People of the Deer Read Online Free

hearts. And they were all baffled by that effort to speak clearly. Most of them gave up the attempt and sought refuge in minute descriptions of the component parts, which only if they are taken in their entirety can give the true measure of the great arctic plains.
    It seemed to me to be a great mystery, this impenetrable obscurity that could not even be shattered by men who gave all their senses and their perceptions to the task.
    But on a day in the spring of 1947, when I had almost completed my own plans to set out for the North, I received the first real clue to the nature of that mystery.
    It was contained in a letter from a former Royal Canadian Mounted Police constable whom I had known during the war. I had written, asking if he had any personal experience with the arctic plains, and his answer told me of a time when he had gone into the western Barrens in pursuit of a suspected murderer. The fugitive escaped—from the police at least—and my friend turned back just in time to save his own life, for he was starved and half-frozen before he reached the shelter of a coastal trading post. Writing to me, he summed up all the Barrens had meant to him in these few, straightforward words:
    I guess it was the emptiness that bothered me most. That damn and bloody space—it just goes on and on until it makes you want to cry, or scream—or cut your own damn throat!
    Emptiness and the terrible space! These were the things which had haunted the imaginations of the few white men who had known the Barrens. And yet, somewhere in the hidden depths of that space there lived—if they still lived—not only the great herds of the deer, but also men... the People of the Deer.

1. Into the Barrenlands
    On a morning in May of 1947 I boarded the train and gave myself up to the demands of the fever that was in me. My preparations for the journey were simple in the extreme. A visit to a War Assets store had provided me with an assortment of old army clothing and a cheap sleeping bag. I already owned a camera of the snapshot variety and this, together with my binoculars and a dozen rolls of film, completed my scientific equipment. For weapons I took only the American carbine I had carried all through the war.
    My actual plans were almost as shadowy as my equipment, for though I knew to within a few thousand square miles where I wanted to go, I still had only the vaguest ideas of how to get there. The canoe routes from the south that Tyrrell had used were closed to me because I intended to travel alone. The eastern and northern borders were impossible too, because the Barrens rivers flowing down to the sea will not permit men to ascend their violent waters to their sources, high on the inland plateau. And sheer distance ruled out any attempt on my part to enter the land from the west.
    But with spring already sweeping into the southlands I had no time to ponder. So on a May morning I bought a ticket to Churchill, a familiar name and the only place in the arctic I knew. Churchill lay on the edge of the Barrens and so I hoped that when I reached the end of steel I would stumble on some means for completing my journey into the interior.
    Again I passed through Winnipeg and The Pas and again I saw the white mile-boards standing sentinel over the narrow cut that traverses the forests to the north. Then the Muskeg Special brought mile-board 512 into view and we swung into Churchill under a gray ice mist that came rolling over the still-frozen settlement. For a time I stood shivering in the chill wind while I examined this place that had been the shining memory of boyhood. But that memory dissolved quickly before the harsh impact of reality.
    The port of Churchill was a miserable conglomeration of cowering shacks half-buried under great drifts. The stained snowbanks pushed tightly up against the slab-sided and scrofulous shanties. The freezing mist from Hudson Bay did its best to soften the ugliness and to hide the monolithic bulk