People of the Deer Read online

  If it is difficult for men to escape from the bloodsucking flies, then it is impossible for the deer to escape. At the height of the fly season the deer become emaciated shadows of themselves who hardly dare take time to eat and rest. They flee along the highest and most windswept ridges in a futile effort to escape a plague that has been known to destroy them from sheer loss of blood.

  Yet the bloodsucking and the flesh-eating flies are not the most dreaded of the hosts. There are two other flies, both large, gaudy things which look like bumblebees. The arrival of a single one of these flamboyant raiders can inspire terror in a herd of deer that neither man nor wolves can equal. Once, while I was watching a small herd of bucks quietly feeding along a steep riverbank, I saw the animals suddenly go mad. The herd disintegrated and its members fled wildly in all directions, with tossing heads and with high reckless leaps that sometimes plunged them sickeningly on the sharp, shattered rocks. One buck turned to the river, and without a moment’s hesitation flung himself over the steep bank and crashed into the shallow waters below, to lie dying with a broken neck.

  I paddled over to the still-quivering corpse, and there met the murderer: a winged, yellow horror perched on the dead deer with its ovipositor throbbing and swelling as it sought a place to lay its microscopic eggs. These eggs hatch into minute larvae which burrow through the hide, enter the blood-stream and in time emerge from the flesh to lie in little pockets just underneath the skin on the back of the deer. By the next spring these pockets have reached full size, and each contains an aqueous grub as big as the end joint of a man’s finger. I have counted two hundred of these white and repulsive parasites under the back hide of a single deer. In June the obese larvae burrow out through the skin, riddling it as if by machine-gun fire, and drop off to pupate on the ground.

  The second of the two devil flies is of an even more evil nature, for its larvae live not under the skin, but in a tight and squirming mass the size of a small grapefruit which clogs the cavities of the deer’s nose and throat until it seems impossible that the victim can escape death by asphyxiation. I once took a hundred and thirty of these giant maggots, each an inch long, from the nasal passages of a single doe.

  Now perhaps—though I cannot prove the supposition—it is the threat of these many varieties of winged furies which drives the deer so far north in the early spring, for the farther north, the later is the coming of fly season. Then—again perhaps—as the flies die off from north to south with the progress of summer, the deer may follow that line of recession in search of undepleted pastures. I do not know if this is true, but I do know that the summer arrival of the deer in the central Barrens during my stay in the land coincided exactly with the final abrupt disappearance of the flies at that point.

  While I am speaking of the flies I may as well exhaust the subject of the minute beasts who prey upon the deer. The big fly maggots are well known to all who know the caribou, but fortunately for their peace of mind few Northerners have any idea of the menageries of other unpleasant beasts that exist under the skin of the deer. Parasites are so numerous, I conclude from my own studies, that there comes a time in the life of every deer, if it survives the other perils, when it is so overloaded with parasites that it simply dies of outright starvation though it spends all day eating. All other things being equal, I doubt if a deer can expect to live more than a dozen years before it is so riddled with worms and cysts that death must inevitably ensue. For the record, and for the enlightenment of any reader who may someday be offered a prime roast of caribou, here is a list of the actual parasites I took from one old buck.

  In the body muscles there was a concentration of tapeworm cysts that averaged two per cubic inch of meat. No part of the muscle tissues was free of these abhorrent things, and in addition to them, there was a liberal sprinkling of the cysts of nematode worms. The lungs also were very active even after death. I counted and removed seventeen nematode worms, most of them over six inches in length. In the liver there were tapeworm cysts of two species, some of them the size of a tennis ball. The intestines yielded one adult tapeworm of great length and antiquity, and even in the heart muscles I found six tapeworm cysts. Of minor parasites, there were a hundred and ninety warble-fly larvae under the hide and about seventy-five bott fly larvae cozily ensconced within the throat and nasal passages.

  Now this particular deer was no exception. It was simply old and therefore very heavily parasitized. But all deer which I have examined, except fawns and some yearlings, have yielded a corresponding count of parasites in degrees of intensity varying with the beast’s age.

  The interesting point here is that all the nematodes and tapeworms have at least two-stage life cycles. That is, they need another host, apart from the deer, to complete their lives. Encysted parasites reach maturity only when the flesh they are lurking in is eaten by another animal. That animal is often man.

  I do not know what sort of internal shape the native eaters of deer—or I myself—may be in. Nor do I want to know. I’m sorry that I brought up the subject. I can only comfort myself with the reflection that if the parasites to be picked up from eating deer meat were pathogenic, then there would be no Eskimos at all. It is thin comfort when I recall the raw meat dinners I have eaten in the Barrens...

  About the end of August a new mood descends upon the deer. Slowly, and in small groups, they begin moving north again, for the time of rut is drawing near and a protracted atmosphere of tension grips the already restless beasts.

  At this time the deer are fat. Freed of flies, they have time to graze on the thick lichens and on the leaves of the tiny bushes that carpet the dry lands. In late summer the bucks accumulate a layer of fat that may be three inches thick along their backs, for they will have no time to eat during the rut. Now the gleaming summer coats of the animals are a rich brown. The massive antlers of the bucks arch to the skies.

  Even the does have recovered from the ordeal of bearing and nursing the young. They are sleek again and, if not eager, at least passively ready for the October days when the rut takes place. The does also are carrying antlers, and though these are only little spikes compared with those of the bucks, they are interesting because the doe caribou are the only female members of the whole North American deer tribe equipped with antlers.

  The rut is a time of fantastic sights and sounds. The great angry bucks engage in constant battle, whether or not a prize awaits the victor. These battles go on incessantly through daylight and through darkness and at times the crash of horn on horn is so continuous and loud that sleep becomes impossible for a man camped near the rutting herds.

  Yet the battles are mostly sound and fury. The tremendous sweep of antlers that dwarf their bearers are of little use as dueling weapons, and usually the only damage to the contestants is to the loser’s pride. There is of course the constant and macabre danger of the two sets of antlers locking, and it is not rare to find the skeletons of such combatants still locked in mutual death.

  For a few weeks the winning bucks take over, and defend the herds of does. But when the urgent drive of their loins is quite exhausted, the older bucks leave the harems and go back to their own segregated lives.

  Until the first fall of winter snow the northward drift continues. But on a certain day, winter gives its brief warning before it roars down out of the darkening arctic and the coming of the first snow fills the deer with panic.

  A frenzy seizes them and they turn as one animal, coalesce into immense frantic herds, and pound toward the south again. Herds run into herds until the concentration is so complete that all the animals throughout the land may be together in one single mighty wave which plunges wildly down upon the shelter of the southern forests.

  In the fall of 1947, I met that panic-stricken wave of fleeing deer. One day the country stretched endlessly northward and was empty of all motion, save where a raven soared in lazy circles against a faded sky. But with the following dawn the
land came alive. From a high hill beside the river I could see nothing but the backs of deer. The river seethed with the multitudes swimming its rapid width, and the clicking of the countless feet was more persistent than the cries of crickets on a warm summer evening in the South. But three days later that same land was dead again. A single wolf, following leisurely over the corroded muskeg, was all that moved upon the plains.

  The winter Barrens seem empty of all living things, but there are still a few isolated little herds of deer, widely dispersed, sheltering in the islands of scrub spruce on the white plains. These deer are so few that their presence often remains unnoticed except by those white shadows which are the foxes and the wolves. Cut off from the forest herds by the arrival of full winter, the isolated ones find a precarious living in the Barrens by digging for lichens through the snow. It is no easy life, for the drifts are sometimes many feet in thickness and packed by the winds to the consistency of wood. Nevertheless, the dangers they face are as nothing to the dangers which beset the main herds sheltering inside the timber line.

  I once met an old white man who had trapped for many years by the lakes in the wooded country of Northern Manitoba where many of the great herds winter. On an October day he took me to look at the narrow neck connecting his lake with an adjoining one. The ice was clear and free of snow and as I looked downward I could see that the floor of the narrows consisted of a chaotic tangle of bones that seemed to reach within inches of the surface. The antlers alone, in that vast boneyard, could have been counted only in the tens of thousands, and the deer that had contributed their bones to the charnel collection must have totaled many times that number.

  After I had seen the narrows the old man told me the story of the days when he first built his cabin near the lake. In those days the deer, arriving from the North, were funneled by two parallel lines of hills into the narrow channel where the boneyard lies. He told me that the press of deer was sometimes so great that fawns were swept off their feet and crushed by the animals around them. He told me that this solid river of deer flowed for as much as two weeks without a slackening of the pressure. Perhaps he exaggerated, for an old man’s memory is often greener than the event. And yet there were the bones under the ice.

  I asked about the channel cemetery, and he went on to tell me how it came about. He spoke of how the Idthen Eldeli Indians—Eaters of Deer, their name means—came every fall to the narrows between the lakes, and each man brought with him at least a case of ammunition for his .30-30 rifle. The Indians remained until the ammunition failed or until the deer were past. Those that did pass. By the time the Indians were gone, the new ice of the narrows and the lakes was creaking with the weight of the dead deer that pressed it down.

  In the spring the ice dropped its weight of bodies into the deep water, and most of those deer were untouched by man except for the bullet holes which scarred their carcasses and except that all had their tongues removed for a reason that I speak of later. In the course of six decades the deep channel became so clogged with bones that a canoe could not safely be paddled through it.

  Now, in the fall, only a trickle of the great rivers of the deer flow past that place. The deer have not changed their routes—they have simply gone. And the rifles that destroyed the deer also destroyed the Indians who held the rifles, as surely as if men had turned the muzzles on themselves. For not even those immense herds could withstand the slaughter they were subjected to, and as the deer’s ranks thinned, so were the ranks of the Idthen Eldeli thinned by the meat starvation which was the aftermath of the great slaughter.

  It is almost the same tale throughout the entire wooded winter range of the deer. At Reindeer Lake, in the late ’30s, the annual kill of deer was somewhere in the vicinity of fifty thousand animals. Now there are not that many living deer in all the Reindeer Lake district and in all the lands about the great lake that was named for them. In a little while the name will be an empty thing and men will forget why that name was given to the lake.

  Still, no one but a fool will blame the Idthen people. Theirs was always a hard and dangerous life. Always the deer were their sole bulwark against starvation and oblivion. Through the long winters, the deer alone made existence in the thin forests possible for these Indians, even as the deer alone made life possible for the Eskimos in the Barrens. Both races were, in fact, Peoples of the Deer, and before the coming of white men, both races lived in balance with the animals who gave them life.

  But when the trading posts began to spread into the Northern forests the rifle rapidly replaced the old weapons of the people. This was perhaps a good thing while those rifles were single-shot muzzle loaders. But profits from the sale of lead and powder were not high enough, and progress called the people through the voices of the traders. The magazine rifle usurped the scene. And a race of men who had devoted all the centuries of their history to the killing of deer with weapons that were efficient only when used with great skill, and when used unrelentingly, were now presented with a weapon that could destroy without restrictions and without the need of skill.

  You have heard all this before. Possibly you heard it in connection with the buffalo and the Southern Plains Indians, but that was a century ago. That was in the time of your father’s father. Listen to what I tell you anyway, for I am speaking of what happened in your time, and is still happening.

  The trading firms grew wealthy and still grow wealthier. As recently as the 1920s, one outpost of a world-famous trading concern actually encouraged the sale of tremendous quantities of ammunition to the Northern Indians by offering to buy all the deer tongues that were brought in! Many thousands of dried deer tongues passed through that post, while many thousands of carcasses, stripped only of their tongues, remained to rot in the spring thaws. I hardly think it just to lay too great a blame upon the Indians.

  The Idthen Eldeli went out to their winter hunting grounds, every hunter carrying a case of shells (a thousand rounds) and often enough they were back at the post before spring for more. The profits mounted pleasantly, so pleasantly that a recent suggestion that the sale of ammunition be limited for the good of the purchasers and of the game was denounced as interference with the liberty of men. It was interference, I suppose, interference with the free rights of men to destroy themselves through ignorance.

  The slaughter of the deer and the destruction of the Deer People had gone on, is going on, and all that has been done to halt the twin massacres is this: agents of the government have been sent out to tell the survivors of the Idthen Eldeli that they must learn the arts of “conservation.” The Idthen People listen to this strange, foreign talk, but in the privacy of their own tents they recall how the white trappers who have encroached upon their lands kill the migrating deer without compunction and without restraint. Then the Idthen People remember that the deer belong to them—to them alone—and have belonged to them for all eternity.

  There is right on their side and more than a little truth. I have part of an actual diary kept by a young white trapper on the edge of the Barrens, and this diary was kept with great exactitude, no detail of his daily life being omitted. In the fall of 1939, when the deer came south through this man’s territory, he went with his rifle to secure his winter supply of meat for himself, for his dogs, and for trap-bait. The deer that he killed for bait were shot all over his area and simply left lying in the open. No attempt was made to protect them from the many scavengers. Instead the man shot enough deer so that when the scavengers were through, he would still have enough carcasses left to set his traps upon. The part of the diary that I have runs only for five weeks, but it lists 267 deer killed in that period and this particular trapper considers his kill to be conservative. I think the Idthen Eldeli have reason to reject the pious “conservation” talk of the agents who are sent to succor them.

  Words alone are sent to halt the slaughter, not only of the deer but also of the People. The few hundred survivors of the Idthen Elde
li, who in 1900 numbered nearly two thousand souls, are to be protected from the folly of white men by the good advice of those set in authority above them. But in a few more years they will need no more advice, and they will no longer be an embarrassment to those who must minister to their needs.

  But I should not be fair if I did not speak of the single “constructive” thing the government has done to save the caribou. I have neglected to tell you of the “real culprit” in the destruction of the deer. He is the oldest scapegoat in man’s history—the wolf. It is the almost unanimous opinion of white traders, trappers and “sports” in the North that the tremendous decrease in the numbers of the deer has come about solely because of the bloodthirsty ravages of that insatiable killer, the arctic wolf. There is no doubt about it. A white trapper who does not kill more than five hundred deer a year himself will go into a perfect paroxysm of fury as he tells you how the wolves are slaughtering the deer by the tens of thousands. He has no proof, of course; but then, who needs proof against the wolf?

  The voices of these men make a loud and useful noise. Under cover of the cries set up against the wolf the real faults lie deeply buried out of the public sight. Government joins the cry, accepts it joyfully, and pays a bounty of $25 on the head of each wolf killed. Government is active and the public interest, should it unhappily be aroused to awareness of the situation, is laid to rest again.

  Cry wolf, you men of little conscience! Ignore the fact that while there have been deer there have always been wolves, and that until your coming, wolves, men and deer lived in mutual adjustment with each other for more centuries than we can count. Cry wolf! No one will give you the lie. The wolves cannot answer. The last survivors of the Peoples of the Deer can-not reply.

  As for the deer themselves—in the spring, when the first thaws are still to come, the anxious does move northward and the great herds form. They are still great, and when they pass by, the talk of their destruction seems insane. Yet now they pass along one route where once they moved by many mighty roads.