People of the Deer by Farley Mowat Page A

wolfed it down with feverish excitement. I remembered that this was the first fresh meat he had tasted in long months, and Anoteelik had not yet forgotten those starvation days by Ootek’s Lake. Kunee was not far behind him, and I cannot describe the emotions that filled me as I watched this girl-child with a knife in one hand and a great chunk of dripping back meat in the other, stuffing her little face and burping like an old club man after a gargantuan meal.
    For the first time Hans showed some animation. He smiled. I do not know whether it was from pleasure in the killing or from anticipation of fresh food. His smile was—well, expressionless.
    Franz too was smiling as we unloaded the heavy cargo and he shouted at Kunee to get a fire going. A new spirit of enthusiasm and fresh life was in the place, as if new blood flowed through the veins of those about me. Even I was stung by an emotion I could not analyze, and I felt alive as I have never felt before.
    The fire had just been lit and a pot of deer tongues just set to boil when a wild babble from the dogs brought me outside again. This time I looked directly to the crossing, and where the butchery had taken place there was a great new herd of does milling as it came up against the stream.
    This time there was no shooting, though Hans could hardly restrain his urge to take up a rifle and empty it again. The deer seemed to ignore the cabin that stood in full view and in a minute they had all taken to the stream. Heavy as they were, they swam buoyantly and powerfully so that they made the crossing without losing ground and landed literally in our own front yard.
    The dogs became insane and threatened to tear their tethering posts out of the frozen ground. The deer paid them, and us, but little heed. Splitting into two groups, they flowed past the cabin, enveloping it for a brief instant in their midst. The stink of barnyard was strong in our nostrils as they passed, then they were gone beyond the ridge.
    In less than an hour I had seen so many deer that it seemed as if the world was full of them, but I had seen nothing yet. That afternoon Franz took me on his sled and we drove warily along the rotten shore ice of the bay, to the Ghost Hills. The heat was remarkably intense; at noon the thermometer had reached 100; and so we wore nothing but thin trousers and cotton shirts. Water lay deep upon the ice and the sled was really more of a boat than a land conveyance. An hour’s travel took us to the north shore of the bay, and here we tied the dogs and climbed a long gentle ridge that faced the south. Below us lay Windy Bay, and beyond it the shattered slopes of the Ghost Hills. It was a scene to be recorded on gray paper, for the growing things had not been able to keep pace with the precipitate transition of the seasons, and the subtle overlay of color that would suffuse the summer plains had not yet begun to flow. The rotting surface of the ice was dark, but framed in ivory drifts, still lingering on the shores and in a thousand gullys and ravines. The hills were dun-colored heights sheathed in rock and long-dead lichens, with startlingly black patches of dwarf spruce spotted along their lower slopes. To the north, the plains sank into white and snow-filled hollows, hiding the muskegs and ponds; then lifted to reveal a hueless and leaden waste that stretched to the horizon.
    From our vantage point all of this achromatic world lay somberly below us as we waited for the coming of the deer. We had not long to wait. Franz caught my arm and pointed to the convoluted slopes of the distant southern hills, and I could just discern a line of motion. It seemed to me that the slopes were sliding gently downward to the bay, as if the innumerable boulders that protruded from the hills had suddenly been set adrift to roll, in slow motion, down upon the ice. I watched intently, not certain whether the sun’s glare had begun to affect my eyes so that they played fool tricks on