People of the Deer Read online

  There was much talk and telling of tales. Without attempting to discourage me, old John was evidently determined that I should be made fully aware of what I was proposing to do, and so he told us the yarn of the Englishman, John Hornby, who set out to winter in the Barrens in the late 1920s.

  Hornby took with him two young Englishmen, fresh from the old country. The three men set out from Great Slave Lake, and then silence dropped down on their track. For a year no word was heard of their fate—and when it did come, it was a grim word.

  A party of prospectors canoeing down the Thelon River the next summer found Hornby’s shanty in a tiny wooded oasis hundreds of miles north of the timber line. The bodies of the three men who had challenged the Barrens were there. Their story was preserved in the diary of eighteen-year-old Edgar Christian, and it was as simple as it was tragic. The three had missed the great autumn migration of the deer, for the deer do not always follow the same path each year. Having missed the deer the intruders began the long winter without the supplies of meat that alone can ensure man’s survival in the white plains. Winter came quickly and there could be no retreat, for the party had no dogs, and men do not walk out of the winter Barrens on foot. So it was only a matter of time—but of a very long time, eking out the thin thread of their lives and always aware that it was a hopeless struggle that they were making. In the end they died, very slowly, and under conditions of great horror.

  There was a subdued silence when John finished this story. I was thinking about Hornby and trying to quell the doubts which were rising within me when old John began to mutter, under his breath.

  “Dimints!” he said. “Dimints and gold cufflinks too!”

  We asked him what he was talking about and he told us the rumor that when the bodies were found, the searchers also uncovered most of the essentials required for dinner at the Ritz. Dinner dress in a wolf den out on the Barrens! It was too macabre a thought to have any bearing on the reality which lay before me. Resolutely I put Hornby out of my mind, and went back to the maps.

  A thought struck me, and I asked John what he knew about the mysterious Eskimos that Tyrrell had seen. Surprisingly, John knew quite a lot, though it was all hearsay, of course. He told me that in the boom days of the ’20s a trading post had actually been established on the southern borders of the Keewatin Barrens, not far from the headwaters of the Kazan where Tyrrell had first met the inland dwellers. While fur prices were soaring this isolated outpost did well, despite the fact that seven hundred miles of canoe route separated it from the nearest point of supply at The Pas.

  Then the fur market collapsed and the post no longer paid a big enough profit. So it was closed, and the brief contact with the inland Eskimos would have been lost again had it not been for a German immigrant, married to a Cree woman, who doggedly persisted in the attempt to keep an independent trading post going. Off and on, over the years, this man did keep contact with the Barrens Eskimos and, though he was no longer in the land himself, it was rumored that he had left a son on the edge of the Barrens, who was believed to make his living by trapping white fox and by occasional trading deals with the natives.

  John pointed out the site of the abandoned trading post on the map, at a place called Windy River—a river that flows into a vast body of water named Nueltin Lake.

  Nueltin itself was almost a legendary place, still unsurveyed and largely unknown in 1947. Yet from the rough dotted outline assigned to it on the map, it was obviously a truly great lake, at least one hundred and twenty miles long, with a third of its length inside the forests while the other two-thirds stretched northward into the open plains of the Barrens.

  After hearing about the existence of the Windy River post I decided Nueltin should be my immediate goal. If I was lucky I might find that young half-Indian, half-German youth who was believed to be still living there. And with his aid, I might hope to realize my dreams; whereas alone I might only add another unpleasant paragraph to the grim tales that are told of the men who have challenged the Barrens and failed.

  Nueltin, then, was the logical choice, but there remained the slight problem of how to cross the intervening three hundred and fifty miles of frozen plains to reach it. I looked wistfully at Johnny Bourasso and wondered how much he would charge for such a flight. There didn’t seem to be much point in asking, for he had just canceled a trip to Chesterfield Inlet on the advice of the weathermen, who had warned of the imminent approach of the spring thaws. When the spring thaws come to the North, all flying ceases for at least a month and there are no exceptions. But I had nothing to lose by asking.

  “Johnny,” I asked, “would you take a chance on a trip to Nueltin tomorrow?”

  He lifted his eyes from the map and took a long moment to think; then—“We’ll give it a try,” he said. He would charge me only $200 for the trip, which was phenomenally cheap for Barrens flying.

  When it was full morning the next day we slogged through the already softening drifts to Landing Lake, where the Anson stood waiting. What had been a light-weight outfit designed for easy travel, when I left the South, had grown monstrously during my brief stay at Churchill. The Canadian Army authorities there, worried about my survival and about the possibility of having to come to my eventual rescue, had loaded me down with such items as a hundred-pound crate of smoke generators (presumably to use in communicating with distant Eskimos since few aircraft fly over the central Barrens), army winter clothing of unbelievable awkwardness and bulk, and a case of complicated meteorological instruments with which (it was hoped) I would make careful surveys of weather conditions at Nueltin Lake. Politeness forced me to accept all these things, though I had no use for them and was already grossly overequipped as a result of my purchases in the Hudson’s Bay Company store at Churchill.

  These purchases had been extensive since there was a definite possibility that I would never locate the young trapper at Nueltin and would have to subsist entirely on my own rations. Johnny had aided in saddling me with an unnecessary amount of freight by remarking that he might very well fail to pick me up before freeze-up, in which case I would have to live on my fat until late December when ice conditions were again suitable for ski landings.

  In consequence I had bought a quarter of a ton of assorted foods, the bulk of which consisted of flour, lard, sugar, tea, baking powder, bacon and salt pork. In addition there was a fair leavening of dehydrated fruits and vegetables, plus—and how the old arctic hands stared when they heard about it!—a case of fruit juices.

  My outfit was further increased by five hundred pounds of freight which had been consigned to the young fellow at Nueltin the previous fall and which had been moldering in a warehouse awaiting the day when some means of transportation might turn up. With the usual haphazard methods employed in arctic transport, this was all turned over to me on the chance I could deliver it.

  The final item that I added to my load was easily the most important. It consisted of three gallons of grain alcohol labeled “for scientific purposes only” in order to conform to the law.

  All of this gear was stacked aboard the Anson, and after a startled look at the looming bulk of the load, Johnny turned quickly away and started up the engines. As the overburdened plane lumbered down the lake the homemade skis flung driving slush outward and upward, enveloping us in chill spray. Then we were airborne and we swung back over the forlorn desolation of Churchill so that the Ingerbritsons could wave a farewell. The Anson turned northward up the ice-bound coast. I looked out to sea, over the pack ice, and when I again turned to look inland the thinning trees had vanished and the aircraft was swinging westward, away from the sea, and into the Barrens.

  The Anson grumbled forward on her quest. Johnny held a map before him on his knees, and over its expanse of vagueness he had drawn a straight compass course to where Windy River should be. But above his head the compass flickered and gyrated foolishly, for in such close proximity to the mag
netic pole a compass is, at best, but a doubtful tool. Yet there were no other aids to navigation, for when we left the coast we also left the sun behind us—obscured by a thick overcast of snow-laden clouds. And as for finding our way by the land underneath us...

  It was a soft white nightmare that we were flying over. An undulating monotony of white that covered all shapes and all colors. The land, with its low sweeping hills, its lakes and its rivers, simply did not exist for our eyes. The anonymity was quite unbroken even by living things, for the few beasts that winter here are also white, and so they are no more than shadows on the snow.

  For a hundred miles there was no change and the monotony began to dull my senses. Johnny passed his map back to me and along the course line he had drawn a cross and added a penciled notation. “Halfway. Should be there shortly after noon.”

  I turned back to the window and tried to fix my gaze on something definite in the blankness that lay below. Then I glanced ahead and saw, with profound gratitude, the faint smear of a horizon. Slowly it took on strength, grew ragged, and at last emerged as a far-distant line of hills. It was the edge of the great plateau which cradles Nueltin, and the Kazan.

  Now the white mantle below us began to grow threadbare. Black spines of massive ridges began to thrust upward through the snow. The undulations of the land grew steeper, as swells begin to lift before a rising storm at sea.

  Again the map. This time the cross lay over Nueltin, but when I looked down I could see nothing recognizable to tie us to the map. I edged forward to the cockpit. Johnny’s face was strained and anxious. In a few minutes he pointed to the flickering needles of the gasoline gauges which showed that half our gas was gone, and then I felt the aircraft begin to bank! I watched the compass card dance erratically until our course was south, then east—and back toward the sea.

  The limit of our search had been reached, and we had found nothing in that faceless wilderness to show us either where we were, or where our target lay. We had overleaped the boundaries of the Barrens—and yet the land had not been caught unaware. It still seemed secure against our invasion.

  The overcast had been steadily lowering and as we turned eastward we were flying at less than five hundred feet. At this slim height we suddenly saw the land gape wide beneath us to expose a great valley walled in by rocky cliffs and snow-free hills. And in that instant I caught a fleeting glimpse of something... “Johnny!” I yelled. “Cabin... down there!”

  He wasted no precious gas on a preliminary circuit. The sound of the engines dulled abruptly and we sank heavily between the valley walls. Before us stood a twisted, stunted little stand of spruce; a river mouth, still frozen; and the top foot or so of what was certainly a shanty roof, protruding slyly from the drifts.

  We jumped stiffly down to the ice and shook hands, for there was no doubt about this being my destination. There was no other standing cabin within two hundred miles.

  But only the wind met us. There was no sign of life about the cabin. We slipped and stumbled helplessly on the glare ice, and our exhilaration at having found our target against heavy odds was rapidly being diminished by an awareness of the ultimate desolation of this place. Our eyes clung hopefully to the handful of scrawny trees, none of them more than ten feet high, that thrust their tops out of the snow to give a ragged welcome. The leaden skies were closing in and the wind was still rising. There was no time to explore, only time to dump my gear onto the ice. Johnny stood for a long moment in the doorway of the plane, as if he was debating with himself whether to ask me if I had changed my mind. I’m glad that he didn’t. I think I should have been tempted beyond my strength. But he only waved his hand and vanished into the fuselage. Then the Anson was bumping wickedly down the bay.

  The plane vanished with appalling rapidity into the overcast. The gale from the Ghost Hills whipped little eddies of hard snow about me and I had arrived in the land that I had set my heart upon.

  But now was no time to soliloquize! I needed shelter, and so I made for the half-hidden cabin. The doorway was snowed-in to a depth of several feet, and when I had dug my way through, I found only a log cavern in the drifts—dank and murky and foul-smelling. The damp was the stinking damp of long disuse, and I could trace the smell easily enough to the floor that was buried under the dirt of years and the accumulated refuse of a winter’s meals.

  Against one wall was a massive stove. But it did nothing to cheer me up, for as far as I could see there was no fuel for its great maw. The wind outside, and the chill damp inside, made the thought of a fire like the dream of a lovely woman—irresistible, and quite unattainable.

  The walls of the cabin were finished in fur. Wolf and arctic fox pelts, all as white as the snows of early winter, were spread over the log walls to dry, and by their simple presence showed that the place was not completely deserted after all. During the next week I came to regard them with affection, for they were the link with the unknown man who had brought them in and who, I sincerely hoped, would come himself before too long.

  There was quite enough to do during the days of waiting. All my gear had to be hauled in from the ice of Windy Bay, and for the balance of the daylight hours I amused myself by wading hip-deep, and sometimes shoulder-deep, through the jealous drifts that guarded the puny treelets near the camp. Three hours’ hard work would yield only enough green spruce and tamarack twigs to let me build one little cooking fire, but in the process of gathering fuel I grew as warm as if I had been able to luxuriate before a roaring blaze. So there were compensations in the fuel problem after all.

  The storm that had heralded my arrival lasted for three full days, but on the fourth day the weather changed abruptly and the arctic spring exploded in a violent eruption. On June the 1st, the sun shone down upon me with a passion that it hardly knows even in the tropics. And it kept on shining for eighteen hours out of every twenty-four.

  In half a day the snow that lapped my observation ridge retreated a dozen feet, leaving the exposed gravel and dead moss to steam away like an over-anxious kettle. It was a queer thing to see, and I felt as if I were sitting on the summit of a frozen world that inexplicably, and with an unbelievable swiftness, had decided to collapse and melt away.

  Every hollow and low-lying spot harbored a freshet that quickened and murmured without pause for rest, even during the brief twilight period that passed for night. The ice began to rot. The shining surfaces turned leaden, dulled and fractured into countless millions of tiny, separate rods that were held upright and together only by their mutual pressure on one another. It was no longer possible to crawl about the drifts in search of wood, for the wet snow refused my weight. After twice plunging over my head into the snow I gave up the search for fear of suffocating in that wet and cold embrace.

  And the birds arrived. One morning I was wakened from an uneasy sleep by the mad laughter of many voices chuckling in zany mirth. I flung open the door and found myself staring into the brilliance, and meeting the eyes of half a hundred disembodied heads. The heads were chickenlike, but stained dull red as if by the lifeblood of the bodies they had been parted from.

  With something approaching horror I stared at the weird visitors and they stared back from maniac little eyes, and laughed until the whole valley rang with sound. I flung a piece of ice at one, and the whole flock suddenly took flight. As they cleared the ground, their trim white bodies that had been invisible against the snow were projected into view, and I knew them then for ptarmigan, the partridge of the arctic.

  And so my first week drew to its conclusion, and the nature of the land had changed so violently that I could not comprehend the magnitude of that change. I was overwhelmed by the rapidity with which it had come about, and since I had only just begun to get acquainted with the frozen land, I was too confused to make much sense out of the fluid wastes that I now found myself marooned upon.

  Yet there was a familiar quality in the warm, humid air th
at is the quality of plowed fields in the spring, though magnified a thousandfold. The sterile, unbreathing land of winter breathed deeply now, and its breath was that of a strong woman in the grip of passion.

  A restlessness and a great unease kept me from sleep even during the brief interval of dusk—the last remnant of the long winter dark. Loneliness was driven from me. I, like all things in the land, waited—for what we did not know. The awakening perhaps of that impalpable entity which is the Barrens.

  On June 4, I climbed a long, rocky slope behind the cabin for a glimpse of the lands that lay beyond the camp. I was sitting in the lee of a great boulder, avoiding the hot glare of the sun, when I heard the cries of dogs from far up the half-frozen river. At once I was confused by an anticipatory excitement combined with a strange hesitancy to disclose myself until I had seen the approaching stranger first. I started down the hill at the double, but checked my rush and retreated nervously to the shelter of my boulder. I was still there when the dogs came into view—nine immense beasts hauling a sled that dwarfed them, for it was over twenty feet in length. Two massive runners with sparse crossbars supported a pile of deerskins, and on the skins was the figure of a man.

  The team drove along the river’s edge to avoid the thaw stream on the surface and the sodden drifts on shore. When it was opposite me and I could see that the driver was no Eskimo, the dogs swung inshore and halted in the cabin yard. Nevertheless I still clung to the shelter of my rock, for now that the moment had arrived, I felt very dubious about the nature of my reception at the hands of this isolated man who saw no strangers from one year’s end until the next. So, weakly, I postponed the moment, and watched as the man got slowly from his sled and stood beside it, staring intently at the cabin door.