People of the Deer (2 page)

With the picture of the deer held firmly in my mind as a spiritual talisman, I returned to the cities for the winter, and my heart was closer to knowing peace than it had been in six years. I went back to the university and took a zoological course which would fit me to become a student of the deer, for in those days the habits and life of the caribou were a great mystery waiting to be solved and I had decided that the pursuit of this mystery was to be my endeavor. Perhaps not completely an honest endeavor, for even then I was dimly aware that the deer were to serve primarily as my excuse for a return to the North, which was calling to me. Nevertheless I worked hard during the winter, and in my spare time I read every book about the arctic that I could lay hands on, until I began to have some conception of what lies behind that unrevealing word.

As I read I came to understand that the arctic is not only a world of frozen rivers and ice-bound lakes but also of living rivers and of lakes whose very blue depths are flanked by summer flowers and by sweeping green meadows. The arctic not only knows the absolute cold of the pole but it also knows days of overpowering heat when a naked man sweats with the simple exertion of walking. And most important of all, I came to understand that the arctic is not only the ice-covered cap of the world but is also nearly two million square miles of rolling plains that, during the heat of midsummer, are thronged with life and brilliant with the colors of countless plants in full bloom. It was these immense plains which drew my special attention, and when I found them on a map of the continent, I saw that they formed a great triangle, with its narrow apex pointing west to the shore of the Arctic Ocean, not far from the mouth of the Mackenzie River and the Alaskan border. The triangle's base lies along the west shore of Hudson Bay, and its two arms extend westward, one along timber line and the other along the coast of the Arctic Sea. And the name of this vast, treeless land is the Barrenlands.

I saw it in my mind's eye as a mighty land and a strange one. As geological time is reckoned, it emerged only yesterday from under the weight of the glaciers, and today it remains almost as it was when the ponderous mountains of ice finished grinding their way over its face. It is a land of undulating plains that have no horizon, of low hills planed to a shapeless uniformity by the great power of the ice. It is a land of gravel, of sand, and of shattered gray rocks, but without soil as we know it. It is also a land that seems to be struggling to emerge from a fresh-water ocean, for it is almost half water, holding countless numbers of lakes and their rivers. And this was the land where I would have to seek out the caribou, for it is their land.

Toward the end of the winter I met an old army friend, who, in peacetime, was a mining engineer, and I told him something of my interest in the arctic. He was a little amused at the idea of anyone's heading out into those lands when he might be reaping the value of five years' war exile from the rich postwar fabric of the boom. But he did me a favor, a much greater one than he knew. He gave me a stack of old government mining reports his father had owned, and he said that he thought some of them might deal with the North I wanted to know. He was right, for in that musty old pile of books I found my lodestone to the land of the deer.

I looked through the pile of pamphlets and books which he had given me. One of the dingiest of the lot bore the prosaic title
Report on the Dubawnt, Kazan, and Ferguson Rivers and the North West Coast of Hudson Bay.
It had been published in 1896 and on the surface it appeared to be a dry-as-dust compilation of outdated facts, written by some dull-eyed servant of government. But appearances were deceptive. I recognized the author's name—Joseph Burr Tyrrell—and I remembered that in some obscure paper I had read an old account of Tyrrell's fantastic explorations through the central Barrenlands of Keewatin. For Tyrrell had been the first—and the last—man ever to traverse the full breadth of the Barrens from south to north.

I opened his report eagerly. It was not quite like the usual run of official documents, for though Tyrrell had been devoted to his gods, mineralogy and geography, he had written about them with an undertone of enthusiasm and excitement which did not seem to belong between those staid covers and government seals. There was an ephemeral quality about his writings that made even his endless comments on the minerals he had examined seem interesting and fresh. And yet, in the Dubawnt Report there was only room for brief hints about the true nature of the land and about the trials and troubles which had beset Tyrrell.

Here and there I did come across scattered references to the deer and, in one place, Tyrrell spoke succinctly of seeing what may have been the greatest single herd ever to be seen by a white man—a herd so vast that for many miles the surface of the land was obscured beneath the blanket of living beasts! The mental image of this magnificent spectacle strengthened my desire to go to the Barrens, but I found one other thing hidden in Tyrrell's report that finally confirmed my resolve.

For Tyrrell spoke also of a “People of the Deer.” Out in those endless spaces, along the river he called Kazan, Tyrrell found a race of men where it was thought that no men could live. And interwoven between his lists of rocks were fragmentary and tantalizing references to these men, who had remained completely cut off from the world's knowledge until the day of Tyrrell's coming. In the Dubawnt Report, a shadow of this forgotten race emerged for the first time before our eyes. And it was clear enough that they were a people who, in Tyrrell's day, had been living the same lives they had led before the Viking longboats first discovered the eastern shores of North America. Tyrrell could spare them only a few terse and niggardly paragraphs, yet he said enough to make the Barrens People seem as fascinating as dwellers in another world. Obviously they were men whose total strength had been devoted to a bitter struggle against the implacable natural forces of the Barrens, and the idea came to me that they might never have found the will or the desire to turn their strength against one another. If this was indeed true, then it was certain they were a people I wanted to know.

But half a century had intervened since Tyrrell discovered this inland race of Eskimos, and it seemed inevitable that during that time great changes must have come to the land and to its inhabitants. I renewed my search of the literature of the arctic in an effort to discover how much was known of the People, and of the land, which Tyrrell had seen, and to my secret satisfaction I found no further word about Tyrrell's people, though there were sufficient rumors and secondhand reports to convince me that those men of the deer still lived in their hidden world. I sent to Ottawa for the most recent maps of the central plains. When they arrived, I spread them out on the floor and studied them with mounting excitement—for they showed little more than the tenuous dotted outlines of those features which Tyrrell had drawn half a century before. For the most part the maps were unsullied white, defaced only by small printed legends, reading “Unmapped.”

To the north of this clouded region, the coast of the continent was accurately shown, and it was studded with the settlements of Eskimos who had been in contact with our race for better than a hundred years. To the east, along the shoreline of Hudson Bay, the picture was the same. To the south lay the forests and the old river routes of the
Voyageurs
who had explored the timberlands centuries earlier. And to the distant west lay the rich and busy valley of the Mackenzie. But in the middle of all these lay only emptiness, not only on the maps but in the books as well.

There was a reason for this. When the first white men looked across the borders of this land, they named it “the Barrens” and shuddered at its terrible rawness. And so they turned from it, never knowing that it held rivers of life in its depths.

The existence of this barrier built upon an indefinable fear was made known to me when I sought definite information about ways and means to enter the land. I went to the books, but again they were not much of a help. I found that several men had indeed traveled in the boundary regions of the Barrens, and a few had even penetrated deeply into the narrow western neck of the plains, where they are squeezed between timber line and the seacoast. Yet all who had attempted to write of what they found had evidently been seized by an inarticulate paralysis when they tried to put their deepest impressions into their writings. They seemed to grope futilely for words with which they could express the emotions the Barrens had instilled in their hearts. And they were all baffled by that effort to speak clearly. Most of them gave up the attempt and sought refuge in minute descriptions of the component parts, which only if they are taken in their entirety can give the true measure of the great arctic plains.

It seemed to me to be a great mystery, this impenetrable obscurity that could not even be shattered by men who gave all their senses and their perceptions to the task.

But on a day in the spring of 1947, when I had almost completed my own plans to set out for the North, I received the first real clue to the nature of that mystery.

It was contained in a letter from a former Royal Canadian Mounted Police constable whom I had known during the war. I had written, asking if he had any personal experience with the arctic plains, and his answer told me of a time when he had gone into the western Barrens in pursuit of a suspected murderer. The fugitive escaped—from the police at least—and my friend turned back just in time to save his own life, for he was starved and half-frozen before he reached the shelter of a coastal trading post. Writing to me, he summed up all the Barrens had meant to him in these few, straightforward words:

I guess it was the emptiness that bothered me most. That damn and bloody space—it just goes on and on until it makes you want to cry, or scream—or cut your own damn throat!

Emptiness and the terrible space! These were the things which had haunted the imaginations of the few white men who had known the Barrens. And yet, somewhere in the hidden depths of that space there lived—if they still lived—not only the great herds of the deer, but also men... the People of the Deer.

1. Into the Barrenlands

On a morning in May of 1947 I boarded the train and gave myself up to the demands of the fever that was in me. My preparations for the journey were simple in the extreme. A visit to a War Assets store had provided me with an assortment of old army clothing and a cheap sleeping bag. I already owned a camera of the snapshot variety and this, together with my binoculars and a dozen rolls of film, completed my scientific equipment. For weapons I took only the American carbine I had carried all through the war.

My actual plans were almost as shadowy as my equipment, for though I knew to within a few thousand square miles where I wanted to go, I still had only the vaguest ideas of how to get there. The canoe routes from the south that Tyrrell had used were closed to me because I intended to travel alone. The eastern and northern borders were impossible too, because the Barrens rivers flowing down to the sea will not permit men to ascend their violent waters to their sources, high on the inland plateau. And sheer distance ruled out any attempt on my part to enter the land from the west.

But with spring already sweeping into the southlands I had no time to ponder. So on a May morning I bought a ticket to Churchill, a familiar name and the only place in the arctic I knew. Churchill lay on the edge of the Barrens and so I hoped that when I reached the end of steel I would stumble on some means for completing my journey into the interior.

Again I passed through Winnipeg and The Pas and again I saw the white mile-boards standing sentinel over the narrow cut that traverses the forests to the north. Then the Muskeg Special brought mile-board 512 into view and we swung into Churchill under a gray ice mist that came rolling over the still-frozen settlement. For a time I stood shivering in the chill wind while I examined this place that had been the shining memory of boyhood. But that memory dissolved quickly before the harsh impact of reality.

The port of Churchill was a miserable conglomeration of cowering shacks half-buried under great drifts. The stained snowbanks pushed tightly up against the slab-sided and scrofulous shanties. The freezing mist from Hudson Bay did its best to soften the ugliness and to hide the monolithic bulk of the huge concrete grain elevator that gives Churchill its sole reason for existence. For Churchill is nominally an ocean port, despite the fact that it is only for a few brief weeks each year that hardy freighters can dare the passage of Hudson Straits to enter the Bay and take on cargo. In May of 1947 that “ocean port” was the ultimate desolation of man's contriving.

Shouldering my kit bag, I trudged up the frozen ruts of Churchill's only road and found my way to the beer parlor. In a few minutes I was sitting comfortably close to the stove while a morose bartender brought me a bottle of sad ale—sans glass. As I drank the thin brew I looked out the dirty window at a clay-cold array of rusted boilers, abandoned donkey engines and dead construction machinery. And I wondered just how the devil I was going to find my way out of this scrap heap of ruined ambitions and into the Barrens. I had several more beers but they seemed to grow weaker, if possible, and my spirits ebbed steadily.

Then the door swung open with a gusty crash and a massive Scandinavian rolled into the room. His eyes lit up with a quick gleam of recognition as he saw me and in an instant the gloom of Churchill was dispelled.

“So you come back!” he boomed. “
Ja!
I thought maybe you would!”

This was John Ingerbritson, and I had last seen him when, as a boy of fourteen, I had gone to look at his ship in the harbor at Churchill. Many years earlier, when he had been living at The Pas, the call of John's Norwegian blood became too strong to deny and so he built a sea-going vessel there in his backyard, five hundred miles from the sea. When all forty feet of the
Otto Sverdrup
was completed, she was loaded on a flatcar and taken north to salt water. Her full tale is a Norse saga that began when John announced that he intended to fish the treacherous Bay waters. The scientists told him bluntly that there were no food fish to be had in Hudson Bay, but John set his nets anyway, and each week he shipped a fine cargo to the markets in distant Winnipeg. For John was a fisherman, though not much of a hand at science.

After hoisting a few for old times' sake, John took me to his home, where Mrs. Ingerbritson welcomed me into her brilliantly clean little house and filled me with good food.

Then, over coffee, and surrounded by the ebullient offspring of John and his wife, I explained why I had come back to Churchill and where I wanted to go. When I finished, John suggested that I should charter a plane, but I was doubtful about the idea. For one thing, the cost of flying in the arctic can be prohibitive. For another thing, a pilot needs a clear-cut objective, and I had none in mind.

While we were talking, a lanky, dark-eyed young man had come quietly into the room and he was introduced as Johnny Bourasso, former Royal Air Force Pathfinder pilot, at present the captain and crew of an ancient twin-engined Anson aircraft that made a precarious living for her owner by flying improbable tramp-freighting runs over the top of the world. Bourasso was at once dragged into the discussion, and the three of us got out the maps.

There was much talk and telling of tales. Without attempting to discourage me, old John was evidently determined that I should be made fully aware of what I was proposing to do, and so he told us the yarn of the Englishman, John Hornby, who set out to winter in the Barrens in the late 1920s.

Hornby took with him two young Englishmen, fresh from the old country. The three men set out from Great Slave Lake, and then silence dropped down on their track. For a year no word was heard of their fate—and when it did come, it was a grim word.

A party of prospectors canoeing down the Thelon River the next summer found Hornby's shanty in a tiny wooded oasis hundreds of miles north of the timber line. The bodies of the three men who had challenged the Barrens were there. Their story was preserved in the diary of eighteen-year-old Edgar Christian, and it was as simple as it was tragic. The three had missed the great autumn migration of the deer, for the deer do not always follow the same path each year. Having missed the deer the intruders began the long winter without the supplies of meat that alone can ensure man's survival in the white plains. Winter came quickly and there could be no retreat, for the party had no dogs, and men do not walk out of the winter Barrens on foot. So it was only a matter of time—but of a very long time, eking out the thin thread of their lives and always aware that it was a hopeless struggle that they were making. In the end they died, very slowly, and under conditions of great horror.

There was a subdued silence when John finished this story. I was thinking about Hornby and trying to quell the doubts which were rising within me when old John began to mutter, under his breath.

“Dimints!” he said. “Dimints
and
gold cufflinks too!”

We asked him what he was talking about and he told us the rumor that when the bodies were found, the searchers also uncovered most of the essentials required for dinner at the Ritz. Dinner dress in a wolf den out on the Barrens! It was too macabre a thought to have any bearing on the reality which lay before me. Resolutely I put Hornby out of my mind, and went back to the maps.

A thought struck me, and I asked John what he knew about the mysterious Eskimos that Tyrrell had seen. Surprisingly, John knew quite a lot, though it was all hearsay, of course. He told me that in the boom days of the '20s a trading post had actually been established on the southern borders of the Keewatin Barrens, not far from the headwaters of the Kazan where Tyrrell had first met the inland dwellers. While fur prices were soaring this isolated outpost did well, despite the fact that seven hundred miles of canoe route separated it from the nearest point of supply at The Pas.

Then the fur market collapsed and the post no longer paid a big enough profit. So it was closed, and the brief contact with the inland Eskimos would have been lost again had it not been for a German immigrant, married to a Cree woman, who doggedly persisted in the attempt to keep an independent trading post going. Off and on, over the years, this man did keep contact with the Barrens Eskimos and, though he was no longer in the land himself, it was rumored that he had left a son on the edge of the Barrens, who was believed to make his living by trapping white fox and by occasional trading deals with the natives.

John pointed out the site of the abandoned trading post on the map, at a place called Windy River—a river that flows into a vast body of water named Nueltin Lake.

Nueltin itself was almost a legendary place, still unsurveyed and largely unknown in 1947. Yet from the rough dotted outline assigned to it on the map, it was obviously a truly great lake, at least one hundred and twenty miles long, with a third of its length inside the forests while the other two-thirds stretched northward into the open plains of the Barrens.

After hearing about the existence of the Windy River post I decided Nueltin should be my immediate goal. If I was lucky I might find that young half-Indian, half-German youth who was believed to be still living there. And with his aid, I might hope to realize my dreams; whereas alone I might only add another unpleasant paragraph to the grim tales that are told of the men who have challenged the Barrens and failed.

Nueltin, then, was the logical choice, but there remained the slight problem of how to cross the intervening three hundred and fifty miles of frozen plains to reach it. I looked wistfully at Johnny Bourasso and wondered how much he would charge for such a flight. There didn't seem to be much point in asking, for he had just canceled a trip to Chesterfield Inlet on the advice of the weathermen, who had warned of the imminent approach of the spring thaws. When the spring thaws come to the North, all flying ceases for at least a month and there are no exceptions. But I had nothing to lose by asking.

“Johnny,” I asked, “would you take a chance on a trip to Nueltin tomorrow?”

He lifted his eyes from the map and took a long moment to think; then—“We'll give it a try,” he said. He would charge me only $200 for the trip, which was phenomenally cheap for Barrens flying.

When it was full morning the next day we slogged through the already softening drifts to Landing Lake, where the Anson stood waiting. What had been a light-weight outfit designed for easy travel, when I left the South, had grown monstrously during my brief stay at Churchill. The Canadian Army authorities there, worried about my survival and about the possibility of having to come to my eventual rescue, had loaded me down with such items as a hundred-pound crate of smoke generators (presumably to use in communicating with distant Eskimos since few aircraft fly over the central Barrens), army winter clothing of unbelievable awkwardness and bulk, and a case of complicated meteorological instruments with which (it was hoped) I would make careful surveys of weather conditions at Nueltin Lake. Politeness forced me to accept all these things, though I had no use for them and was already grossly overequipped as a result of my purchases in the Hudson's Bay Company store at Churchill.

These purchases had been extensive since there was a definite possibility that I would never locate the young trapper at Nueltin and would have to subsist entirely on my own rations. Johnny had aided in saddling me with an unnecessary amount of freight by remarking that he might very well fail to pick me up before freeze-up, in which case I would have to live on my fat until late December when ice conditions were again suitable for ski landings.

In consequence I had bought a quarter of a ton of assorted foods, the bulk of which consisted of flour, lard, sugar, tea, baking powder, bacon and salt pork. In addition there was a fair leavening of dehydrated fruits and vegetables, plus—and how the old arctic hands stared when they heard about it!—a case of fruit juices.

My outfit was further increased by five hundred pounds of freight which had been consigned to the young fellow at Nueltin the previous fall and which had been moldering in a warehouse awaiting the day when some means of transportation might turn up. With the usual haphazard methods employed in arctic transport, this was all turned over to me on the chance I could deliver it.

The final item that I added to my load was easily the most important. It consisted of three gallons of grain alcohol labeled “for scientific purposes only” in order to conform to the law.

All of this gear was stacked aboard the Anson, and after a startled look at the looming bulk of the load, Johnny turned quickly away and started up the engines. As the overburdened plane lumbered down the lake the homemade skis flung driving slush outward and upward, enveloping us in chill spray. Then we were airborne and we swung back over the forlorn desolation of Churchill so that the Ingerbritsons could wave a farewell. The Anson turned northward up the ice-bound coast. I looked out to sea, over the pack ice, and when I again turned to look inland the thinning trees had vanished and the aircraft was swinging westward, away from the sea, and into the Barrens.