The Snow Walker (6 page)

My people were not willing that the Innuhowik should do this, for they needed their dogs and they were also angry on behalf of the women. It seemed it would come to a fight until Koonar stepped in. He said if my people would assist the Innuhowik to go, he himself would remain and all the gifts he could make would be ours.

Do you wonder why he agreed to stay? My people wondered too. Perhaps he believed his injuries would make him a burden to his fellows; or perhaps it was because the woman, Airut, was with child.

In the worst time of winter, when the blizzards rule the land, the eight Innuhowik left our camps, driving dog sleds eastward in search of the salt sea and their own big ships. No word was ever heard of them again, not even by our cousins, the sea people, who live along the coasts. I think that in the dark depths of the winter nights their magic failed them and they perished.

So now the tale of the Innuhowik becomes the tale of Koonar, of Airut, and of the children she bore. First was the boy Hekwaw, whose name I bear, born in the spring. A year later Airut had a girl child who was called Oniktok, but afterwards she had no more children. Koonar seemed content with his life, even though he was so crippled he could hardly leave his tent or his snowhouse. The other men of the camp hunted the meat that fed Koonar and his family, but they were glad to do this because Koonar was well liked. He did not laugh as much as he had done when his own men were still with us, and he spent many hours playing Innuhowik games. He taught these to his son and one of them was still played in my own grandfather’s time. Many small squares were marked out on the snow or on a piece of deer hide, and each man had a number of stones… but now that game is forgotten.

Kiliktuk was the man closest to Koonar, since both were shamans who knew many magical things and understood each other’s minds. Koonar would often talk of things he had seen in distant places. Sometimes he told of great battles on land and sea fought with such weapons that men’s blood flowed like spring freshets. It was remembered that, when he spoke of such things, his face would become terrible and most people were afraid to remain in his presence even though such talk of great killings of men could not easily be believed.

Things went well in the many camps along the River until the child, Hekwaw, was in his eighth year and had become a very promising boy and a source of much pride to his father. After the snows began that autumn, Kiliktuk decided that a journey must be made south to cut trees for new sleds, kayak frames, tent poles and other wooden things that were needed. In earlier times this had been considered a dangerous venture, one to be made only when a large number of Innuit from many camps could band together for protection in case the Itkilit attacked the wood gatherers. But since the Itkilit had suffered so heavily at the gorge and the Killing Falls, it was thought they would not now be anxious to fight.

Because of his crippled leg, Koonar could not leave the camps in order to teach Hekwaw, his son, the ways of men on the land, so Kiliktuk had become the boy’s teacher. Now he asked that Hekwaw accompany the wood-gathering party in order that he might learn the nature of the southern country. Koonar loved his son and wished him to become a foremost man, so he did not oppose this. The boy took his place on Kiliktuk’s long sled, and a big party of men, some women and other boys set off to the south. They passed through the country of little sticks to the end of a big lake stretching far into the forests. Here they made camp.

Each morning thereafter the men drove south on the ice of the lake to where good timber grew on its shores. Before dark they would return to the travel camp where the women would greet them with trays of hot soup and boiled meat. At first some men stayed at the camp during the day to guard it, but when no signs of Itkilit were seen these men went also to help with the cutting.

On the sixth day, while the Innuit men were far down the lake, a band of Itkilit came running on snowshoes out of the small woods near the camp. When the Innuit men returned again in the evening, they found three women and three boys, Hekwaw among them, dead in the snow.

Kiliktuk and his companions did not pursue the Itkilit into the thick cover of the forests, knowing they would be helpless against the long bows, spitting their arrows from hiding. They were afraid that the slaughter of their women and children was planned to draw them into an ambush. So they wrapped the remains of the dead ones in caribou skins, loaded the sleds, and started north.

The sounds of their lamentings were heard in the river camps even before the dog teams were seen. It is remembered that when Kiliktuk entered Koonar’s igloo he took an iron knife Koonar had given him and thrust it partway into his own chest, inviting Koonar to drive it home into his heart.

The fury of Koonar at the loss of his son was of a kind unknown to my people. It was of a kind unknown in our land. Koonar did not lament his dead, as my people did; he burned and roared in the grip of madness, and so terrifying was he that none dared come near him for the space of many days and nights. Then he grew silent… silent and cold, with a chill more dreadful than his fury. At last he ordered the people to bring him muskox horns, the best and hardest dry wood, plaited caribou sinews, and some other things.

He worked in his snowhouse for three days and when he was done he held in his hand the father of this bow which I have made—although what I have done is but the crude work of a child compared to what Koonar wrought.

For a long time after that he ordered the lives of the people in the camp as if they were no more than dogs. He drove each hunter to make a crossbow. If a man did not make it well enough, Koonar struck him and forced him to do it again. It is unthinkable for one of us to strike another, for to do so is to show that you are truly a madman; yet the people endured Koonar’s madness, for their awe of him was the awe one has of a devil.

When each man had a crossbow and a supply of bolts, Koonar dragged himself out of the snowhouse and made them set up targets and practise shooting, day after day. Although it is not in my people’s nature to give themselves in this way to such a task, they were afraid to resist.

With the coming of the long night which is the heart of winter, Kiliktuk, obeying Koonar’s will, chose the ten best marksmen and ordered them to prepare dogs and gear for a long journey. Six teams were hitched to six sleds and the chosen men left the camps, heading south along the frozen river. Kiliktuk was in the lead, and on his sled lay Koonar, well wrapped in muskox robes against the brittle cold.

It is told how these men boldly drove into the forests, Koonar having banished both fear and caution from their hearts. For seven days they drove southward among the trees, and in the evening of the seventh day they came in sight of the smoking tents of a big band of Itkilit upon a lake shore.

The Innuit would have preferred to draw back and wait for dawn before attacking, but Koonar would allow no delay. The sleds spread out and were driven at full speed across the intervening ice straight into the heart of the Itkilit camp. They came so swiftly, the Itkilit dogs hardly had time to howl an alarm before the sleds halted in a line and the Innuit men jumped off, bows in hand.

Many of the Itkilit came spilling out of their tents without even stopping to seize their own weapons, for they could not believe they would be attacked so boldly. They were met by the whine and whirr and thud of the bolts.

Many Itkilit died that night. The Innuit would not have harmed the women and children but Koonar demanded that everyone who could be caught be killed. When the slaughter was over, Koonar ordered the tents of the Itkilit burned down so that those who had escaped into the forests would die of starvation and frost.

While the flames were still leaping, the Innuit turned their teams northward. They drove with hardly a pause until the trees began to thin and the plains stretched ahead.

Only then did they make camp. Koonar was so exhausted that he could not move from his sled where he lay with eyes closed, singing strange songs in a voice that had lost most of its strength. When Kiliktuk tried to give him a drink of meat soup he thrust it aside, spilling it on the snow. It is remembered that there was no joy in that camp. Too much blood had been shed and there was darkness in the hearts of the men of my people.

At dawn, the sleds drove north again, but when they were almost in sight of the home camps Kiliktuk’s sled turned aside from the trail. He motioned the others forward, bidding them to carry the news of the battle.

Late that night a man stepped out of his snowhouse at the home camp to relieve himself and saw something that made him shout until everyone in the camp came outside. To the north a tongue of fire thrust upward as if to join the flickering green flames of the spirit lights. The long roll of snow-covered hills by the Killing Falls emerged briefly from the darkness. The people were still watching in astonishment when a sled came swiftly into camp from northward. On it rode Kiliktuk… and he was alone.

He was asked many questions, but neither then nor later did he tell the people how the last of the Innuhowik departed. Only to his grandson, the son of Koonar’s daughter, did he tell that tale. That child also was called Hekwaw and he was the father of my father’s fathers, and it was through them that I heard how Kiliktuk drove Koonar down the River to the place where the Innuhowik’s old boat was still cached among the rocks. It was from them I heard how Kiliktuk tenderly placed Koonar in that boat and piled bundles of dry willow scrub around him. Then Kiliktuk put the flint and steel in Koonar’s hands and parted from the stranger who had become his son.

kiliktuk drove away
as he had been ordered to do, and when he looked back, flames were already lifting above the boat. So the last of the Innuhowik went from our lands to that place of warriors where, he had told us, his people go at the end of their time.

There followed many years and many generations during which my people prospered because of the gift of this bow. We no longer feared the Itkilit and in our pride and strength went against them. We drove them south into the forests for such a distance that, after a time, they were hardly even remembered. Our camps spread over the whole width and breadth of the plains.

But in the time of my grandfather’s grandfather, the strangers returned.

This time they came not to our country but to the forested lands in the south, and there they made friends with the Itkilit. They did not wear iron on their breasts or on their heads, and they were not called Innuhowik. They were
your
people, who are called
Kablunait
. The Kablunait brought gifts to the Itkilit, and foremost of these was the gun.

Then the Itkilit considered what we had done to them in times they had never forgotten.

They came north out of the forests again, first in small bands and then in hundreds, and Koonar’s gift failed us. They killed us from great distances with their guns and they roamed so widely over our lands that my people had to flee north almost to the coasts of the frozen seas.

It seemed as if the guns brought by the Kablunait would mean an end to my people, and so it might have happened. But one summer the Itkilit failed to appear on the plains; and as summer followed summer and they still failed to return, my people began to move slowly south and recover their land.

The Itkilit stopped coming against us because they were dead in their thousands; dead from a fire that burned in their bodies, rotting the flesh so they stank like old corpses while life still lingered within them. This we know, for that fire, which was another gift from the Kablunait, afterwards swept out over the plains and my people also died in their thousands.

Now the Itkilit are no more than a handful scattered through the dark shadows of the forests; and the wide country where my people once dwelt is nearly empty of men.

So it ends… But this bow I hold in my hand is where it began.

darkness had fallen
and the fire was nearly out. Hekwaw stirred the coals until the fire was reborn under the touch of the night wind. His face was turned from me as he dropped the crossbow onto the flames and I could barely hear his words:

“Take back your gift, Koonar. Take it back to the lands of the Innuhowik and the Kablunait… its work here is done.”

Two Who Were One
_______

After death carried the noose
to Angutna and Kipmik, their memory lived on with the people of the Great Plains. But death was not satisfied and, one by one, he took the lives of the people until none was left to remember. Before the last of them died, the story was told to a stranger and so it is that Angutna and Kipmik may cheat oblivion a little while longer.

It begins on a summer day when Angutna was only a boy. He had taken his father’s kayak and paddled over the still depths of the lake called Big Hungry until he entered a narrow strait called Muskox Thing. Here he grounded the kayak beneath a wall of looming cliffs and climbed cautiously upward under a cloud-shadowed sky. He was hunting for
Tuktu,
the caribou, which was the source of being for those who lived in the heart of the tundra. Those people knew of the sea only as a legend. For them seals, walrus and whales were mythical beasts. For them the broad-antlered caribou was the giver of life.

Angutna was lucky. Peering over a ledge he saw three caribou bucks resting their rumbling bellies on a broad step in the cliffs. They were not sleeping, and one or other of them kept raising his head to shake off the black hordes of flies that clung to nostrils and ears, so Angutna was forced to crawl forward an inch or two at a time. It took him an hour to move twenty yards, but he moved with such infinite caution that the bucks remained unaware of his presence. He had only a few more yards to crawl before he could drive an arrow from his short bow with enough power to kill.

Sunlight burst suddenly down through the yielding grey scud and struck hot on the crouched back of the boy and the thick coats of the deer. The warmth roused the bucks and one by one they got to their feet. Now they were restless, alert, and ready to move. In an agony of uncertainty Angutna lay still as a rock. This was the first time he had tried to stalk Tuktu all by himself, and if he failed in his first hunt he believed it would bode ill for his luck in the years ahead.

But the burst of sunlight had touched more than the deer and the boy. It had beamed into a cleft in the cliffs overhanging the ledge where it had wakened two sleeping fox pups. Now their catlike grey faces peered shortsightedly over the brilliant roll of the lake and the land. Cloudy black eyes took in the tableau of the deer and the boy; but in their desire to see more, the pups forgot the first precept of all wild things—to see and hear but not to be seen or heard. They skittered to the edge of the cleft, shrilling a mockery of the dog fox’s challenge at the strange beasts below.

The bucks turned their heavy heads and their ears flopped anxiously until their eyes found the pups scampering back and forth far over their heads. They continued to watch the young foxes, and so they did not see the boy move rapidly closer.

The hard twang of the bow and the heavy thud of an arrow striking into flesh came almost together. The deer leapt for the precipitous slope leading to the lake, but one of them stumbled, fell to his knees and went sliding down on his side. In a moment Angutna was on him. The boy’s copper knife slipped smoothly between the vertebrae in the deer’s neck, and the buck lay dead.

The curiosity of the pups had now passed all bounds. One of them hung so far out over the ledge that he lost his balance. His hind legs scrabbled furiously at the smooth face of the rocks while his front feet pushed against air. The rocks thrust him away and he came tumbling in a steep arc to pitch into the moss almost at Angutna’s feet.

The pup was too stunned to resist as the boy picked him up by the tail. Angutna put a tentative finger on the small beast’s head, and when it failed to snap at him he laughed aloud. His laughter rang over the hills to the ears of the mother fox far from her den; it speeded the flight of the two surviving bucks, and rose to the ears of a high-soaring raven.

Then the boy spoke to the fox:

“Ayee!
Kipmik—Little Dog—we have made a good hunt, you and I. Let it be always this way, for surely you must be one of the Spirits-Who-Help.”

That night in his father’s skin tent Angutna told the tale of the hunting. Elder men smiled as they listened and agreed that the fox must indeed be a good token sent to the boy. Tethered to a tent pole, the pup lay in a little grey ball with his ears flat to his head and his eyes tightly shut, hoping with all his small heart that this was only a dream from which he would wake to find solace at the teats of his mother.

such was the
coming of the white fox into the habitations of men. In the days that followed, Angutna shared most of his waking hours with Kipmik who soon forgot his fears; for it is in the nature of the white fox to be so filled with curiosity that fear can be only a passing thing.

While the pup was still young enough to risk falling into the lean jaws of the dogs that prowled about the camp, he was kept tethered at night; but during the days, fox and boy travelled the land and explored the world that was theirs. On these expeditions the pup ran freely ahead of the boy over the rolling plains and hills, or he squatted motionless on the precarious deck of a kayak as Angutna drove the slim craft across the shining lakes.

Boy and fox lived together as one, and their thoughts were almost as one. The bond was strong between them for Angutna believed the fox was more than a fox, being also the embodiment of the Spirit-Who-Helps which had attached itself to him. As for Kipmik, perhaps he saw in the boy the shape of his own guardian spirit.

The first snows of the year came in late September and soon after that Kipmik shed the sombre grey fur of youth and donned the white mantel of the dog fox. His long hair was as fine as down and the white ruff that bordered his face framed glistening black eyes and the black spot of his nose. His tail was nearly as long and as round as his body. He was small compared to the red foxes who live in the forests, but he was twice as fleet and his courage was boundless.

During the second winter they spent together, Angutna came of age. He was fifteen and of a strength and awareness to accept manhood. In the time when the nights were so long they were almost unbroken, Angutna’s father spoke to the father of a young girl named Epeetna. Then this girl moved into the snowhouse of Angutna’s family and the boy who was now a man took her to wife.

During the winters, life was lived without much exertion in the camps of the barrenland people for the deer were far to the south and men lived on the fat and meat they had stored up from the fall slaughter. But with the return of the snowbirds, spring and the deer came back to the plains around the Big Hungry and the camps woke to new and vigorous life.

In the spring of the first year of his marriage, Angutna went to the deer-hunting places as a full-fledged hunter. With him went the white fox. The two would walk over the softening drifts to reach rocky defiles that channelled the north-flowing deer. Angutna would hide in one of the ravines while the fox ran high up on the ridges to a place where he could overlook the land and see the dark skeins of caribou approaching the ambush. When the old doe leading a skein approached the defile she would look carefully around and see the little white shadow watching from above. Kipmik would bark a short greeting to Tuktu, and the herd would move fearlessly forward believing that, if danger lurked, the fox would have barked a cry of alarm. But Kipmik’s welcoming bark was meant for the ears of Angutna, who drew back the arrow on the bent bow and waited.

Angutna made good hunts during that spring and as a result he was sung about at the drum dances held in the evenings. The fox was not forgotten either, and in some of the songs the boy and the fox were called the Two Who Were One, and that name became theirs.

In the summer, when the deer had passed on to the fawning grounds far to the north, the fox and the boy sought other food. The Two Who Were One took the kayak down the roaring rivers that debouched over the scarred face of the plains, seeking the hiding places of the geese that nested in that land. After midsummer the adult geese lost their flight quills and had to stay on the water, and at such times they became very shy. The kayak sought out the backwaters where the earthbound geese waited in furtive seclusion for the gift of flight to return.

While Angutna concealed himself behind rocks near the shore, Kipmik would dance on the open beach, barking and squealing like a young pup. He would roll on his back or leap into the air. As he played, the geese would emerge from their hiding places and swim slowly toward him, fascinated by this peculiar behaviour in an animal they all knew so well. They had no fear of the fox for they knew he would not try to swim. The geese would come closer, cackling to one another with necks outstretched in amazement. Then Angutna’s sling would whir and a stone would fly with angry hiss. A goose would flap its wings on the water and die.

It was an old trick Kipmik played on the geese, one used by foxes since time began… but only Kipmik played that game for the benefit of man.

so the years
passed until there were two children in the summer tent of Angutna—a boy and a girl who spent long hours playing with the soft tail of the fox. They were not the only young to play with that white brush. Every spring, when the ptarmigan mated on the hills and the wild dog foxes barked their challenges as an overtone to the sonorous singing of the wolves, unrest would come into the heart of the fox that lived in the houses of men.

On a night he would slip away from the camp and be gone many days. When he returned, lean and hungry, Angutna would feed him special tidbits and smilingly wish good luck to the vixen secreted in some newly dug den not far away. The vixen never ventured into the camp, but Kipmik saw to it that she and her pups were well fed, for Angutna did not begrudge the fox and his family a fair share of the meat that was killed. Sometimes Angutna followed the fox into the hills to the burrow. Then Angutna might leave a fresh fish at its mouth, and he would speak kindly to the unseen vixen cowering within. “Eat well, little sister,” he would say.

As the years slipped by, stories of the Two Who Were One spread through the land. One of them told of a time when Angutna and his family were camped alone by the lake called Lamp of the Woman. It was a very bad year. In midwinter there was an unbroken month of great storms and the people used up all the meat stored near the camp but the weather was too savage to permit the men to travel to their more distant caches. The people grew hungry and cold, for there was no more fat for the lamps.

Finally, there came a day without wind. Angutna hitched up his team and set out for a big cache lying two days’ travel to the west. The dogs pulled as hard as their starved muscles would let them while the fox, like a white wraith, flitted ahead, choosing the easiest road for the team. The sled runners rasped as if they were being hauled over dry sand, for the temperature stood at or fifty or sixty degrees below freezing.

On the second day of the journey the sun failed to show itself and there was only a pallid grey light on the horizon. After a while the fox stopped and stared hard into the north, his short ears cocked forward. Then Angutna too began to hear a distant keening in the dark sky. He tried to speed up the dogs, hoping to reach the cache, which lay sheltered in a deep valley, before the storm broke. But the blizzard exploded soon after, and darkness fell with terrible swiftness as this great gale, which had swept a thousand miles south from the ice sea, scoured the frozen face of the plains. It drove snow before it like fragments of glass. The drifting granules swirled higher and higher, obscuring the plodding figures of man, fox and dogs.

Kipmik still moved at the head of the team but he was invisible to Angutna’s straining, snowcaked eyes, and many times the anxious white shadow had to return to the sled so that the dogs would not lose their way. Finally the wind screamed to such a pitch that Angutna knew it would be madness to drive on. He tried to find a drift whose snow was firm enough for the making of a snowhouse, but there was none at hand and there was no time to search. Turning the sled on its side facing the gale, he dug a trench behind it with his snowknife—just big enough for his body. Wrapping himself in his robes he rolled into the trench and pulled the sled over the top of the hole.

The dogs curled abjectly nearby, noses under their tails, the snow drifting over them, while Kipmik ran among them snapping at their shoulders in his anxiety to make them continue on until some shelter was found. He gave up when the dogs were transformed into white, inanimate mushrooms. Then the fox ran to the sled and burrowed under it. He wormed in close, and Angutna made room so that he might share the warmth from the little body beside him.

For a day and a night nothing moved on the white face of the dark plains except the snow ghosts whirling before the blast of the gale. On the second day the wind died away. A smooth, curling drift shattered from within as Angutna fought free of the smothering snows. With all the haste his numbed body could muster, he began probing the nearby drifts seeking the dogs who were sealed into white tombs from which they could no longer escape by themselves.

He had little need of the probe. Kipmik ran to and fro, unerringly sniffing out the snow crypts of the dogs. They were all uncovered at last, and all were alive but so weak they could barely pull at the sled.

Angutna pressed on. He knew that if no food was found soon, the dogs would be finished. And if the dogs died, then all was lost, for there would be no way to carry the meat from the cache back to the camp. Mercilessly Angutna whipped the team on, and when the dogs could no longer muster the strength to keep the sled moving, he harnessed himself into the traces beside them.

Just before noon the sun slipped over the horizon and blazed red on a desolate world. The long sequence of blizzards had smoothed it into an immense and shapeless undulation of white. Angutna could see no landmarks. He was lost in that snow desert, and his heart sank within him.

Kipmik still ran ahead but for some little while he had been trying to swing the team to a northerly course. Time after time he ran back to Angutna and barked in his face when the man persisted in trudging into the west. So they straggled over that frozen world until the dogs could go no farther. Angutna killed one of the dogs and fed it to the others. He let them rest only briefly, for he was afraid a new storm would begin.