People of the Deer Page 4

  If his arrival had been a shock to me, it was at least an anticipated one. To him, the shock of arriving home and seeing that someone had been living in his camp must have been tremendous. He stood quite still for several minutes. Then he leaned over the sled and withdrew his rifle from its case. Rifle in hand he walked forward to where my ax was lying, and picked it up, staring at it as if it had been some celestial object fallen from the skies. Long afterwards he told me how it had been impossible for him to resolve the turmoil in his mind when he arrived home and found this mute evidence of a strange visitor.

  You see, he had lived all his life in a land where strangers do not arrive as if by magic from another sphere. He had looked for tracks of dog teams and had seen none, yet he knew of no other way that a man could come to Windy River in wintertime. There are no strangers in that land—unless you count the unseen ones who dwell amongst the rocky hills and are not of human kind.

  With his rifle in hand and fear in his heart, he opened the cabin door and stepped inside. The litter of my belongings and the strange supplies must have baffled him completely, but he stayed inside, and I chose that time to descend from my hill.

  2. The Intruders

  The dogs saw me at once and before I had reached the sled their hysterical outcry brought the man to the door with rifle crooked over his arm and his face blank and expressionless.

  It was a tense and uneasy meeting. Franz—that was his name—like all men who live too long alone, had lost the hard shell that human contacts build for us. Such isolated ones become soft and defenseless on the outside, and so they come almost to dread even the casual meetings with their fellows that are routine to us.

  That is but part of the resentment that men like Franz feel for the casual stranger. There are other things. I think that only in such tremendous isolation does one feel the fear of his own species that is a throwback to primeval days when any stranger was a potential enemy.

  I set about explaining myself and my presence at the cabin as best I could, but the words sounded rather lame.

  Franz gave me no help at all, though he showed visible relief when he discovered that I had come by air. After I had said my piece, he stood for a good five minutes staring stolidly at me without uttering a word, and I had ample time to study him.

  He was still very young, but with an unkempt air about him that made him seem much older in my sight. He was not tall, but slender with a lithe, wild look. He wore an unidentifiable hodgepodge of native skins and white man’s clothes, and on his head he wore a tattered aviator’s helmet of the sort that children wear about our city streets. The helmet peak was down and half-obscured his face. Black eyes were in its shadow, and below them a prominent and uncompromisingly Teutonic nose set on the smooth, Asiatic background of an Indian face.

  His unblinking scrutiny was rapidly unnerving me, and then I had an inspiration. Remembering what I had always heard about the North, I made a stumbling appeal for hospitality. Blankness faded from his face, he smiled a little and stepped into the cabin, beckoning me to enter.

  I felt that I needed a stiff drink, so I burrowed in my kit and produced a bottle. Without asking Franz, I poured a drink for each of us. I suppose it was the first that he had ever had. He gulped it down, and as he coughed and wiped tears from his eyes, his frozen taciturnity began to thaw, then melted with the same untrammeled rush that the snows had shown in the first spring sun. He began to talk—stiffly at first and in awkward monosyllables that slowly grew together and became coherent. Eskimo and Cree words were mixed with English, but as his conversation reached full flow, the native words dropped out and his facility with a language that he had little call to use returned to him.

  Oddly enough he asked no questions and betrayed no curiosity about me after the initial explanations had been made. Instead he talked of the long trip that he had just completed, and from that point his talk worked backward through the winter, into the years before. Finally, when dawn was with us, he was back as far as childhood’s memory would recall. It was an amazing experience that he and I went through that night. I listened as I have never listened to another man, and Franz talked as if his voice had been denied to him since childhood days. His story was the tale of the intruders in the land, and of their struggle to make the land their own. And his tale gave me a chilling insight into the manner in which the Barrenlands had kept themselves inviolate from us.

  His father, Karl, whom he worshipped with a restrained simplicity, had come to Canada from Germany, three decades earlier. The immigrant brought with him some of the memories of a cultivated man, but for reasons of his own he shunned the semi-civilized South of Canada and wandered to the North. Here, in due time, he found a wife amongst the mission-trained Cree Indians who live on the south verges of the high Northern forests. Karl’s wife was a good woman and she was a good mother to his children, bringing them the best of the Cree blood, which is not inferior to that of any race.

  About 1930, the trading company at Nueltin Lake asked Karl to be their manager there. He accepted, and after a three weeks’ canoe trip north from Brochet, the family arrived at Windy Bay. But it was a somber arrival, for the log building of a departed rival trader which Karl had hoped to use had been burned to the ground. And so, with autumn already bloodying the dwarf shrubs of the plains, Karl and the seven children had to build a winter home out of the meager trees that could be found.

  When the one-room shack was finished and roofed with caribou skins, Karl was ready to do business. He anticipated no opposition in dealing with the Eskimos, for he was the only trader within two hundred miles. And his customers were the men that I had come to see, the People of the Barrens.

  It must have been a strange childhood for Franz and for his brothers and sisters. They kept aloof even from the Eskimos. And the tiny outpost was visited only once each summer from “outside” when a canoe brigade arrived from Brochet to bring in the winter stock and carry out the season’s fur. For the rest of the long months that stretched into years, only the deer kept Karl and his family company. The tremendous forces of the land beat down on the intruders without interference and drove them in upon each other. But the children, growing into youth in the protracted isolation of the place, slowly adapted to the land.

  In the ’30s the People of the Barrens were still numerous enough so that nearly forty hunters—all heads of families— could come to trade their fox pelts at the little post. But as the years passed, so passed the hunters. Their names upon the “Debt books” of the post were lined out one by one, and there were few new ones to take their places. The price of pelts on the world’s markets fell and so the profits of the post fell off. At last the company decided to withdraw, and in due course that message came to Karl.

  The message came and Karl received it gratefully, for during the winter of that year his wife had died, and this man who had never been able to put away his fears of the land was now desperately lonely.

  And so it was that when the fall came, the tiny cabin by the shores of Windy Bay stood empty to the wind. When the Eskimo hunters came south with fur, they found the door open and snow piled within the room, but nothing else. The Eskimos returned without the food and shells that they had counted on—and by spring there were many of them who would live to hunt no more.

  Yet though Karl had left the land with a vast relief, it was not so with his children. Down in the forests where there are many trading posts and many men, Franz and the other children found a way of life they did not like.

  Unlike most mixed-bloods, Franz was, by reason of his long isolation, quite unprepared to meet the barriers of race. The inevitable rebuffs that he was forced to accept from the race-conscious white men of the trading posts, who make a practice of holding aloof from the “savages,” as they are wont to call them, turned Franz in upon himself in a way that the Barrens had never done. He had not learned to think of himself as Indian, or as half-breed—bu
t as a white man. He could not fit himself into the miserable borderline existence that is the best the “breeds” can ever hope to know. Instead he remembered the great open plains of the North, the limitless lands where he was a man at his own evaluation. He remembered, too, the grave by the abandoned cabin, for Franz had loved his mother.

  Though Franz was the eldest, and so felt it more deeply than the others, the rest of the children were also becoming aware of the social divisions of mankind, and they too recalled the Barrens with the regret of children who remember happiness.

  In the late ’30s Karl gave way to the desires of his children and undertook the long journey back to the shores of Windy Bay. But concern for the happiness of his children was not the only incentive. The price of white fox pelts had soared, and Karl was going back as a free trader who could gather the harvest of the Eskimos for a healthy profit, and at the same time make use of the trapping skill of his children. Nor was he disappointed in them, for Franz and his brother Hans became adept at the taking of the fox. Even the two older girls took part in the trapping, and they too came to be expert.

  Yet the new life at Nueltin was not the same for Franz. He carried with him the bitter scars of his reception at the southern settlements, and as he ranged out into the plains, constantly expanding his trap line until he at last came into contact with the camps of the Eskimos, Franz was of two minds about them. They treated him as an honored guest and as an equal, and this treatment helped restore his self-esteem and relieve the bitterness. Yet he could not prevent himself from feeling the same superiority toward the Eskimos that the white traders had shown toward him.

  I suppose it was this conflict, and the essential need of restoring his hurt ego, which made Franz blind to the slow fate that was relentlessly destroying his new-found friends. He became contemptuous of the apparent improvidence that seemed to bring the Eskimos only starvation. He echoed the sentiments of the white men who had belittled him—and perhaps he was also echoing his father’s sentiments—when he called his friends “ignorant natives.” He did not care to try to understand the nature of the evils destroying the People of the Barrens. In his own way, he even contributed to those evils, while with the part of him that was restored and revived by the Eskimos’ friendship he was extending aid to them in their dire need.

  The trading post of course was open once more and so the dozen surviving hunters of the People again gave up the pursuit of game for food, in favor of the pursuit of fur. They brought their furs to Karl and received only a token of their value, for Karl had neither friendship nor sympathy for them. Living in the Barrens again, he was beset by the memory of his wife and by the loneliness that his children did not share. He hated the land, and it was his desire to make enough money to be able to leave it behind forever. Since he was a free trader and had no overseer to watch his policy, he was able to harvest all the colossal profit margin which is considered legitimate throughout the North.

  Then, in 1943 an event occurred that decided Karl on leaving the great plains. His eldest daughter, Stella, the one whom he most loved, was lost in the winter barrens for fifteen days.

  The girl had been returning from a visit to a distant meat cache and she drove her own team, following the team of her brother Hans. Hans was then sixteen and Stella fifteen.

  Some thirty miles from Windy Bay a blizzard enveloped them. Hans tied the lead dog of his sister’s team to the back of his own sled and they drove on, trusting to the wind to remain steady so that they would not lose direction.

  The blizzard rose to its full fury in one angry blast a few minutes after it had begun. Hans could not see his sister, nor could she see him. The wind was so violent and the ground drift so thick Hans did not notice that the traces of his sister’s team had snapped between the lead dog and the next in line. Hans drove forward and a single dog followed him, dragging the broken traces.

  Not knowing the trace had snapped, Stella rode on, sitting on her sled and keeping her face covered from the vicious gale. Her dogs were young, and without the leader they lost the trail at once, for it was blown over and obliterated moments after Hans’s sled had passed.

  Then the wind began to veer southward. Hans felt the change and was able to keep his team on course, but the dogs of Stella’s team continued resolutely into the teeth of the veering wind. When Hans arrived at the post at last, he discovered what he had not known till then—that he was alone.

  There was no hope of going back and searching. It was suicidal even to think of going out into the mounting storm. So the family sat about the stove and waited for the wind to drop.

  The blizzard lasted only a day, but it was fifteen days before Stella returned to Windy Camp. It is a true measure of how well the children had become part of the land that this girl managed to survive midwinter in the Barrens with almost no food, and with no bedding, for better than two weeks.

  She realized that she was lost, and she did the only sensible thing—made camp. With her snow knife she cut a few blocks for a windbreak and burrowed into a drift behind the blocks. When the storm died she emerged and tried to decide where she was. But there are no landmarks in winter, not so much as a weedtop above the snow. The change in wind had gone unnoticed, and so Stella believed that she was a day’s travel farther north than she really was. For the four hours of daylight she traveled south by the sun, but an overcast sky followed that first day, and for a week there was no sun. After three days her dogs were so famished that they could not pull, for she had long since abandoned the meat load she had carried on the sled. Now she cut all the traces, letting most of the dogs go in the hope that they would find their ways home alone. Three of the dogs she killed, for she needed their meat. Then she left the sled and walked on, carrying nothing but one thin robe and a pack of dog meat on her back.

  She traveled in an immense curve, south and away from safety. She walked until fatigue threatened her with the sleep that ends in freezing death. When that danger came, she stopped and rested cautiously. Sometimes she scrabbled through the drifts on hilltops and found a few wizened bearberries or a handful of rock-tripe, a kind of moss. When she felt strong enough she picked up her robe and walked on to the south, knowing that she had missed the Bay of Nueltin, but knowing also that to stay still was to die. She was lost in an area of nearly fifty thousand square miles, and she might have been almost anywhere in that vast area for all she knew. Yet still she did not quit.

  She walked the entire length of Nueltin Lake, more than a hundred miles, and at last she came out on the south bay of that lake. But Stella did not recognize it, did not even know that it was water she was walking over, for the snow and ice lay deep that year. She saw timber ahead then, timber on an island, as it happened, and with her last strength she reached the edge of the spruce bush and then she slept—and would have slept forever but for a miracle.

  By the barest of chances the trapper who once a winter came this far north drove his dogs around that wooded island on that day. He was the only living soul within a radius of better than a hundred miles and his team drove straight to the body of the girl. He found her within an hour of her arrival, and he carried her to his travel camp and there he cared for her.

  But the incredible part of this tale is yet to come: after a single day Stella was fit, yes, and eager to travel home. On the sixteenth day of her disappearance she was heading north, warmly wrapped in the cariole of the half-breed trapper, and on the seventeenth day she was at home on Windy Bay. Old Karl shed tears to see her. The boys also shed tears, but they had been shedding them for days, and not only because of grief, for they were suffering the excruciating agony of snow blindness after two weeks of futile searching in the empty plains.

  When spring came, Karl prepared to leave the land forever. He spoke to Franz and Hans, but they were unwilling to go south, and in the end he left them behind, for he was aware that they would continue to make a good catch of foxes every year.
Karl took the freight canoe toward the south, carrying the younger children and the season’s furs. Hans and Franz remained behind, Franz because he could not face the return south, and Hans for some inscrutable reason of his own.

  In the distant world beyond, the war drove on to its appointed end, but in the silence of the Barrens even its muted echo did not intrude. The years passed, until in 1947 I unexpectedly descended on Windy Bay, and in those intervening years the pattern of life there had undergone no change. Once each year the boys loaded their canoe and traveled as far south as the nearest outpost of trade; and here, quickly, they disposed of their furs, bought what they needed for the year, and fled back through the forests to the arctic plains. For the rest of the year they roamed the Barrens, by dog team in winter, and on foot or with pack dogs in summer.

  Oddly enough, each lived his life apart. Hans grew desperately quiet and often spoke no words for days on end. Each had his own trap line in a different area, and during the winter the brothers were often absent from the cabin in different directions for an unbroken month. They sometimes returned at the same time but more often they missed each other during their brief visits to the cabin. The pressure of loneliness weighed on them always, but Franz, with a legacy of strength from his Indian mother, and with his increasing intimacy with the Barrens People, managed to hold this loneliness partly at bay, and so escaped the madness that seeps into the spaces in the brains of lonely men. He built and ramified his own protective shield and it enabled him to hold his own against the impersonal animosity of the plains.

  Among the Eskimos he came to be considered as one of the band, and yet not quite of it, for even when all other human contacts were denied to him, he still held the crumpled ramparts of his pride of race. Still, the People were his sole bulwark against the destroying loneliness, and so Franz compromised his pride. He was with but never of them, and as a result he was never quite beyond the reach of loneliness. It was a driving but controlled hunger which was in him, and it took the form of an endless restlessness that became anguish. He tried to solace it by expanding his hunting range so he could wander over new lands, farther and farther from the post in Windy Bay.