The Snow Walker (5 page)

Cursing himself for having left his dog at home, the shepherd went for help, running heavily toward the distant village. He was breathless by the time he reached it. Armed with whatever they could find, a dozen men were soon gathered together, calling their dogs about them. Two of them carried muzzle-loading shotguns while another carried a long-barrelled military musket.

The day was growing old when they set out across the moors, but the light was still clear. From afar the shepherds saw the white flecks that were the two dead sheep. Grouped close, they went forward cautiously until one of them raised an arm and pointed, and they all saw the shaggy thing that crouched beside one of the sheep.

They set the dogs on it.

Nakusiak had been so busy slicing up meat to sun-dry in the morning that he did not notice the approaching shepherds until the frenzied outcry of the dogs made him look up. He had never before seen dogs like these and he had no way of knowing that they were domestic beasts. He sprang to his feet and stood uncertainly, eyes searching for a place of refuge. Then his glance fell on the grim mob of approaching shepherds and he sensed their purpose as surely as a fox senses the purpose of the huntsmen.

Now the dogs were on him. The leader, a rangy black-and-brown collie, made a circling lunge at this strange-smelling, strangely clad figure standing bloody handed beside the torn carcasses. Nakusiak reacted with a two-handed swing of the spear-haft, striking the bitch so heavily on the side of her head that he broke her neck. There was a hubbub among the shepherds, then one of them dropped to his knee and raised the long musket.

The remaining dogs closed in again and Nakusiak backed to the very lip of the cliff, swinging the shaft to keep them off. He lifted his head to the shepherds and in an imploring voice cried out:
“Inukuala eshuinak!
It is a man who means no harm!”

For answer came the crash of the gun. The ball struck him in the left shoulder and the force of the blow spun him around so that he lost his balance. There was a shout from the shepherds and they rushed forward, but they were still a hundred yards away when Nakusiak stumbled over the cliff edge.

There was luck in the thing, for he only fell free a few feet before bringing up on a rocky knob. Scrabbling frantically with his right hand he managed to cling to the steep slope and slither another yard or so past a slight overhang until he could lie, trembling and spent, on a narrow ledge undercut into the wall of rock.

When the men joined the hysterical dogs peering over the cliff edge, there was nothing to be seen except the glitter of waves on the narrow beach far below and the flash of gulls disturbed from their resting places.

The shepherds were oddly silent. They were hearing again that despairing cry, instantly echoed by the shot. Whatever the true identity of the sheep killer might be, they knew in their hearts that he was human, and the knowledge did not sit easily with them.

They shifted uncomfortably until the man who had fired spoke up defiantly.

“Whatever ‘twas, ‘tis gone now surely,” he said. “And ‘tis as well, for look you at the way it tore the sheep and killed the dog!”

The others glanced at the dead dog and sheep, but they had nothing to say until Macrimmon spoke.

“Would it not be as well, do you think, to make a search of the beach?”

“Ach, man, don’t be daft!” the gunner replied irritably. “‘Twould be the devil’s own job to gang down there… and for what? If that thing was alive when it fell, then ‘tis certain dead enough now. And if ‘twas never alive at all…” He let the sentence lie unfinished.

Calling the dogs the shepherds moved homeward over the darkening moors, and each one wrestled with his doubts in silence.

There was no policeman at Taransay, and no one offered to carry a message to the nearest constable across the mountains to distant Stornaway. Macrimmon put the feelings of all the men into words when he was being questioned about the event by his wife and daughters.

“What’s done is done. There’s no good to come from telling the wide world what’s to be found on the moors, for they’d no believe it. Best let it be forgotten.”

Yet Macrimmon himself could not forget. During the next two days and nights he found himself haunted by the memory of that alien voice. Up on the inland moors sloping to the mountain peaks, the wind seemed to echo it. The cry of the gulls seemed to echo it. It beat into the hard core of the man and would not be silenced and, in the end, it prevailed.

On the third morning he stood once more at the edge of the cliff… and cursed himself for a fool. Nevertheless, that dour and weatherbeaten man carefully lowered himself over the cliff edge. His dog wheened unhappily but dared not follow as his master disappeared from view.

The tide was driving out and the shingle glistened wetly far below him, but the shepherd did not look down. He worked his way skillfully, for in his youth he had been a great one at finding and carrying off the eggs of the cliff-nesting gulls. However, he was no youth now and before he had descended halfway he was winded and his hands were cut and bruised. He found a sloping ledge that ran diagonally toward the beach and he was inching his way along it when he passed close to a late-nesting gannet. The huge bird flung herself outward, violently flailing the air. A wing struck sharply against Macrimmon’s face and involuntarily he raised a hand to fend her off. In that instant the shale on which his feet were braced crumbled beneath him and he was falling away toward the waiting stones.

Unseen on the cliff top the dog sensed tragedy and howled.

The dog’s howl awakened Nakusiak from fevered sleep in the protection of the little cave which had been his first sanctuary. Here, on a bed of seaweed, he lay waiting for his body to heal itself. His swollen shoulder throbbed almost unbearably but he stolidly endured, for it was in his nature to endure. All the same, as he waited for time to work for him, he was conscious that there was nothing ahead in this alien world but danger and ultimate destruction.

When the dog’s howl woke him, Nakusiak shrank farther into the recesses of his cave. His good hand clutched the only weapon left to him… a lump of barnacle-encrusted rock. He lifted it and held it poised as the rattle of falling stones mingled with a wailing human shout outside his cave.

His heart beat heavily in the silence that followed. It was a silence that reminded Nakusiak of how it is when an ermine has cornered a ground squirrel in a rock pile and waits unseen for the trapped beast to venture out. Nakusiak was aware of anger rising above his pain. Was he not
Inuk
—a Man—and was a man to be treated as a beast? He changed his grip on the rock, then, with a shout of defiance, stumbled out of his sanctuary into the morning light.

The sun momentarily blinded him and he stood tensely waiting for the attack he was sure would come. There was no sound… no motion. The glare eased and he stared about him. On a thick windrow of seaweed a few yards away he saw the body of a man lying face down, blood oozing from a rent in his scalp.

Nakusiak stared at this, his enemy, and his heart thudded furiously as the inert body seemed to stir, and mumbled sounds came from its mouth. In an instant Nakusiak was standing over the shepherd, the lump of rock raised high. Death hovered over Angus Macrimmon, and only a miracle could have averted it. A miracle took place. It was the miracle of pity.

Nakusiak slowly lowered his arm. He stood trembling, looking down at the wounded man and the trickle of blood from the deep wound. Then with his good arm Nakusiak gripped the shepherd, rolled him over, and laboriously dragged his enemy up the shingle to the shelter of the cave.

a search party
found the dog on the cliff edge the next morning and guessed grimly at what had happened. But the searchers only guessed a part of it. When a couple of hours later six of them, all well armed, reached the beach in a fishing skiff, they were totally unprepared for what they found.

A thin curl of smoke led them directly to the cave. When they came to peer fearfully into the narrow cleft, guns at the ready, their faces showed such baffled incredulity at the scene before them that Macrimmon could not forbear smiling.

“Dinna be frighted, lads,” he said from the seaweed mattress where he lay. “There’s none here but us wild folk and we’ll no eat you.”

Inside the cave a small driftwood fire kindled by Nakusiak with Macrimmon’s flint and steel burned smokily
.
The shepherd’s head was bound with strips of his own shirt, but his bruised back with its broken ribs was covered with the fur parka that had been on the back of the sheep stealer not long since. Beside him, staring uneasily at the newcomers, Nakusiak sat bare to the waist, hugging his wounded shoulder with his good arm.

The Eskimo glanced nervously from Macrimmon’s smiling face to the blob of heads crammed into the cave entrance, then slowly he too began to smile. It was the inexpressibly relieved grin of one who has been lost in a frightful void and who has come back into the land of men.

for many days
Nakusiak and Macrimmon lay in adjoining beds in the shepherd’s cottage while their wounds healed. Macrimmon’s wife and daughters gave the Eskimo care and compassion, for they acknowledged their debt to him. For his part, he entertained them with songs in Eskimo, at which the good wife muttered under her breath about “outlandish things,” but smiled warmly at the stranger for all of that.

As he was accepted by the Macrimmons, so was he accepted by the rest of the villagers, for they were kindly people and they were also greatly relieved that they did not have to bear the sin of murder. Within a few weeks the Eskimo was being referred to with affection by all and sundry as “the queer wee laddie who came out of the sea.”

Nakusiak soon adjusted to the Hebridean way of life, having accepted the fact that he would never be able to return to his own land. He learned to speak the language, and he became a good shepherd, a superb hunter of sea fowl and grey seals, and a first-rate fisherman as well. Three years after his arrival at Taransay, he married Macrimmon’s eldest daughter and started a family of his own, taking the Christian name of Malcolm, at the insistence of the young local clergyman who was one of those who particularly befriended him. During the long winter evenings he would join the other men at the Crofter’s Dram and there, sitting before the open fire, would whittle his marvellous little carvings as a way of describing to his companions the life he had known in the distant land of the Innuit.

So Nakusiak, the man who had come so far in space and time from the Walrus Place to a strange destiny in an alien world, lived out his life in Taransay. But it was no exile’s life. Long before he died at the end of the century and was buried in the village churchyard, he had become one with the people of that place; and his memory remains a part of their memory still.

One summer afternoon in our time, a young man who is Nakusiak’s great-grandson knelt to read the inscription written by the Eskimo’s clergyman friend and carved into one of the twin stones that stand over the graves of Malcolm and his wife. There was pride in the young man’s face and in the set of his shoulders as he read the words aloud:

Out of the sea from what lands none can tell,

This stranger came to Taransay to dwell.

Much was he loved who so well understood

How to return for evil a great good.

The Iron Men
_______

As I sat in the
doorway of my tent watching Hekwaw at work, my glance travelled from the quick motions of his lean hands, sending a knife blade gleaming over white wood, to his rapt face. Black hair hung long and lank over his brow, shadowing his eyes.

Dreaming over his task, he seemed neither to see nor hear the world around him—a world of rolling tundra, of looming hills, of rushing rivers and still lakes; a world of caribou, white wolves, black ravens and a myriad birds. The world that we, in our ignorance, chose to call the Barrenlands. It was Hekwaw’s world but for the moment he was unaware of it, intent on giving new life to a memory out of another age.

The long arctic sun was lying on the rim of the horizon before he rose and came toward me carrying the product of memory. It was a thing made of antler bone, black spruce and caribou sinew… and it had no place upon those northern plains. It was a crossbow, a weapon used by the Scythians in Asia Minor three thousand years ago and one that dominated the medieval battlefields of Europe until the age of gunpowder.

Some days earlier Hekwaw had been recalling stories from the ancient times of his people and he had spoken of a weapon I did not recognize. I questioned him until he drew a picture of it in the sand. I could not believe what he showed me, for it seemed impossible that his ancestors, isolated in the central arctic, could have discovered a weapon known to no other native American people. I asked him if he could make one of the weapons and he nodded. Now the crossbow was a reality.

Laying an unfeathered wooden bolt in the groove, he drew back the sinew string with both hands and lodged it in a crossways slit. On the shadowed river a red-throated loon dipped and swam. There was a sudden, resonant vibration on the still air. The bolt whirred savagely over the river and the loon flashed its wings in a dying flurry.

Hekwaw lowered the bow, placed it carefully beside him and squatted on his heels to light his stained old soapstone pipe. He did not wait for my questions but began a tale which had been called back to life across many centuries by the vibrant song of the crossbow.

AI-YA!
But this
is a weapon! It came to us in distant times but I keep the memory of it because my fathers’ fathers were men to whom it was given to remember. So it is that I can speak of the Innuhowik.

They were beings who seemed more than human, yet death could fell them. They were bearded, but their beards were not black like those of the Godbringers—they were yellow and sometimes brown and looked as bright as copper. The eyes of some were brown also, but most were of the colour of the eastern sky just before sunrise, or the deep ice of the winter lakes. Their voices boomed and rumbled, and they spoke no words my people understood.

We never knew what land they came from, only that it lay eastward beyond salt waters which they travelled over in boats many times the length of a kayak.

In those days my people lived, as they had always lived, far inland and so they did not witness the arrival of the Innuhowik. The tents of my forbears stood along the shores of
Innuit Ku,
River of Men, which flows north out of the forests. My people avoided the forests for these belonged to the
Itkilit,
the Indians as you call them. In spring when the caribou migrated north out of their lands, the Itkilit sometimes followed, and when they came upon one of our camps there would be fighting. Afterwards they would withdraw into the shelter of the trees. We feared them, but the tundra plains were ours by right, as the forests were theirs by right, and so our southernmost camps stood only a few days’ journey from the place where Innuit Ku emerges from the shadows of the trees.

One late-summer day when the leaves of the dwarf willows were already darkening, a young boy lay on the crest of a hill close to the most southerly Innuit camp. It was his task to give warning if the canoes of the Itkilit should appear. When he saw something moving far to the south he did not wait to be sure what it was. He came running like a hare over the rocky plain and his cry pierced into the skin tents of the families who lived at that place.

It was past noon and the men were mostly resting in the cool tents, but at the sound of the boy’s cry they ran out into the blazing light. Women clutched their babies and quickly led the older children into the broken hills beyond the River.

The people had chosen the site of that camp with care. A little distance to the south of it the River roared through a narrow gorge, tossing great plumes of spray high into the air. Neither canoe nor kayak could pass through unless it stayed close to the cliffs on the western side. And men lying on top of these western cliffs could look directly down upon the only safe channel. It was to this gorge that the Innuit men hurried when the boy gave the alarm. Beside each man was a pile of frost-shattered rocks, jagged edged and as heavy as one man could lift. These were the best weapons we could muster against the Itkilit, for in those times my people had not good bows because the only wood available to us was of a kind too weak and too soft.

The men atop the cliff had not long to wait before something came into sight far up the River. As it plunged toward them they stared fearfully, but they were perplexed too. It was a boat they saw—not a canoe—and one such as no Innuit had ever imagined. It was as long as three kayaks, as broad as the length of a man, and built of thick wooden planks. The beings it carried were stranger still. All save one sat with their backs to the front of the boat and pulled at long paddles set between wooden pins. There were eight of them, sitting in pairs. The ninth stood in the back facing the rest and holding another long paddle thrust out behind. He held the gaze of my people for he wore a shining metal cap on his head and under it his face was almost hidden by a long yellow beard. Polished iron sheets on his breast caught reflections from the swift waters and sent lights into the eyes of the men on the cliffs.

These strange ones were almost upon the Innuit, but my people were so bewildered they did not know how to act. Were these
men
below them? Or spirits? If they were spirits they could not be killed. They
could,
however, be angered, then there would be no way of knowing what they might do.

The big wooden boat swept into the gorge and was steered into the western channel by the tall man at the stem whose bellowing voice could be heard even above the roar of the waters. From the cliffs high above, my people watched… and did nothing, and the strangers passed on down the River.

As the Innuit began to rise to their feet, one of them yelled, and they all looked where he pointed. Three long, bark canoes had appeared upriver, and this time there was no doubt who came into our lands. They were Itkilit, dressed in scraped hides and wearing the faces of death, and driving their canoes as swiftly as wolves racing after a deer.

There was barely time for my people to snatch up the sharp rocks lying beside them. As the canoes flew past below, they came under a hail of boulders that smashed bark boats and men’s bones. Two of the canoes broke apart like the skulls of rabbits under the blows of an axe.

The River was red that day; but from out of the spray of the gorge, one canoe emerged. The Innuit men ran to the shore, tossed their swift kayaks into the stream and gave chase.

Great falls block the River only a few miles downstream from the gorge, and it was toward the falls that the last canoe, holed by stones and with some of its men wounded, was being driven. When the funnelling current above the falls was reached, the Itkilit saw death ahead and knew death was behind them. At the last moment they turned out of the current and drove their sinking canoe ashore. They leapt up the bank toward a ridge of rocks from whose shelter they hoped to defend themselves from the Innuit.

They did not reach that ridge. It was already held by the iron-clad strangers who had also been warned by the current and by the roar of falling water and had gone to the shore. These strange ones rose up from behind the rocks of the ridge and charged down upon the Itkilit roaring like bears, thrusting with great long knives, and slashing with iron axes. Only a few Itkilit got back to the River. They flung themselves into it and were swept over the falls.

The strangers—they whom we later called Innuhowik, Iron Men—stood watching the kayaks where they hovered in the current. Perhaps my people seemed as terrifying to their eyes as they had seemed to ours, but they were brave. One of them came slowly to the shore carrying no weapon in his hands. At his approach the kayaks nervously moved out of the backwater and away from the land. The yellow-bearded leader of the Innuhowik came to the water’s edge, and my people wondered at his size for he stood a head taller than any of them. They watched as he drew a short knife from his belt and held it out, handle first, toward the kayakers.

It was a man named Kiliktuk who paddled cautiously toward the spot and, reaching out his long, double-bladed paddle, touched the handle of the knife. The stranger smiled and laid the knife on the paddle blade so Kiliktuk could draw it to him without touching shore.

Soon all the kayaks were beached and the men who were my forefathers were crowded around the Innuhowik fingering their tools and weapons. It was clear the strangers were not ill-disposed to the Innuit, so they were brought back to the camp. Far into that night the song-drums sounded while Innuit and Innuhowik sat together by the fires and feasted on caribou meat and fish. It is remembered that the strangers ate like men—like hungry men—and that they looked at our women with the eyes of men.

As to what happened after, the stories speak of many things. They tell especially of the strength of the Innuhowik, and of the wonderful tools and weapons they possessed. These were mostly of iron, which was unknown to the Innuit except as hard, heavy stones which sometimes fell from the skies.

After they had been in the camp for a few days, the Innuhowik began asking questions by means of drawings in the sand, and by signs, and the people understood that they wished to know if Innuit Ku led to the sea in the east. When they had been made to know that it did not, but led instead to the northern seas from which the ice seldom passes, they became unhappy. They talked with one another in loud voices, but at last came to an agreement and let us understand they wished to remain with us for a time.

We were glad to have them stay. They soon gave up wearing their own clothing of thick cloth and metal plates and put on the soft caribou-skin garments our women made for them. When the cold weather began they even put aside their horned iron caps which made them look like muskox bulls.

The Innuhowik knew many secret things. They could make fire by striking iron on rock and they had small blue stones that could tell them where the sun was even though the sky was black with clouds. But although they had much wisdom, there were many things in our land which were strange to them. We taught each other, and perhaps it was they who had the most to learn.

Their leader’s name was Koonar. He could carry whole carcasses of caribou for many miles. He could split the skull of even the great brown bear when he wielded his long iron blade. His mind was just as strong, and in only a little time he could understand and speak our tongue. From Koonar’s lips my people heard the story of how the Innuhowik came to our River. It was told that they sailed out of the northeast in their long wooden ships until they reached the coast of the sea which lies far to the east of us. Some of them stayed there guarding their ships while others took smaller boats and went inland up the rivers, though what it was they sought we never learned.

Koonar’s boat went far south into unknown lands and travelled upon lakes and rivers running through the forests. But one night there was trouble with the Itkilit, and they fought, and some of the Innuhowik perished, as did many of the Itkilit. Koonar turned back but found his old way now barred by the Itkilit and so the Innuhowik followed new rivers north, hoping to be able to turn east to the shores where the long ships waited. When they were five days’ travel to the south of the first Innuit camps, they came upon two tents of Itkilit and surprised the people in them, killing all except a young boy who escaped and carried word to other Itkilit camps. Then Koonar and his men were pursued into our land as I have already told.

Koonar lived in Kiliktuk’s tent, where also lived Airut who was Kiliktuk’s daughter. She was a fine young woman with full, round cheeks and a laughing voice. She had been married once but her man had been killed when his kayak was holed on a rapid in the River. Kiliktuk hoped Airut would seem good in Koonar’s sight so that Koonar might become a son in that tent. Yet Koonar, alone of his men, seemed not to desire a woman, and so he did not take Airut though she was willing.

One day in the month when the snows come, Koonar went to a cache near the deer crossing place to bring back some meat stored there. He was returning with two whole gutted carcasses on his shoulders when he slipped and fell among the rocks with such force that one of his thigh bones was shattered. He was carried into Kiliktuk’s tent with pieces of bone sticking out of the flesh, and even his own men believed he would die. He was sick for a long time; and it may be that he lived only because Airut refused to let death take him away, and because Kiliktuk who was a great shaman could command the help of the spirits.

Koonar recovered but he never walked freely again nor did he regain his great strength, for it seemed the injury he had suffered had eaten into his heart. Truly he was changed for now it came about that the hopes of Kiliktuk were realized. Koonar took Airut as his wife, even as his men had all taken wives, and after that my people believed the Innuhowik would stay forever in the camps of the Innuit.

The people were wrong. When the snows were thick on the land and the rivers were solidly frozen, the Innuhowik gathered in a big snowhouse the people had built for them and spent many days talking together. What all that talk came to in the end was that the Innuhowik decided to forsake their women and go away from the land of my people. They had made up their minds to travel eastward over the tundra plains, using some of our dogs and sleds.