Otherwise (33 page)
Andy considered string figures child’s play and thought them frivolous, but I was becoming increasingly sceptical about the ability of science to define, explain, and illuminate the nature of nearly everything. When I defended the string figures as a valid source of information Andy would have none of it. ”Only facts can reveal the truth” was his unyielding dictum.
August was now well advanced and the scarcity of deer had become our major worry. One day Ohoto confronted Andy and me with the blunt accusation that the absence of great herds was
our
fault. If we had not insisted on camping on the isthmus, he told us, the herds would certainly have come that way. We had blocked their chosen path so they had probably gone south across the plains behind our Angikuni camp. Ohoto insisted that if we were to find the herds we must return to Angikuni.
We did not require much persuasion.
Tuesday: Up and away at 0700 heading back to Angikuni. Dead calm day, hot and clear, though there was a frost last night. I sat in the bow with plane-table and compass, mapping the south shore of Nowleye while to save gas Andy and Ohoto paddled. Tegpa snoozed in the sunshine. It was a bit like a Sunday picnic excursion to Toronto Island, only without girls or booze. Alas
.
Near the east end of Nowleye Ohoto spotted a big buck on shore. First buck we’ve seen and he had a magnificent spread of antlers. Andy wanted him so Ohoto took him with one shot and I was sorry. He looked so magnificent against a crimson evening sky. There was no pleasure in seeing him
suddenly fling himself into the air then crumple backward on his haunches with bloody foam flecking his wide nostrils. But I have to admit to the pleasure of sinking my teeth into a strip of his back meat, with an inch of fat on it, roasted poneass-style on an open fire after Andy had got his measurements and checked his guts for parasites. He tasted a hell of a lot better than the maggoty
nipku
I’d been chewing on all day
.
We went ashore to check out the first big Kuwee rapid, which we had portaged on the way west. The main chute is about 250 yards long and 40 wide. A stinker, full of white water and three-foot back waves. Ohoto wouldn’t run it and didn’t want us to, but Andy and I were in a what-the-hell mood. We unloaded most of the gear for Ohoto to carry around the rapid, then pushed out into the slick current at its head. As was usually the case when once committed, doubt and irresolution vanished and we shot into the spume in a state of high excitement that lasted till we were spat out at about 20 mph into the pool at the foot of the rapid. Ohoto, watching, shook his head and pointedly didn’t congratulate us
.
Thursday: Up at dawn, to find a major miracle has taken place. The flies are gone! Utterly vanished! There seems no logical explanation for this. It’s a dead-calm day, hot and clear and no frost last night. I timidly stripped off and took a bath in a pond. Still no flies so I spent about an hour splashing about in the nude while Tegpa and Ohoto both tried to get me to come out. Neither Eskimos nor Eskimo dogs believe in swimming or in bathing
.
Ohoto has been keeping a diary. He and I have this in common – both of us have trouble reading what we write,
but I have the edge because I’m using the Roman alphabet. He’s apparently using one he made up himself
.
Andy doing another autopsy this evening. Not many deer around but heavy tracks on both sides of Kuwee show where they’ve been crossing. In some places the banks are churned into muck for hundreds of yards. And below some rapids the hair shed while swimming is matted so thick along the shore you can shovel it up with a paddle. No doubt about it, for whatever reason the big herds of cows and fawns avoided the isthmus this year and crossed Kuwee instead. Too damn bad we missed them, but Ohoto says not to worry, the bucks are still to come and once back at Angikuni we’ll be on hand to greet them
.
A piping hot pile of marrow bones for supper, with steak and kidney stew. Ohoto says that Eskimos eat five meals a day and snack in between. On the trail they get by with only three meals! He mentioned that a good way to get next to a girl is to give her a bundle of marrow bones. He says results are usually immediate and satisfying, which is more than we
kablunait
can claim for bouquets of roses
.
We came down Kuwee like shit through a goose, running all the rapids, sometimes with the kicker going full blast to give us steerage way in the tight spots. Scary stuff! But wonderfully stimulating, though Ohoto looks worried and shakes his head and Tegpa sticks
his
head under a packsack when the going gets really wet. Ah well, boys will be boys and we are on the home stretch
.
We still had some gas so we decided to use it up finding out how big the nameless lake northwest of Angikuni is. Well, we never did find out. It goes on and on, one stretch of water leading into another. It was such a maze it was
impossible to map it or figure where we were, but we must have got to within a few miles of another huge lake Tyrrell heard about from the Eskimos and stuck on his map in dotted lines: Tulemaliguetna – Little Dubawnt. There’s supposed to be a river from it running north to Baker Lake and we could maybe go out that way to Hudson Bay if we have to. There seems to be no bloody end to where you
could
go in this country in a canoe if you had the time and inclination
.
Last day on the trail. At dusk we paddled, because now out of gas, through the strait separating Tyrrell Bay from Kinetua Bay, and our old wall tent came into view. It looked as insignificant as a splash of gull shit against the awesome backdrop of the Angikuni plateau but was sure and hell a more encouraging sight than an empty tent ring!
We spent the next morning settling in but after lunch I climbed the escarpment behind camp to see if there might be deer on the plateau.
Might
be? When I looked west it seemed as if the entire wide sweep of tundra had come alive!
La foule
was here at last.
The deer were mostly bulls in strings of a dozen to a hundred or more, but so many strings oozing implacably southward that the entire countryside appeared to be rippling in slow motion. My range of vision was about ten miles and everywhere within view, west, south, and north, deer were drifting along, grazing as they went. Every ridge line was roughened by their antler-crowned silhouettes, and the lowlands were scarred by flagellation of intertwining paths.
It was such a compelling sight that only with difficulty could I break free and race back to camp with the electrifying news. Then the three of us trotted up the escarpment; Andy and I to record the spectacle and Ohoto simply to revel in it.
Andy counted 1,347 bucks passing within a mile of us during half an hour’s observation. They seemed to be moving at slightly more than a mile an hour. We calculated that between eight and ten thousand were in sight on the entire sweep of tundra at any given moment and estimated that as many as thirty thousand were probably passing through our field of view every twenty-four hours.
After a time I grew tired of calculations and slipped away by myself to a distant rock pile where I could watch the passing show close up.
A superb day with a pale opal sky, a blinding sun, a light breeze to cool me off, and not a single blackfly. This world seemed freshly reborn with the arrival of the deer
.
Those I met en route to the rock pile showed little interest in me. Not quite correct – a typical reaction of those passing at close range was to take a wide-eyed look, snort incred ulously, then, spreading both back legs in a most undig nified sort of half-squat, have a huge piss. They might then circle me fifty or a hundred feet distant until they got my wind. At which they sometimes sneezed then, loping off a few yards, would ignore me. At no time did they appear to have any fear of me. The experience was humbling
.
One yearling seemed to think I might make an acceptable companion and followed along close at my heel. I hadn’t
a clue what was on his mind but was afraid he might draw too much attention to me so I tried getting rid of him by howling at him, wolf-style. Whereupon, I swear, he edged even closer. Finally I pelted him with handfuls of bog, whereat he snorted and departed in high dudgeon
.
So I wandered through the grazing herds, to take a seat amongst the boulders of the rock pile and remained there until dusk, moving as little as possible … watching, smelling, and hearing the passage of
la foule.
Smelling? Yes, because the gentle breeze carried the sweetish odour of cow barn. And all the time I was hearing the soft rumble of caribou guts digesting moss and lichens and gently farting, all to the rhythm of a steady click-clack made by their ankle joints. The truth was, the caribou were not just part of the landscape – they were the landscape!
The immense antlers borne by the bigger bucks seemed impossibly ponderous, swollen by the velvet coating which most of them had not yet shed. Younger bucks with lesser antlers made way for their elders. Some individuals noticed my presence and came right up to the rock pile, thrusting their big muzzles toward me and snuffling wetly. One young buck essayed a tentative lick and when I waved him off, leapt back on all four legs at once with a great who-o-o-o-f of astonishment or indignation
.
There was a tiny pond nearby and all the while the deer were streaming past and around it (sometimes pausing to drink), a pair of old squaw ducks and eight or ten half-grown young swam about as contentedly as if they and the deer all belonged to one big happy family
.
Clouds began rolling in from the south and when the sun was briefly obscured by a thunderhead, paralysis
seemed to grip the deer. Each became motionless, standing statue-like, heads down and all facing north as if in some obscure act of obeisance. Most held their positions until the sun shone out again, at which they resumed their southward plodding and grazing as if nothing had happened. It all seemed most peculiar and somewhat ominous, although when I swept the horizon with my binoculars I could see nothing untoward
.
Occasionally an individual broke out in an insane sort of gallop, running at top speed, weaving and twisting, sometimes slipping and falling down, only to leap to its feet and be off again. At least I knew what
this
was all about. Although too far away for me to see, I knew a bumble-bee lookalike, a warble fly or botfly, was trying to lay its eggs on some victim, which fled from this little nemesis in panic terror. Justifiable terror, for I have found a fist-sized mass of botfly maggots clogging the throat and nostrils of an emaciated and exhausted deer, and have counted as many as a hundred bullet-sized holes in a deer hide: holes drilled through the living skin by the emerging larvae of warble flies
.
As the evening drew down, the strings of bucks dissolved into individual animals spreading out on every side. A short-eared owl flew by, bat-like, and so close to my head that I felt the wind of its passing and it roused me from what must have been a nearly hypnotic trance
.
Stiffly I got to my feet and headed back to camp carrying an indelible vision of
la foule
. I wonder, though, will these enormous herds survive even in the memory of the next generation of mankind? Maybe by then
la foule
will become as mythical as the earth-shaking multitudes of prairie buffalo have become. As for me, I’m convinced the Eskimos
have got it right when they claim tuktu gives the world a special aura of vitality – one that enters into the being of every watcher, man or beast, and makes the hearts of all beat stronger
.
Two days later there came a lull in the flow of deer across the plateau behind our camp so we paddled to the inlet of the Kazan where, on an earlier visit, we had found evidence of a major caribou crossing of great antiquity.
It was again in use.
Both banks had been freshly torn to shreds by deer hooves but few deer were to be seen so we pushed on upstream under the slopes of Kinetua to Tyrrell’s Turning Lake. Here we met the herds again. They were crossing the Kazan in a nearly solid stream and the effect was as if
two
rivers, one of water and one of flesh and bone, were intersecting.
We landed well below them and went ashore where a solidly massed phalanx of about a hundred bucks was doing what looked like close-order drill, bunched together so tightly their antlers seemed to interlock
.
Anxious to shoot some close-up photos, Andy and I crouched behind some boulders and sent Ohoto around behind the herd. When he leapt out at them they stampeded so directly for us that if we hadn’t stood up and yelled and waved our arms madly they could have overrun us. It was scary enough to send us back to the safety of the canoe
.
Relative
safety because now Ohoto decided to demonstrate how the Ihalmiut hunt caribou at river crossings
. They
do it from kayaks – we did it from a much-less-manoeuvrable seventeen-foot canoe
. They
use short spears
about four feet long fitted with broad, knife-like points but we had no such weapons
.
At Ohoto’s instruction Andy and I paddled the canoe into the midst of a herd of swimming bucks, which began milling about un certain whether to continue across the river or retreat to the north shore. We were soon surrounded by flying forefeet, plunging bodies, and great, swinging antlers. Yelling lustily, Ohoto thrust the blade of his paddle at the backs of the nearest bucks, aiming close to the spine and just behind the rib cage. The paddle did no damage but had it been a real spear it would have cut a rent through skin and flesh to collapse the deer’s diaphragm. A deer so speared will quickly drown. But the ones Ohoto whacked with his paddle seemed more likely to pound the canoe into slivers so with one accord Andy and I paddled us out of the melee and downstream, while Ohoto laughed like a mad fool
.
It was a vivid demonstration of something I would not want to try in a kayak, but then I am not an Ihalmiut
.