People of the Deer (27 page)

Amow was happy then, and cried, “Let us free the sun, for then there will be light in darkness, and I shall see to make a mighty hunt!” But Kakwik had no desire to see the wolf become a hunter of great skill, and he would not agree with the white wolf, but kicked the dirt back over the gleaming sun.

This was the beginning of the battle, but in those days all animals spoke the same tongue with man and when they fought, they fought with words alone. So Kakwik fought with the first wolf, and the sound of battle echoed over all the hills and was as loud as thunder. Amow was clever, yet Kakwik was more clever; and so at length the wolf was beaten and fled back into the cave, while Kakwik went out to hunt.

But when Kakwik was gone, Amow quickly uncovered Hekenjuk and freed him from the grip of rocks. Flaming, the sun rose to the peak of the black sky and all darkness vanished. Kakwik was filled with rage, a rage so great that even high Hekenjuk trembled; and to placate the wolverine, the sun agreed to go back into hiding for part of every day. And thus it is we have the change from night to day.

With the coming of the sun, the seasons came, and now in the summer, when the hunting is not hard, the wolf grows strong and so the days are longer. But in winter, when the hunting of the deer is hard, Kakwik is stronger and the sun must hide, so that the days then are short.

Now when Kaila saw that Hekenjuk the sun had been freed without his knowledge he was mightily enraged. His lightning shattered the sky, and his storms blew over the breadth of the land. The skies grew as angry as foam at the foot of the rapids, and Nipello the rain first fell over the world. So also came Aput and Hiko, the snow and ice, and also the blizzards which live in the long winter nights.

And because of these things, Kaila is known to this day as the God of All Weather. Even today his anger lives, and our world is only a toy for his anger to crush.

Ohoto paused again. In the evening sky the dark rage of Kaila was massing and the sun was shrinking before it. Flames roared down from the zenith, to lose themselves in the angry black clouds which poured up from the horizon like coils of thick smoke, and spread out over the pallid face of the sky. Then somewhere in the storm-darkened hills a white wolf howled sadly, and the echoing cry wavered over the lake like the voice of the first of all wolves, bewailing the loss of the sun. The long echoes shattered and died as Ohoto once again took up his tale.

After a time the woman grew big in the belly for with the coming of Hekenjuk, the Giver of Life, the loins of the man had grown heavy with seed. The woman gave birth to her children, and these were not men as we know them—but dogs!

From her womb came forth litters of dogs. Yet in those times all things spoke the same tongue with man, and so all things were brothers, even with man, and the dogs were man's brothers too.

Now in those days the man and woman lived in a camp by a vast inland sea which lies far off to the west. But soon that camp by the sweet-water sea was filled with the children the woman endlessly bore. At last there were so many the man could not hunt for them all. He grew weary and even the woman, their mother, grew weary. So on a day she took off her deerskin boot and blew into it, and by her magic it became a great boat. Then she launched the boat on the waters of the sweet-water sea, and in it she placed most of the children she had borne. When the wind came out of the north, the woman pushed the boat free, and the wind took it southward until it was gone from her sight.

The boat sailed on into the south until it passed from the lands of our people into the deep, hidden lands where the forests cover the world. Here the boat entered the mouth of a river and ran aground on a shoal.

Many of the dogs in the boat were hungry and were sick of the water, so some of them swam to shore and entered the forests, and here they have lived ever since, for they became Itkilit—the Indian peoples.

But still the wind blew from the north and at last the boat slipped free of the shoal and drifted on to the south. How far—no one knows. When it at length came to rest, the remainder of the dogs entered into an unknown land, and here they became Kablunait—the fathers and grandfathers of you and your kind.

Not all of the dogs were sent away in that boat, for some remained in the camp by the inland sea, and these were the ones the woman favored over all of the others. After a time these became the fathers and grandfathers of me and my kind, for they were the first Innuit—the first Men.

As Ohoto finished speaking, the sullen darkness of the storm swept in over the Great Lake and the long moan of the coming wind rose above the cry of the distant wolf.

All along the stark and rocky shores which lay beneath us were the old camps of the Innuit, and they were as silent as the dead soul of the land. Dimly I saw the stone circles which marked the places of tents, with the lichens growing high amongst them. Beyond the stone rings, up on the ridges where the frost-shattered rocks of the slope stood upended like tombstones disordered by earthquakes, there were the people.

Little rock mounds rose above the stone surface like gray boils on the bones of the land. All along the darkening shores the little mounds rose. And under each of them slept a son of the woman, with the tools he had used in his life by his side.

15. From the Inland Sea

The succeeding days at Angkuni brought no sign of the deer. While we waited impatiently for their arrival, I took advantage of the windy days to explore the high plateau north of the lake, and in many places among the mounded gravel ridges I found further traces of the men who were gone. One day I picked up an oddly shaped fragment of wood, and when I asked Ohoto to identify it, he replied that it had been part of a crossbow.

Now this was a startling discovery because, as far as I knew, no Eskimo people had ever used this weapon. When I questioned him more closely, Ohoto told me that the Ihalmiut of the previous generation regularly made crossbows from the springy horn of the muskox, and used them extensively in hunting Tuktu. The remnants of the bow by Angkuni Lake were proof of the truth of his words, but to this day the Ihalmiut occasionally make crossbows of spruce for the children to use in hunting ptarmigan and small animals.

There could be no doubt that the crossbow was as old as the People, but where, I wondered, had they acquired the art of making such a weapon? Was it on the far steppes of Asia? And if so, why had the Ihalmiut retained this art, which had evidently been lost to all other Eskimo peoples?

The ancient history of the Ihalmiut is shrouded in mystery, but the legend of genesis which Ohoto told me has in it many hints about the nature of that mystery. Ohoto's curious reference to the “inland sea,” where the first woman lived, probably applies to the real inland sea we know as Great Bear Lake. There are many things in the folklore of the Ihalmiut to indicate that Great Bear was once the home of the People; and there is nothing at all to indicate that the Barrens race ever dwelt by the ocean. The whole spoken history of the Ihalmiut belongs exclusively to a people who have not the faintest folk memory of life beside the salt water. The language and customs of the inland men give further evidence of a broad and ancient split in the proto-Eskimo race, for almost all the religious and magical tabus of the Ihalmiut deal uniquely with an inland culture based solely on Tuktu the deer. The language, too, is widely divergent from that used by the sea peoples. It differs not only in minor ways, but it lacks the very words which are specifically related to knowledge of the sea.

Knud Rasmussen, leader of the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921 to 1924, who was himself half Eskimo, guessed the probable meaning of this chain of differences between the coast Eskimos and the plains dwellers. Rasmussen traveled a little way up the River of Men, from its mouth at Baker Lake, and he encountered an inlying group of former coastal Eskimos who had met and assimilated a small remnant of the inland people who had been driven north by the plague. The culture of this bastard group was predominantly coastal in folklore, though inland in practice. However, Rasmussen, who was an observant man, detected signs of an unusual antiquity of race in them which went far beyond anything to be found among other Innuit. From his brief but intense contact with this group, he concluded that they represented the last surviving link with the proto-Eskimo stock from which all modern Eskimos are descended. But Rasmussen never met the Ihalmiut, and never even suspected their existence.

Let me turn back the blank pages of a history which will never be written, and tell you how I would explain the coming of the crossbow to the great ridge beside Angkuni Lake.

In an age long forgotten, thousands of years before Christ, a new movement among the constantly shifting races of northeastern Asia brought an irresistible pressure against the men who were then living in the eastern peninsula of Siberia. The pressure was applied slowly, but it was inexorable, and the men who were to be the fathers of the Innuit were forced ever east and north. Some of them perhaps emerged on the Arctic Coast of Siberia, for there, to this day, lives a race of men, the Chukchee, who are much like our own coast Eskimos.

However, the balance of the fugitive Asians, who had continued eastward, at length found themselves hemmed in on the narrowing apex of land which is now the Chukchee Peninsula. There may well have been a complete land bridge to North America in those days, but this is of no importance, for there was certainly a chain of islands crossing the Bering Strait, and it would have been easy then, as it is now, to go from Asia to Alaska by island-hopping. The spreading pressure area in Siberia now forced the fugitives to cross the continental strait.

Probably the new land of Alaska was already occupied by the forebears of the Indians, and its coasts may even have been in the hands of the Asiatics who had earlier been forced to the Siberian coast, and who had there developed a sea culture and spread eastward. The new migrants from the west would thus have been forced to move through the interior until they found unoccupied land. Probably they worked through the Brooks Mountain barrens in northern Alaska—a devilishly inhospitable area—until they reached the true, flat Barrens, near Great Bear Lake. These rolling plains would have been like home to the wanderers, for the tundra to the north and east of Great Bear is very similar to the northern treeless plains of Siberia. On their American Barrens these peoples from the west would have found a familiar world of rocks, muskegs and lichens. And not only the land, but its beasts too would have been familiar. The white fox, the lemming and the wolf, as well as many other animals, are virtually identical in both Siberia and Northern Canada. As for Tuktu the deer—in those distant ages mighty herds of both wild and tame reindeer roamed the Asiatic plains, even as their close relatives, the caribou, roamed the Barrens of North America. Thus, an immigrant race who had lived on reindeer would find no serious difficulty in building a new life about the caribou. They would naturally use the same weapons and much the same techniques that they had learned in Asia—and the crossbow was originally an Asiatic weapon.

As they spread out from Great Bear, two new influences would have begun to make themselves felt. The caribou made their annual migrations north each spring to the Arctic Coast, and over a period of years beginning perhaps two millenniums ago, some of the inland dwellers must have reached the coast in seasonal pursuit of the migrating deer. These people could have acquired a knowledge of the sea, and perhaps developed a mixed sea-and-caribou culture such as persists to this day with the Bathurst Inlet Eskimos. Caribou provide the staff of life in summer for these people, but in winter they depend on the sea for seals and other aquatic mammals.

The second factor to disturb life about Great Bear Lake may have been of a more recent nature. It is known that, many centuries ago, centers of human population pressure developed on the prairies lying south of the Canadian forests. This pressure was exerted northward, in succeeding waves. In relatively recent times the proto-Cree Indians were pushed out of the plains and forced high up into the forests, where they in turn pressed against the south flanks of the Athapascan Indians, of which the Chipewyans are one group.

The Athapascan people were unable to stand firm against the pressure of the Crees, for they were poorly organized, or not organized at all. They could not fight except through the medium of quick raids and ambushes, and so they moved north to escape. They moved right out into the Barrens at last, and in time they suited their way of life to the deer and became almost as migratory as the deer herds themselves.

It was inevitable that they should encroach on the lands of the inland Eskimos near Great Slave Lake, and it was inevitable that blood would be shed. Samuel Hearne, writing of his search for the Coppermine River in the year 1771, tells of the massacre of an Eskimo band by Athapascans at a place now called Bloody Falls. This is a famous tale, but it was only one isolated incident in a war of attrition and of survival which must then have been very old, and which was to continue almost to the end of the nineteenth century.

As the Athapascans were unable to stand against the inroads of the Crees, so the unwarlike inland Eskimos were even less able to withstand the recurrent Indian invasions. Eventually the men of the plains were forced eastward away from the Great Freshwater Sea.

There are Ihalmiut folk memories of the trek in search of new lands where the Itkilit had not yet penetrated. Some of the fugitives, probably those who had already been to the sea in pursuit of caribou herds, seem to have fled northeastward, and it is probable that these people came to the Arctic Coast from Coronation Gulf to Chantrey Inlet. These northern fugitives also developed a new culture adapted to the demands of the sea. But the rest of the plains dwellers went east into the widening angle of the Barrens, and remained an inland people.

The sea culture came to have a complex structure, built up of many layers of change, migration and the intermixing of local groups. The original offshoots of the proto-Eskimo stock, who had learned to live from the sea, spread eastward as far as Greenland, and westward again back into Siberia. But the men who had steadfastly remained with the plains since their arrival on the continent stayed in the plains. Stubbornly they clung to the old things as they fled eastward where the depths of the Barrens are greatest. The inlanders eventually reached the spreading plains of the Keewatin Territory on the west coast of Hudson Bay, a north-south stretch of tundra vast enough so that it was at last possible to avoid the thrusts of the Indians. And in this new land, good fortune came to the fugitive descendants of the first Eskimo stock.

When white men came to the prairies and the forests of Northern Canada in force, the pressure of the Indians into the Barrens ended. With the decimation by disease (mainly smallpox) of the Idthen Eldeli about 1780, the Eskimos were able to push southward, up the River of Men, until they established their southernmost camps on the very edge of the forests. Now the entire length of Innuit Ku was theirs, and more and more camps came into being.

No one will ever know with certainty how many Innuit lived in the interior tundra plains in the good years of the early nineteenth century. There must have been more than a thousand, and perhaps twice that many in 1880, before a new evil came upon them from the South and accomplished that destruction which two millenniums had been unable to achieve.

I well remember the whitened fragments of the crossbow I found in the Angkuni hills. But at the time of its finding, the crossbow meant little to me, for it was then only another sad relic to handle and wonder about, and to put aside. We had little interest in meditating on such ancient history then, for we were becoming increasingly worried about our own immediate future. The deer still had not come and we could no longer wait for their life-giving flow into the barren hills of Angkuni. It was time we took active steps to find other food.

We tried fishing, but though we set our nets in picked places along the lakeshore, we caught nothing. And this was not only strange, but a little frightening, for all the other great lakes of the Barrens swarm with whitefish, lake trout and pike. Only Angkuni inexplicably refused to give us fish.

There remained the birds, but despite many heartbreaking hunts after ptarmigan we managed to kill only three or four in a week. Truly, the land about Angkuni was dead in every sense of the word. There was nothing alive that could be eaten; there were only eaters—the flies and ourselves.

It was then almost August, and at last we decided we would wait no longer but would set out in search of the laggard deer. Very early in the morning of a bright day when no puff of wind ruffled the stiff crests of the gray-green lichens on the hill slopes, we packed our gear into the canoe and set out to find Tuktu. And we were all glad to go, for the atmosphere of Angkuni, which had become increasingly oppressive to Andy and me, had an even more deep-seated and ominous effect on Ohoto.

We paddled westward from Kinetua Bay until our way was blocked by what seemed to be a great isthmus. After a search we came to a passage, very shallow, but with enough water to allow us to drag the canoe over the barrier and into open water beyond. At this point Tyrrell's map became useless. We could no longer identify his landmarks or his route, perhaps because we had passed through the isthmus by a different channel. Now we were off the narrow lane of known territory which Tyrrell had explored. Instead we swung to the west into another vast bay of Angkuni which Tyrrell had missed.

The sky was flawless and the sun fiercely hot. The cold waters of the lake grew misty under the pounding heat. The lowlands under the hills became an undulating phantasmagoria, as mirages flickered endlessly before us.

There was an absolute and tangible silence, broken only by the fluid dip of paddles and the gentle mutter of water underneath the bow of the canoe. The lake itself was frozen in the dead, unearthly grip of perfect calm.

Islands rose suddenly before us, like surfacing sea monsters soundlessly appearing. They lifted clear of the horizon, then floated faintly in the sky as their mirage images dissolved. The shore drew away from us and twisted so that its low, uncertain progress gave us no clear conception of whether it was one mile or ten miles away. Angkuni lost all semblance of reality and of concrete form. Its shores and islands had an amorphous quality which defied the eye and left the mind with no clear memory of what had passed astern of the canoe.