Tyrrell stayed only a day at the camp, because he was anxious about the future, and he did not know where the river would lead him. As a good host, Ajut undertook to accompany Tyrrell downriver and show him the way out of the Ihalmiut country. When the canoes moved off, they were accompanied by the kayaks of Ajut and of his eldest son, Kakut.
When Ajut and Kakut returned to their home, nearly a month later, they brought extravagant tales of what they had seen of the fabulous things the white man carried in his canoes. Kakumee listened avidly to these tales of the wealth of the stranger, and he harbored them in his mind.
All of the Ihalmiut spoke of these things with much wonder, but though they saw and appreciated the worth of Tyrrell’s belongings, they did not envy the white man. The People were not greedy for change and so remained content with the life they had always known by the River of Men. In a few years the little gifts Tyrrell had made to them were lost or broken and the memory of the white man’s wealth grew dim. It was this way with all of the Ihalmiut save one alone.
Kakumee did not forget. He remembered the goods of the white man as if they had been, in fact, the goods of Kakumee. He dreamed vivid dreams and these remained in the daytime to haunt him. He was filled with a great longing he could not describe, for there were no words in the language of the Ihalmiut to describe the insatiable yearning that had come over him to possess material things. But he kept his dreams to himself, for he knew they were evil according to the Laws of Life in the land. So he spoke no word of the visions which were hidden deep in his mind.
In the winter of the year when Tyrrell passed down the river, Ajut decided his two eldest sons had crossed the threshold from childhood to manhood. During that winter both Kakut and Kakumee began to receive instruction in the shaman’s secrets known to their father, for long ago it had been decided that these two sons of the shaman would follow in the path of old Ajut.
Ajut revealed to his sons all that he himself knew of the spirits of the land, and taught them the magic spells which are spoken in an ancient language. He explained the manner of calling on Kaila, the Wind of the Sky and the great God of all men. He warned the youths of the dangers of Paija, Apopa and other inimical spirits, and explained how they could master these beings.
Before the coming of spring there came a time when Ajut could teach his sons nothing more. Now it was left to them to find their own way. It is the custom for a youth who wishes to become a shaman to seek out seclusion far from all other men and there know such suffering that he may meet a Tornrak, a good spirit, who will speak to the novice as he lies or sits in a trance. This Tornrak then becomes the guiding spirit of the new shaman and is the strongest and most potent force the shaman can call on for aid in the future.
Kakut, being the eldest, was the first to set out alone from the camps. He was gone nearly two weeks and he carried no food for his trip nor did he eat during that time. It was a period of great storms, and though he had no shelter from the driving winds, Kakut survived to return to the camp of his father and to tell of what he had found.
Five days out from the camp he had been halted by a blizzard and had squatted in the lee of a rock which thrust out from the snow. Here he stayed for a week or more—he could not tell how long it was—and he did not move nor did he eat. About the fifth day he thought he had died, yet in death he beheld a huge crooked stick pushed out of the snow at his feet. He listened with terror while the stick spoke strange words. Then it grew arms, long knotty arms, and from its lower end thrust out a spidery tangle of legs. Kakut was filled with fear, but all the same he drew out his snow knife and made a lunge at the Thing. His knife was twitched from his hand, so he flung himself on the being and grappled with its twisting body of wood until at long last he subdued it. Then he rose to his feet and said:
“Kaitorak—you, the Spirit of Forests! Now you are mine! You shall do my word in all things, and never again go free in the forests far to the south of this land!”
Kakut broke a twig from the back of the spirit and sewed it into his amulet belt, and then he came back to the camp. Thus it was that Kakut found his Tornrak.
It was Kakumee’s turn then, and this is the tale that he tells of his search for the Tornrak:
I went forth from the camp in the morning before it was light, and I walked into the north. It was cold but I felt nothing of that. I was hungry yet I felt nothing of hunger. I was alone after a time in a place where not even a fox track crossed the snow. I came to a frozen lake and in the middle of it I built a half-shelter of snow and sat down to wait.
Nothing came for many days but the wind, then on a night there was a great crashing noise from deep under the ice. I thought at once of the Great Fish which is said to live in the lakes and I got up to run to the shore, but my legs were so stiff and cramped they refused to obey me. So I fell on the ice and lay as one who is dead.
The ice under me crashed and muttered and splintered until the cold water surged up through the cracks and filled my mouth and my nostrils. Still I could not move from that spot and at last the ice under me sank into the water and carried me down.
All was dark in my eyes and then slowly a thing began to take shape in the green mist of the water. It was no fish, but the head of a man with no body and with arms and legs springing right out of the head. But the strangest of all things was that this was the head of a white man, though not the one I had seen on the river the previous summer.
It was a strange face, heavily bearded and with cold eyes the color of sky. I knew I was drowning, and I struggled against the grip of the water and all the time that great head swam about me and laughed, making a horrible bubbling sound in my ears. I knew it was a Tornrak, and that I should grapple with it and conquer it so that it would help me in the future, but the cold water was filling my lungs and I was drowning.
I do not know how long I struggled under the ice but I believed I was dying, for all things faded from my mind. When I recovered myself, I was lying on top of the ice by a great black hole filled with water which did not wish to freeze. But my water-soaked garments had frozen hard to the ice underneath them. I was bitterly cold. I fought my way out of the clothing and it was hard as new iron. I tore flesh from my hands and my body, wriggling out of the ice-hard furs, but at last I was free and ran naked over the lake, and the frost did not touch me.
Later the People told me they followed my tracks for a full day’s journey over the plains, and my bare footprints were clear in the snow. They came to the lake and saw the great hole, and my frozen clothes that looked like a dead man lying out there on the ice. But they did not go close, for no one could say how that hole had been opened through ten feet of hard winter ice.
When Kakumee told this story to Ajut, his father, the old man was greatly afraid. He could not understand what it meant. He knew only that Kakumee had failed to subdue the spirit he had seen and he may have feared that instead the spirit had captured Kakumee. But he could not be sure, and so he said nothing at all to the youth, and he told the People he believed Kakumee had captured a wonderful Tornrak.
In the summer of that year, Ajut died and was buried under rocks in the land where the frost does not leave the ground. He took with him his bow, his stone pipes and his shaman’s staff—but his magic he left to his sons.
Kakut was satisfied with his inheritance and after a little while he began to fill the place of his father. To him came those who suffered ills of the mind or of the body. Some he healed and some died, but Kakut’s reputation grew steadily all through the land and he was known as a good man and as a great worker of magic.
It was otherwise with Kakumee. The restless and nameless desire of his childhood had become an irresistible curse since his novitiate on the ice of the lake. His strange dreams grew more vivid and so oppressive that even the familiar spirits at his command could give him no surcease. Often he thought of calling on the bodiless head of the white man who lived under
the lake, but he was afraid, for he did not know if he could control it, and he feared that it might seize him and carry him back under the waters to die.
Kakumee’s hunting did not prosper, nor did anything he attempted to do. He lost patience with his fine muskox horn bow one day when he was hunting, for he had tried to make it kill a deer at three hundred paces, an impossible range, and so he flew into a rage at it and smashed it on a rock. He did not know why he did this. He did not know that he was remembering the rifle of the white visitor which could kill at three hundred paces.
He was content with nothing made by the People, with none of the tools or weapons, and he showed his discontent more and more as the years slipped away. Had he not been a shaman he would have been held up to ridicule, for it is often the excuse of a poor hunter that his weapons are inadequate to the task. But fear of the man was growing steadily in the hearts of the People.
This was the way of things until the fifth winter after the death of Ajut. Then came a time when Kakumee took a bride, and this was strange, for he was now twenty-two and long past the age when most Ihalmio men seek out a woman. He had been too obsessed by his dreams to want women. Now he took a young girl to wife and if reports speak truly, he loved her and found in her some measure of release from the frustration which tormented his hours. He loved her and so one night as they lay naked on the sleeping ledge of the igloo he told her the truth about his fight with the white devil he had met under the lake. She was young, not much more than a child, and she listened without comprehension to the tale and to the illusions of great wealth that Kakumee disclosed to her in his effort to rid himself of the weight of his dreams. She listened but could not understand, and one day she turned on her husband when others were near and openly ridiculed him in their hearing.
“You are a dreamer of dreams!” she cried. “But I am heavy with child, and I cannot suckle a child on the dream-stuff that fills your head and your heart. Give me something to fill these soft breasts of mine that I may know I married a man and a hunter.”
Who knows what happened then in the mind of Kakumee? I think the love for his wife died as a hare dies when an arrow splits it from end to end. But before dawn came again to that winter encampment, Kakumee had vanished out of the land. By morning the ceaseless swirl of the drifts had filled up the tracks of his dog sled so that no one even knew which way he had gone. He had told no one of his plans, for not even his wife would have believed he was mad enough to set out alone to seek the place where the white men dwell beyond the frozen wastes of the plains.
The place of the white man, of the traders, was unknown to the Ihalmiut men at the turn of the century. It was as distant and unreal a place as the bland surface of the white moon. The People knew of the white men only through Tyrrell’s visit and through the magnified and distorted tales of a man called Angyala who had once passed through their land, and who had lived on the coast and knew something of the white man by hearsay. He spoke of the place called Iglu Ujarik (which means Stone House), where the white traders lived.
Iglu Ujarik is Churchill, and it takes its Eskimo name from the sullen piles of gray rock which are all that remain of the fort built by Samuel Hearne in the days of the arctic wars with the French. And Iglu Ujarik was the goal of Kakumee as he drove his long sled to the south, though he had no notion of how far it was.
It was an epic journey. Three days of hard traveling took him out of the land of the Ihalmiut, into the forests. These lands are forbidden to the men of the People, because they are the homes of the hostile Indians who have held a blood feud with the inland Eskimos since time beyond knowing and because the country of forests is filled with demons and spirits who side with these Indians.
Nevertheless Kakumee left the hard-packed snows of the plains and entered the forests and now his long, narrow-runnered sled so well suited to the icelike snows of the Barrens became an encumbrance to him. In the soft drifts under the black roof of the spruces the sled sank to its crossbars and the dogs could not pull it until he had gone on ahead and broken a trail.
Snowshoes were unknown to Kakumee for there was no need of them out on the hard snows of the plains, but in the forest a man breaking trail for his dogs must wear snowshoes. Now here is the measure of the tenacity and intelligence of Kakumee: it usually takes a race of primitive people many long generations to evolve and perfect a new piece of equipment, yet Kakumee not only solved the problem of snowshoes, but in a single day he constructed a pair that, while they were rough, were adequate to his purpose. They served, these hooplike things he had made, and so the heavy sled with its load of deer meat for the dogs and the man drove on deeper into the forests.
The forests are believed to be evil, and it is thought by some of the Ihalmiut men that the trees themselves live, and resent the presence of Eskimo men. If an Innuit must travel and sleep in the forests, he has a grace of five days during which he is safe, but should he linger longer under the shadow of trees, the trees will conspire to destroy the intruder.
Kakumee had now been in the forests for almost five days, and only the compulsion which drove him enabled him to bear the mounting terror the forests brought to his heart. On the afternoon of the fifth day he came to a great lake with many rocky islets which were free of trees, and on one of these islets Kakumee made his camp for the night. There was no wood for a fire so he sat in the shelter of a low wall of snow blocks. He shivered with fear and with cold, and a desperation began to possess him. At last he sprang to his feet and cried wildly on the spirit he had met in the waters under the distant lake on the Barrens.
For Kakumee was lost in space and in terror. His supply of deer meat was nearly exhausted and he was afraid to go on, but he could not turn back. He feared many things, but most of all he feared the Indian devil called Wendigo who eats the flesh of travelers. The ghosts and demons of the land had voices that came through the darkness out of the forests surrounding the lake. The five days were done, and to Kakumee it seemed as if the black spruces had begun to grow more closely together, obstructing his terrified path. He thought that in the course of another day they would have grown so close he could not pass between them, and they would not let him withdraw, so that he would be held like a beast in a deadfall until Wendigo claimed him.
He did not know how far or in what direction lay Iglu Ujarik, and he did not know when he might come unexpectedly upon a camp of the Indians—who would probably murder him.
All these things passed through his mind as he stood shivering by his sled and screamed a summons into the darkness to the spirit he had once seen under the water. There was no answer, but the aurora flickered with sudden violence, bathing the desolate land in a violet light, and Kakumee took this as a sign.
He had no fire that night and yet he was able to sleep alongside his sled with only the dogs, curled up against his back, for warmth and protection.
A lesser man—or perhaps a saner man—would have turned back. Only a brave man or a madman, inexorably driven, would have continued into the unknown which stretched darkly ahead. Before dawn on the sixth day in the forests, Kakumee hitched up his dogs and drove southward again.
Though he could not know it, he was now two hundred miles off his track. Iglu Ujarik lay far to the east, and to reach it he should long since have swung eastward along one of the mighty rivers which run to the sea. But his track had been too far inland and so he had missed these waters, and now he came instead to a great frozen river that ran to the south into the forests. He could only travel where the rivers ran, for the forests were too thick to admit his long awkward sled, even had he dared the ominous darkness under the trees.
On the afternoon of the tenth day he rounded a bend in the river and came unexpectedly on the log shanty of a white man. It was no more than ten feet square, yet to Kakumee it seemed immense and pregnant with menace.
The place was silent and the snow about it unbroken. No smoke came from th
e tin pail which served as a chimney. Only the thunderous roll of the frost-riven ice splitting on top of the river could be heard. Kakumee halted his starving dogs and fingered his amulet belt as he looked fearfully at the cabin. At last he walked stiffly forward on foot, came up to the door and found it swinging ajar.
Snow had banked thickly into the windowless shanty, but on one side of it a high wooden bunk was above the reach of the snow. Kakumee saw that something rested silently there. His heart was a tremulous thing in his chest, but his courage had not yet come to its end. He walked into the cabin, staring with wide, frightened eyes, and beheld a horrendous sight.
He looked down upon the bearded, frozen face of a white man, and into ice-cold eyes like the blue of the sky.
To Kakumee’s overwrought mind his face seemed to be one with the face he had seen during his novitiate. He could not believe that the thing he was looking at was a mere corpse. He saw it instead as the spirit he had called upon, by the shores of the lake. Though he was horribly frightened, he nevertheless saw in this macabre encounter a second chance to grapple with the Tornrak who had once eluded him.
Words came to his lips, garbled, gibbering words. He leaped forward and seized the head by its still, frosty hair. Now he grappled with the spirit, seeking to master it. The room roared with sound. Dimly Kakumee heard his own voice screaming questions at the thing he fought with, as it lifted and wavered in front of his staring eyes. The thunder of nameless noises seemed to take on a palpable form until the room became darker than darkness and suddenly vanished from the Eskimo’s sight. The head of the white man grew larger until it was as large as the world, and suddenly its frozen lips parted and the cataclysmic sound split and shattered into words!