On the evening of the fifth day, the River slowed and widened into a long lake. There was a low, rocky island in its centre, upon whose shores two deerskin tents squatted like miniature volcanic cones upon a long-dead lava bed.
I made toward them and a mob of dogs broke into a furious uproar, bringing a handful of people tumbling out of the tents. The men waded into the icy shallows to the top of their waterproof skin boots and drew my canoe to shore. We were all overcome with a childlike shyness.
Although I had lived with Eskimos in the past it had been weeks since I had spoken to any other human being; and coming as I did from the uninhabited plains to the west, my appearance must have seemed as inexplicable to these people as any shooting star across the midnight sky.
They were six in number. There was an old man, Katalak, whose face had been corroded by the long years into a gargoyle mask; and his wife, Salak, also withered with age but still sharp-eyed and alert. There was their stolid middle-aged son, Haluk; his plump wife, Petuk, and their two children, Okak and Akoomik.
They escorted me into Katalak’s tent and, while the women lit a willow fire outside and brought a pot of deer tongues to the boil, we three men sat on a pile of skins and smoked. They asked no questions although their curiosity about me must have been intense. After we had fed and drunk a gallon or so of tea, I explained that I had come down the River from its source, which I had reached after a twenty-day journey north from timberline. They told me that none of their people had ever lived or travelled that far to the west except for one who had gone that way a long, long time ago and never returned.
“Perhaps I know something of him,” I said, and I told of finding the cache under the white canoe and how the things I had taken from it had probably saved my life.
A silence followed, during which Katalak carefully filled the soapstone bowl of his pipe, lit it, puffed once then passed it to his wife. Eventually he spoke.
“The white canoe is no man’s cache. It is the spirit home of Kakut, who was my father and who is the father of us all.”
I was appalled by my own stupidity, for I had known that, in death, pagan Eskimos take with them the things they have found necessary during their earthly lives. I knew now that instead of borrowing from a cache, I had robbed a grave.
Katalak sensed my distress. He stretched out his hand and laid it lightly on my shoulder. The expression on his seamed and desiccated face was reassuring.
“You did no wrong,” he said gently. “Had Kakut wished otherwise, you would have travelled past the hill called Kinetua and seen nothing. You took from his grave only what he was glad to give.”
He reloaded the pipe and when it was lit he passed it to me. Darkness had fallen and Salak brought a small tin can filled with caribou fat into which a wick of wild cotton had been inserted. This lamp produced a meagre, reddish flame that wavered beneath a pennant of black smoke. In that flickering and faint illumination I could just see the old man’s face, shadowed but intent. He looked slowly at each in turn, until his gaze rested on me.
“You are Kablunait, a white man. We are Innuit, the People. But tonight we are as one. None of us would be here if Kakut had not wished it so. We live, all of us, because of gifts made by dead hands. There is a story to tell about that.”
in the time long ago, I lived by the River, and my father was Kakut, and his name was known along the sea coast and up all the rivers far into the plains that belonged to the deer, the muskox, and the great brown bear. Many mysteries were known to Kakut—mysteries that belonged to the Woman in the days when she made Men. Kakut spoke with the spirits. His hunting fed entire camps during bad times, and hunger never came into the tents and snowhouses where he lived. Ai-ee! He was a man who knew how to give the spirits their due.
He was such a powerful man that I lived under his shadow, and because of that I was not content. In my sixteenth summer I accompanied my family to the coast for the yearly trading, but when they went back up the River I did not go with them for I had begun to listen to other voices. There were new Gods in the land who spoke through the black-bearded white men you call priests. One of these had built an igloo of wood near the trader and, during our visit, he spoke often to me and told me many strange things. He also talked to the trader, asking him to give me work for the winter so I could stay in that place and learn the ways and the thoughts of the white men.
The trader was uneasy about that because he knew the power of Kakut and had no wish to anger him. So I went to my father and told him what I desired. He did not stand in my way. “The young wolf runs where he runs,” was all he said.
I stayed for two years with the white men and learned to speak a new language. But my blood still remembered the old tongues, and when Salak came down to the coast during my eighteenth summer, the old tongues outshouted the new. I wished her to become my woman and stay with me and learn white men’s ways. We would possess ourselves, I told her, of the many good things the white men have, and live in a wooden igloo and be always warm and well fed. Salak agreed to become my woman and she came to live with me but she would not agree to stay at the coast. In the autumn she moved into the tent of my father and his family and prepared to return up the River with them. She said that our child-to-be was of the Innuit, not of the Kablunait, and he must be born in his own land among his own people. I was angry with her but, also, I loved her very much and so, against my desires, I gave up the life at the coast and went with my family and my wife.
That winter I thought my own thoughts but did not speak them aloud. It was not until the dark days of mid-winter, when my mother died and they made ready to place her under the rocks with the tools, clothing and ornaments which were hers, that I could no longer be quiet.
Then I spoke out against the foolishness of burying all those good things with the dead. I told those who sat about in my father’s snowhouse it was evil to take the wealth that comes so hard to our people and place it on the windswept rocks to bleach and blow into decay. The women moaned and bent their bodies, and the men turned from me and would not look in my direction. All save Kakut.
His face alone did not change when I spoke against the ways of my people; and he replied in a voice that was as soft as the whisper of the white owl’s wings.
“Eeee… those are words you have said. Perhaps they are the words of one who has darkness in front of his eyes. Men become blind when they travel over new snow on a day when there is a haze over the sun, and that happens because they deny the powers that lie in the wind and the snow and the sky and the sun. That is one kind of darkness. There is another. It comes when men deny or forget what their fathers’ fathers knew. We must pity you, Katalak, for you are blind.”
After that, I found I could no longer remain in the camps of my people. One day I harnessed my dogs and I took Salak and forced her onto my sled and drove my sled east to the coast and back to the place where the white men lived. Salak made no complaint but did her woman’s work while I worked for the trader and became almost his right hand. In the spring, when the snow geese returned to the ponds by the coast, she gave birth.
So did we live until three years after my Haluk was born. That summer, when the families who made up the camp of my father arrived as usual at the coast, I saw that one canoe was missing. It was the great white canoe that belonged to my father.
I went to the camp of the newcomers, and I knew all of the people. They gave me greetings and I waited, as is the custom, for them to tell what was new. They were slow to speak and I grew impatient and asked a straight question, which was a rude thing to do. Someone answered, “It is true. Kakut is dead.”
Then I spoke words whose memory will shame me forever.
“Well, then… if my father is dead, where is his canoe? Where are his and the many things which were his? I am Katalak, his son, and it is just that the son should have those things, for the son is alive and has mouths to feed.”
Those people gave me no answer. They spoke of the hard winter, of the shortage of white foxes, of many things which did not concern me, but of my father’s possessions they would not speak.
That night I talked to Salak. I told her we would borrow the trader’s canoe and engine—he had the first engine ever seen in the country—and we would go back up the River and find the grave of my father. Then I would have those things which the priest and the trader said were rightfully mine, and I would use them and not leave them to rot over the bones of a man who no longer could have any needs.
Salak replied that I would do what I would do but, as for her, she wanted for nothing nor did she think she and I and Haluk, and the child who was soon to be born, wanted for anything. She was content, she said, and it would be well if we were all content. But I would not listen to the words of a woman for to have done so would have shamed me in the eyes of the white men.
We began our journey next day. The River was deserted in that season because the people had all come down to the coast to trade, to escape the flies and to fish. We had a good eighteen-foot canoe and the little engine, and for awhile all went well. We climbed slowly westward up the white waters. Then the engine broke down and I did not know how to fix it. The flies became a black plague such as I had never known before. The deer, which should have been travelling with their fawns in small companies all over the tundra, seemed to have vanished, and we ran out of food. We had to track the canoe up the rapids for Haluk was too young to help and Salak too pregnant and I could not portage it alone.
But I would not give up. And so we came at last to the camp where I had been born and found no sign of the grave of Kakut. I left Haluk and Salak there, scraping moss off the rocks in order to eat, and went westward on foot. I walked for three days by the banks of the River and found nothing.
When I got back to the camp Salak was sick. We turned back toward the sea, but before we came to the coast Salak gave birth to a dead child—a son it was—and she buried the body in the old way, under some rocks by the shore. I said nothing when she took tea and tobacco and wrapped these things in her own parka and placed them on top of the grave.
That journey should have ended the matter and perhaps it would have done so, but during the following winter a stranger came to the trading post. He was of the Padliermiut who dwell far to the northwest and seldom come out to the coast. This man had made the long journey to try and buy ammunition, for his people were out of powder and lead and were starving. His had been a very hard journey and he had been forced to kill most of his dogs. Finally he became lost in strange country and was so weak from hunger he could not go on.
Then, so he told us, he saw a mountain appear high and black on the bleak plains where, before, he had seen nothing. On its crest he saw something white. Although he was afraid, for he was sure this was a vision of the kind men see when death is upon them, he approached and saw a big white canoe. When he went near it, he found the fat carcass of an autumn-killed deer lying on the windswept ridge, its body untouched by foxes or wolves. He took that meat and fed himself and his two remaining dogs, and then followed the frozen path of the River east to the coast.
When he told his story some people talked of the helping spirits. I paid them no heed, but when the stranger spoke of the great white canoe I listened. He described where it lay and where the mountain was. Then I thought he was lying, for in my search I had walked far up the River and had seen no mountain. Even so, I was sure he had found the grave of my father and would return to it on his way back to his own people and take from it the goods which were mine.
That evening I hitched up the post dogs and set off on the stranger’s back trail. There was need for haste because the first gale would cover his tracks, so I drove the dogs and myself without mercy. Strangely, the weather stayed calm for a week and the tracks left by the sled of the stranger remained as clear as when he made them.
It was after dark when I came to the place where he said he had seen the great ridge. I waited for dawn, but before it could come a blizzard began to blow out of the north. It blew for five days, keeping me trapped in a hole I had dug in the drift, with no heat and no light and my food almost gone.
On the fifth day the wind changed and blew hard enough from the west to cover the land with ground drift so that nothing could be seen. I was driven east out of the plains as a puff of water is driven out of a whale’s head when he spouts.
When I got back to the settlement, the trader was angry because I had gone away without his permission and because the post dogs were starved and their feet cut to pieces. He called me a fool. He said the rich grave of my father did not really exist—that it was no more than a story invented to hide from me the fact that the rifles and traps, the nets and the tools of Kakut, had been stolen as soon as he died. The priest said the same thing, adding these words, “Your people are liars and thieves. They are pagans, and cannot be believed. Only when God has come into their hearts will you get back what is rightfully yours.”
I believed what the white men said and for years my heart was bitter against my own people. Whenever they came to the post I would make an opportunity to examine their gear. Although I never recognized anything which had belonged to my father, this meant to me only that the people feared discovery and had left the stolen things cached in the country when they came to the coast.
For ten more years I lived with the white men, doing their work and trying to be like them. I tried hard to forget the ways of my people. I thought each new year would be the one when I would cease to be of the Innuit and become truly one of the Kablunait—for this was what they had promised would come to pass if I remained with them and did as they wished.
But the years drew on, and Haluk was growing toward manhood, and Salak bore no more children and there was no change in my life. The people who came to trade at the post treated me distantly, as if I was one of the white men; but the white men did not treat me as one of themselves. Sometimes it seemed that Salak and Haluk and I were alone in the world, and I began to have very bad dreams. I dreamt I was alone in a deserted place where no birds sang, no wolves howled, nothing moved except me, and the sky was growing darker and darker, and I knew that when the night came it would never be followed by another dawn.
I began to grow silent and I did not laugh, and my wife was afraid for me. One day she took courage and spoke.
“My husband, let us go away from this place and return to the River and to the people. For laughter is there, and the deer walk the land, and fish swim in the waters.”
Her words were very painful to me so I took my dog whip and struck her across the face with the butt of it, and she was silent.
The months passed and my heart was rotting within me, but I would not turn my face to the River for I could not go back to the people who had stolen what was mine. Yet sometimes, after I dreamt the terrible dreams, I saw their faces in the darkness and they were smiling and their lips shaped words of welcome that I could not hear.
One day the priest came to the wooden shanty in which we lived.
“Katalak,” he said, “you have long wished to be one of us—the Kablunait—now the time is coming. When the trading ship arrives in the summer it will take your son, Haluk, away in it and he will go to the world where all men are white men. He will stay there many years and will learn many things, and when he returns to this land he will be a God-man and like a Kablunait, and so, through him, you will become one of us too.”
So he spoke, but instead of bringing me peace his words filled me with despair. Something swelled in my chest and almost throttled me. A shrieking voice swept through my mind. I picked up my snowknife, swung it high over my head and ran at him, shouting: “This you shall not do! You have had my life! It is enough! You will not have Haluk’s too!”
The priest fled, but in a little while he came back accompanied by the trader. Both carried rifles, and the trader pointed his rifle at
my belly and told me he was going to lock me in the dark cellar where we kept the walrus meat for the dogs. He called me a murderer and told me the police would come in the summer and I would be punished for a long time. He was so angry, spit fell from his mouth. But I was even angrier. I reached again for the snowknife, and then he fired and the bullet went into me just under my ribs.
After that there is a space of many days I do not remember. When I came to myself I was in my cousin Powaktuk’s canoe. With me was my son and my wife and Powaktuk’s family. I was lying on some deerskin robes. I could only raise my head a little but I could see over the gunwales and I knew where we were. We were going up the River. I was being carried back to the place of my people.
When they saw I was awake they smiled at me and nodded their heads, and my cousin said, “It comes to pass. On the day Kakut died he spoke, saying that after his eyes became blind forever the eyes of his son would see again.”
It had taken a long time for my father’s words to begin to come true.
As we continued up the River we stopped at many camps and everywhere I was welcomed back to the land. At each camp people gave me things. Some gave me dogs, some gave me traps, one gave me a good rifle. Another gave me a sled, another a set of harness, and yet another gave Salak a fine meat tray. So it went until by the time we reached this island and prepared to make our own camp, Salak and Haluk and I wanted for nothing with which to begin the old life again.
My cousin and his family camped with us and everyone took such good care of me that I was able to walk before the snows came. The deer arrived in greater numbers than anyone could remember and we cached enough meat and fat to keep us and the dogs well fed until spring. We set our traps and there were many foxes, and life was good in this place.
One night when the blizzard thundered, I sat in my cousin’s snowhouse and spoke to him of certain things which had lain within me for a long time.