Lost in the Barrens

by Farley Mowat

  “We won’t shoot for a while,” Awasin whispered as the deer came close. “Let them forget about us, then we can pick the herd we want.”

  An old doe followed by two fawns braved the gap and galloped off toward the south. Behind her, small herds began to follow. In a few minutes the flow was steady again.

  Jamie began counting the numbers that passed, but when he reached a thousand, he gave up. “I never thought there were that many deer in the whole world!” he whispered. Awasin did not reply. Instead he squeezed Jamie’s arm and nodded toward a compact herd of about sixty animals slowly approaching. These were mostly young does, and they looked fat and sleek. A few fawns grunted about behind their mothers, or made short dashes ahead of the herd.

  “That is the herd!” Awasin muttered. “I’ll do the shooting, and you be ready to kill the cripples when I stop!”

  Tense with excitement, Jamie at the same time felt a sensation of revolt against killing the approaching deer. They were so tame, so magnificent, and so very much alive that he hated the prospect of the slaughter. “Do we have to kill the does?” he whispered urgently. “What’ll happen to their fawns?”

  “Forget about it,” Awasin replied shortly. “I hate it as much as you do. But the fawns will be all right. They’re old enough to be on their own by now.”

  There was no further time for argument. The herd was bunching into the gap. Awasin knelt forward, rested the rifle on a lip of rock and opened fire. Shooting quickly but skillfully, he dropped the two leading beasts; then, half turning, he shot three more animals in the rear of the herd. The deer in the center reared and snorted in sudden fright but did not break away, for they were blocked by the dead bodies ahead and behind. Some stood stupidly in one spot, gazing about with their large eyes for some indication of the danger. They did not understand what was happening until the smell of fresh blood struck their nostrils. Then they stampeded—but it was too late. Methodically, quickly, the rifle cracked. When the herd broke free of the deathtrap, nine of their number lay upon the rocky ground, and three fawns ran foolishly about beside the bodies.

  Awasin put down his rifle and turned away. Jamie knew how Awasin felt. For this was slaughter. It was like shooting cows in a barnyard, Jamie thought. He was very glad Awasin had not asked him to do the killing.

  Taking a deep breath, Jamie drew the long knife and walked over to the bodies of the deer. Only because it was absolutely necessary could he nerve himself for the task in hand. Fortunately all the deer were dead, and he had no need to finish them off. But he had to draw and skin them. Clumsily he set to work, and as he was struggling with the messy job one fawn came up close, grunting anxiously. Jamie tried to frighten it away. It would not go, but stood with its forelegs apart, sniffing at Jamie’s clothes. He tried to ignore it and went on with his task.

  Awasin joined him, and without a word began to help. Deftly and almost mechanically the Indian boy skinned off the hides and then cut up the meat. The hindquarters and forequarters he placed in one pile. In another went the tenderloins, the strips of tender back meat with their precious bands of sinew still attached, and the tongues. Hearts, kidneys, and livers went in still another pile with the briskets.

  Not a thing was wasted. Having been forced to kill these does, Awasin was making certain that every ounce of meat would be used. Within two hours the work was done.

  Only then did he speak. “All right,” he said. “Now let’s get this back to camp.”

  Jamie wiped his knife on the moss. “What about the carcasses and the scraps?” he said. “If we leave them here, they’ll scare off all the other deer.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Awasin replied. “Look overhead!”

  Jamie had not noticed the arrival of hundreds of herring gulls. The big white birds swooped low above the gap, circling hungrily and filling the air with their raucous cries. “You mean they’ll clean up for us?” Jamie asked in surprise.

  “Wait and see,” Awasin replied briefly.

  He spread the fresh hides, weighed down with rocks, over the meat piles after he and Jamie had loaded all they could carry on their backs. At a jog trot they headed back to the camp, dumped their loads and returned. They had been gone no more than ten minutes, but when they reached the killing place Jamie saw with astonishment and disgust that each deer carcass had disappeared under a heaving, fighting, flapping blanket of gulls. Despite himself he shuddered. Quickly he shouldered another load.

  As he set off now, the fawn came running up. Ungainly and awkward, it scampered along behind him and made Jamie feel even more guilty about the slaughter of the does. Awasin was unloading at the camp when the fawn suddenly ran to him and nuzzled its nose against his legs. The Indian boy had not seen it, and with a startled shout he jumped halfway across the camp.

  Jamie chuckled. “Looks like you’ve found a friend,” he said.

  Awasin grinned sheepishly. “I suppose since I killed its mother I have to be its foster father now,” he replied.

  “It’ll probably wander away and join some other herd,” said Jamie. “And if it doesn’t maybe we can train it to draw a sled the way the Laplanders do with reindeer.”

  The fawn refused to wander. When the boys finished carrying all the meat and hides to the camp, it was still with them.

  Now began the work of preparing the meat. Squatting side by side, the boys began slicing it into thin, waferlike pieces. It was tricky work, but Awasin was an expert. He went at the job as if he were peeling an apple, and gradually peeled the bigger pieces down to the bone at the core. When a large pile was sliced, Jamie picked it up and carefully hung the pieces above the ground on the branches of the scrubby willows. Under the bright sun, the meat began to dry at once.

  Next Awasin turned to the hides. Choosing a sandy, level area, he stretched the skins, then pegged them down around the edges with the flesh side uppermost. Then he carefully scraped away the last fragments of tissue with the rounded end of his knife blade. The skin was of a bluish color, and Awasin remarked that it was not yet “prime” and not much good for clothing. “But it’ll do for a tent,” he said.

  The next job was to strip away the three-inch-wide band of sinews that ran down the full length of each strip of back meat. These sheets of sinew, each three feet long, were hung to dry on the paddle, which had been stuck on end in the sand. At the lower end of each sheet Awasin tied a stone so that the sinew would dry straight. “Woman’s work this,” he complained to Jamie. “But we’re going to need sinew thread before too long.”

  By dusk the jobs were finished. The boys were tired, but strangely content. After a good dinner they lay down in a makeshift tent they had erected, using stones, twigs, and “green” hides.

  Their first day as dwellers in the plains had ended, and they had much to show for it. Nine skins; enough meat to make a hundred pounds of “jerky,” or dry meat; supplies of sinew thread and plenty of fresh meat for daily use. Also, they had acquired a friend.

  The fawn pushed its way under the edge of the tent to lie down awkwardly beside Awasin. Jamie pulled a handful of sedge and gave it to the little deer, who munched away contentedly.

  Jamie stretched out on his blanket and sighed. “Not so bad,” he said a trifle smugly.

  “Don’t be too proud. We still have much to do,” Awasin answered cautiously.

  CHAPTER 14

  Camp at the Deer Fence

  DURING THE NEXT WEEK THE BOYS found so many urgent jobs that they had little time for worrying. The weather was changing, and there was clear indication that summer days were done. There was heavy frost almost every night, and in the morning half an inch of ice lay on the tundra pools until the noonday sun melted it away.

  Luckily the sun was still bright, and in three days the meat laid out on the willow scrub had dried. Jamie collected it carefully and packed it away in rough bags made from some of the “green,” or untreated, caribou hides.

  The main problem now was to keep warm. The makeshift tent, supported only by
low scrub, was full of gaps. Their clothing was thin and their footgear almost worn out. After one particularly miserable night when they lay sleepless and shivering in their tent, Jamie decided to do something about the shelter problem. “We’ll have to build some kind of house, Awasin,” he said. “Maybe we could make a sort of igloo out of rocks. If we stuffed all the chinks with moss and covered the whole thing with deer hides it ought to be fairly warm.”

  “We must do something!” replied Awasin, still shivering from the night’s chill. “You go ahead on the house. I’ll see what I can do about some clothes.”

  Jamie set about housebuilding. There were plenty of flat rocks nearby and he gathered a pile of these at a spot beside the fire. Then he marked out a circle on the sand about five feet in diameter. Using the broad forehead antler from an old caribou skull, he dug out the sand inside the circle until he came to solid rock about a foot below the ground level. Next he began a circular wall, laying flat stones one on top of the other. At one point he placed a long, narrow stone across two others set upright in the wall. This was to be the door—a low, narrow entrance through which a boy, on hands and knees, could crawl.

  It was ticklish work. Since there was no mortar to hold the stones, they had a tendency to topple inward and knock the whole thing down. When the wall was three feet high, it became so tottery that Jamie did not dare build it any higher.

  His next problem was a roof. After much thought he placed the broken paddle across the top, like a rafter. Then he gathered armfuls of the longest willows he could find, and made a crude thatch that rested on the rock wall and on the shaft of the paddle. Over this he stretched a number of fresh caribou hides, with the fur side down. He arranged the skins in such a way that they sloped out toward the edge of the wall, so they would carry off the rain and melting snow.

  His next task was to gather sphagnum moss and chink the many gaps in the wall. Then he hauled several loads of moss through the door and spread the spongy stuff on the floor as a kind of mattress. The house was done.

  It did not look like much—in fact, from the outside it looked like another pile of rocks in a rocky world. But inside it was fairly snug and warm, and when Jamie hung a piece of deer hide over the doorway the little stone igloo was almost comfortable, even though there was no room to stretch out or stand up.

  Meanwhile, Awasin had been hard at work trying to improvise new moccasins. Though he had often seen his mother and other Cree women making footgear, he had never before tried his hand at it.

  He went at the job doggedly, determined to do well. The first task was to prepare the hide, and this he did by choosing three of the best deerskins and sinking them in a tundra pool, where he left them for two days. At the end of this time the hair had loosened and he was able to scrape it off with the blade of his knife. Next he cut out the leg sections of the hides, and the piece of skin which covers the caribou’s forehead. These pieces were yellow, almost transparent when wet, and looked rather like parchment.

  Awasin knew that the skin should be tanned, but this was a long and difficult business and he did not feel confident of success, so he decided simply to smoke the hides instead. He hung the skins over a fire smothered with wet moss, and every now and then he moistened the hides with water. After several hours the skins had turned to a dirty brown color, and Awasin judged they were ready to use.

  Cutting the moccasins was easy. He took one of his own tattered moose-hide moccasins, slit the seams, and laid it out flat on the deer hide as a pattern. Some careful work with the knife gave him the rough material, cut out to shape. The Cree moccasin is designed in such a way that almost the whole thing can be cut from a single piece of hide. Then the seams are sewn together. It is not really difficult—with needles and thread. Awasin had neither, but like all those who live in the far north, he planned to make what he did not have.

  He searched through the deer bones near camp until he found the shoulder blade of a young deer that had been killed by Denikazi’s hunters. The flat center section was only about an eighth of an inch thick, and from this section Awasin chopped out a piece about as big as a playing card—and almost as thin. Then, using his knife as a splitting tool, and a stone as a hammer, he carefully sliced the bone into a number of slivers. They were the size of toothpicks. Sharp at one end, they were flexible enough to be bent double without breaking. But they had no holes for the thread.

  Awasin considered the problem for a while, and then he got the fishhook. Using the sharp point, he scraped away at the thick ends of his needles until he had made small holes right through the bone. He ruined half his needle supply in the process, but he ended up with five bone needles that—despite their thickness—looked serviceable.

  The thread problem was simpler. Taking down one of the hanks of sinew, Awasin soaked this bone-hard strip in warm water for a few minutes until it became as soft and pliable as silk. Then, with his knife, he split off single threads, each about three feet long.

  Now he was ready for work upon the moccasins. First using the fishhook to make the holes, he began sewing up the seams. At first his stitches were clumsy and too far apart, but Awasin was clever with his hands and soon he did a neater job.

  He had used the leg hide of the caribou for the moccasins, since this is tougher and more durable than the body hide. All the same, the soles were thin, for caribou skin is not nearly so thick or tough as the moose hide which the Crees normally use. Awasin solved this problem by cutting extra soles from the very tough hide found on the forehead of the deer, and he sewed these to the bottom of each moccasin.

  The finished moccasins were not things of beauty, but they would do. Jamie laughed when he saw them, but he was glad enough to pull on a pair in place of the tattered footgear he had been wearing.

  The boys’ socks had long ago been worn through, but by placing layers of soft grasses in the bottom of each moccasin they found they could keep their feet warm and comfortable. There was only one serious drawback. Being made of untanned hide, the moccasins would dry as hard as cardboard when they were not being worn. So each morning the boys had to fill them with water for a while before pulling them on. They were cold and clammy at first, but soon warmed up, and—better still—they were almost watertight.

  His success with the moccasins encouraged Awasin to try making winter parkas. He had no good hides for this purpose, so he and Jamie agreed to use the two blankets they had brought with them. But Awasin soon found that a tailor’s task is much more difficult than it looks. In the end he had to content himself with two capelike garments that could be pulled over the back and around the chest, but that had no arms. For the moment they would do. But when winter came, Awasin knew he would have to tackle the problem again.

  By the time they had been a week in the camp by the deer fence, the boys had accomplished minor miracles. Not only had they provided themselves with the essential things they needed, but the very acts of building, and making, had filled them with a new self-confidence. They looked over their achievements with real pride. There was the “house” there were moccasins, coats, and a hundred pounds of dry deermeat that would keep indefinitely and was equal to five hundred pounds of fresh meat. It was a lot of meat, but as Jamie looked at it the thought struck him that the winter meals were going to be monotonous.

  “How about catching some fish?” he suggested one day. “When I was getting water this morning at the lake I saw plenty of grayling running. If we could just figure some way to set our net we could catch all we need.”

  Of course they had fished with nets before, but always from canoes. Setting a net from the shore is a very different proposition.

  Their net was thirty feet long and four feet deep. Wooden floats were attached to one edge, and small lead weights to the other. Once in deep water it would float in an up-and-down position—but getting it into deep water without the use of a boat would be difficult.

  “We can’t set it in the lake,” Awasin said, “but we might find some way to use it on the
river. Let’s walk down and see.”

  Carrying the net, the fishline, and the fifty-foot length of light rope, they set off along the shore of the lake to the point where the river began. It was half an hour’s walk to the river mouth. Here they found a rapid, and just below it a tiny bay that had been cut into the bank by an eddy of the current. As they looked down into its cold, clear waters they could see the silvery shapes of lake trout, and the flickering shadows that were fat arctic whitefish.

  “If we could just stretch the net across this bay we’d catch all the fish we could use,” said Jamie wistfully. Then an idea struck him. “Hey!” he yelled. “Get out the fishline!”

  Awasin produced the line from his carrying bag.

  “You stand on this point of land,” Jamie ordered, “and I’ll go round to the point on the other side of the bay, with the fishline. I’ll tie a rock to one end and heave it over to you. Then you tie the rope to your end, and I’ll haul the rope back so that it stretches right across. Then all we have to do is tie one end of the rope to the net, heave away, and we’ll have it set in the mouth of the bay!”

  Awasin was enthusiastic. “Go on!” he cried. “Let’s see how it works!”

  Jamie raced around the tiny bay to the far point, where he picked up an apple-sized rock and tied it to one end of the line. It was an easy throw, and the rock splashed into the water at Awasin’s feet. Quickly he grasped it, took off the rock, and attached an end of the light rope. “All right!” he yelled.

  Jamie began drawing the line across, and as the rope paid out at Awasin’s end he made ready to fasten the net to it. At last the net itself began to move into the water and in a few moments it was set across the mouth of the little bay and anchored to shore at both ends.

  Walking back to join Awasin, Jamie looked proudly out over the swirling waters where the line of the submerged net could be dimly seen.