The Snow Walker (4 page)

Silence greeted my words and the faces before me seemed to shrink into themselves. In my anxiety to convince them of the truth of what I had seen, I went too far.

“Truly it is the bear!” I cried. “I have seen his tracks. I can show them to you. Like the tracks of a very big man!”

A young girl far back on the ledge screamed shrilly.

“Paija!” she wailed. “Paija is here!”

I stood there hearing nothing but the short, sharp breathing that comes with terror. At last Katelo spoke. He did not look at me.

“Akla does not walk in the winter, Saluk. In the winter he sleeps in his house under the snow.”

It was what everybody knew… what I knew myself, only for the moment I had forgotten. Then I saw what a fool I had been. I began to understand what I had done.

It was late then to make amends, but I went back to my own snowhouse and took my wife in my arms and told her I had done wrong in breaking the tabu. As I tried to soothe her, I spoke of the strength of the white man’s God and I told her that now I would call upon this God to protect the people from Paija. At first I spoke only to give her peace, but it came to me after awhile that if I could convince the Innuit of God’s power then the wolverines would become only wolverines again; the print in the snow would belong to a bear that had somehow been roused from its winter sleep; and the shadow of Paija, which was darkening the minds of the people, would vanish.

I jumped to my feet, picked up our child and, pulling Nuljalik after me, ran to Katelo’s. The place was still crowded. The people were afraid to go to their own homes. The children whimpered and the women stared with faces rigid with fear. Ah, my friend, how it hurt to see them like that! Yes, and to know that the fault was my own!

Old Powhuktuk, the shaman, was there on the broad ledge with the rest. I spoke directly to him.

“Powhuktuk! You are a great
angeokok,
master of spirits, here in this land. Well then, hear me, for I am also an angeokok in the lands of the south. I too have the ear of great spirits. I too can command them to help me.”

All eyes were on me and I turned slowly and looked into each of those faces.

“Listen, you people! I will call up
my
spirits, and they will do battle with Paija, and they will drive her away!”

Then I crossed myself and I, who had not been to mass for so many years, began to pray out loud. At first I only said meaningless phrases that did not come from the heart, but as the old familiar words rang in my ears some part of the faith of my childhood began to return. Soon I was praying passionately and I fell to my knees. Something of my passion seemed to pass to the watchers and they began to sway where they sat. My voice grew stronger as I chanted and I felt power within me. Something seemed to flow back and forth between me and the people. They began chanting too, in low, humming voices—ancient chants of the Innuit, making a background for my Christian prayers…

It lasted for hours, until I was drained of my strength and soaking with sweat. The emotions that had gripped me were so strong, and so strange, that I was dazed, hardly knowing what I was doing. Katelo and Powhuktuk lifted me to a place on the ledge and one of the women began to serve soup from a pot hung over a lamp. That place was alive again. There was new life in those faces. Those men and women who had never reproached me for what I had done were going to believe I had been able to undo my mistake. They had faith.

All but one. Powhuktuk spoke out above the babble of talk and his old, whistling voice brought silence.

“Saluk! Maybe your spirits are strong. Are they strong enough? Have they indeed driven Paija away?”

I replied slowly and solemnly.

“
Imah
! Yes! She is gone! She will never return!”

There was another young man there that night—Onekwa, a good friend of mine, only recently married. Now he jumped off the ledge happily shouting that he was going to fetch his wife and father and mother from their snowhouse nearby. Katelo waved him on his way, telling him to go to all the houses and ask the people to come for a feast. Onekwa nodded and crawled out through the tunnel. I turned to look at Nuljalik who was trimming a lamp. She lifted her head, smiling at me with a face that was warm with the light of the lamp, and warmer still with the love she bore me… and then, from the darkness outside, there came a terrible cry!

How can I describe it? It was beyond mortal words for it held terror beyond anything mortal.

For one moment it was as if I saw before me the dreadful shape of Paija herself. The people were transfixed by that cry and it appeared that I alone had the power of motion. There was a deer spear of Katelo’s in a niche beside me. I grabbed it and made for the door, shouting, “Akla! The bear has got Onekwa!”

My wife forestalled me. She flung herself against my legs so that we fell together to the hard-packed floor, and as we struggled her voice rose in a frenzied wail.

“
Not Akla! Paija come for her gift! You will not go out!”

She fought like a demented thing and I had no time to be gentle with her. I caught her by her long black hair and flung her against the wall and again I plunged toward the doorway that loomed black before me.

I can see that dark tunnel mouth so clearly still… for it was the last thing I ever saw. Nuljalik had scrambled to her feet. She seized a fat lamp and flung it at my head. It missed me but the scalding oil ran down my brow into my eyes, and they instantly became twin sockets of fire. Dimly I heard my wife’s voice, as if from a great distance.

“You
must
not look on her… you
will
not look on her!”

Then I was aware of nothing but the agony, and I rolled on the floor like an animal. I hardly felt my wife push past me as she thrust her way into the dark tunnel…

andré paused, and
the pause lengthened. His hands gripped the edge of the table with such pressure that the old bones shone translucently through the yellowed skin. His sightless eyes were no longer wells of mystery. He was looking through them down the long years into the abyss of an igloo tunnel into which his woman had vanished.

Slowly his grip on the table relaxed. He folded his hands in his lap and calmly continued his story.

for many days
I was in a delirium of pain, but I remember calling unceasingly for my wife. Nobody answered for a very long time, then one day I heard the voice of Katelo.

“Call no more for Nuljalik! Call no more for your wife! Paija has been here… and is gone with her gift.”

Why they let me remain alive is a mystery to me. Yet I, who had no right to expect it, received kindness from them. They took my son from me, it is true, but I can believe he grew up to be a good man, one who lived according to the laws of his people. It was the right thing they did, and I did not resent it. As for me, there followed seven months of darkness in the new camp the people moved to.

On a day late in the summer I was lying alone in the small tent the Innuit had pitched for me when I heard a voice speaking Chipewyan. It was Denikazi, and with him was Father Danioux. The priest had at last come north to bring the light of God to the heathen Esquimaux. You may judge his surprise when he found me there; but he was friendly toward me and so for the first time I was able to unburden myself. He listened in silence to my tale, and when I had finished, he put his hand on my forehead.

“Ah, my son, you have sinned greatly. It was blasphemy for such a one as you to command God’s help… you who had long ago forsaken Him. And it was a great sin to have even pretended to believe in the superstitions of these poor people. Yes, but harsh was the penance. To lose your wife to the bear because of her pagan beliefs, and to lose your sight because of that same heathen devil-worship, was indeed terrible. Truly you have suffered. But take comfort now for
le bon Dieu
is merciful. He will welcome you back and He will give you the opportunity to make amends for your sins. You will begin by helping me bring these poor children of darkness into the way of the Faith.”

Instead of giving comfort, his words touched off madness in me. To him the sacrifice Nuljalik had made was clearly no more than the act of an ignorant animal. I sat on the pile of skins and savagely flung his hand away.

“You lie!” I raged. “It was no bear! It was the devil-bitch, Paija, who slaughtered my wife!”

That violent rejection of God and priest might have led a lesser man to abandon me but, whatever his faults may have been, Father Danioux would not do such a thing. The next day, when I was calmer, he talked to me again and I repented of my rage and did not reject his desire to bring me back to the comfort of religion. But I refused to help him in his mission to the Innuit. I refused because I remembered Katelo’s words when I challenged the beliefs of his people:

“… this is not the land of the Kablunait… you do not understand how it is here. We know what we know.”

I remembered, and I who had dealt a deep wound to those who had been so good to me would not wound them again. Perhaps the time might come when they would welcome the God of the white men… but that time was not yet.

I said as much to Father Danioux. Angrily and without my help he went ahead with his mission to the Innuit; and when that mission failed, he was convinced, doubtless with justice, that it was my stubbornness which had prevented him from bringing many heathen souls to the True Path.

Even so, when he and Denikazi departed they took me with them. After we reached Caribou, there was nowhere for me to go, so Father Danioux took me into the mission. Then he set himself the task of cleansing my soul.

Life slowly began to have meaning for me again as I determined to atone for what I had done, by serving God. Despite my blindness I made myself useful to Father Danioux, being willing to do all he asked of me… except one thing.

One thing alone I would not do. I would not condemn my wife and her people for what they believed. I would not disavow their beliefs. How could I do that? It would have been to make mockery of Nuljalik’s death… of the gift she had made. No! Though he demanded it of me for the fifty years we were together, sometimes shouting that I was an unredeemed sinner and a heretic in my heart, I would not bend to his will.

That struggle between us remained unresolved until death stood beside him. His breathing had quieted and I knew that he lived only because of the faint warmth on the hand I laid on his face. It may be I felt rather than heard his last words:

“… it would have been… a far greater sin… if you had denied
her who gave you your life…”

Stranger in Taransay
_______

The village of Taransay straggles
along a bleak piece of craggy shore on the outer Hebrides—those high-domed sentinels that guard the Scottish mainland coast from the driving fury of the Western Ocean. The few strangers who visit Taransay remember the acrid smell of peat smoke on the windswept hills, the tang of the dark local ale, and the sibilant patter of the Gaelic tongue spoken by the shepherds and fishermen who gather during the long evenings under the smoke-stained ceiling of the Crofter’s Dram.

It is the only public house for many miles, and it holds within its walls the beating heart of Taransay, together with many of its memories. Strange objects hang from the narrow ceiling beams or crowd the shelves behind the bar—remembrances of ancient wrecks, flotsam of the northern seas, the trivia of time. Amongst them is a collection of tiny figures delicately carved in white bone. These are ranged in the place of honour on a centre shelf where they catch the eye and stir the mind to wonderment. There are narwhals, long-beaked and leaping from an ivory sea; walrus thrusting tiny tusks through a miniature kayak; three polar bears snarling defiance at a human figure whose upraised arm holds a sliver of a spear; and a pack of arctic wolves poised in dreadful immobility over a slaughtered muskox.

There is an alien artistry about those carvings that never sprang from the imagination of an island shepherd, yet all were carved in Taransay. They are the work of a man named Malcolm Nakusiak who was a voyager out of time.

nakusiak’s odyssey began
on a July day in the mid-1800s, under a basalt cliff in a fiord on the eastern shore of Baffin Island. To the score or so of people who lived there, it was known as
Auvektuk
—the Walrus Place. It had no name in our language for no white man had ever visited it although each year many of them, in stout wooden vessels, coasted the Baffin shores chasing the Bowhead whale.

These great whales were no part of men’s lives at Auvektuk. For them walrus was the staff of life. Each summer when the ice of Davis Strait came driving south, the men of Auvek- tuk readied spears, harpoons and kayaks and went out into the crashing tumult of the Strait. On the grinding edges of the floes they stalked obese, ton-weight giants that were armoured with inch-thick hide, and armed with double tusks that could rend a kayak or a man.

Of all the Auvektuk hunters, few could surpass Nakusiak. Although not yet thirty years of age, his skill and daring had become legendary in his own time. Young women smiled at him with particular warmth for Eskimo women do not differ from their sisters the world over in admiring success. During the long winter nights Nakusiak was often the centre of a group of men who chanted the chorus as he sang his hunting songs. But Nakusiak had another skill. He was blessed with fingers that could imbue carvings made of bone and walrus ivory with the very stuff of life. Indeed, life was a full and swelling thing for Nakusiak until the July day when his pride betrayed him to the sea.

On that morning the waters of the Strait were ominously shrouded with white fog. The hunters had gathered on the shore, listening to the ludicrous fluting voices of the first walrus of the season talking together somewhere to seaward. The temptation to go after them was great, but the risk was greater. Heavy fog at that time of the year was the precursor of a westerly gale and for a kayaker to be caught in pack ice during an offshore storm was likely to be fatal. Keen as they were for walrus meat, courageous as they were, these men refused the challenge. All save one.

Gravely ignoring the caution of his fellows, Nakusiak chose to wager his strength—and his luck—against the imponderable odds of the veiled waters. The watchers on the shore saw his kayak fade into obscurity amongst the growling floes.

With visibility reduced to about the length of the kayak, Nakusiak had great difficulty locating the walrus. The heavy fog distorted their voices and confused the direction, yet he never lost track of them and, although he had already gone farther to seaward than he had intended, he still refused to give it up and turn for home. He was so tautly concerned with the hunt that he hardly noticed the rising keen of the west wind…

some days later,
and nearly two hundred miles to the southeast, a Norwegian whaler was pounding her way southward through Davis Strait. The dirty, ice-scarred wooden ship was laden to her marks with oil and baleen. Her crewmen were driving her toward the hoped-for freedom of the open seas, all sails set and drawing taut in the brisk westerly that was the last vestige of a nor’west gale.

In the crow’s nest the ice-watch swung his telescope, searching for leads. He glimpsed something on a distant floe off the port bow. Taking it to be a polar bear he bellowed a change of course to the helmsman on the poop. Men began to scurry across the decks, some running for guns while others climbed partway up the shrouds to better vantage points. The ship shouldered her way through the pack toward the object on the ice and the crew watched with heightened interest as it resolved itself into the shape of a man slumped on the crest of a pressure ridge.

The ship swung into the wind, sails slatting, as two seamen scampered across the moving ice, hoisted the limp body of Nakusiak in their arms and danced their way back from floe to floe, while a third man picked up the Eskimo’s broken kayak and brought it to the ship as well.

The whalers were rough men, but a castaway is a castaway no matter what his race or colour. They gave Nakusiak schnapps, and when he was through choking they gave him hot food, and soon he began to recover from his ordeal on the drifting ice. All the same, his first hours aboard the ship were a time of bewilderment and unease. Although he had seen whaling ships in the distance, and had heard many barely credible stories from other Eskimos about the Kablunait—the Big Ears—who hunted the Bowhead, he had never before been on a ship or seen a white man with his own eyes.

He began to feel even more disturbed as the whaler bore steadily toward the southeast, completely out of sight of land, carrying him away from Auvektuk. He had been hoping the ship would come about and head north and west along the coast into the open water frequented by the Bowheads, but she failed to do so, and his efforts to make the Kablunait realize that he must go home availed him nothing. When the ship reached open water, rounded Kap Farvel at the south tip of Greenland and bore away almost due east, Nakusiak became frantic. Feverishly he began repairing his kayak with bits of wood and canvas given to him by the ship’s carpenter, but he worked so obviously that he gave away his purpose. The newly patched kayak was taken from him and lashed firmly to the top of the after hatch where it was always under the eye of the helmsman and the officer on watch. The whalers acted as they did to save Nakusiak’s life, for they believed he would surely perish if he put out into the wide ocean in such a tiny craft. Because he came of a race that accepted what could not be altered, Nakusiak ceased to contemplate escape. He had even begun to enjoy the voyage when the terrible winds of his own land caught up to him again.

The whaler was southeast of the Faeroe Islands when another ice-born nor’west gale struck her. She was a stout ship and she ran ably before it, rearing and plunging on the following seas. When some of her double-reefed sails began to blow out with the noise of cannon fire, her crew stripped her down to bare poles; and when the massive rollers threatened to poop her, they broke out precious cases of whale oil, smashed them open and let the oil run out of the scuppers to smother the pursuing graybeards.

She would have endured the storm had not her mainmast shrouds, worn thin by too many seasons in the ice, suddenly let go. They parted with a wicked snarl and in the same instant the mainmast snapped like a broken bone and thundered over the lee side. Tethered by a maze of lines, the broken spar acted like a sea anchor and the ship swung inexorably around into the trough… broached, and rolled half over.

There was no time to launch the whaleboats. The great seas tramped over them, snatching them away. There was barely time for Nakusiak to grab his knife, cut the kayak loose, and wriggle into the narrow cockpit before another giant comber thundered down upon the decks and everything vanished under a welter of water.

Washed clear, Nakusiak and the kayak hung poised for a moment on the back of a mountainous sea. The Eskimo held his breath as he slipped down a slope so steep it seemed to him it must lead to the very bowels of the ocean. But the kayak was almost weightless, and it refused to be engulfed by the sucking seas. Sometimes it seemed to leap free and, like a flying fish, be flung from crest to crest. Sometimes it flipped completely over; but when this happened, Nakusiak, hanging head down beneath the surface, was able to right his little vessel with the twisting double paddle. He had laced the sealskin skirt sewn to the cockpit coaming so tightly around his waist that no water could enter the vessel. Man and kayak were one indivisible whole. The crushing strength of the ocean could not prevail against them.

The bit of arctic flotsam, with its human heart, blew into the southeast for so long a time that Nakusiak’s eyes blurred into sightlessness. His ears became impervious to the roar of water. His muscles cracked and twisted in agony. And then, as brutally as it had begun, the ordeal ended.

A mighty comber lifted the kayak in curling fingers and flung it high on the roaring shingle of a beach where it shattered like an egg. Although he was half stunned, Nakusiak managed to crawl clear and drag himself above the storm tide line.

Hours later he was awakened from the stupor of exhaustion by the cries of swooping, black-backed gulls. His vision had cleared, but his brain remained clouded by the strangeness of what lay around him. The great waves rolled in from the sounding sea but nowhere on their heaving surface was there the familiar glint of ice. Flocks of sea birds that were alien both in sound and form hung threateningly above him. A massive cliff of a dull red hue reared high above the narrow beach. In the crevices of the cliff outlandish flowers bloomed, and vivid green turf such as he had never seen before crested the distant headlands.

The headlands held his gaze for there was something on them which gave him a sense of the familiar. Surely, he thought, those white patches on the high green places must be scattered drifts of snow. He stared intently until fear shattered the illusion. The white things moved! They
lived
! And they were innumerable! Nakusiak scuttled up the beach to the shelter of a water-worn cave, his heart pounding. He knew only one white beast of comparable size—the arctic wolf—and he could not credit the existence of wolves in such numbers
…
if, indeed, the things he had seen were only wolves, and not something even worse.

For two days Nakusiak hardly dared to leave the cave. He satisfied his thirst with water dripping from the rocks, and tried to ease his hunger with oily tasting seaweed. By the third day he had become desperate enough to explore the cliff-locked beach close to his refuge. He had two urgent needs: food… and a weapon. He found a three-foot length of driftwood and a few minutes’ work sufficed for him to lash his knife to it. Armed with this crude spear his courage began to return. He also found food of sorts; a handful of shellfish and some small fishes that had been trapped in a tidal pool. But there was not enough of these to more than take the edge off his growing hunger.

On the morning of the fourth day he made his choice. Whatever alien world this was that he had drifted to, he would no longer remain in hiding to endure starvation. He determined to leave the sterile little beach and chance whatever lay beyond the confining cliffs.

It was a long and arduous climb up the red rock wall and he was bone weary by the time he clawed his way over the grassy lip to sprawl, gasping for breath, on the soft turf. But his fatigue washed out of him instantly when, not more than a hundred paces away, he saw a vast assemblage of the mysterious white creatures. Nakusiak clutched the spear and his body became rigid.

The sheep, with the curiosity characteristic of members of their family, were intrigued by the fur-clad figure on the rim of the cliff. Slowly the flock approached, led by a big ram with black, spiralled horns. Some of the ewes shook their heads and bleated, and in this action the Eskimo saw the threat of a charge.

The sheep bleated in a rising chorus and shuffled a few feet closer.

Nakusiak reached his breaking point. He charged headlong into the white mob, screaming defiance as he came. The sheep stood stupidly for a moment, then wheeled and fled, but already he was among them, thrusting fiercely with his makeshift spear.

The startled flock streamed away leaving Nakusiak, shaking as with a fever, to stare down at the two animals he had killed. That they were mortal beings, not spirits, he could no longer doubt. Wild with relief he began to laugh, and as the sound of his shrill voice sent the remaining sheep scurrying even farther into the rolling distance, Nakusiak unbound his knife and was soon filling his starving belly with red meat—and finding it to his taste.

The strange scene under the pallid Hebridean sky had been witnessed by the gulls, the sheep… and by one other. Atop a ridge a quarter mile inland a sharp-faced, tough-bodied man of middle age had seen the brief encounter. Angus Macrimmon had been idly cleaning the dottle from his pipe when his practised shepherds’ glance had caught an unaccustomed movement from the flock. He looked up and his heavy brows drew together in surprise as he saw the sheep converging on a shapeless, unidentifiable figure lying at the edge of the cliff. Before Macrimmon could do more than get to his feet he saw the shape rise—squat, shaggy and alien—and fling itself screaming on the flock. Macrimmon saw the red glare of blood against white fleece and watched the killer rip open a dead sheep and begin to feed on the raw flesh.

The Hebrideans live close to the ancient world of their ancestors, and although there are kirks enough on the Islands, many beliefs linger on that owe nothing to the Christian faith. When Macrimmon watched the murder of his sheep, he was filled not only with anger but with dread, for he could not credit that the thing he saw was human.