People of the Deer (28 page)

The hypnotic atmosphere seemed to transform all our efforts into a nebulous and ever-changing dream. Then suddenly Ohoto pointed into the waters beneath us.

“Kuwee!”
he cried. “Here flows a little river!”

With some sense unknown to us, he had detected the invisible presence of a slight current in the bay. At his direction, we turned the canoe toward the shimmering and elusive shore. We closed in on the land and it resolved itself into a contorted jumble of smashed rocks. We let the canoe drift. Then, when we were so close we could have touched the boulders with a paddle, we heard the stream for which we were seeking.

It was hardly a river, this secret water flashing momentarily against the lake before losing itself in the still depths. Yet Kuwee, as Ohoto named it, seemed a friendly and delightful being. It ran from the northwest, out of the heartland of the Barrens where no white man had ever traveled, and it ran out of the direction from which the deer should come. Because of these things and because we hoped for fish under its rapids, we began the ascent of Kuwee and left Angkuni behind.

Kuwee had little depth. Like most Barrens rivers it simply ran at will over the boulder-laden land, for it had not yet dug itself a bed. We scrambled up and our progress was a constant struggle with shallow but active rapids. During the first day's travel we were plagued by a sense of frustration, for only many days of tortuous progress could tell us with certainty whether or not we were following a blind alley.

Towards evening of that day, we rounded an abrupt angle of the river and came upon two stone men by the shore. I cannot express the magnificent sensation of relief they gave us, but for the first time I felt the true power of the Inukshuk. I knew then why they had been built everywhere across the land, and I understood the mute role they played. The oppressive sense of our unimportance, and the nagging fears that we were being sucked into a dead vacuum somewhere beyond the scope of life, were banished instantly when the stone men appeared. We smiled at them, and at each other, and we waved our paddles cheerfully at those silent beings who have vital force without the gift of life.

By noon of the second day we had progressed well into the land to the west, and Kuwee was growing stronger and more clearly defined as we moved up it. This was strange, for rivers usually grow weaker as you near their headwaters. At last the little river opened into a lake and we went ashore to climb a ridge and see if we could discover the inlet to that lake.

From the ridge we saw no opening along the tenebrous line of undulating shore, but far off to the west was the minute projection of another Inukshuk upon a hill. With perfect confidence we headed into the open water and set a course for the distant stone man.

We were only a mile from shore when, with no more warning than an artillery shell is likely to give, the still lake erupted into a cataclysmic sea. The wind did not “rise,” it simply was in being! The soporific and somehow frightening calm of the preceding days was not broken, it vanished instantly. No clouds showed anywhere upon the unchanged sky and yet from somewhere, as if generated on the exact spot where the canoe was moving, a wind that was almost a hurricane was born.

The lake was shallow, and in a minute it had been whipped to white-tipped breakers which lifted us, then flung us down again with calculated savagery. Ohoto worked frantically with the teapot to bail out the solid sheets of spray, while Andy and I drove the furiously active craft toward the nearest shore.

There was an unconcealed and bitter animosity about that wind which brought a greater terror than the elements had ever instilled in me before. It lay, I think, in the unexpected nature of the attack, whose unprovoked violence had come upon us so quickly that the mind hardly grasped its reality until the storm was threatening to sink us. We survived it, but I never again walked the Barrens, or paddled a canoe upon the lakes and rivers of the plains, without a sort of Ancient Mariner complex, peering back over my shoulder as it were, so that the unseeable and vindictive presence would not again take me so nakedly unaware.

We made the shelter of a reef, and here the canoe pounded viciously until the wind vanished as inexplicably as it had risen. Then we scuttled feverishly along the shore, hugging the coastal rocks as a rat hugs the walls of a broad room.

For five more days we traveled up the river, and where the falls were too angry we portaged our gear over the flat, sodden world around us. The hills and ridges were all gone, sunken into a morass so that only their black spines remained in sight, like buffaloes wallowing in a swamp. Water seemed to have risen up through the earth's crust to drown the country in one great, quaking bog. It was no place for men, but it was built to order for the flies, and these rose to a crescendo of hungry activity so that they crawled over our bodies like a living cloth.

At every rapid Ohoto showed his skill as a fisherman, using a short length of twine and a hook baited with a bit of shiny tin. Standing on a rock near the foot of the rapid, he whirled the hook about his head, let it fly into the deepest pool, and with clockwork regularity hauled out the great red-fleshed lake trout. At night we sat about the fire—when we could find fuel enough to build one—and ate the boiled heads of the trout. Nor were we too delicate to eat the firm red meat raw when no fire could be had. Our slim rations were almost gone, so we gorged on fish. But though we consumed tremendous quantities, we seemed to extract no stamina, no strength and staying power from this food. It was a firsthand demonstration of the inability of fish to meet the dietary needs of men in the arctic plains.

On the fifth day we came upon a low-lying point that almost bisected a little lake on the river's course. There we found a tent ring, the remnants of another camp of bygone men. But this ring was very small and not quite round. Even more baffling were the nearby ribs of a boat, which were much more like those of our canoe than like a kayak's.

Ohoto muttered, “Indians camped here. See—here is their
umiak,
their canoe!”

It was almost incredible that forest Indians could have found their way through the hostile lands of the Innuit to such a distance. But Ohoto was right, for this was indeed an ancient camp of the Idthen Eldeli, built in the days when those Eaters of the Deer used to follow the great herds northward even as we were following them now. For us it was a heartening find. That camp, and the Inukshuk we had seen earlier, made it certain that Kuwee must lead to some major river course, or lake, where the deer might be expected. Yet it was also a mystifying find and my imagination dwelt on those distant days when the birch canoes of the Idthen Eldeli penetrated the Barrenlands and when butchery and massacres were known on many lakes and rivers.

Kuwee left the little lake and pointed to the north. Another day, and we heard the heavy, sullen roar of a big rapids, and went ashore to have a look before proceeding into the maelstrom.

Once on the high bank of the shore, and raised from the downward-sloping surface of the river, we saw stretching to the horizon on the west the clear, livid blue of open water under a blazing sun. Here was a vast unnamed and unmapped lake that no white man had ever looked upon before. This lake, whose western shores lay below the line of the horizon, was an irresistible magnet to our restless curiosity. Where it should have shown upon the maps there was nothing but blank white paper. The desire to sketch in a crude black outline on that virginal expanse of map was, I suppose, the essence of the desire which makes most men yearn to push beyond known limits, whether in the flesh or in the mind.

But Ohoto did not share our desire. For a long time he stared moodily out over the gleaming waters. When at last he spoke, it was to show the first signs of fear we had seen in him.

“It would be well if we turned back,” he said. “Better to camp among the dead we know, than venture into this place where men have never been!”

We questioned him and discovered that he had no knowledge of this place where we now stood. Ohoto's fears were natural enough, yet he stifled them when we insisted on pushing forward, and when we reminded him of the friendly presence of the Inukshuk. But before we climbed into the canoe, after portaging around the rapids to the lake's ragged shore, Ohoto stopped to gather a handful of small pebbles. Once in the canoe, he tied these little stones together with a length of rawhide line. We paddled out over the translucent waters and when the bottom of the lake had dropped and disappeared from sight, Ohoto carefully slid his string of pebbles overboard and let them go, soundlessly, into the deep waters.

It was his gesture of appeasement toward the unknown beings who might lie hidden under the glaring surface of the lake.

16. Ghosts, Devils and Spirits

It is time now to speak about the ghosts and devils who share the Barrens with the People and the deer, for in the days which followed the discovery of the nameless lake, these things loomed large in our experiences.

In the world of the Ihalmiut, the Law governs both man's social and his spiritual life, and applies with equal force not only to the absolute realities but to the abstractions of the supernatural. There is but one Law for man and for the spectral entities whose name is legion. These “other beings” are so numerous and have such varied forms that the Ihalmiut do not know them all by name or even by description, and they can hardly gauge the full potentialities of those they know. It follows therefore that a man must be exceedingly careful to observe the most trivial instructions of the Law which can alone protect him from both the known and the unknowable.

It was through the fine mesh of the Law of Life that I saw and came to have a limited understanding of the hierarchy of the Barrens' demiworld. Kakumee was my principal instructor and he knew whereof he spoke, for he was closely in league with many ghosts. He showed no reluctance in discussing these things with me, nor did I encounter that reluctance among any of the People, perhaps because they have not yet heard that the beliefs are abhorrent to white men, and must be hidden from us.

At the peak of the hierarchy of spiritual beings stand those elemental forces of nature which have no concrete form. At their head is Kaila, the god of weather and of the sky. Kaila is the creator and thus the paramount godhead of the People. He is aloof, as the mightiest deity should be, and man is no more than dust under his feet. He demands neither abasement nor worship from those he has created. But Kaila is a just god, for he is all things brought about by the powers of nature, and nature, who is completely impartial, cannot be unjust.

It is permissible to appeal to Kaila, yet there is no implicit belief that Kaila will hear or respond to prayers couched in the midge-like voices of men. This quality of impersonality, of detachment, in this god of the Ihalmiut strengthens the majesty of his power. Kaila is no simple creation of men's imaginations shackled to the whims and fancies of human minds. Kaila, to the People, is an essence. Kaila is not spoken of with fear, nor yet with love. Kaila
is.
That is enough. What man may do or not do is of no more direct concern to Kaila than the comings and goings of ants under the moss. Kaila is not a moral force, because the Ihalmiut have no need of a spiritual magistrate to administer the moral law. Kaila is essential power. He is the wind over the plains; he is the sky and the flickering lights of the sky. Kaila is the power in running water and in the motion of falling snow. He is nothing—he is all things.

The amorphous quality of Kaila makes it difficult for an outlander to understand the Ihalmiut's real concept of their god, but the lesser deities associated with Kaila are more readily comprehensible. Of these, the most important are Hekenjuk the sun, and Taktik the moon. Both are real in the same sense that the world is real, and it has happened that shamans in trances have visited Taktik and found themselves in a land not unlike the Barrens.

However, though they have a concrete existence, both Taktik and Hekenjuk exist also as primeval forces which are manifestations of Kaila. This dual concept allows for the parable of Hekenjuk being released from his imprisonment deep in the bowels of the earth by Amow the wolf; and this parable is no more difficult to reconcile with modern religious thought than is the parable of Adam and Eve. In fact, most of the spiritual beliefs dredged up by anthropologists from the folklore of native peoples are nothing
more
than parables. This point is worth remembering when we tend to pass superficial judgments on the religions of native races.

The demiworld of spirits, ghosts and devils is much easier to understand. These spirit beings are either devoted to the cause of good or evil or to an admixture of the two. For the sake of clarity I have divided them quite arbitrarily into three groups. The first of these, the supernatural entities who devote themselves to evil, are fantastic and often horrible apparitions, which are in some ways no more than elaborations of the ultimate evil in man or the ultimate destructive power in animals. Those with a human form kill by human means, but those that resemble animals destroy by means of teeth and talons.

Of those evil spirits the foremost is Paija, an immense female devil. She is a giantess who has but a single leg, springing from her generative organs, and who is clothed only in flowing black hair. Paija stalks abroad in the winter nights, and her single track is sometimes found in the new snow, an immense, twisted impression of a human foot.

No man can tell you much of Paija, except from hearsay, for to see Paija is to die with the sight of her frozen in the mind, forever beyond the reach of words. I once heard of a man called Jatu who lived near the Hudson Bay coast and who met Paija. One winter night he was coming home from his trap line, a blizzard blowing in his face. The swirling clouds of gray snow were like shadows seen by the light of a misted moon on a black night. Jatu had reached his igloo and was pulling up to a halt when those of his family who were inside the snow house heard him scream above the whine of the wind. He cried out a single word before his screams ended, and that word was “Paija!”

It was hours before anyone dared venture out to see what had happened. Then a brother of Jatu, who wore an amulet belt and was something of a shaman, took his spear and went out into the night. He found Jatu standing by his sled. The snow was drifting steadily so that it had already risen above Jatu's knees—and he was dead. Frozen solidly there, yet he still stood and his open eyes stared into the smoke of the drifts—and in his eyes was the image of Paija. So the brother of Jatu came as close as any man ever has to seeing Paija and remaining alive, and he saw only the horror reflected in the eyes of the dead man in the snow.

This is a well-known story, and both Jatu and his brother were well-known men along the river where I heard this tale.

Paija is the most feared of all devils, yet she is but one of many. Another of these unpleasant beings is a troll with a huge and hairless belly which drags on the ground. The tips of this devil's fingers are armed with wicked knives which grow from the flesh. He is said to lie in wait for men in the high hills of the land and to tear the flesh from the body of a victim with such exquisite deliberation that the victim lives for many hours.

Another, called Wenigo, is a notorious cannibal who haunts the forests. Wenigo is also known to the northern Indians and he is the most feared spirit in their land, where he is called Wendigo. There is no doubt that these two devils are one and the same, and this is very interesting, for it illustrates one of many affinities between the culture of the Indians and the Ihalmiut, who are blood enemies of each other.

These three unpleasant demons, like dozens of others in this group, serve a useful purpose. Wenigo was a very powerful influence in dissuading the Ihalmiut from venturing deeply into the timbered areas, where they might have been massacred by the Idthen Eldeli. Paija keeps men from making unnecessary journeys in the winter darkness, when the blizzards are awake, and that is a good thing, for many men have not returned from such dangerous journeys. As for the troll of the hills, he too acts as a deterrent to those who would try to penetrate the dangerous rock heaps where he lives.

His value was demonstrated to me once when I took Ootek with me for a trip into the Ghost Hills near Windy Bay. Ootek was loath to go, but rather than admit his fear he came along. We made progress only with the most heartbreaking efforts, for the overburden of immense glacial rocks was so heavy that horizontal travel was worse than mountain climbing. We leaped from rock to rock, and even with rubber-soled boots I took several painful tumbles. Ootek had deerskin kamiks on his feet which gave no grip at all on the smooth and moss-encrusted stone. After two hours, in which we had gone only three miles, Ootek slipped and caught his leg between two rocks.

He did not cry out with the pain, but tears were in his eyes when I reached him and he could hardly bear to stand. With Ootek limping painfully, supporting himself with a rifle for a crutch, it took us seven hours to retrace our path. Had he been alone, Ootek would still be in that vicious labyrinth of shattered rocks, and the troll might well have claimed another victim. As it was, and with all the help I could give him, he barely made the shore of Windy River without collapsing. And all he was suffering from was a badly bruised ankle!

Whether they exist or not—and I will not argue the point—the demons
do
represent manifestations of real and potential evils, and so they are not without value.

The second of my arbitrary groups includes those unpredictable spirits who may be benevolent, neutral, or actively evil—more or less as the mood strikes them. Of these, the most interesting is Apopa. Apopa is the Puck of the Barrens, a little dwarf devil shaped like a man, but grossly deformed. He plays malicious tricks on the People, but not all of his trickery is completely objectionable and so the Ihalmiut regard him with tolerance unless he carries his jokes a little too far.

The trick Apopa played on me is still something of a puzzle.

One afternoon in the fall of my second year in the country, Andy and I were sitting quietly in the cabin at Windy Bay, drinking tea and chatting. Then without warning the little shack was violently shaken, much as a rat is shaken in the jaws of an angry dog. We both jumped to our feet and rushed out of doors, certain an earthquake had struck us. But as we stood on the bank of the river, we could see nothing amiss. A small herd of deer rested contentedly by the far shore, and the September day was drowsy and quiet.

Baffled and a little uneasy, we went back to our tea. But we had barely seated ourselves when the shaking was repeated! Tin mugs bounced off the table and stretching-boards fell with a great clatter from the rafters. This time we were thoroughly excited. Once again we ran outside, and again we could find nothing to explain the sudden vibrations in the cabin.

Some Ihalmiut who had come down for a visit were camped near at hand, and in search of an explanation of the strange tremors I walked up to their tents and described what had happened. They looked at me quite blankly, and showed no signs of comprehension. In some exasperation I asked if they had not felt the vibrations too, and I even suggested that they were playing a trick on the white men. They only looked more puzzled than ever. Then Ohoto brightened a little.

“Kakumee is camped just over the hill,” he said. “Perhaps he will know what happened, for it sounds like the work of a devil.”

I went on to Kakumee's tent, and when I put my question to him he answered at once—almost as if he had been expecting my visit and knew its reason.

“It was Apopa,” he told me. “Apopa—the mischievous one. He flew over this place, for I saw the air shake as he passed, and so I knew he was near. No doubt he glanced down at your igloo and saw the two Kablunait drinking their tea. Apopa would laugh to see such a ludicrous thing, for his sense of humor is keen. So you see, when he laughed he shook the walls and the floor, and that was what you felt.”

That was that. The matter was settled, and the Innuit paid no more attention to it, except to chuckle a little at the exquisite sense of humor of Apopa, who was so uproariously amused by the mere sight of white men. Well, I suppose that Apopa too has his value, for a sense of humor is a hard thing to retain in that land.

Apart from Apopa and one or two other particular devils, there is one large group in my second category of spirits that can be collectively referred to as the
Inua.
They comprise not only the actual ghosts of dead men but also, to some extent, the spirits of such inanimate objects as rivers, rocks and plants. The Inua come in two sizes:
Inua mikikuni,
the little ghosts; and
Inua angkuni,
the great ghosts. Inua of both sizes vary from active hostility to active benevolence toward men. The dangerous Inua are those who come from the land of the dead, because of failure to give them proper burial, because of some crime they have done, or because of evil which was in their hearts when they died. These spirits are not content to remain in the land of the dead. Instead they return, to pass through the lands of the living, and they may come in the actual guise of a man. They are fond of the rough hill country, and so are another good reason for giving the rocky hills a wide berth. However, they do not restrict themselves to the hills, but may come wandering over the plains in search of a living being whom, by treachery or through terror, they can possess and thus manage to return fully into the land of the living.

One of my most vivid experiences in the Barrens was when an
Ino
—the singular of
Inua
—chose to attack my song-cousin, Ootek. Here is the story just as it happened. I did not see the Ino myself; nevertheless I am convinced that as far as Ootek was concerned, this Ino existed in an unpleasantly material sense.