People of the Deer Read Online Free Page B

diary of eighteen-year-old Edgar Christian, and it was as simple as it was tragic. The three had missed the great autumn migration of the deer, for the deer do not always follow the same path each year. Having missed the deer the intruders began the long winter without the supplies of meat that alone can ensure man’s survival in the white plains. Winter came quickly and there could be no retreat, for the party had no dogs, and men do not walk out of the winter Barrens on foot. So it was only a matter of time—but of a very long time, eking out the thin thread of their lives and always aware that it was a hopeless struggle that they were making. In the end they died, very slowly, and under conditions of great horror.
    There was a subdued silence when John finished this story. I was thinking about Hornby and trying to quell the doubts which were rising within me when old John began to mutter, under his breath.
    â€œDimints!” he said. “Dimints and gold cufflinks too!”
    We asked him what he was talking about and he told us the rumor that when the bodies were found, the searchers also uncovered most of the essentials required for dinner at the Ritz. Dinner dress in a wolf den out on the Barrens! It was too macabre a thought to have any bearing on the reality which lay before me. Resolutely I put Hornby out of my mind, and went back to the maps.
    A thought struck me, and I asked John what he knew about the mysterious Eskimos that Tyrrell had seen. Surprisingly, John knew quite a lot, though it was all hearsay, of course. He told me that in the boom days of the ’20s a trading post had actually been established on the southern borders of the Keewatin Barrens, not far from the headwaters of the Kazan where Tyrrell had first met the inland dwellers. While fur prices were soaring this isolated outpost did well, despite the fact that seven hundred miles of canoe route separated it from the nearest point of supply at The Pas.
    Then the fur market collapsed and the post no longer paid a big enough profit. So it was closed, and the brief contact with the inland Eskimos would have been lost again had it not been for a German immigrant, married to a Cree woman, who doggedly persisted in the attempt to keep an independent trading post going. Off and on, over the years, this man did keep contact with the Barrens Eskimos and, though he was no longer in the land himself, it was rumored that he had left a son on the edge of the Barrens, who was believed to make his living by trapping white fox and by occasional trading deals with the natives.
    John pointed out the site of the abandoned trading post on the map, at a place called Windy River—a river that flows into a vast body of water named Nueltin Lake.
    Nueltin itself was almost a legendary place, still unsurveyed and largely unknown in 1947. Yet from the rough dotted outline assigned to it on the map, it was obviously a truly great lake, at least one hundred and twenty miles long, with a third of its length inside the forests while the other two-thirds stretched northward into the open plains of the Barrens.
    After hearing about the existence of the Windy River post I decided Nueltin should be my immediate goal. If I was lucky I might find that young half-Indian, half-German youth who was believed to be still living there. And with his aid, I might hope to realize my dreams; whereas alone I might only add another unpleasant paragraph to the grim tales that are told of the men who have challenged the Barrens and failed.
    Nueltin, then, was the logical choice, but there remained the slight problem of how to cross the intervening three hundred and fifty miles of frozen plains to reach it. I looked wistfully at Johnny Bourasso and wondered how much he would charge for such a flight. There didn’t seem to be much point in asking, for he had just canceled a trip to Chesterfield Inlet on the advice of the weathermen, who had warned of the imminent approach of the