The Snow Walker Read online

  I went in by air in an old Fairchild float plane of the stick-and-string variety flown by a pilot whose main claim to fame was that he had written off seven airplanes and had managed to walk away more or less uninjured from each of them.

  The settlement itself consisted of a score of scrofulous log shanties flung any-old-which-way across a desolate sand ridge on the north shore of Caribou Lake. Right in the middle was a hog-backed log church with a corrugated iron roof. At the north end of the ridge stood the cluster of red-and-white-painted Company buildings, the store, a little warehouse and the manager’s cabin.

  Stories about Caribou were legion throughout the north. Most of them grew up around the iron-bound nature of the man who was as good as King of a district as big as Scotland—Father Danioux, a whipcord bundle of ancient sinews, with a long white beard and a piece of trap steel for a backbone. When the Father came to Caribou from France half a century earlier, he immediately set about building a kind of church-state. He took hold of the Indians, both Chips and Crees, and punched and twisted and bent them into the shape he had in mind. Though some of them tried, they couldn’t stand up against him because he could beat them even at their own game. Anything an Indian could do, Danioux learned to do better. It wasn’t long before he was the absolute boss of a little theocracy that functioned like something out of the Old Testament. If one of the Indians backslid, Danioux thought nothing of taking a dogwhip to him. One of the stories about him had to do with the trouble he ran into with an old Chip medicine man who tried to buck him in the early days. Danioux solved that problem during an epic confrontation by putting a bullet through the man’s skull.

  Father Danioux hated outsiders—not that many such ever found their way to the Caribou country. If they did, they got nowhere with the natives because Danioux forbade “his people” to have anything to do with other white men. He barely tolerated the Company post because he needed us to bring in supplies; but he took a good fat tithe of furs from the Indians before they were allowed to trade for the flour, guns, tea, ammunition and the few other things he allowed them to buy.

  The commissioner had taken pains to brief me about him:

  “Treat him with kid gloves. Don’t ever cross him. The old bugger runs the show at Caribou!”

  Danioux’s relations with me were as icy as the arctic winds that cut through the thin trees from the barrenlands not far to the north of us. He ordered the natives to have no more to do with me than was absolutely necessary, and he never deigned to come near the post himself. When he had a message for me—more like an imperial edict—Brother Maloche would bring it over, feeling his way through the rabble of half-starved dogs with great agility, considering that he was stone blind.

  I had had enough of the place before the first month was out, and I started banging out radio messages to head office in Winnipeg reminding the commissioner I was only filling in and asking when the permanent replacement would arrive. When I received only evasive answers, I began to realize that finding anybody else to take on the job looked like a long-term problem. Finally I resigned myself to spending the winter there. I wasn’t entirely unhappy about the prospect thanks to a mass of books left behind by my predecessor… and to the friendship of André Maloche.

  André and I took to each other right from the start. The non-fraternizing edict did not seem to apply to him and he would visit me two or three times a week. We would sit close to the angry glow of my sheet-iron stove trading stories about the north or just yarning. He was a big man, and gaunt. Under his thick, white eyebrows the empty eye sockets were impenetrable black pits that discouraged me from probing too deeply into what lay behind them. He was a private man, but a friend worth having. His serenity and his quiet sense of humour were marvellous antidotes against the loneliness of the long winter nights.

  My affection for him grew in direct proportion to my dislike of the priest. The everyday details of men’s lives in such an isolated little world as ours had to be common knowledge and so I came to know a good deal about how Danioux treated his lay brother. For nearly half a century André had lived under the biting goad of an austere and iron-willed autocrat whose religious ideas bordered on the fanatical. Through those long decades Danioux had used André as a sort of spiritual whipping boy while physically treating him like a serf. The wonder of it was that André, who was no weakling either physically or mentally, should have accepted it. One night I overstepped myself and made an oblique display of my indignation.

  “My friend,” replied André gently. “Do not think too harshly of le bon Père. At heart he is a saintly man. His life has been a hard struggle against heathen unbelief. Moreover, he has much to bear; and if at times he grows impatient with the load he carries, that is excusable.”

  I grunted sceptically.

  “Perhaps you will understand,” he continued, “if I tell you that my treatment at his hands is just. It is deserved. Because, you see, I am a cross he has to bear.”

  I did not understand but André volunteered no further explanation. We chatted idly until it was time for him to return to the frigid little room which was his home in the log shanty that served as a mission residence.

  A few days later my half-breed clerk told me Father Danioux was seriously ill. I sent over to the mission to see if I could be of any help but, over the years, André had become an effective if rough and ready man with a scalpel or a pill. He was already dosing Danioux with sulfa, and did not need me to confirm his diagnosis. It was pneumonia—the Old Man’s Friend, as my grandfather used to call it.

  When the time came for my regular radio schedule that night, I tapped out a message asking for an emergency flight. A Norseman started out from The Pas next day but ran into bad weather and had to turn back. For a week after that we had nothing but storms, and not even the white owls could move. André stayed by the bed of the sick man night and day, nursing him with the dedication of a wife… but one afternoon the bell of the little church began to toll. Danioux was dead. They put his rough coffin on a trellis of spruce poles high above the frozen earth which could not receive him until the ground thawed in spring.

  It was some time before André came to visit me again, and when he did there was a great change in him. He had become even more gaunt—almost skeletal—but his face had lost its masked, impervious look. The years seemed to have fallen away from him. I thought this was a reflection of his relief at coming to the end of fifty years of wearing Danioux’s saddle. It was more than that.

  We drank coffee for awhile, then André spoke softly as if to himself.

  “Finished. C’est fini.”

  He turned his blind face toward me.

  “Maybe you will be patient with an old man if he opens up his heart? It has been closed too long. Always I have lived alone with this thing. You would do me much kindness if you would listen.”

  Then he told me a story so strange that to this day I cannot be sure if it was real or even what it means.

  you know i came from a little farm near Dauphin, eh? Lots of children in my family. But my father, he was killed in the bush, cutting pulp, when I was nine, and after that it was not long before my mother died. The Church took pity on us children. Me, I went first to an orphanage but when I was older I was sent to the seminary. They wished to make a priest of me, but that could not be. No, I was too wild for that. For me there was just the woods and the rivers and, best of all, the life my mother’s people lived, for they were of the Salteaux. So one day I ran away and went to live with the Salteaux. But the priest they had there soon found out about me and I was taken back. Then I was very angry and foolish. I made so much trouble they would lock me up in a room for days. I got more angry, and one night I took matches and a candle and started a fire in the dormitory and then I ran away again.

  This time I was not caught, for I went too far; up to The Pas, and then with an old trapper to Athabasca Lake. He died when I was eighteen and I took over hi
s outfit and went trapping on my own. I was twenty when I first came to the Caribou Lake country, and that winter I trapped mink and muskrats up toward Wollaston.

  One time I was visiting a Chipewyan camp and old Denikazi—in those days he was the chief and a great traveller—told me about the Esquimaux who lived up to the north in the tundra. Denikazi had met some of them at tree line when they came south to get wood. He had played udzi with them, gambling for dogs. His stories gave me a hunger to visit those lands of mystery where it was said the muskox still lived and the so-beautiful white foxes could be found in such numbers a man could make a fortune in a single season.

  Denikazi said the best time to travel in the tundra plains was late in the winter. So in February I drove to Caribou and traded my furs for ammunition, tea, lard, flour and bacon. I was here in your store, talking to the manager, when the young priest in charge of the mission came in. Father Danioux was only a few years older than me. He was on fire with the idea to bring all the Indians to God, but he had also heard of the Esquimaux no white men had ever visited, and he had heard I was going to try and reach their country.

  He wanted me to take him with me so he could claim them for God also, but I did not like priests. I did not even go to mass anymore. When I refused, the Father became angry and threatened he would drive me out of the Faith altogether if I would not help in God’s holy work. That bothered me, to tell the truth, but I did not let him see. I said he could do what he wanted, but me, I was travelling alone.

  So off I went to the north… and what a fine journey that was! Inside the forests there was plenty of deer so when I got to the edge of their winter yards I made a camp, killed lots of caribou, and dried the meat over smoky fires. When I had as much meat as my nine dogs could haul, I drove on again. My dogs and me, we were all strong and young, and we felt good. We travelled fast and hard and we were happy—I was going into a land nobody else had visited, and my dogs had full bellies and maybe they felt the same excitement.

  The trees grew thinner and shorter along the shores of frozen rivers until there were no more trees at all. There was only a white plain rolling farther than I could see from the top of the highest hills. I thought: How will I find the Esquimos in so big a country? I did not know how but I was sure to try.

  Big rivers still pointed north so I drove on their ice. Sometimes I would find a clump of willows in the lee of a hill and then I would have a little fire; but for the most part there was nothing to burn, so the dogs and I ate our meat frozen and dry, but it was good, strong stuff and we did not mind. When the winds blew hard we could not travel. The north wind cut through my fur capote like it was made of fish net, and the ground drift would get so thick I could not even see my lead dog—but most of the time there was little wind and the sky was so big and cold and clear it was like there was no top over that land at all.

  Every day I was sure I would find some sign of the Esquimos but always those big white plains stayed empty except for a few hares and white owls and the tracks of a wolf or a fox. There was no sign of men. Then, eight or nine days after I left the forests behind me, I saw a big ridge on the horizon. When I got closer I saw three figures on top of it and they looked like men. I was a little scared but I drove on, and the figures never moved, and that made me feel more uneasy. Before I started up the slope I slipped my rifle out of its case, but when I got to the top I found those figures were just made of piled-up stones.

  It was a disappointment, you understand, but not too bad because those figures had been made by men, for sure. And when I drove on over that ridge I went down into a deep valley and found a real oasis. It was a stand of black spruce, maybe fifty acres. The trees were small but they were real trees! My team went tearing in among them and I put my arms around one of the dwarf trunks and gave it a big hug. I looked around. Somebody else had found that place before me. Here and there were stumps where someone had been cutting timber, but they were all old cuttings.

  I hadn’t found the Esquimos, but now it was time for me to settle down to make a camp. That same day I began chopping logs for a cabin. Those trees were frozen solid right to the middle and my axe would jump back out of the cuts like it was crazy. All the same, in three days I had the walls of a cabin eight feet by eight. I roofed it with poles, then caribou skins, then blocks of hard snow. When I put my little tin stove inside, it was snug but there was no room in there to have a dance!

  For the next few weeks things went well and I was happy. There was plenty of fox tracks and I set out a big bunch of traps. I had not much meat to spare for bait, but that did not matter. Those foxes were so tame they were pushing each other away to get caught. That was fine for awhile, but then I began to see this was really a hungry land. I drove my dogs hundreds of miles around that place and never found game. My store of meat began to run out. I tried to set a net under the river ice, but that ice was ten feet thick… impossible! Soon I had to feed the dogs with fox carcasses, and then I had to eat fox myself. I began to wonder if I was foolish to come out into this country. The cold was terrible and it kept me busy cutting wood for my stove, and just as busy making it burn for it was all green stuff.

  I began to lose heart a little. The emptiness of that country was worse than the cold. Once I saw a raven and I thought it might mean a little herd of deer starting north out of the forest but when I drove south for nearly a day I never saw a living thing. The foxes vanished. Maybe I’d caught them all, but anyway the traps were empty. Late in March things got serious. I could not feed all my dogs anymore. I had to kill some to feed the others.

  Denikazi had told me the caribou would start north in April or early May, and so it would be all right if I could hang on until the deer herds reached my place. There was only one way to do that. I killed the rest of my dogs and began to eat them myself. They were not much good for me. They were starved and the meat was bitter and there was no fat, but they kept me alive anyway.

  Yes, I kept alive, but by the end of April the deer had not come and I was very weak and also sick from eating starving dog meat. I thought: well, that’s the end of it. I was pretty near gone when one day I heard dogs yelping, and a man’s voice.

  They say you don’t believe what you hear when you are pretty near dead… but I believed it! I crawled out of my bunk and got the skin door pulled open and nearly fell outside. There, right in front of my cabin, was a long wooden sled and three little men staring up toward me. Esquimos, for sure! I started toward them, staggering like a drunken fool, and they caught me when I fell.

  You will perhaps not believe what those sauvages did next. Remember, they had never seen a white man in all their lives. The only strangers they knew about were the Chipewyans and, except for a few like Denikazi, the Chips hated the Esquimos and would shoot them when they got a chance.

  What did they do? They carried me to my cabin and put me in my robes and piled their own robes on me. Then they cleaned out the place—it was worse than a bear’s den—and for three days they nursed me, day and night, with meat soups and marrow and all sorts of stuff I never heard of. While I began to get some strength, they talked away to me in their own language and laughed and grinned and sang songs, and they brought my spirit back to life the same as they brought my body back.

  In three days I was feeling good again. They wanted me to go with them, so we cached my cariole and some of my gear and I rode off on their long sled to their camps, four days’ travel northwest. They had six snowhouses under the lee of a big hill by the shores of a frozen lake, and thirty-five people lived in that place.

  Those Esquimos—Innuit, they called themselves—they were the fine people. Everything they had they gave to me, and I could give them nothing but endless trouble. They taught me their language, with a patience we do not often have even for our own children. They gave me affection and friendship as wholehearted as it was tolerant. And… they gave me my wife, a girl of my own choosing.

  Her name was Nulj
alik, the daughter of Katelo, one of those men who found me at my cabin. I think she was no more than seventeen years old; a small person, slim and almond eyed, and a round red face like a good, sweet apple. She had a slow smile that warmed me better even than the good food Katelo’s old wife made for me. Katelo was quick to see the looks that passed between his daughter and me. One night when we were all climbing under the robes in his big deerskin tent, he said to me, simply, because I did not yet know so many Innuit words:

  “Schweenack—not good for man to sleep alone. Here is arnuk, a woman for you. Take her, Saluk (that was the name they had given me). She is willing.”

  Nuljalik came to me in the new tent those people built for us, and the love she gave me was of a kind our race, perhaps, has forgotten. She kept nothing of herself away from me and expected me to do the same. That was a hard lesson for me to learn, how to give without holding back, but Nuljalik showed me the way.

  It had been in my mind that when the summer came I would try to walk south out of the plains country; but as time went along and the birds and caribou and flowers filled the long days with sights and sounds and smells, I told myself it was foolish to try to walk south. I would wait, and in the winter Katelo would take me south with his dog team. So I waited, and when winter came I did not go south. No. My world had changed. Now my world was the world of the Innuit. With this people, in that distant place, there was for me a peace of the heart, and a good feeling of the spirit. Yes, I was happy there.

  The first year passed and a son was born to Nuljalik, and it seemed nothing could darken the happiness of our life together; yet even then there were little shadows flickering on the edge of things. So it must always be, perhaps, when a stranger comes to make his life with men of other customs and beliefs. He cannot be born again as one of them. As I became more and more familiar with the Innuit ways, I no longer admired everything they did… or thought. They seemed too much bound up with superstition. They had so many tabus, things that must or must not be done… a web of obstacles in a land where nature had placed obstacles enough before men. I could see no purpose worrying about a legion of devils and spirits that could exist only in imagination. But when I tried to treat such things as childish nonsense, it brought my wife such distress I was obliged to give lip service, at the least, to the pagan beliefs. Katelo was the wisest of all the Innuit and once I tried to make him see the foolishness of the people’s fear of spirits. This is how he replied: