The Snow Walker (3 page)

For the next few weeks things went well and I was happy. There was plenty of fox tracks and I set out a big bunch of traps. I had not much meat to spare for bait, but that did not matter. Those foxes were so tame they were pushing each other away to get caught. That was fine for awhile, but then I began to see this was really a hungry land. I drove my dogs hundreds of miles around that place and never found game. My store of meat began to run out. I tried to set a net under the river ice, but that ice was ten feet thick… impossible! Soon I had to feed the dogs with fox carcasses, and then I had to eat fox myself. I began to wonder if I was foolish to come out into this country. The cold was terrible and it kept me busy cutting wood for my stove, and just as busy making it burn for it was all green stuff.

I began to lose heart a little. The emptiness of that country was worse than the cold. Once I saw a raven and I thought it might mean a little herd of deer starting north out of the forest but when I drove south for nearly a day I never saw a living thing. The foxes vanished. Maybe I’d caught them all, but anyway the traps were empty. Late in March things got serious. I could not feed all my dogs anymore. I had to kill some to feed the others.

Denikazi had told me the caribou would start north in April or early May, and so it would be all right if I could hang on until the deer herds reached my place. There was only one way to do that. I killed the rest of my dogs and began to eat them myself. They were not much good for me. They were starved and the meat was bitter and there was no fat, but they kept me alive anyway.

Yes, I kept alive, but by the end of April the deer had not come and I was very weak and also sick from eating starving dog meat. I thought: well, that’s the end of it. I was pretty near gone when one day I heard dogs yelping, and a man’s voice.

They say you don’t believe what you hear when you are pretty near dead… but
I
believed it! I crawled out of my bunk and got the skin door pulled open and nearly fell outside. There, right in front of my cabin, was a long wooden sled and three little men staring up toward me. Esquimos, for sure! I started toward them, staggering like a drunken fool, and they caught me when I fell.

You will perhaps not believe what those
sauvages
did next. Remember, they had never seen a white man in all their lives. The only strangers they knew about were the Chipewyans and, except for a few like Denikazi, the Chips hated the Esquimos and would shoot them when they got a chance.

What did they do? They carried me to my cabin and put me in my robes and piled their own robes on me. Then they cleaned out the place—it was worse than a bear’s den—and for three days they nursed me, day and night, with meat soups and marrow and all sorts of stuff I never heard of. While I began to get some strength, they talked away to me in their own language and laughed and grinned and sang songs, and they brought my spirit back to life the same as they brought my body back.

In three days I was feeling good again. They wanted me to go with them, so we cached my cariole and some of my gear and I rode off on their long sled to their camps, four days’ travel northwest. They had six snowhouses under the lee of a big hill by the shores of a frozen lake, and thirty-five people lived in that place.

Those Esquimos—
Innuit
, they called themselves—they were
the fine people. Everything they had they gave to me, and I could give them nothing but endless trouble. They taught me their language, with a patience we do not often have even for our own children. They gave me affection and friendship as wholehearted as it was tolerant. And… they gave me my wife, a girl of my own choosing.

Her name was Nuljalik, the daughter of Katelo, one of those men who found me at my cabin. I think she was no more than seventeen years old; a small person, slim and almond eyed, and a round red face like a good, sweet apple. She had a slow smile that warmed me better even than the good food Katelo’s old wife made for me. Katelo was quick to see the looks that passed between his daughter and me. One night when we were all climbing under the robes in his big deerskin tent, he said to me, simply, because I did not yet know so many Innuit words:

“
Schweenack
—not good for man to sleep alone. Here is
arnuk,
a woman for you. Take her, Saluk (that was the name they had given me). She is willing.”

Nuljalik came to me in the new tent those people built for us, and the love she gave me was of a kind our race, perhaps, has forgotten. She kept nothing of herself away from me and expected me to do the same. That was a hard lesson for me to learn, how to give without holding back, but Nuljalik showed me the way.

It had been in my mind that when the summer came I would try to walk south out of the plains country; but as time went along and the birds and caribou and flowers filled the long days with sights and sounds and smells, I told myself it was foolish to try to walk south. I would wait, and in the winter Katelo would take me south with his dog team. So I waited, and when winter came I did not go south. No. My world had changed. Now my world was the world of the Innuit. With this people, in that distant place, there was for me a peace of the heart, and a good feeling of the spirit. Yes, I was happy there.

The first year passed and a son was born to Nuljalik, and it seemed nothing could darken the happiness of our life together; yet even then there were little shadows flickering on the edge of things. So it must always be, perhaps, when a stranger comes to make his life with men of other customs and beliefs. He cannot be born again as one of them. As I became more and more familiar with the Innuit ways, I no longer admired everything they did… or thought. They seemed too much bound up with superstition. They had so many tabus, things that must or must not be done… a web of obstacles in a land where nature had placed obstacles enough before men. I could see no purpose worrying about a legion of devils and spirits that could exist only in imagination. But when I tried to treat such things as childish nonsense, it brought my wife such distress I was obliged to give lip service, at the least, to the pagan beliefs. Katelo was the wisest of all the Innuit and once I tried to make him see the foolishness of the people’s fear of spirits. This is how he replied:

“In the land of
Kablunait
—the white men—things may be as you say… but this is not the land of the Kablunait. I do not understand how it is in your land. You do not understand how it is here. We know what we know.”

After that I tried to keep my impatience to myself and, in truth, it did not bother me so much. My life was very busy. I learned to spear the caribou at the river crossings and to be a good traveller over the winter wastes. I learned the lusty songs of the Innuit and I myself became something of a story-teller during the long nights when we clustered in the snowhouses and talked and sang the dark hours away. Seldom did I feel a desire to return south. What was there for me that I did not have with the Innuit? In the great plains I had work, good friends, a wife and child.

Ah, yes, my friend, that was the happy time, and it lasted for three years… but, bear with me now, for what I have to tell has been a pain that half a century has never dulled.

In the autumn of the third year, I was sick and the shaman, Powhuktuk, came to my tent and sang magic songs. I got well, as I would have done in any case, but when I was back on my feet Powhuktuk warned me I must not hunt for as many days as I had been sick. He was a real ancient, Powhuktuk, with a face like dried fish skins and a voice as hard and shrill as a hawk’s; and he knew how I felt about the beliefs his people held. He stood in front of me, outside my tent, and he shook his old bird-claw hands in my face and spit flew from his mouth, so determined was he to make me understand how serious this matter was.

“It is the kindness of Kaila, Mother of Life, that you are well,” he wheezed at me. “So you must pay her back by not harming any of her children for twelve days and nights. If you kill anything it will be bad. You will bring evil here! Paija herself will come and make us pay!”

Paija, I knew about. She was believed to be the most cruel of all the spirits. To me it was nonsense, but I kept my counsel. I might also have kept the tabu, except it was late in the year and, because of my sickness, I did not have quite enough caribou in my caches. I knew the migrating herds might leave the plains before twelve days and I did not intend to let my woman and child go hungry in the long winter that stretched ahead. This I told myself… knowing all the same that if I ran short my neighbours would make good my needs. Yes, I knew that, but also I did not wish to be dependent for I was a young man filled with much pride. Or perhaps—how can I know now?—perhaps I wanted to find an excuse to break a foolish law… to
show
those people how little their superstitions meant to me.

On the ninth day of the tabu a big herd of deer came out of the north and began to cross the river a mile below our camp. They were the best of bucks—big, heavy, each carrying a blanket of fat three or four inches thick under his hide. They were also likely to be the
last
of the bucks for that year and so every hunter in our camp launched his kayak and flew downstream into the middle of the swimming herd.

I followed in my own kayak.

In the confusion and excitement of the slaughter, the men did not at first notice I was among them but then, one by one, they paused in the spearing, looked sideways at me and paddled away from the killing place. Before long I was alone there, my spear and right arm drenched with deer blood.

When I paddled home the camp was silent. Even the dogs were quiet. I saw no one as I walked up to my tent. When I told my wife of the hunt I had made, she too was silent, but late that night she woke me with her weeping and when I asked her why she cried, she would not speak. She did not need to, for I knew. I began to feel guilty—not on account of Paija but because I had brought fear into the hearts of the people.

Men do not often bear guilt easily and so I shouted harsh words at Nuljalik and called her a fool. Then I went to the tent of Katelo, and there were many people with him. I shouted at them too, calling them children and worse than children. Only Katelo answered and he waited until I had shouted myself out.

“
Ayorama
—it cannot be helped,” he said. There was no anger in his voice.
“Eemah,
Saluk has done what he has done. Perhaps it will come to nothing.”

His gentleness only angered me more. I went quickly to my own tent, but I did not sleep well for although Nuljalik tried to make no noise, I knew she wept the whole night through.

Winter set in soon after. Storm followed storm and for weeks we could hardly stir from the snowhouses. When at last there came a short period of calm and we could visit our distant meat caches, we found that a plague of wolverines had invaded the land and many caches had been ripped open and the meat stolen or spoiled. Then, a little time later, a crazed fox came into camp and the dogs set upon it and killed it, but not until many of them had been bitten. We had to kill those dogs for as you know the hydrophobia is a disease that cannot be stopped except by death.

These misfortunes were not unnatural, but it seemed there were too many of them. No one mentioned the breaking of the tabu in my presence, but I knew people were thinking about it and I became short tempered and grew harsh even with my own wife and child. One night when I insisted to Nuljalik that the wolverines were not devils but only animals, she replied,
“Kakwik,
the wolverine, is the servant of Paija.”

Then, for the first time, I struck Nuljalik. I hit her hard with the flat of my hand and knocked her to the floor of the snowhouse. She did not cry but only went back to the work of sewing a new pair of boots for me.

As time went on, the wolverines grew bolder and began raiding caches within sight of our camp. The few dogs remaining to us would not attack them and we were losing meat we could not spare. In the darkness of the long nights the men of the camp would not even venture out to protect the caches. It seemed the fear of Paija was afflicting them all. So I took it on myself to protect the meat, and many were the black, frozen hours I spent tramping around the caches. Although I sometimes got a glimpse of one of the robbers, I did not manage to kill any of them and the loss of meat and fat went on.

Then one night when I was visiting the caches there came a pause in the wind and the grey curtain of ground drift stilled. There was a rift in the clouds and the white lights of the aurora shone brightly enough so I could see a fresh track in the hard snow before me. It was a single footprint, but it was huge. It was nearly as long as my forearm and its shape was almost like that of a human foot.

For a few moments my breath stopped and I was so frightened I could not move. I had heard many stories about Paija! It was said she was a giantess possessed of a single leg that grew out of the middle of her belly. It was said she visited human camps only by darkness, when the blizzards roared, clothed in nothing except her own coarse black hair. It was said that to see her was to die with a great hole ripped in your chest out of which Paija had torn the living spirit of her victim.

Although I believed none of this, the sight of that great footprint, before the clouds closed in and the wind whipped up the snow wraiths again, truly struck fear into my heart. I made for the shelter of the nearest snowhouse. It was Katelo’s. When I scrambled in through the door tunnel it was to find many people crowded on the sleeping ledge in the yellow light of the fat lamps. They stared at me as if fearing what I might do or say. In that warm, lighted place I shook off my own panic and when I had greeted the people I said:

“Look you. I have just come from the caches and I know who is robbing us of our meat. It is not the wolverines alone, it is a mightier beast. I have found the tracks of
Akla,
the giant brown bear.”