Read Online People of the Deer by Farley Mowat - Free Book Online

had been able to spare from his own scanty stocks. But after they had gone, Franz thought about the things they had told him, and in his mind there was a mixed foreboding. He knew that the camps of the Ihalmiut must be nearly empty of deer meat, for he knew that the fall kill had been a meager one. And on his own most recent trips through the Ihalmiut land, he had missed several deer carcasses which he had cached the previous autumn for dog feed; he was aware that this meat must have gone into human bellies. He was also aware that the People do not steal unless death has come close enough to make a mockery of morals.
    On this midwinter visit, Ootek and Angleyalak had told Franz the deer had left the land, and that unless the spring came early, the People too would be gone before the warm suns brought the deer back again.
    Franz had listened to this prophecy and in his heart anger almost outweighed pity. It was an anger that he should feel a duty and a responsibility toward these “savages,” and an anger that they should be so foolishly improvident, failing to look to and prepare for the distant future as he, a white man, did. There was anger, too, that they had robbed his caches and so made it more difficult for him to travel around the trap lines on which his livelihood depended. And yet perhaps the thing which angered the young trapper most of all was the insistent feeling that his very presence in the place had helped to bring about the fatal misery of the People.
    His father, and the other traders who had once brought furs from the Ihalmiut, had shown the People that pursuit of fox pelts was more desirable than pursuit of meat. And so, in a few decades, the People had learned to neglect the caches of good meat, which they had been used to making every fall. Instead they learned to trap the white fox and to trade the pelts for flour, shells and guns. As far as the Ihalmiut could discern, it was a satisfactory change, for they were able to meet their simple needs with much less labor, after the traders came.
    But when trading ceased to pay the high profits always required of it, the great company withdrew its post and the new way of life that had been taught to the People in their innocence now became death. Men who were once great hunters of the deer had become instead great hunters of the fox, but men cannot eat fox pelts. The People could not change their ways again. “Surely,” they thought, “if we trap fox this winter and take the pelts south, we shall find the trader has returned.” But when the hunters traveled south, the trading post stood empty and decayed as it had stood for many hungry years.
    The traders came, stayed briefly while their profits warranted, then left the land, abandoned it, and thought no more of the destruction they had wrought. Franz lived there still. And he could not drive out the hidden knowledge of the fault. Perhaps it was because of this that when Ootek and Angleyalak went almost empty-handed back to the Little Hills, Franz thought of them almost with anger in his heart.
    The winter months dragged slowly by and there came no more cries for help. At last, early in March, Franz traveled northward to the Ihalmiut camps and stayed a day in the igloo of old Hekwaw. Here Franz ate his share of the communal food as he had always eaten it, but that share did not even take the edge off his healthy appetite and he quickly made his excuses and left the camp. He traveled north to his most distant trap line and once again found that many of his meat caches had been robbed by men.
    It was mid-March and Angleyalak had returned from a futile hunt during which he carried no gun, but only a crude bow that served him little better than a toy serves a child; for the men of the Ihalmiut had forgotten how to make cunning bows of horn, during the long years when they had no need of bows, and the bright guns and shells were to be had in return for pelts. Angleyalak returned to the tent