The Snow Walker (13 page)

We began our journey next day. The River was deserted in that season because the people had all come down to the coast to trade, to escape the flies and to fish. We had a good eighteen-foot canoe and the little engine, and for awhile all went well. We climbed slowly westward up the white waters. Then the engine broke down and I did not know how to fix it. The flies became a black plague such as I had never known before. The deer, which should have been travelling with their fawns in small companies all over the tundra, seemed to have vanished, and we ran out of food. We had to track the canoe up the rapids for Haluk was too young to help and Salak too pregnant and I could not portage it alone.

But I would not give up. And so we came at last to the camp where I had been born and found no sign of the grave of Kakut. I left Haluk and Salak there, scraping moss off the rocks in order to eat, and went westward on foot. I walked for three days by the banks of the River and found nothing.

When I got back to the camp Salak was sick. We turned back toward the sea, but before we came to the coast Salak gave birth to a dead child—a son it was—and she buried the body in the old way, under some rocks by the shore. I said nothing when she took tea and tobacco and wrapped these things in her own parka and placed them on top of the grave.

That journey should have ended the matter and perhaps it would have done so, but during the following winter a stranger came to the trading post. He was of the
Padliermiut
who dwell far to the northwest and seldom come out to the coast. This man had made the long journey to try and buy ammunition, for his people were out of powder and lead and were starving. His had been a very hard journey and he had been forced to kill most of his dogs. Finally he became lost in strange country and was so weak from hunger he could not go on.

Then, so he told us, he saw a mountain appear high and black on the bleak plains where, before, he had seen nothing. On its crest he saw something white. Although he was afraid, for he was sure this was a vision of the kind men see when death is upon them, he approached and saw a big white canoe. When he went near it, he found the fat carcass of an autumn-killed deer lying on the windswept ridge, its body untouched by foxes or wolves. He took that meat and fed himself and his two remaining dogs, and then followed the frozen path of the River east to the coast.

When he told his story some people talked of the helping spirits. I paid them no heed, but when the stranger spoke of the great white canoe I listened. He described where it lay and where the mountain was. Then I thought he was lying, for in my search I had walked far up the River and had seen no mountain. Even so, I was sure he had found the grave of my father and would return to it on his way back to his own people and take from it the goods which were mine.

That evening I hitched up the post dogs and set off on the stranger’s back trail. There was need for haste because the first gale would cover his tracks, so I drove the dogs and myself without mercy. Strangely, the weather stayed calm for a week and the tracks left by the sled of the stranger remained as clear as when he made them.

It was after dark when I came to the place where he said he had seen the great ridge. I waited for dawn, but before it could come a blizzard began to blow out of the north. It blew for five days, keeping me trapped in a hole I had dug in the drift, with no heat and no light and my food almost gone.

On the fifth day the wind changed and blew hard enough from the west to cover the land with ground drift so that nothing could be seen. I was driven east out of the plains as a puff of water is driven out of a whale’s head when he spouts.

When I got back to the settlement, the trader was angry because I had gone away without his permission and because the post dogs were starved and their feet cut to pieces. He called me a fool. He said the rich grave of my father did not really exist—that it was no more than a story invented to hide from me the fact that the rifles and traps, the nets and the tools of Kakut, had been stolen as soon as he died. The priest said the same thing, adding these words, “Your people are liars and thieves. They are pagans, and cannot be believed. Only when God has come into their hearts will you get back what is rightfully yours.”

I believed what the white men said and for years my heart was bitter against my own people. Whenever they came to the post I would make an opportunity to examine their gear. Although I never recognized anything which had belonged to my father, this meant to me only that the people feared discovery and had left the stolen things cached in the country when they came to the coast.

For ten more years I lived with the white men, doing their work and trying to be like them. I tried hard to forget the ways of my people. I thought each new year would be the one when I would cease to be of the Innuit and become truly one of the Kablunait—for this was what they had promised would come to pass if I remained with them and did as they wished.

But the years drew on, and Haluk was growing toward manhood, and Salak bore no more children and there was no change in my life. The people who came to trade at the post treated me distantly, as if I was one of the white men; but the white men did not treat me as one of themselves. Sometimes it seemed that Salak and Haluk and I were alone in the world, and I began to have very bad dreams. I dreamt I was alone in a deserted place where no birds sang, no wolves howled, nothing moved except me, and the sky was growing darker and darker, and I knew that when the night came it would never be followed by another dawn.

I began to grow silent and I did not laugh, and my wife was afraid for me. One day she took courage and spoke.

“My husband, let us go away from this place and return to the River and to the people. For laughter is there, and the deer walk the land, and fish swim in the waters.”

Her words were very painful to me so I took my dog whip and struck her across the face with the butt of it, and she was silent.

The months passed and my heart was rotting within me, but I would not turn my face to the River for I could not go back to the people who had stolen what was mine. Yet sometimes, after I dreamt the terrible dreams, I saw their faces in the darkness and they were smiling and their lips shaped words of welcome that I could not hear.

One day the priest came to the wooden shanty in which we lived.

“Katalak,” he said, “you have long wished to be one of us—the Kablunait—now the time is coming. When the trading ship arrives in the summer it will take your son, Haluk, away in it and he will go to the world where all men are white men. He will stay there many years and will learn many things, and when he returns to this land he will be a God-man and like a Kablunait, and so, through him, you will become one of us too.”

So he spoke, but instead of bringing me peace his words filled me with despair. Something swelled in my chest and almost throttled me. A shrieking voice swept through my mind. I picked up my snowknife, swung it high over my head and ran at him, shouting: “This you shall not do! You have had
my
life! It is enough! You will not have Haluk’s too!”

The priest fled, but in a little while he came back accompanied by the trader. Both carried rifles, and the trader pointed his rifle at my belly and told me he was going to lock me in the dark cellar where we kept the walrus meat for the dogs. He called me a murderer and told me the police would come in the summer and I would be punished for a long time. He was so angry, spit fell from his mouth. But I was even angrier. I reached again for the snowknife, and then he fired and the bullet went into me just under my ribs.

After that there is a space of many days I do not remember. When I came to myself I was in my cousin Powaktuk’s canoe. With me was my son and my wife and Powaktuk’s family. I was lying on some deerskin robes. I could only raise my head a little but I could see over the gunwales and I knew where we were. We were going up the River. I was being carried back to the place of my people.

When they saw I was awake they smiled at me and nodded their heads, and my cousin said, “It comes to pass. On the day Kakut died he spoke, saying that after his eyes became blind forever the eyes of his son would see again.”

It had taken a long time for my father’s words to begin to come true.

As we continued up the River we stopped at many camps and everywhere I was welcomed back to the land. At each camp people gave me things. Some gave me dogs, some gave me traps, one gave me a good rifle. Another gave me a sled, another a set of harness, and yet another gave Salak a fine meat tray. So it went until by the time we reached this island and prepared to make our own camp, Salak and Haluk and I wanted for nothing with which to begin the old life again.

My cousin and his family camped with us and everyone took such good care of me that I was able to walk before the snows came. The deer arrived in greater numbers than anyone could remember and we cached enough meat and fat to keep us and the dogs well fed until spring. We set our traps and there were many foxes, and life was good in this place.

One night when the blizzard thundered, I sat in my cousin’s snowhouse and spoke to him of certain things which had lain within me for a long time.

“I am a man whose liver is eaten by shame,” I told him. “Through all the years since Kakut died I believed the people had taken for themselves the things which were my father’s. Now I know they only kept those things against the day of my return. Shame has eaten my liver, yet there is one thing I would like to know. Where is Kakut’s great canoe? When the ice goes from the River I will have need of a canoe of my own.”

My cousin looked at me strangely.

“Eeee,
Katalak, the blindness has not yet left your inner eye; otherwise you would have seen that of all the things that you have in your snowhouse, none is familiar from your father’s time. You have forgotten, perhaps, that what one of us has belongs to all of us in time of need. These things are true gifts made to you in your time of need. As for the white canoe, it lies where it has lain since Kakut’s death—over his bones and over all the things he had in life and which he may have need of in the place beyond.”

When I heard this I was more ashamed than ever, yet I felt better inside myself too, for now there was no one else to blame for the mistake I had made when I abandoned my people. There was only myself left to be angry with. And why should a man be angry with himself?

Throughout that winter I slowly learned to live without anger, and it was the best winter of my life. All the people in that camp were as one, and I was again part of that one. Sometimes people from other camps came to visit with us, and sometimes we drove down the River to visit them. There were song-feasts and there was story telling and much eating of good meat. Then in the middle of the winter Salak began to grow big with child. It seemed to me that at last I had everything a man could want, and the memory of the years when I had wished to be one of the Kablunait began to grow dim, like the spirit lights in the northern sky fading into the brightness as the spring returns to the land.

When the sun began to climb high over the horizon and the snows started to soften, we finished with our trapping and made ready to receive the returning deer herds.

This island where we sit is a fine place for deer hunting because it is like a stepping stone in the middle of the long lake. In the autumn the deer herds heading south swim to it and rest before continuing on their way. Heading north in the spring, they cross over to it on the ice, for they remember it and take the same path they used in the autumn. Also the island has stands of willows to provide us with fuel, so it is a good place to camp. But in the spring when the ice grows black and rotten and the River begins to break up, we must leave it for then sometimes the island is flooded. It is our custom to camp on the mainland shore at that time of the year until we can begin our voyage down to the coast by canoe.

In the spring that I speak of, the winter snows lay very thick on the land; and when the thaws started, the water flowed everywhere across the rocks and swamps as if the land itself was melting. My cousin and I saw it would be a year of big floods so one day we sledded his canoe over to the mainland shore and cached it at a safe height above the still-frozen surface of the river. Then we returned to the island intending to take all the people and goods ashore on the sleds the following day.

That was our plan, but during the night the spirits sent us such a storm as I do not ever remember seeing. It began with a fall of wet snow, then the wind rose and the snow turned to rain that poured out of the night as if Sredna, Mistress of the Waters, had turned her world upside down. Our snowhouse crumbled and when I tried to stretch caribou hides over the holes the wind was so strong it brought me to my knees. Then the howl of the wind was lost in a shuddering thunder that shook the roots of the island. We knew what it was. Swollen with the flood from the land, the River had risen and burst free of the ice. Swirling floes, thicker than the height of a man, were being flung out over the rotten surface ice of the lake, crushing our road to the shore.

I shouted for my cousin but my voice was snatched away by the wind and lost in the roaring as the islands of ice beat each other to pieces. Salak and Haluk and I fought our way toward a high drift in whose lee my cousin’s snowhouse had stood. We met him and his family crawling toward us. His house had collapsed. We all managed to burrow into the back of the soaking-wet drift, and there we stayed until dawn.

It came grey and ugly, whipped by a rain that seemed to grow steadily worse. We knew the rain on the half-melted snows would make the River swell even faster. Yet with the return of the daylight, our courage came back. We gathered most of our things on the highest part of the island and set up a tent. We had plenty of food, and we believed the lake could hardly rise high enough to submerge the whole island. We believed we had only to wait four or five days for the flooding to end, then we would find some way to escape.