.

His two tents—one for himself and a young wife, and one for an old wife and two adopted, or stolen, children—were enormous, but filthy, and in a poor state of repair. We were invited into the main tent and its contents were as unbelievable as if we had found a pawnshop dropped down in the heart of the Barrens. The place was packed with rusted and useless items of white men's goods. There were parts of at least a dozen rifles and shotguns, all heavy with rust except for one or two kept in use. There were countless tin cans, an old cast-iron stove with no bottom or top, tin pails which could no longer hold water, boxes of scrap bits of metal and clothing, an ancient Edison gramophone with one cylindrical record, rusted and broken tools and an endless profusion of other things, most of them ruined by time and neglect. There was also a great collection of tools, weapons and even toys made by the People.

I was appalled, for it was not simply the material wealth of one man I saw, but the wealth of a race, piled there to decay and to pass into dust that one man's passion might be well fed. Useless junk, most of it, that in its time might well have helped the Ihalmiut to delay their progress to extinction. The tents of Kakumee were filled with the sterile wealth of his race while the tents of that race were silent, and empty of men.

A few weeks later Kakumee came to see me at Windy Cabin, for he knew we would soon depart and he wanted to take possession of anything we might be persuaded into leaving behind. I was not glad to see him, for at last I was sickened by the incredible greed which had made him prey on his People even in death. I ordered him away, and told him bluntly not to come back. I spoke in the presence of other men of the People and the blow to Kakumee's prestige must have been severe. However, he went only as far as his travel tent, pitched a few hundred yards away, and there he remained while our preparations to leave were completed.

But on the last day of my stay, I began to see Kakumee with a clearer perspective. At last I began to understand something of the tragedy which underlay and partly explained the apparent malice of the man. Now that my anger was gone, I was aware of the unexpected presence of pity. The curtain of evil, which hung around Kakumee like a cloak, became threadbare, for I had begun to see the depth of the calamity which had long ago come upon him. So I went to his camp, and from his parting words I learned what I should have guessed long before.

Kakumee was squatting on his sleeping robes in the gloom of the tent. When at last he spoke, his head was turned from me and his eyes fixed on a slit of white light showing along one of the seams of the tent. He spoke strongly, and savagely, of the days when his People had been happy, and many. Then he faced me.

“Now where are my People, you white man? When you went down the banks of the River of Men, did you not see my People? Did you not see the graves of the dead on every side of the land until the graves were as many as the hills that rise from the plains? And did you not listen—and hear the voices of the People, as they spoke of how it was that they died?

“Those ghosts speak much of the Kablunait, the white men, who have all things in this world, but being greedy for more, took also the deer who were our life—and gave us back only the Great Pain which sits in our chests till we die!

“You are rich! You are very rich, white man! Richer in tea, and in rifles and shells than we of the People. And yet we too are rich! Richer in graves, and in ghosts—and this is your doing.”

These were the last words I heard from the lips of the son of Ajut. And only then did I understand the full powers of the devil of Kakumee and know the immensity of the deception it had practiced upon him. I left his tent knowing what the old man himself will never know, such is the cunning of the devil who drove him: that the evils which were the gifts of the white men had been brought to the land and to the People in the body and in the mind of a man of the Ihalmiut.

14. Stone Men and Dead Men

The end of June in 1948 saw the last stragglers of the spring deer migration passing out of the Windy River country, thereby bringing Andy's caribou studies to a temporary halt. We decided to follow the deer into the northern Barrens, and our choice of a destination was Angkuni Lake.* Angkuni—the Great Lake—lies halfway down the River of Men and we chose it for two reasons. In the first place it was once the scene of the greatest deer concentrations known to the Ihalmiut, which would make it rewarding for Andy. And in the second place it lies in the very heart of the interior plains and thus it offered us an excellent base from which I could continue my investigations into the history of the inland people.

Tyrrell was the first white man to reach Angkuni, and since his visit in 1894 it has been seen by only two or three other white men. Very little of its contorted shoreline has been mapped and no one knows the lake's true extent, though I should think it must be at least forty miles in length.

When Tyrrell passed across the lake he saw, but did not visit, one camp which may have held two hundred Eskimos—and this was only one of many camps along the bays and inlets. From stories told to me by Hekwaw and Ohoto I knew that somewhere near the turn of the century Angkuni had probably been the site of the largest Eskimo encampments ever known throughout the arctic regions. Those camps are all empty now and no man lives beside Angkuni's shores, but I hoped a visit to the lake might still reveal the answers to many unsolved riddles about the old days of the People.

With much hesitation Ohoto had agreed to accompany us as guide, but his emotions as he contemplated the trip were mixed. In more than thirty years no Ihalmio had visited the Great Lake nor had anyone dared travel down the river, for these waters no longer knew the tents of living people. Only shallow graves and restless spirits remained along their shores. Ohoto and his dead father, Elaitutna, had been born in one of the largest camps of the Angkuni group and so the land was dear to Ohoto's youth and he felt drawn to it, though at the same time he was repelled by his fears of a dead land and its unseen inhabitants.

It would be tedious to write at length about the river above the Great Lake, for graves, rapids and falls are all of a kind, even when they stretch for two hundred miles. I shall begin the story of our visit to Angkuni on the day when our canoe came in sight of the famous hill called Kinetua, which guards the western entry to the lake. Ohoto was in the bow that day and when he identified the looming majesty of the great hill we knew we had achieved our goal, in space at least. We bore down on Kinetua and the river flung us angrily from side to side in a rocky gorge before it gave up the war it had waged against us and the mutter of its tormented waters ceased.

The current sank away and dissipated its strength in the still waters of Kinetua Bay. Kinetua itself hung over us and cut off the sinking sun so that we moved in shadow, although on the distant north shore the sun still flung a clear yellow light over the old encampments of the
Kinetuamiut
—as the Angkuni group of the Ihalmiut had been called. The long hills rolled up green from Angkuni Lake, which stretched to the horizon ahead of us. The canoe drifted idly on still waters and nothing in all that vast world moved or lived save we three intruders and a white-winged gull. The Kinetuamiut were gone; the living men were gone; and yet the land was not quite so deserted as it seemed.

We landed at the foot of Kinetua and climbed its receding slopes until we stood on the bank of the mounded giant. From the crest we looked far out over the sodden muskegs; past ridges, eskers and little lakelets, and as far as the most distant glitter of the Great Lake's southern bays. We looked out over a dead land—but not a deserted one, for our eyes quickly discovered the shapes of men standing in monumental immobility on every side of us.

They were men. But men of stone! Insensate little pillars of flat rocks piled precariously atop each other, they stood on every hill, by every lake and river, as they have stood throughout the long ages of the People who created them and called them
Inukshuk
(semblance of men). They are such puny monuments, these lone inhabitants of emptiness, it seems inevitable that they must topple into the anonymity of the rocky slopes from which they sprang. And yet they will not fall. They stand immutable, contemptuous of the winter gales and of the passing years, imbued with an essential quality that belies their faceless forms and gives to them more than a semblance of reality as men. More real, more vital, are these shapeless things than the cold-eyed statues of our great museums. This is because they were not built to keep some memory green, nor to express the hidden passions of a sculptor's hands. The Inukshuk have being because they were created as the guardians of living men against a loneliness which is immeasurable.

When the first man came this way, restlessly probing into unknown lands, he paused upon some hill before he ventured further into the obscurity ahead, and here he raised the figure of an Inukshuk. Then, as he went forward into the boundless distances, he retained a fragile link with his familiar world as long as he could still discern the dwindling figure of the man of stone. Before it disappeared behind him, the traveler paused to build another Inukshuk, and so another and another, until his journey ended and he turned back, or until he no longer needed the stone men to bind him to reality and life. The Inukshuk are not signposts, just simple landmarks as most white men have thought. They are—or were—the guardians who stolidly resisted the impalpable menace of space uncircumscribed, which can unhinge the finite minds of men. From the crest of Kinetua we looked out and saw these lifeless beings and were comforted to see them standing there.

For a long time we three were silent as we gazed out over the Angkuni hills studded with their motionless sentinels. The light was going and the bay lay motionless below us when at last Ohoto broke into our thoughts.

“This is the place,” he said. “Here stood my father's camp—and it will not be strange if he should come to me and if I again hear his voice that has been silent for two winters past.”

It was a true prophecy he made, but on that evening Andy and I paid it little heed. Descending the hill then, we paddled across the bay of Kinetua and pitched our tents on a sloping shelf along the northern shore. Andy and I were very tired, but there was little rest for us that night. We lay sleepless for hours, listening to the voice of Ohoto as he sat in the darkness outside and chanted the thin, lugubrious songs which are sung only for dead ears.

In the morning our little travel tents were filled with a fresh and boisterous breeze. The mood of the previous night had vanished. I stood outside the tent and looked at the spacious and aloof beauty of the country as it lay revealed under a brilliant sun. Northward the great bare hills rolled into a white sky only faintly touched with an ephemeral blue. The soft and flowing colors of the lichens and the grassy swales seemed to assume the properties of motion as the wind hurled itself up the valleys and over the far crests. The wind brought a measure of life to a lifeless land; and while the wind blew, the loneliness was held at bay.

Below our camp the clear waters of Angkuni flickered under the wind's touch as the seas built up and drove toward a dim line of ridges on the southern shore. At our feet was the broad low path of a huge isthmus cutting across the lake to lose itself in the bright distance.

There were no trees nor other ragged, upward shapes to break the smooth contours of the land—the swollen continuity of curving space. But hidden in some favored valleys were a few tiny “forests,” each consisting of a dozen or so scrawny spruces, none of which stood more than a yard high. Poor, ugly little things, they thrust their heads upward until they were on a level with the shoulders of the shallow valleys, then they were caught and cut down by the scythe of the winds. Held down by that invisible barrier of air they spread outward, growing like plants beneath a pane of glass.

The wind is master in that land, but we blessed it for its simple presence since while it blew, the haze of flies was held impotent in the shelter of the lichens. Breakfast was mercifully free of flies on our first day at Angkuni, and afterwards we took advantage of the wind's kindness and went exploring. Ohoto was the first to leave the camp and he went inland, ostensibly to scan the wastes for signs of deer. I watched him idly as he grew smaller in the distance and then I saw him pause. Lifting my binoculars I watched while he heaped up a little pile of rocks upon a ridge. In a few moments it was done and Ohoto passed out of sight over the rise, leaving yet another Inukshuk to stand against the Barrens' sky.

We had brought with us a copy of Tyrrell's sketch map, the only existing map of Angkuni, and while Andy went to examine and measure the antlers of some long-dead deer, I set off along the shore of Kinetua Bay to try to find the Eskimo campsites Tyrrell had seen and recorded fifty years before. Half a mile away I came to a rocky point which was labeled “Eneetah's Camp” on Tyrrell's map. Little triangles printed on the sheet indicated that three tents had stood here in Tyrrell's time.

I cast about and at last came upon three circles of boulders, half hidden in the moss and lichens. I walked into the center of one of these tent rings, for such they were, and found the hearth and in it the blackened embers of a fire which looked to be so recent it startled me. For a brief moment I almost believed this camp had been deserted only yesterday and that its owners might return at any moment. I raised my eyes and searched the glittering surface of the water, but nothing moved and the illusion passed.

Only then did I remember that decay and rot are almost strangers to the Barrenlands. In this world of clean sun and wind both wood and things of bone seem to possess a strange immortality so that after centuries they still retain the form they had when they were first brought to rest amongst the boulder heaps. I particularly remembered finding a roll of birchbark some three hundred miles north of the forests where the last birch trees grow. That bark, intended for the repair of some Indian canoe, had faced the hunger of the years for at least three generations, and when I found it, it was still sound and untouched by rot. This relative absence of decay is an important thing to men who are driven to pry into times long past. The tent- and igloo-dwelling Barrens peoples left little enough to mark their passing, but because of this victory of matter over dissolution, what little did remain has been miraculously preserved to tell its tale with a clear tongue.

Examining Eneetah's camp more closely, I came upon part of a human skull lying in a little bed of dark, coarse hair which had once cushioned the skull from snow and sun, and which now cushioned it against the weight of years. There was no grave nearby and so the skull suggested that when death came to this camp he took all men, leaving none to obey the law which says men must have a sufficient burial. There was further evidence of sudden tragedy, for near at hand were the precious poles which had once held up the tents. The tents themselves had long since vanished into the bellies of mice and wolverines, but the poles remained; and tent poles in that land of “little sticks” are not abandoned unless no man still lives to use them any longer.

The thick moss within the boulder rings veiled other things as well: a copper fishhook, a ladle of muskox horn—and a wooden spool which had once held white man's thread. The spool alone was of our time, and may have been one of the gifts Tyrrell left with the people whose fleets of kayaks welcomed him under Kinetua. All of these things that I had found, mute in themselves, created voices in my mind. They told me that death had struck Eneetah's camp after its first visit by a white man, but before the goods of traders became common in the land. The sun-whitened cylinder of wood, and the fragments of tools, told me who Eneetah's killer was, for I knew that the Great Pain of Kakumee's bringing had come into the land less than two decades after Tyrrell—and before the Innuit met the traders on the borders of the Barrens.

I left Eneetah's camp and walked westward along the shore, passing rows of miniature Inukshuk set up by children at their play—pathetic little products of dead hands. After a time I came to a shallow inlet backed by a massive cliff and in this sheltered place I found a soft green swale running down to the only sand beach I saw on the Great Lake. It was an oasis; a warm and gentle place, and on that grassy meadow I found the tent rings of a mighty camp.

There were perhaps thirty rings scattered here and there and at least eighteen of these had been in use when last the site was occupied by man. But like Eneetah's place, this site had also been deserted suddenly. In and around the rings I found the tools of Ohoto's people. Here was a wooden
tuglee
from a woman's hair—this precious ornament discarded in the moss. There lay a section of a bow with a good spring still retained in its ancient fibers. Nearby was a stone meat cache filled with the bones and hair of many deer which had been left to rot away, unused. Down by the sandy shore immense square blocks of stone had been upended to form winter resting places for kayaks where they would be secure from the ever-hungry dogs. No dogs had found them—but time had taken them instead. The frail bones of the little vessels were complete and only the skin coverings had vanished, leaving the naked frames to look like the skeletons of slim and graceful beasts, denuded of all flesh.