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

days on end. Yet on this year the winds forgot their place and mounted steadily, until the whole world that was the Barrens became a single roaring wind without cessation.
    Had there been game to hunt, no man could have ventured out to hunt that game. In the igloo of Angleyalak, the family huddled under the skin robes upon the sleeping bench— and waited.
    By day there was a faint pallid glow to lighten the still gloom of the snow house. By night there was nothing, for there was no deer fat to burn in the little lamp. The wind rang on the snow walls with such devilish persistence that its voice at last ceased to be heard and became one with a growing silence. The dogs no longer stirred, but lay in tightly curled, half-frozen balls, with noses under tails, sleeping the unconscious sleep of those who near the end of hunger.
    The two birds were eaten. The children had the balance of their meat, but Angleyalak had a small share. The guts and feathers went to the dogs and only Iktuk ate nothing. Her husband tried to make her eat his own slim portion but she turned from him coughing blood, and would not eat.
    A week after the old woman had left the place, Iktuk could no longer stir except to cough. It was at this time that Angleyalak went to the igloo of Ootek, which stood only a few hundred feet away, and he had trouble finding that igloo because the ground drift—the never-ending ground drift—obscured the way like a thick mist.

    In Ootek’s igloo there were the man, his young wife, Howmik, and a child who was still nursing at her dried-up breasts. Ootek himself had eaten nothing for twelve days, and the scraps of old robes that had been boiled over the last handful of willow twigs had gone to the two who could not live without each other. This was the third child of Ootek, and the first one that had lived a full year’s span. Hunger had taken the others in their time, and now Ootek was prepared to disregard the law which says that first the hunter must be fed.
    Angleyalak spoke to Ootek and they debated, quietly and with long intervals between their words, some course of action they might take. They knew Franz was away on his distant trap lines and they knew that he might not return to his camp for a month or more. And that would be too late. But now Ootek remembered hearing of a white man who had recently built a tiny trading post some ten days’ journey to the east, in order to trade with the coastal Eskimos who sometimes wintered inland from the sea. It seemed to Ootek that they should forsake the Little Hills and make their way eastward, seeking to escape from death. Yet when Angleyalak heard this suggestion he could not agree to it. He knew that he could not join Ootek and the rest, for Iktuk could no longer walk and Angleyalak had no dogs with strength to pull the sled.
    A week later there were still four igloos on the shores of Ootek’s Lake, but only one of these held human life. The People from the other three had set out toward the east in a forlorn and nearly hopeless struggle for survival, with the inexorable presence of destruction close upon their wavering trail.
    In the remaining igloo, Iktuk wakened suddenly from a long sleep, and she would have screamed in terror at what she saw, but her thin blood ran backward down her throat and choked the scream. The others slept beside her and did not stir, for only Iktuk had glimpsed the devil who had come for her.
    Struggling terribly, she gained a brief control of her choking lungs and in a wild paroxysm, she forced the life-giving fluids from her chest. The hemorrhage flowed heavily from her gasping mouth, dripped over the edge of the sleeping ledge, fell, and froze instantly upon the floor.
    In the middle of the day which followed, Angleyalak awoke and found his wife’s body frozen in a grotesque contortion on the snow below the ledge. He tried desperately to drag it out of the igloo before the children woke but he could not bend the legs