The Snow Walker (9 page)

The morning broke clear and calm, as if no wind had ever blown. I could only manage to stand and shuffle about, and I went to the sled, but the meat was all gone. Nothing was left but some shreds of skin and some bones. Two of my own dogs had been killed and the remainder were hurt.

There was nothing to do. I began to look for my rifle in the debris near the sled but before I could find it I heard dogs howl in the distance and when I looked to the west I saw the domes of three snowhouses below the bank of the river. I turned and shuffled toward them.

I remember but little of the days I spent in that camp because my wounds festered and I was often unconscious. Those people were kind and they fed me with food they could ill spare—though in truth it was partly my food, for it was the meat of the dogs who had eaten the seals. Before I could travel again, the sun had begun to grow warm and to rise higher up in the sky. Yet the warmth of the oncoming spring could not thaw the chill in my heart.

I made a light sled for the two dogs I had left and prepared to depart. Those in the camps tried to keep me with them for they said that by now there would be no life in my snowhouse that stood by the lake of the deer crossing, and I would only die there myself if I returned before spring brought the deer herds back to the land.

But I did not fear death anymore so I set out. Weak as we were, the dogs and I made the journey home in ten days. We had luck, for we found a deer cache that must have been lost by some hunter the spring of the previous year. It was a foul mess of hair, bones and long-rotted meat, but it gave us the strength to continue.

When we came in sight of the lake my belly grew sick and my legs weakened and I could hardly go on; yet when I neared the camp life pounded back through my veins… for the snowhouse still stood and the snow had recently been dug away from the door!

I shouted until my lungs crackled in the bright, cold air and when none answered, I began to run. I reached the passage and scrambled inside.

abruptly Anoteelik ceased
speaking. He sat staring out over the lightening waters of the Bay… out toward the islands that were still no more than grey wraiths on the shifting horizon. Tears were running down his disfigured cheeks… running like rain. Then with his head bowed forward over his knees, very quietly he finished the tale.

i was greeted
by Aputna, my mother-by-right, and by Itkut. The old woman had shrunk to a miserable rag of a thing that should have been gone long ago; but Itkut seemed strong and his body was firm to the touch when I took him up in my arms.

I looked over his shoulder, and asked, “Where is Kala?” though I knew what the answer would be.

Aputna’s reply was no louder than the whisper of wind on the hills.

“What was done
…
was done as she wished. As for me, I will not go away from this place, yet I only did what she said must be done
…
and Itkut still lives
…
Where is Kala? Hold your son close in your arms, love him well for the blood in his veins. Hold him close, oh, my son, for you hold your wife too in your arms.”

when the ice
left the river, Itkut and I came back down to the coast. Kala was of the Sea People, so I took her bones out to that island which lies far from the shore. While I live I shall take gifts to her spirit each spring… in the spring, when the birds make love on the slopes and the does come back to our land, their bellies heavy with fawn.

The Woman and the Wolf
_______

The people built the little
snowhouse and departed into the western lands. They went from the place singing laments for the dying, and they left nothing behind them except the old man. They took Arnuk, the dog, that being the old man’s wish, for Arnuk was the last gift an old man could make to his son and to his grandson and to his people.

It had been a hard time—those long, hungry months before the spring—and in the camp there had been the cries of children who were too young to know that starvation must be faced in silence. There had been death in the camp, not of men but of those who were of the utmost importance to the continuance of human life. The dogs had died, one by one, and as each was stilled so men’s hopes for the future shrank.

Though it had been a harsh time, no word had been spoken against the folly of feeding one old and useless human body. Maktuk, the son, had shared his own meagre rations equally between his aged father and his hungry child who also bore the name that linked the three together. But one dark April day the old man raised himself slowly from the sleeping ledge and gazed for a little while at his grandchild. Then out of the depths of a great love, and a greater courage, old Maktuk spoke:

“I have it in my heart,” he said, “that the deer await you at the Western Lakes, but I stay here. You shall take Arnuk with you so that in the years ahead you will remember me.”

The old man had his rights, and this was his final one. In the morning the people were gone, and behind young Maktuk’s sled the dog Arnuk tugged convulsively at her tether and turned her head backward to stare at a small white mound rising against the snow ridges. Arnuk had been born two winters earlier, but she was the ninth pup of the litter and so there was little food for her. If the old man had not taken it upon himself to feed and care for her, she would have died before her life truly began. With his help she saw warm days come and tasted the pleasures of long days romping with other young dogs by the side of the great river where the summer camp was pitched. When she grew tired she would come to the skin tent and push against the old man’s knees until he opened his eyes and smiled at her.

So she grew through the good times of youth and the people in the camp looked at her with admiration for she became beautiful and of a size and strength surpassing that of any other dog in the camp. Maktuk, the elder, gave her the name she bore, Arnuk—The Woman—for she was wife and daughter to him in the autumn of his years.

Because there can be no death while there is birth, old Maktuk decided in mid-winter that his dog should be mated, although famine had already struck the camp. It was arranged, and so Arnuk bore within her the promise of a strength which would be the people’s strength in years to come. When Maktuk, the elder, felt the throb of new life in the womb of The Woman, he was content.

Hunger grew with the passing days. The older dogs died first then even Arnuk’s litter mates lay silent in the snows. But Arnuk’s strength was great; and when there was some scrap of bone or skin the people could spare, she received it—for in her womb lay the hopes of years to come.

This was the way things stood when the people turned from the little snowhouse and set their faces to the west, dragging the sleds with their own failing muscles.

The ties that bind man and his dog can be of many strengths, but the ties that bound Arnuk to old Maktuk were beyond human power to sunder. Arnuk went with the people, but resisting stubbornly. On the third night of the journey she gnawed through the rawhide tether and vanished into the swirling ground drift. In the morning Maktuk, the son, held the frayed tether in his hand and his face was shadowed by foreboding. Yet when he spoke to his family it was with these words:

“The Woman has gone to my father and she will be with him when the Snow Walker comes. But my father’s spirit will know of our need, and perhaps the day will dawn when he will return The Woman to us.”

Arnuk reached the little igloo before daybreak and when the old man opened his eyes to see if it was the Snow Walker, he saw the dog instead. He smiled and laid his bony hand upon her head, and once more he slept.

The Snow Walker was late in coming, but on the third day he came unseen; and when he passed from the place, the bond between man and dog was broken. Yet Arnuk lingered beside her dead for another day, and then it was perhaps the wind that whispered the unspoken order: “Go to the people. Go!”

When she emerged from the snowhouse she found the plains newly scoured by a blizzard. For awhile she stood in the pale winter sun, her lambent coat gleaming against the blue shadows, then she turned her face with its broad ruff and wide-spaced amber eyes toward the west. That way lay her path, and within her the voices of the unborn generations echoed the voice of the wind but with greater urgency. “Go to the places of men,” they told her. “Go!”

Head down and great plume held low, she moved westward into the pathless spaces and only once did she pause to turn and stare at her back trail, waiting for some final sign. There was no sign, and at length she turned away.

This was the beginning of her journey. Death had released her from the ties that held her to one man, but she was still bound fast to Man. Through untold generations stretching back through the long dim sweep of time before the Eskimos drifted east across the island chain from Asia, the fate of her kind had been one with that of Man. Arnuk was one with the people and her need of them was as great as their need of her.

She did not halt when darkness swept the bleak plains into obscurity. At midnight she came to the place where she had chewed her way free of young Maktuk’s sled. She knew it was the place only by an inner sense, for the snow had levelled all signs and drifted in all trails. Uncertainty began to feed upon her as she circled among the hard drifts, whining miserably. She climbed a rock ridge to test the night air for some sign that men were near. A scent came to her—the odour of an arctic hare that had fled at her approach. But there was no scent of man.

Her whines rose to a crescendo, pleading in the darkness, but there was no answer except the rising mutter of the wind. Unable to endure the weight of her hunger and loneliness, she curled up in the shelter of a drift and lost herself in dreams.

So the dog slept in the heart of the great plains. But even as she dozed restlessly, a profound change was taking place in the secret places of her body. She lay with her nose outstretched on her broad forepaws and her muscles twitched with erratic impulses. Saliva flowed in her mouth and had the taste of blood. In her mind’s eye she laid her stride to that of the swift deer, and her teeth met in the living flesh and she knew the ecstasy of the hunter.

From out of time the ageless instincts which lie in all living cells were being revitalized so that the dog, and the new life within her, would not perish. When Arnuk raised her head to the dawn light, the thing was done, the change complete.

The dawn was clear, and Arnuk, her perceptions newly honed, tested the wind. When she found the warm aroma of living flesh she went to seek it out.

A Snowy Owl, dead white and shadowless in the pre-dawn, had swept across the plains with great eyes staring. The owl had seen and fallen on a hare so swiftly that the beast had known nothing until the inch-long talons took life from him. For a little time the great bird chose to savour its hunger; and while it sat complacently crouched above the hare, it did not see the flow of motion behind a nearby drift.

Arnuk was a weasel easing up on a lemming, a fox drifting toward a ptarmigan. Skills she had never fully known had come alive within her. She inched forward soundlessly over the hard snows. When she was still a few yards from the owl, it raised its head and the yellow eyes stared with expressionless intensity full into Arnuk’s face. Arnuk was the stillness of death, yet every muscle vibrated. When the owl turned back to its prey, Arnuk leapt. The owl saw the beginning of the leap and threw itself backward into its own element with a smooth thrust of mighty wings. Those wings were a fraction slow and the hurtling form of the dog, leaping six feet into the air, struck flesh beneath the feathers.

Arnuk slept afterwards while white feathers blew into the distance and tufts of white fur moved like furtive living things in the grip of the wind. When she woke again the age-old voices within her had quieted. Once more she was man’s beast, and so she set out again into the west, unconscious yet directly driven.

The people whom she sought were wanderers on the face of a plain so vast that it seemed limitless. The dog could not envisage the odds against her finding them, but in her memory was the image of the summer camp by the wide river where she had spent her youth. She set her mind upon that distant place.

The days passed and the sun stood a little higher in the sky after each one faded. Time passed under the dog’s feet until the explosion of spring overwhelmed the tundra. The snows melted and the rivers awoke and thundered seaward. Flights of ravens hung like eddies of burned leaves in a white and glaring sky, and on the thawing ponds the first ducks mingled with raucous flocks of gulls.

Life quickened in the deep moss where the lemmings tunnelled and on the stony ridges where cock ptarmigan postured before their mates. It was in all living things and in all places, and it was within the womb of the dog. Her journey had been long and her broad paws were crusted with the dried blood of many stone cuts. Her coat was matted and lustreless under the spring suns. Still she drew upon her indomitable will and went forward into the western plains.

Gaunt and hot eyed she brought her quest to an end on a day in June. Breasting a long ridge she saw before her the glittering light of sun on roaring water and she recognized the river.

Whining with excitement she ran clumsily down the slope, for her body had grown awkward in these last days. Soon she was among the rings of weathered boulders where, in other summers, men’s tents had stood.

No tents stood there now. There were no living men to welcome the return of the lost one. Only the motionless piles of rocks on nearby ridges, that are called
Inukok
, Men of Stone, were there to welcome Arnuk. She understood that the place was abandoned yet for a time she refused to believe it. She ran from old tent ring to old meat cache, sniffing each with a despairing hope, and finding nothing to give her heart. It was dusk before she curled herself in a hollow beside the place where Maktuk, the elder, had once held her at his knees, and gave herself up to her great weariness.

Yet the place was not as deserted as it looked. While Arnuk was making her fruitless search she was too preoccupied to realize that she was being watched. If she had glanced along the river bank she might have seen a lithe shape that followed her every move with eyes that held in them a hunger not born of the belly. She would have seen and recognized a wolf, and her hackles would have risen and her teeth been bared. For the dogs of men and the dogs of the wilderness walk apart, theirs being the hostility of brothers who deny their common blood.

The wolf was young. Born the preceding season, he had stayed with his family until, in the early spring of this year, the urge to wander had come over him and he had forsaken his clan’s territory. Many adventures had befallen him and he had learned, at the cost of torn flanks and bleeding shoulders, that each wolf family guards its own land and there is no welcome for a stranger. His tentative approaches had been met with bared teeth in the lands of three wolf clans before he came to the river and found a place where no wolves were.

It was a good place. Not far from the empty Innuit camp the river flared over a shallow stretch of ragged boulders to lose itself in the beginning of an immense lake, and here for centuries the caribou had forded the shallows during their migrations. Two or three times a year they crossed the river in untold thousands, and not all escaped the river’s surge. Drowned bodies of dead deer lay among the rocks at the river mouth, giving food to many foxes, ravens and white gulls. The wolves of the country did not visit the place because it belonged to man, and that which man claims to himself is abhorrent to the great wild dogs.

Knowing nothing of this tabu, the young male wolf, the wanderer, had taken up his home by the river; and here he nursed his loneliness, for even more than dogs, wolves are social beings.

When the young wolf saw and smelled Arnuk, he was filled with conflicting emotions. He had seen no dog before but he sensed that the golden-coated beast below him was somehow of his blood. The smell was strange, and yet it was familiar. The shape and colour were strange, and yet they roused in him a warmth of memory and desire. But he had been rebuffed so many times that he was cautious now.

When Arnuk woke she did not at first see the stranger, but her nostrils told her of the nearness of deer meat. Her hunger was overpowering. She leapt to her feet and flung herself upon a ragged haunch of caribou that had been dragged to within a few yards of her sleeping place. Only when she had satisfied her first hunger did she glance up… to meet the still gaze of the young wolf.

He sat motionless a hundred feet from her and did not even twitch an ear as Arnuk’s hackles lifted and the threat took form deep in her throat. He remained sitting quietly but tense to spring away, and after a long minute Arnuk again dropped her head to the meat.

This was the way of their first meeting, and this is what came of it.

Arnuk could no longer resist the insistent demands of her heavy body. Once again the hidden force within her took command. Ignoring the young wolf, who still cautiously kept his distance, Arnuk made a tour of the familiar ground beside the river. She carefully examined the carcasses of five drowned deer and chased away the screaming gulls and guttural ravens, for this meat was hers now by right of greater strength. Then, satisfied with the abundant food supply, she left the river and trotted inland to where a rock outcrop had opened its flanks to form a shallow cave. Here, as a pup, Arnuk had played with the other dogs of the camp. Now she examined the cave with more serious intent. The place was dry and protected from the winds. There was only one thing wrong, and that was the smell. The rock cleft was pervaded with a potent and unpleasant stench that caused Arnuk to draw back her lips in anger and distaste—a wolverine had bedded in the cave during the winter months.