People of the Deer (16 page)

I had a wild thought that I should take Miki's rifle and shoot this man, so we could take what we needed out of his little log store. But the thought was born only in the memory of the boy Elaitutna, who was dead now, whether he still breathed or not. The thought flickered and passed. And we three turned away and went back to the west to the camps of those whose lives were in our hands.

There were no words between us—all words were dead. We ate none of the flour, and so in our weakness it took us four days to return, and I crawled the last little way to the fire.

Elaitutna, my father, was finished. He was still sitting by the door of the shelter, but frozen and stiff with his eyes closed as they had been at the end of his life. I was afraid Nanuk would speak and demand that we eat the flesh of the dead, but she was too weak to speak and the body of my father sat there where it was.

The flour we brought from the white man was enough for a single small meal for each one who lived in the camp. Many could not retain the raw flour, but it did not matter for it could only hold off the devils of death for a day.

In the tent of Owliktuk, his wife held a dead child to her breasts, and this child was Oktilohok. Owliktuk could not make her release it, so it too stayed in the tent.

So also in the tent of Ootek and Howmik. One child lay dead on a scrap of deerhide, the other near death in her womb.

Then it was my turn to mourn for the death of a child. Elaitutna did not wake to my calling, and his small hands were frozen by the frost which is colder than ice. After him Aljut, the son of my wife, died and was gone. Death meant nothing to us in that place. There was no weeping, and no woman cried out the laments of the dead. Death meant nothing to us in that place...

But those were terrible days, days I do not wish to remember. Let them be forgotten in your ears and your heart. I will say nothing more of that time.

Two days after our return from the place of the white man, Tuktu came at last and so the rest of us lived. It was the deer in the end, the deer who alone in all of the world know the needs of the People, who took pity on us in our camp by the edge of the forest when there was no pity in all of our land. Tuktoriak—the Spirit who lives in the deer—sent a great buck into our camp and made him stand so close and so foolishly by the fire of Ootek, that Ootek was able to kill the deer with the tiny bullets of Miki's rifle.

That was in the spring of the year. Late in the spring we returned to Ootek Kumanik, there to find the wolverine-scattered bones of Angleyalak, his wife and his daughter. These bones we buried, as we had buried our dead in the foreign lands of the forest. But for a long time we thought the devils had taken Kunee and Anoteelik and we were very glad in our hearts when we heard they were safe.

So ends Ohoto's memory of the spring of the year 1947—a year that belongs to the present—a year that took twelve lives from the twoscore people who were the last survivors of the thousands of men who roamed the plains country only a few decades ago.

9. These Are Their Days

The present still holds varying moods for the Ihalmiut, and many are pleasant. These are the moods the people exploit and enjoy, and as for the others—they are put out of mind in the times when their presence is not felt in the flesh.

One day in the fall there was a frost at Windy Cabin, and I began to look over my supplies of winter clothing. I had checked them over rather carefully before Andy and I left Churchill, but that had been several months earlier, and since that time I had looked at many things, and my eyes were beginning to see with the vision of my foster folk. Now I looked again at my long woolly underwear, three or four thick woolen sweaters, and my heavy blanket capote. These things no longer seemed to offer the warmth and protection for which they were intended.

After a while I put them all back in a box and hunted up Ootek, my song-cousin.

“Nipello aqako!”
Ootek remarked as I came up to him. Snow tomorrow! Yes, I believed him, and it was that forthcoming snow which had brought me to him. It was a delicate problem. I did not like to ask Ootek outright for skin clothes for he would probably have disrobed on the spot and, while we
were
song-cousins, my intimacy with the man had not extended to the point where I wanted to wear the clothes he had been living in all summer. I tried to be subtle.

“Ootek,” I said, “I am told your mother is the finest maker of clothes in all the camps. Is that so?”

Ootek did not take the bait. His natural modesty evidently extended to the work of his mother as well. He looked at me sadly.

“The old woman makes clothes that would fit well on a muskox! Who told you this monstrous lie?”

I tried a different tack. “The snow will be here tomorrow, just as you say,” I told him. “And that may be all right for you—but we poor white men who do not know how to dress in this land will probably freeze.” I shivered with appropriate emphasis, and glanced at Ootek to see how he was taking it all.

He was beaming. The text of his reply cannot be quoted, but the gist of it was that I had no need to fear from the cold, for Howmik, his wife, would be delighted to take care of the problem, and that care did not entail the making of clothes.

This time I nearly gave up; but I decided on a last try. I pulled out a plug of tobacco and said bluntly:

“How many plugs for a suit of new winter furs?”

I expected Ootek to look hurt, but he beamed even more and told me the clothes would be ready in two weeks if the snow came that night. (Work on winter clothes may not be begun until after the first snow has fallen.) Two plugs of tobacco would be about right, and they would go to his mother, the one who made clothes which might fit a muskox but hardly a man. Ootek measured me on the spot, taking a length of rawhide line and, with it, measuring waist, height and arms. For each measurement he tied a knot in the cord, and when he was through, we set off for his camp to put in the order.

Fall days in the camp under the Little Hills were short, for the sun was losing its place in the sky as winter approached. At Ootek's camp the white pavement of ancient deer bones was carpeted with the fall-killed hides of buck deer. Perhaps fifty of these were staked out or held stretched with stones at their edges, and the bluish tint of fresh skins was fading into the gray-white of dried hides. The scars of warble flies dotted the skins like smallpox eruptions, but the little pockets of larvae which began to swell in the fall had been carefully scraped away along with the remnants of fat and tissue. Howmik came from her tent and selected one of the hides which was nearly dry. She examined it with great care, testing the hair to make sure it was firm in the skin. Then she took it back to the tent and squatting by the smoke of the fire made ready to tan it. The tanning of hide for clothes is simple. All that Howmik had to do with the stiff, untreated skin was to work it between her hard hands until it grew soft. Then it could be cut to the pattern by Ootek's mother and made part of a new winter outfit.

All tanning is not quite so simple. The boots of the People must be made of caribou hide, and for boots, the hide from the neck of the buck deer is the thickest and best. This hide must be soaked in water for a long time until the hair rots from the skin and the skin itself can be scraped with the curved woman's knife until it is as thin as good parchment. For the sole of the boot the skin from the forehead of the deer is the toughest, though it is not nearly so tough as the sealskin soles the coast people use.

Boots and clothes are still sewn with the fine sinews which lie in a broad band along the back of the deer, and Howmik still does her sewing with delicate needles carved and filed from the shoulder blades of the deer. Her stitching is a miracle to behold. In order that the summer boots shall be waterproof, she must make the seams perfectly tight solely by virtue of her sewing. The stitches are often so fine they cannot be counted at all with the naked eye, and how Howmik makes them is something that no man can say.

Not all boots are made in the same manner as these summer ones I have mentioned. For winter use there are boots made with fur soles turned down so that a man will find a good grip on the ice. There are others fur-lined throughout, and there are the fine and delicate slippers of fawn or of hare to wear next to the skin.

All this cleaning and preparing of hides, this making of boots and of clothes, is the work of the women; and in its season is the work of their days. I have spoken only of a few of the things they must make. The full list is almost endless. Bags, buckets, ornaments, clothing, tents, kayak covers and robes are but a few of the many things the woman must make from Tuktu the deer. There is no lack of work to make the days full when the deer hides are prime.

It was old Kala, Ootek's mother, who made my suit of furs, my “winter house.” And she made them without seeing me from the time she began until she was done. Yet when Ootek brought them to me, they fitted well. At two plugs of tobacco, she did not overcharge, for to show me her skill, she had inserted pure white inserts of belly skin over the whole of the outside parka, in a pattern which combined grace and beauty with the most remarkable blending of fur.

The days in the camp of Ootek held room for a great many skills as fine as those displayed by old Kala. The family was a well-regulated one and work did not seem a burden even to those who had the most to do. For one thing, it was the particular task of Kala, as the eldest one of the family, to keep the cook fire in fuel. Daily the old woman walked out from the camps, and sometimes her search took her ten miles over the land before she found a willow thicket which met with her needs. Then she would cut, and tie up, a tremendous bundle of twigs and carry this bundle home on her back. Yet what was a twenty-mile walk for old Kala? There was plenty to enjoy on the way. There—a herd of fat does grazing high on the slope of a hill, fine beasts, with sleek velvet coats... Or Uh-ala, the long-tailed duck, calling its woman's gossip loudly from the edge of a pond... Perhaps Kala might flush a ptarmigan from its well-hidden nest, and the half-developed eggs made her a welcome snack during the walk.

Often, if there was no fuel close at hand, the camp's children went with her. Atnalik, the orphaned son of Ootek's sister, would carry his little toy sling, and stubbornly chase the alert birds of the ridges, the snow buntings and longspurs, and sometimes he would come proudly back to old Kala, with his tiny catch held high in his hand.

If she went alone to her search, there were memories enough to keep Kala happy. Rich memories, those of old Kala—she who had known three husbands and a dozen children in her time, had seen Tyrrell, the first white man, come to the river, and knew all the tales of three generations of men.

Kala gathered the fuel, sewed clothes for her son, kept the fires burning and, not least of her tasks, made acid comments on the way her son and his wife ran their lives. That is an old woman's privilege, one the Ihalmiut do not refuse to the old. Perhaps one day Ootek fails to bring in fresh meat when it is needed and so he must accept the tongue-lashing of this old crone. Nor will he grow angry at her, but he will laugh a little bit sheepishly, shake his head, and reply, “Mother, I shall do better tomorrow—and you shall have a fine fresh marrowbone to worry away at with your old teeth.”

In the camps of the People the days of an old woman are full—in the summer. And though she works she is not driven as old people may often be in other lands. She has her time to gossip and to visit the nearby camps and she has both the right and the freedom to speak out against the ways of her children, and of their children too, while she lives.

Well, her days are as they should be. For with the coming of winter the old woman's life is a pawn without value. If the winter be hard, and famine comes to the family, then the old one must die. It is something that all people know, but that is never spoken aloud. In summer the old ones live their lives free of much of the restraint which lies on the younger ones of the People. In winter youth may turn to age and call on it to walk into the night and never return.

For Howmik too, life can be pleasant enough. In the summer of 1947 she bore a child—Kalak—and it was a great happiness to her that this child was born. Three other children, small heaps of rocks over their bones, had not seen the end of their first year in the land. But surely Kalak would live and do well. A fine healthy child, she would eat and grow fat, for Howmik was certain that in the winter ahead there would be much good meat laid by in the caches about the camps.

There was enough for Howmik to do in the summer, and yet she had ample time for the pleasures of living. Although there was no clothing to make until fall, there were many pounds of
nipku,
dry meat, to attend to out on the hills. When the sun shone, the meat had to be turned before the flies quite possessed it, and when rain threatened, the widespread slices of meat had to be quickly gathered and stored safely away.

There were five meals a day to prepare for those of her tent and perhaps two or three visitors from the tents of Ohoto or Hekwaw—all these had to be fed. Soup three or four times a day, with plenty of fat and bone marrow melted in it, and cold roasts or boiled meat for the other two meals—this was enough to keep everyone happy.

The dogs were also in Howmik's charge during the summer. But they were light work, for there were only three of the beasts, and these had been obtained by Ootek only that spring, for none of his own dogs had survived the starvation of the previous year. These three were young dogs not yet broken to work with the sled, and so they still had the freedom of camp. Despite the trouble they made for Howmik, being great thieves, nevertheless they were never tied. The Ihalmiut look upon dogs much as they look upon people. The time of hardship and of bitter labor comes soon enough both to men and to man's beasts. The Ihalmiut say, “While they are young, while life here is easy, let them find what joys they may. Let them be as free as all young things should be.” So the dogs have no labors except when Atnalik hitches a model sled behind one or the other of them and makes the dog drag the sled in imitation of the real work it must soon learn to do.

The dogs were well fed, fat animals of infinite good nature. It was not unusual to see one of them lying on its back while the naked child, Kalak, sprawled on the dog's belly, pummeling it with small hands, or pouring fistfuls of sand and grit into the gaping red mouth. Things would soon change for these dogs, but now they lived free lives, subject only to the sibilant hiss with which Ootek warned them when they trespassed too far over the bounds.

Howmik's main labor was for the child she had borne. Each day she devoted long hours to Kalak, amusing the child, feeding her from her breasts at the first sign of hunger, bathing her with wet lumps of moss, or simply talking to her as all women talk to their young.

In the camps of the People the child is king, for childhood is short and tragedy often comes after. As it is with the dogs, so the early years of a child are made free of compulsion and of hard labors, for these years must always remain in the child's memory to alleviate the agonies which come with mature years.

It has been said by people who should know better that Eskimos treat their children well only so the children will in turn treat their parents well when old age is upon them and their time of usefulness is at an end. In point of fact, the People treat their children with great sympathy and forbearance because they know so much of humanity.

I remember once when Ootek, who had agreed to stay with us for a couple of weeks, left Windy Camp to walk sixty miles over the tundra simply to assure himself that Kalak was well and happy. Then he turned and retraced the sixty miles, arriving back at our camp five days after he left it. When he arrived back, he was contrite that he had been forced to leave Andy and me, and he apologized because he had been so weak in his concern for his child. Again, I remember one day when I was talking to him about children and I expressed surprise that no Ihalmiut child knows corporal punishment even when the provocation is great. I spoke casually, but Ootek replied with vehemence, for it seemed he was honestly puzzled that I should not know why a child is never beaten.