The Snow Walker (7 page)

The sun was long since gone and there were no stars in the sky when they moved on; therefore, Angutna did not notice as, imperceptibly, Kipmik turned the team northward. He did not notice until late the next morning when the dawn glow showed him that all through the long night they had been travelling into the north.

Then Angutna, who was a man not given to rage, was filled with a terrible anger. He believed it was all finished for him and his family. He seized his snowknife from the sled and with a great shout leapt at the fox, his companion of so many years.

The blow would have sliced Kipmik in two but, even as he struck, Angutna stumbled. The blade hissed into the snow and the fox leapt aside. Angutna stayed on his knees until the anger went from him. When he rose to his feet he was steadfast once more.

“Ayorama!”
he said to the fox who watched him without fear. “It cannot be helped. So, Little Pup, you will lead us your way? It is a small matter. Death awaits in all directions. If you wish, we will seek death to the north.”

It is told how they staggered northward for half a day, then the fox abandoned the man and the dogs and ran on ahead. When Angutna caught up to Kipmik it was to find he had already tunnelled down through the snow to the rocks Angutna had heaped over a fine cache of meat and fat in the fall.

a year or
so later a great change came to the world of the plains dwellers. One winter day a sled drove into the camps by the Big Hungry and a man of the sea people came into the snowhouses. Through many long nights the people listened to his wondrous tales of life by the salt water. They were particularly fascinated by his accounts of the wonders that had been brought to that distant land by a white man come out of the south. Their visitor had been commissioned by the white man to acquaint the plains people with the presence of a trading post on the eastern edge of the plains, and to persuade them to move close to that post and to trap furs for trade.

The idea was much talked about and there were some who thought it would be a good thing to go east for a winter, but most of the people were opposed. By reason of his renown as a hunter, Angutna’s opinions carried weight and one night he spoke what was in his mind.

“I think it is to be remembered that we have lived good lives in this land, knowing little evil. Is it not true that
Tuktoriak
has fed and clothed us from before the time of the father’s fathers?
Eeee!
It is so. And if we turn from the Deer Spirit now to seek other gifts, who can say what he may do? Perhaps he will be angry and speak to his children, the deer, and bid them abandon our people. And then of what value would be the promises made by this man on behalf of the Kablunait?… Those promises would be dead sticks in our hands.”

So spoke Angutna, and most agreed with him. Still, when the stranger departed, there were two families who went with him. These returned before the snows thawed in the spring and they brought such wealth as a man could hardly credit: rifles, steel knives, copper kettles and many such things.

But they also brought something they did not know they were bringing.

It was a sickness that came into men’s lungs and squeezed the life from their bodies. It was called the Great Pain and it flung itself on the plains people like a blazing wind. In one season it killed more than half of those who lived in that land.

Panic struck many of the survivors who, believing the land was now cursed, fled to the east to seek help from the white man. From him they learned a new way of life, becoming trappers of fur and eaters of white man’s food. And, instead of Tuktu, the beast they now pursued was Terriganiak—the white fox. During all time that had been, the plains people had known the white fox as a friend in a land so vast and so empty that the bark of the fox was often the only welcoming sound. Since time began, foxes and men had shared that land and there had been no conflict between them. Now men turned on Terriganiak and lived by the sale of his skin.

For a time Angutna and a few other men and their families tried to continue living the old life in the old places, but hunger came more often upon them and one autumn the deer failed to appear at all. Some said this was because of the great slaughter of deer resulting from the new rifles in the hands of all northern people, Indian and Innuit; but Angutna believed it was due to the anger of Tuktoriak. In any event, the last few people living on the inland plains were forced to follow those who had already fled to the east and become trappers of fox.

When the survivors of that long trek came to the snowhouses which stood a few miles away from the house of the trader at the mouth of the River of Seals, they expected to be greeted with warmth and with food, for it had always been the law of the land that those who have food and shelter will share with those who have not.

Disappointment was theirs. White foxes, too, were scarce that winter and many traps stood empty. Those people who had chosen to live by the fox were nearly as hungry as the people who journeyed out of the west.

Angutna built a small snowhouse for his family, but it was a dark place filled with dark thoughts. There was no fuel for the lamps and almost no fuel for the belly. Angutna, who had once been such a great hunter was now forced to live on the labours of others because, even if he had so wished, he could not have trapped foxes. He could not have done so because Terriganiak was his Spirit-Who-Helps and for him, the lives of all foxes were sacred. Other men went to their traps and, when they were lucky, caught foxes whose pelts they bartered for food. Sometimes a portion of that food was given to Angutna’s wife; but Angutna had nothing to give in return.

The new way of life was as hard for Kipmik as for Angutna. The fox who had always been free now lay, day and night, tethered to a stick driven into the floor of the snowhouse. All around that place steel traps yawned for his kind and there were many men with rifles who, to help feed their families, would not have hesitated to put a bullet through him, for although Kipmik was growing old, his pelt was still thicker, softer and longer than that of any fox that had ever been seen before.

As the winter drew on, the remaining foxes deserted that part of the country and then hunger was the lot of all who had tried to live by the fox. There were no more gifts to the family of Angutna, who had himself become so emaciated that he could do little but sit like a statue in his cold house, dreaming of other times, other days. Sometimes his gaze would fix on the curled ball of white fur that was Kipmik, and his lips would move, but silently, for he was addressing a plea to the Spirit-Who-Helps. Sometimes the fox would raise its head and stare back into the eyes of the man, and perhaps he too was pleading for the freedom that once had been his.

The trader heard about the fabulous fox who lived in the houses of men and one day he drove his dogs to the camps of the people to see for himself whether the stories were true. He entered Angutna’s snowhouse, and as soon as he saw Kipmik curled up on the floor he wished to possess that magnificent pelt.

It distressed him to see the big, staring eyes and the swollen bellies of Angutna’s children. He felt pity for the people who were starving that winter. But what could he do? He did not own the food that lay in his storehouse. It belonged to the company that employed him, and he could not part with a pound unless there was payment in fur.

Angutna greeted the visitor with a smile that tautened the skin that was already stretched too tightly over the broad bones of his face. Even though he be in despair, a man must give a good greeting to those who visit his house. It was otherwise with the fox. Perhaps he smelled the death stink from the skins of so many of his kind this stranger had handled. He pulled away to the side of the snowhouse as far as his tether would reach and crouched there like a cat facing a hound.

The white man spoke of the hard times that lay on the people; of the shortage of foxes and the absence of deer. Then he turned to look at Kipmik again.

“That is a fine fox you have there. I have never seen better. If you will sell it to me, I can pay… as much as three sacks of flour and, yes, this I can do, ten, no, fifteen pounds of fat.”

Angutna still smiled, and none knew the thoughts that swirled behind the masked face. He did not answer the white man directly, but spoke instead of trivial things while he wrestled with himself in his mind: food… food enough to ensure that his wife and children would live until spring. Perhaps he even believed his Spirit-Who-Helps had something to do with the miraculous hope the white man extended. Who will know what he thought?

The trader knew better than to say anything more about Kipmik, but when he went outside to his waiting sled he ordered his Eskimo helper to take a small bag of flour into Angutna’s snowhouse. Then he returned to his trading post at the mouth of the River of Seals.

That night the woman, Epeetna, made a small fire of willow twigs in the tunnel entrance and she and her children ate unleavened bread made of flour and water. She passed a cake of it to Angutna where he sat unmoving on the sleeping ledge, but he did not taste it. Instead he threw it to the fox. Kipmik bolted it down, for he too was starving. Then Angutna spoke, as it seemed, to himself.

“This is the way it must be.”

Epeetna understood. The woman let her hair loose so that it hung down over her face. The acrid smoke from the fire clouded the four figures sitting on the high ledge. The small flames gave hardly enough light for Angutna to see what he was doing, but his fingers needed no light as he carefully plaited the Noose of Release.

When it was finished, Angutna slipped Kipmik’s tether and the fox leapt up to the ledge and stood with its paws braced against the chest of the man—free once again. The black eyes were fixed on the eyes of the man, in wonder perhaps, for the fox had never seen tears in those eyes before. Kipmik made no move when the noose fell over his neck. He made no move until Angutna spoke.

“Now, Little Pup, it is time. You will go out onto the plains where the deer wait our coming.”

And so Kipmik passed into that country from which nothing returns.

Next morning when the trader opened his door he found the frozen pelt of the fox suspended from the ridge of his porch by a strangely plaited noose. The pelt swayed and spun in the breath of the wind. The trader was delighted, but he was uneasy too. He had lived in that land long enough to know how little he knew. He wasted no time ordering his helper to load the promised food on a sled and take it to the snowhouse of Angutna.

The payment was received by Epeetna. Angutna could not receive it for the Noose of Release was drawn tight at his throat. He had gone to join the one he had lost.

His grave still stands on the bank of the River of Seals. It is no more than a grey cairn of rocks with the decayed weapons of a hunter scattered among the quiet stones. Inside the grave lies Angutna, and beside him lies the fox who once lived in the houses of men.

The two are still one.

The Blood in Their Veins
_______

Barely visible from Gene Lushman’s
rickety dock at the mouth of Big River, Anoteelik stroked his kayak to seaward on the heaving brown waters of Hudson Bay. Vanishing, then reappearing on the long, slick swells, the kayak was so distant it might have been nothing more than an idle gull drifting aimlessly on the undulating waters.

I had helped Anoteelik prepare for that journey. Together we had carried the skin-wrapped packages of dress goods, food and tobacco down from Lushman’s trading shack. Then the squat, heavy-bodied Eskimo, with his dreadfully scarred face, lashed the cargo to the afterdeck and departed. I watched him until the bright flashing of his double-bladed paddle was only a white flicker against the humped outlines of a group of rocky reefs lying three miles offshore.

This was the third time I had seen Anoteelik make his way out of the estuary to the farthest islet on the sombre rim of the sea but it was the first time I understood the real reason behind his yearly solitary voyage.

Gene Lushman, barrenland trapper and trader, had first drawn my attention to him three years earlier.

“See that old Husky there? Old Ano… tough old bugger
… one of the inland people and queer like all of them. Twenty years now, every spring soon as the ice clears, Ano, he heads off out to the farthest rock, and every year he takes a hundred dollars of my best trade goods along. For why? Well, me son, that crazy old bastard is taking the stuff out there to his dead wife! That’s true, so help me God! He buried her there… far out to sea as there was a rock sticking up high enough to hold a grave!

“Father Debrie, he’s tried maybe a half dozen times to make the old fellow quit his nonsense. It has a bad influence on the rest of the Huskies—they’re supposed to be Christians, you know—but Ano, he just smiles and says: ‘Yes, Father,’ and every spring he turns in his fox skins to me and I sell him the same bill of goods, and he takes it and dumps it on that rock in the Bay.”

It was the waste that bothered and puzzled Gene. Himself the product of a Newfoundland outport, he could not abide the waste… a hundred dollars every spring as good as dumped into the sea.

“Crazy old bastard!” he said, shaking his head in bewilderment.

Although he had traded with the Big River people for a good many years, Gene had never really bridged the gap between them and himself. He had learned only enough of their language for trade purposes and while he admired their ability to survive in their harsh land he had little interest in their inner lives, perhaps because he had never been able to stop thinking of them as a “lesser breed.” Consequently, he never discovered the reason for Anoteelik’s strange behaviour.

During my second year in the country, I became friendly with Itkut, old Anoteelik’s son—indeed his only offspring. Itkut was a big, stocky man still in the full vigour of young manhood; a man who laughed a lot and liked making jokes. It was he who gave me my Eskimo name,
Kipmetna,
which translates as “noisy little dog.” Itkut and I spent a lot of time together that summer, including making a long boat trip north to Marble Island after walrus. A few days after our return, old Ano happened into Itkut’s tent to find me struggling to learn the language under his son’s somewhat less-than-patient guidance. For a while Ano listened to the garbled sounds I was making, then he chuckled. Until that moment the old man, with his hideously disfigured face, had seemed aloof and unapproachable, but now the warmth that lay hidden behind the mass of scar tissue was revealed.

“Itkut gave you a good name,” he said smiling. “Indeed, the dog-spirit must live in your tongue.
Ayorama
—it doesn’t matter. Let us see if we can drive it out.”

With that he took over the task of instructing me, and by the time summer was over we had become friends.

One August night when the ice fog over the Bay was burning coldly in the long light of the late-setting sun, I went to a drum dance at Ano’s tent. This was forbidden by the priest at Eskimo Point, who would send the R.C.M.P. constable down to Big River to smash the drums if he heard a dance was being held. The priest was a great believer in an ever-present Devil, and he was convinced the drums were the work of that Devil. In truth, these gatherings were song-feasts at which each man, woman or child took the drum in turn and sang a song. Sometimes it was an ancient song from far out of time, a voice from the shadowy distances of Innuit history; or perhaps it might be a comic song in which the singer made fun of himself. Often it was the story of a spectacular hunting incident; or it might be a song of tragic happenings and of the spirits of the land.

That night Itkut sang a song of the Hunting of Omingmuk, the muskox. As the story unwound, Ano’s face came alight with pride—and with love.

Toward dawn people began to drift away and Ano suggested we walk to the shore and have a smoke. Flocks of plover, grey and ephemeral in the half light, fled shrilling before us, and out on the dim wastes of the sea spectral loons yapped at one another.

Ano’s face was turned to the sea.

“I know you wonder at me, Kipmetna, yet you look at this torn face of mine and your questions are never heard. You watch as I make my spring journey out to the rock in the sea and your questions remain silent. That is the way also with my People. Tonight, perhaps because Itkut sang well and brought many memories to me from a long time ago, I would tell you a story.”

once there was
a woman, and it was she who was my belly and my blood. Now she waits for me in that distant place where the deer are as many as the stars.

She was Kala, and she was of the Sea People, and not of my People who lived far from the sea on the great plains where no trees grow. But I loved her beyond all things in the sea or on the land. Some said I loved her too much, since I could never find the strength to share her, even with my song-cousin, Tanugeak. Most men respected my love and the
angeokok,
Mahuk, said that the sea-mother, Takanaluk Arnaluk, was pleased by the love I had for my wife.

My mother was Kunee and my father was Sagalik. I was born by the shore of Tulemaliguak, Lake of the Great Bones, far west of here, in the years when the camps of the inland people were almost emptied of life by the burning breath of the white man’s sickness. My father died of it soon after my birth.

I was born in the late summer months, and Kunee, my mother, was dead before autumn. Then I was taken into the childless tent of Ungyala and his wife Aputna. They were not young people. Once they had lived very far to the south but their camps too had been stricken by the sickness and they had fled north. They too had been burned by the flame in the lungs, and their sons and daughters had died.

Soon after they took me into their tent, Ungyala and Aputna made ready to flee again, for there were not enough people left in our camps even to bury the dead. So we three went west… far off to the west into a land where the Innuit had never lived for fear of the Indians who sometimes came out of the forests into the plains. The deer were plentiful in that place and we lived very well while I grew toward the age of a man and learned to hunt by myself and to drive the long sled over the hard-packed snow.

All the same, it was a lonely land we had come to. There were not even any Indians—perhaps they too had been burned by the plague. We saw no
inukok,
little stone men set on the hills to tell us that other men of our race had travelled those long, rolling slopes. It was a good land but empty, and we hungered to hear other voices.

In the winter of the year when I became
angeutnak,
almost a man, the blizzards beat upon us for a very long time. Ungyala and I had made good kills of deer in the autumn so we three did not suffer; yet we longed for the coming spring, the return of the deer and the birds. We yearned for the voices of life, for the voices we heard were of wind and, sometimes I thought, of those spirits who hide in the ground.

In the month when the wolves begin to make love there came a break in the storms. Then I, in the pride of my youth and filled with a hunger I could not yet name, decided to make a journey to the northwest. I said I hoped to kill muskox and bring fresh meat to the camp. Ungyala agreed to my going, though he was not very willing for he was afraid of the lands to the northwest. I took seven dogs and drove the komatik over the snow-hidden hills for three days, and saw no living thing. That land was dead, and my heart was chilled, and only because I was stubborn and young did I go on.

On the fourth day I came to the lip of a valley, and as I began to descend my lead dog threw up her head. In a moment the dogs were plunging into soft snow, the traces all tangled, and all of them yelling like fiends. I stopped them and walked cautiously forward until I could look down into the flat run of a gulley that lay sheltered by walls of grey stone. There was movement down there. It was
kakwik,
the wolverine, digging with his slashing front claws into the top of what looked like a drift. I ran back to my team and tried to unleash a few of the dogs so they could chase him, but now they were fighting each other; and before I could free them, kakwik was gone, lumbering up the long slope and over the rocks.

I kicked at the dogs, jumped on the sled, and drove headlong into the gulley; but when I slowed past the place where kakwik had dug, my heart went out of the chase.

He had been digging into the top of a buried snowhouse.

Ungyala believed that no men lived to the west and north of our land, yet here was a house. The door tunnel was snowed in and drifts had almost buried the place. I took my snow probe and slid it into a crack between blocks in the roof. It went in so easily I could tell the inside was empty of snow.

I grew cautious and more than a little afraid. The thought came that this might be the home of an
Ino,
a dwarf with knives where his hands should be. Yet the thought that this might instead be the home of true men gave me courage.

With my snowknife I cut a hole in the dome… squeezed through it and dropped to the floor. As my eyes grew used to the gloom, I saw that this had been a shelter for men… only now it was a tomb for the dead.

There were many bones lying about and even in that dim light I could see that not all had belonged to deer or muskox. One was a skull with black hair hanging down over gleaming white bone where the flesh of the cheeks had been cut away with a knife.

I was about to leap up to the hole in the roof and drag myself out of that terrible place when I saw a shudder of movement under a pile of muskox robes at the back of the sleeping ledge. I was sure something terrible crouched there in the darkness and I raised my snowknife to strike, and fear was a sliver of ice in my belly.

But it was no devil that crawled painfully out from under that pile of rotting hides.

Once, I remember, I found the corpse of a fawn wedged in a deep crevice among some great rocks. It had been missed by the ravens, foxes and wolves and, because it was autumn, the maggots had not eaten the meat. It had dried into a bundle of bones bound around with skin.

The girl who lay helpless before me on the ledge of the snowhouse looked like that fawn. Only her eyes were alive.

Although I was young; and greatly afraid, I knew what I must do. There was a soapstone pot on the floor. I slid the blade of my knife into the flesh of my left arm and let the hot blood flow into the bowl. Through the space of one day and night I fed the thing I had found with the blood from my veins. Drop by drop was she fed. In between feedings I held her close in my arms under a thick new robe I had fetched from my sled, and slowly the warmth from my body drove the chill from her bones.

Life came back to her but it was nearly three days before she could sit up at my side without aid. Yet she must have had hidden strength somewhere within her for later that day when I came back into the snowhouse after feeding my dogs, all the human bones on the floor, to the last fragment, had vanished. She had found strength, even though death still had his hands on her throat, to bury those things under the hard snow of the floor.

On the fifth day she was able to travel so I brought her back to Ungyala’s camp and my parents-by-right took her in and were glad she had come. Neither one made any comment when I told how I had found her and what else I had found in the snow-house. But later, when Ungyala and I were on a journey away from the camp picking up meat from an autumn cache, he spoke to me thus:

“Anoteelik, my son, this person has eaten the flesh of the dead… so much you know. Yet until you too have faced death in the way that he came to this girl, do not judge of her act. She has suffered enough. The spirits of those she has eaten will forgive her… the living must forgive her as well.”

The girl quickly recovered her youth—she who had seemed beyond age—and as she grew fat she grew comely and often my heart speeded its beat when she was near. She spoke almost no words except to tell us her name was Kala and that her family, who were Sea People, had come inland from the north coast in the fall to hunt muskox.

It was not until the ravens returned that one day when we men were far from camp, she broke into speech to my mother-by-right. Then she told how the family dogs had died of the madness which is carried by foxes and wolves, and how, marooned in the heart of the dark frozen plains, her parents and brother had followed the Snow Walker. She told how she also had waited for death until hunger brought its own madness… and she began to eat the flesh of the dead. When she finished her tale she turned from my mother-by-right and cried, “I am unworthy to live!” She would have gone out into the night and sought her own end had my mother not caught her and bound her and held her until we returned.

She was calmer by the next day, but she asked that we build her a snowhouse set apart from the camp, and we followed her wish. She lived alone there for many days. Aputna took food to her and talked to her, but we two men never saw her at all.