The Snow Walker (10 page)

Arnuk’s nose told her that the wolverine had been gone for several weeks, and there seemed little likelihood that he would return until the winter gales again forced him to seek shelter. She scratched earth and sand over the unclean floor, then set about dragging moss into the deepest recess. Here she hid herself and made surrender to her hour.

Arnuk’s pups were born on a morning when the cries of the white geese were loud in the spring air. It was the time of birth, and the seven squirming things that lay warm against the dog’s fur were not alone in their first day of life. On the sand ridges beyond the river, female ground squirrels suckled naked motes of flesh; and in a den by a ridge a mile distant, an arctic fox thrust his alert face above the ground while the feeble whimpers of the pups his mate was nursing warned him of the tasks ahead. All living things in the land by the river moved to the rhythm of the demands of life newborn or soon to be born. All things moved to this rhythm except the outcast wolf.

During the time Arnuk remained hidden, the young wolf underwent a torment that gave him no peace. Restless and yearning for things he had never known, he haunted the vicinity of the cave. He did not dare go too close, but each day he carried a piece of deer meat to within a few yards of the cave mouth and then drew back to wait hopefully for his gift to be accepted.

On the third day, as he lay near the cave snapping at the flies which hung in a cloud about his head, his keen ears felt the faintest tremors of a new sound. He was on his feet instantly, head thrust out and body tense with attention. It came again, so faint it was felt rather than heard—a tiny whimper that called to him across the ages and across all barriers. He shook himself abruptly and with one quick, proprietary glance at the cave mouth, he trotted out across the plain—no longer a solitary outcast but a male beginning the evening hunt that would feed his mate and pups. So, simply and out of his deep need, the young wolf filled the void that had surrounded him through the torturing weeks of spring.

Arnuk did not so easily accept the wolf in his newly assumed role. For several days she kept him at a distance with bared teeth, although she ate the food he left at the cave mouth. But before a week was out she had come to expect the fresh meat—the tender ground squirrels, arctic hares and plump ptarmigan. From this acceptance it was not a very long step to complete acceptance of the wolf himself.

Arnuk sealed the compact with him during the second week after the pups were born, when, coming to the den mouth one morning, she found part of a freshly killed caribou fawn lying ready for her, and the sleeping form of the young wolf only a few feet away.

The wolf had made a long, hard hunt that night, covering most of the hundred square miles of territory he had staked out for his adopted family. Exhausted by his efforts, he had not bothered to retire the usual discreet distance from the den.

For a long minute Arnuk stared at the sleeping wolf and then she began to stalk him. There was no menace in her attitude and when she reached the wolf’s side her great plumed tail went up into its husky curl and her lips lifted as if in laughter.

The wolf woke, raised his head, saw her standing over him and knew that here at last was the end to loneliness. The morning light blazed over the den ridge as the two stood shoulder to shoulder looking out over the awakening plains.

Life was good by the banks of the river during the days that followed. There was no emptiness now in Arnuk’s heart. And for the wolf there was the swelling pride with which he lay in the sun outside the den while the pups tussled with his fur and chewed at his feet.

Time passed until the pups were in their seventh week. Midsummer had come to the barrens and the herds of deer were drifting southward again. The crossing place was once more thronged and calves grunted beside their ragged mothers while old bucks, their velvet-covered antlers reaching to the skies, moved aloofly in the van.

One evening a hunger for the chase came over Arnuk, and in the secret ways men know nothing of, she made her desire known to the wolf. When the late summer dusk fell, Arnuk went out alone into the darkening plains, secure in the knowledge that the wolf would steadfastly guard the pups until she returned.

She did not intend a long absence, but several miles from the river she came on a band of young buck deer. They were fine beasts, and fat, which at this time of the year was unusual. Arnuk was tired of lean meat and she circled the resting herd, filled with an ardent appetite.

A change of the uncertain breeze betrayed her and the startled deer sprang to their feet and fled. Arnuk was hungry and the night was a hunter’s night. She took up the long chase.

The hours drove the brief darkness from the land and when the early winds of dawn rose in the north the young wolf roused himself from his vigil at the cave mouth. An ill-defined uneasiness made him turn to the den and thrust his head and shoulders into the entrance. All was well, and the pups were rolled together in a compact ball, jerking their sturdy legs in sleep. Yet the prickle of anxiety persisted in the wolf’s mind and he turned toward the river where the grey light picked out the long rolls of distant ridges. Perhaps he was worried by Arnuk’s long absence; or perhaps he had been disturbed by senses unknown to man. He trotted away from the den sniffing at the cold trail of the dog, hoping to see her approaching across the lightening plains.

He had gone no more than a quarter of a mile when the vague sense of something amiss took concrete form. A vagrant eddy brought the north breeze to his nostrils and instantly he knew what had disturbed him when he woke. He sprinted back toward the cave with startling speed.

As he breasted the slope beside the den the stink of wolverine filled his nostrils and he was transformed by an elemental fury. He came down the slope in half a dozen gigantic leaps, ears flat to his skull and his throat rumbling with incoherent rage.

the wolverine which
had wintered in the cave where Arnuk’s pups now whimpered in their sleep was a sixty-pound male, a little past his prime, and more than a little short of temper. That spring he had methodically searched for a mate across hundreds of miles of the surrounding country and had found none. During the night of Arnuk’s hunt he had returned to the ford by the river where he expected to find a good store of drowned deer. Instead he had found nothing but clean bones and the evidence that a wolf and a dog had pre-empted what he considered to be his private larder. His mood grew worse, and when his wrinkling nostrils caught the faintest trace of pup smell from the direction of the old winter lair, he did not hesitate. His belly rumbling with hunger he turned from the river in the grey dawn light and circled upwind until he found a rock outcrop that gave him cover and from which he could observe the den. Here he waited until he saw the young wolf trot away from the den mouth toward the inland plains.

Cautiously the wolverine moved in upon the den, pausing to reassure himself that the pups were undefended. His massive body hugged the rough ground as he drew closer and now, certain of success, he could foretaste the pleasure of the killing and the salt warmth of blood.

There was blood enough for him to taste that dawn.

The young wolf’s furious rush was so swift that the wolverine had only time to slew about and take the weight of the attack upon his side. It was enough to save him for the moment. Although the wolf’s teeth sank into the tough skin, they missed their intended hold upon the throat, meeting instead in the muscles of the wolverine’s shoulder. On any lesser beast it would have been a good hold, but on this beast it was not good enough. Aflame with an incandescent anger, he swung the wolf clean off its feet as he whirled in a savage counter-thrust.

Had the wolf been older and more experienced he might have released his grip and sidestepped that lunge, but he was young and blinded by the allegiance he had so freely given to the pups he had not sired. He held his grip and did not slacken it even when the wolverine’s teeth and claws raked deep into his flank.

They fought in silence. On the eastern rim of the horizon the red sun seemed pallid beside the glare of blood upon the rocks. Drawn to the cave mouth by the first onslaught, the pups watched for an instant and then, terrified by the fury of the struggle, retreated to crouch trembling in the dark earth. Only the gulls witnessed the duel’s end.

the gulls warned
Arnuk. As she trotted wearily homeward in the warmth of the morning, she saw them circling and heard their strident screams. They eddied ominously above the rocks where the den lay and, weary as she was, anxiety gave her new strength and she came on at a gallop. And so she found them. The wolverine had dragged himself toward the river before he bled to death. But the wolf, his belly ripened raggedly so that his entrails sprawled around him, lay stiffening beside the entrance to the cave.

The bodies still lay where they had died when, a few days later, the voices of men echoed once more along the shores of the river, and young Maktuk bent down to the dark opening and gently thrust his hand under the timid pups while Arnuk, half wild with old emotions, stood trembling by his side. Maktuk was a man who could read much that is never written and he understood all there was to know of what had taken place beneath those shattered rocks.

On an evening in late summer he took his son to the bank of the river and placed the boy’s hand on the head of the saffron-coated dog.

“Maktuk, my son, in a little time you also shall be a man and a hunter, and the wide plains will know your name. In those days to come you will have certain friends to help you in the hunt, and of these the foremost you shall always call
Arnuk;
and then my father will know that we received his gift and he will be at ease. And in those times to come, all beasts shall fall to your spear and bow, save one alone. Never shall your hand be raised against the white one—against
Amow,
the wolf—and so shall our people pay their debt to him.”

The Snow Walker
_______

I am Ootek, and my
people are the people of the River of Men. Once they were many and the land was good to them, but now it is my time and we have almost forgotten how it was in the old days when the deer flooded the tundra and gave us life. Hunger comes often now, and the deer but seldom. No one now lives by the big lakes to the north although when my father was young the tents of the people stood everywhere along those shores. I have travelled down the River to the big lakes but when I reached them I turned back from an empty land.

Only the spirits who remain in those places remember the times when a man might stand on a hill as the deer passed by and though he looked to the east or the west, the south or the north, he would see only their brown backs and hear only the clicking of antlers and the grumbling of their full bellies.

The great herds have gone… and so we who lived by the deer must follow the Snow Walker even as my father followed him in the spring of the year.

after the ice
had grown thick on the lakes last winter there came a time of storms and for many days we stayed in our igloos. The children grew quiet and did not play and the old people sometimes looked toward the door tunnels with shadowed eyes. The snows mounted over the top of the igloos until we could not even venture out to look for willow twigs to burn. The igloos were cold and dark for we had long since eaten the deer fat that should have burned in the lamps. So little food remained to us from the few southbound deer we had been able to kill in the autumn that the dogs were beginning to starve, and we ourselves were not much better off.

One day Belikari, who was my closest neighbor among the seven families living in the camp, came to tell me that a mad fox had run into the tunnel of his snowhouse where his dogs lay and had bitten three of them before it was killed by the rest. Those three dogs died with foam at their lips, and they were only three of many. This was another evil because when the foxes went mad their pelts became worthless and so, even if the storms had allowed us to travel, it would have been no use visiting the traps.

After a long time the blizzards ended and the weather grew calm and cold. All the people had survived though some of the old ones could hardly stir from the sleeping ledges. We younger men took the few remaining dogs and went searching for meat we had cached on the Flat Country. We found only a little because most of the caches were buried under hard drifts that had mounted so high they had covered the markers.

The women and children helped to keep famine at bay by digging under the drifts near the igloos for fish bones and scraps of old hides with which to make soup. By such means we hoped to cling to our lives until the warm winds and the lengthening days might bring the deer back to our country from the forested lands in the south.

But long after the time when the ice should have started to rot, it still lay heavy and hard on the rivers and lakes, and the days seemed to grow colder again until we wondered if winter would ever come to an end. We ate all the food we had, and the deer did not come. We waited… for there was nothing else we could do. We ate the last of our dogs, and still the deer did not come.

One day the men gathered in Owliktuk’s snowhouse. His wife, Kunee, sat on the ledge with her child in her arms, and the child was dead. We knew it could not be very long before many of the women were nursing such sorrow. My cousin, Ohoto, put some thoughts into words.

“Perhaps people should go away from this place now. Perhaps they might go south to the place where the white man has come to live. It might happen that he would have food he would give us.”

The white man had only recently come to live on the edge of our country, to trade with us for foxes. It was a long way to his place and only Ohoto had been there before. Since we had no dogs, we knew we would have to carry everything on our backs, and the children and old people would not be able to ride on the sleds as they should. We knew some of them would not see the white man’s place… but the child of Owliktuk and Kunee was dead. We decided to go. The women rolled up a few skins to use for tent shelters and sleeping robes; the children carried whatever they could, and we men slung our packs on our shoulders and we left our camp by the River and set out into the south.

Soon after we started, the sun turned warm and for five days we walked to our knees in melting snow. My wife’s mother had lost count of the years she had lived, yet she walked with the rest and still helped to pitch camp at the end of each day. But on the fifth night she did not offer to help. She sat by herself with her back to a rock and spoke to none except Ilupalee, my daughter. She called the child to her.

From a distance I watched and listened as the old woman put her bony hands on my daughter’s head. I heard her softly singing her spirit song to the child, the secret song she had received from her mother’s mother and with which she could summon her helping spirit. Then I knew she had made up her mind what she must do.

It was her choice, and my wife and I could say nothing about it, not even to tell her of the sorrow we felt. During the night, she went from the camp. None saw her go. We did not speak her name after that for one may not use the name of a person who has gone out on the land to seek the Snow Walker until the name and the spirit it bears can be given again to a newly born child.

The next day we reached the Little Stick country which borders the forests. Here there was plenty of wood so we could at least have fires where we could warm ourselves. Toward evening we overtook Ohoto’s family squatted beside a fire, melting water to drink since there was no food. Ohoto told me his daughter had fallen and could not rise again so they had to make camp. When the rest of the people came up, it was clear that many, both young and old, could not go on; and Ohoto thought we were still two or three days distant from the home of the white man.

I had been carrying Ilupalee on my shoulders most of the day and was so tired I could not think. I lay down by the fire and shut my eyes. Ilupalee lay beside me and whispered in my ear:

“A white hare is sitting behind the little trees over there.”

I thought this was only a dream born out of hunger so I did not open my eyes. But she whispered again:

“It is a big, fat hare. She Who Walked said it was there.”

This time I opened my eyes and got to my knees. I looked where she pointed and could see nothing except a patch of dwarf spruce. All the same I unslung the rifle from my pack and walked toward the trees.

Indeed it was there!

But one hare does not provide more than a mouthful of food for twenty-five people so we had to think carefully what should be done. It was decided that the three strongest men—Alekahaw, Ohoto and I—would eat the hare and thereby gain strength to go on to the white man’s place. My wife built a fire apart from the camp so the others would not have to endure the smell of meat cooking. She boiled the hare and we three men shared it; but we left the guts, bones, skin and the head to make soup for the children.

We walked away from the camp along a frozen stream so we would not have to wade through the soft snow. My skin boots were thin and torn and my feet were soon numb because at each step we broke through the thin crust above the thaw water. I did not mind because my stomach was warm.

It was growing dark on the second day when we came to a clearing in a spruce woods on the shore of a lake where the white man had his house. His dogs heard us and howled and when we came near he opened the door and waited with the bright light of a lamp shining behind him. We stopped and stood where we were because he was a stranger, and a white man, and we had met very few white men. He spoke to us, but not in our language, so we could not reply. When he spoke again, very loudly, and still we did not reply, he went back into his house.

It grew cold as the darkness settled around us, and our wet boots became stiff as they froze. I thought of Ilupalee and wanted very much to do something, but did not know what we should do.

After a long time the door opened again and the white man came out. He was wiping his beard. We smelled hot fat from his house but he shut the door behind him and motioned us to follow him to another small cabin.

He unlocked the door and we went in. He lit a lamp and hung it on a rafter so we could see that the walls were piled high with boxes, but we looked hardest at the many bags of flour stacked in front of a table. We started to smile for we believed the white man understood our needs and would help us. We stood under the lamp watching the flame reflect light from the beads of cold fat still clinging to the white man’s beard, and we gave ourselves up to the joy growing within us.

The white man opened a drawer in the table and took out a handful of small sticks of the kind used to show how much a trapper can have in exchange for the fox pelts he brings. Holding these sticks in his hand he spoke sharply in his own tongue. When we did not reply he went to a wall of the cabin, took down a fox pelt and laid it before us; then he pointed to the carrying bags which were slung on our shoulders.

The joy went out of us then. I made signs to show had no fox pelts to trade, and Alekahaw opened his bag to show how empty it was. The white man’s eyes were of a strange green colour and I could not look into them. I looked at his forehead instead while I waited for whatever must happen. Slowly his face grew red with anger, then he threw the sticks back in the drawer and began to shout at us.

Anger is something we fear since an angry man may do foolish and dangerous things. When I saw the anger in this man’s face, I backed to the door. I wanted to go from that place but Alekahaw was braver than me. He stood where he was and tried to explain to the white man how it was at the camp where the rest of the people were starving. He pulled up his
holiktu
so the man could see for himself how Alekahaw’s ribs stuck out from his body. Alekahaw touched his own face to show how tightly the skin was stretched over the bones.

The white man shrugged his shoulders. Perhaps he did not understand. He began turning down the flame in the lamp and we knew he would soon go back to his house, then the door would be shut against the needs of the people. Quickly Ohoto pulled two boxes of shells out of his bag. These were the last bullets he had and he had been saving them against the time when the deer would return. Now he put them on the table and pointed to the flour.

The white man shook his head. He was still angry. He picked up the lamp and started to go to the door. Alekahaw and Ohoto stepped out of his way, but something happened inside me and although I was frightened I would not let him pass.

He kept his eyes on me but he stretched out one hand behind him until it came to rest on a rifle hung on the wall. I could not make way for him then because I was afraid to move while he had his hand on that gun.

So we all stood still for a while. At last he picked up a small sack of flour and threw it over the table to fall at Ohoto’s feet. Then he took the rifle, shoved me aside with the barrel, pushed the door open and told us to leave. We went outside and watched as he locked the door. We watched as he went back into his house.

A little while later we saw him looking out of his window. He still had the rifle in his hand so we knew there was no use remaining. We walked away into the darkness.

Day was breaking when we got back to the camp. Those who were still able to stand gathered in front of Owliktuk’s tent and we told what we had to tell. We showed them the sack of flour which was so small a child could easily lift it.

Owliktuk spoke against us, blaming us because we had not taken the food that was needed. He said we could have repaid the white man next winter when the foxes were again good. But if we had tried to take food from the white man there would have been killing. Perhaps Owliktuk only spoke as he did because his second child was now going from him. The rest of the people said nothing but returned to their families with the small portions of flour which were their shares.

I carried my father’s share to his tent. Although he had once been the best hunter among us and only the previous year had fathered a child on his third wife, he had aged very much during the winter and his legs had weakened until he could barely walk. When I told him what had happened and gave him the flour for himself, my stepmother and the small child, he smiled and said, “One has a son who knows what may be done and what may not be done. One is glad no blood was shed. It may be that things will get better.”

It did not seem he was right about that. We had made the journey to the white man’s place and it had come to so little. Now we were too weak to go back to our own land. And on the second day after we three men returned to the camp, the Snow Walker came to the children Aljut and Uktilohik. There was no mourning for them because those who still lived had no sorrow to spend on the dead.

Each day thereafter the sun shone more brightly. Spring was upon us and still the deer had not returned. One day I tried to visit my father to see how it was with him but I was unable to walk that short distance. I crawled back into my own tent where my wife sat rocking herself with her eyes closed and her mouth wide and gasping. Beside her my daughter sometimes wailed in the thin, dry voice of an old woman. I lay down on some brush inside the flap and together we waited.

Perhaps it was the next day when I awakened to hear someone shout. The shout came again and the voice seemed familiar and the words set my heart racing.

“Here is a deer!”

I caught my rifle by the muzzle and crawled into the morning sunlight. At first I was blinded but after a moment I saw a fine buck standing a little way off with his head high, watching the camp.

I raised my rifle with hands that could not seem to hold it. The sights wavered and the deer seemed to slide up and down the barrel. Clutching it tight, I took aim and fired. The buck flung up his forefeet and leapt toward the sheltering trees. I fired again and again until the rifle was empty but the shots all went wide. I could see them kicking up little spouts of snow but I could not hear the hard thud that tells a hunter when he has hit.