The Curse of the Viking Grave

by Farley Mowat

  “I wish I shoot hole in his head!” Peetyuk blazed. Then a slow smile spread over his face. “I guess he think I shoot—like Kakumee. Listen, I tell what happen…” and he described the charade he had acted out for Zabadees’s benefit.

  Awasin chuckled and, despite himself, Jamie could not suppress a half-smile. Then his face clouded.

  “That’s fine and dandy fun for you, but we’re in a real jam now. Not only are we stuck with Angeline, we don’t have a clue about the route from here to the edge of the Barrens.”

  “Clue? What that?” Peetyuk asked. “Never mind clue. That story I tell, all true. I hear many times. Kakumee come this way. So we go east on Dead Men’s Lake. It run into big lake Idthen people call Nuelthin, then go north. I find way easy.”

  Angeline had joined them as they talked and now she spoke directly to Jamie.

  “I too am sorry, Jamie. I wished not to make any trouble, and I would never have told any but my brother what Zabadees was like. If you want me to go back, I will go alone on my snowshoes. I can carry enough food in a packsack.”

  Jamie bit back the sharp reply he was about to make, for he saw that the suggestion of tears glinted in the girl’s dark eyes. “Listen, Angeline,” he said awkwardly. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to take you into the Barrens. It can be awfully tough out there. But you sure can’t walk back to Thanout Lake alone, so I guess you’ll have to come with us.”

  Awasin and Peetyuk were both smiling as Jamie finished, Awasin from relief that a difficult situation had been eased and Peetyuk from pure delight. When, an hour later, they sat around the fire eating their breakfast of porridge, bannock and tea, they were a gay and purposeful crew—more cheerful than they had been for many days.

  When they broke camp they did so with renewed enthusiasm. They rearranged the loads, placing some of the lighter gear from Peetyuk’s long sled on the carioles, and tied the two canoes (nested one inside the other, with their thwarts removed) upside down on top of Peetyuk’s sled. Angeline would drive Peetyuk’s team in the lead position, while Peetyuk went ahead on snowshoes to find and break the trail.

  The dogs seemed filled with new energy, too. The sleds moved off at a good pace and were soon abreast of the rocky islet. On its crest stood two gray clusters of poles, cone-shaped and looking somewhat like the skeletons of tepees. Awasin called to his team and the dogs broke into a run and drew up alongside Jamie’s cariole.

  “Old-fashioned Chipeweyan graves,” Awasin shouted, pointing to the two “tepees.” “Peetyuk’s story must have been true.”

  Dead Men’s Lake was not a long one and in an hour they had found its exit. There followed half an hour’s swift run down the ice of a small river, then suddenly ahead of them lay an immense expanse of open ice stretching to the eastern horizon.

  The carioles and the sled came to a halt and the four travelers stood together looking out over the vast reaches of Nuelthin-tua. To the south the gray waste of ice lost itself amongst innumerable wooded islands. To the north there seemed to be just as many islands, but these were barren of all trees. Black and rounded, they humped up from the ice like the backs of so many sleeping mastodons.

  “That where my land begin,” said Peetyuk proudly, pointing to the north.

  “Then let’s get moving,” Jamie replied. “Look at that sky. If we get caught in a blizzard out on the open ice we’ll have a rough time.”

  The almost colorless sky was streaked with long streamers of white clouds which seemed to be fleeing, like a school of silver herring, in front of an ominous dark mass which was swelling up over the eastern horizon.

  “Big storm, maybe,” Awasin said. “It is better if we do not go far from shore.”

  No one disputed the wisdom of this, and when they started on again it was along the shore of what was evidently a great bay which ran northward until it terminated in a line of barren hills.

  Soon the wind began to rise, kicking flurries of snow crystals ahead of them. The sky darkened rapidly. By noon it was completely overcast. Anxious to make as much distance as possible before the storm broke, they did not stop for lunch but pushed on, munching pieces of cold bannock as they trotted beside their sleds. Reaching the foot of the bay they turned east to skirt its hills and this brought the wind dead in their teeth. Suddenly the black clouds overhead began to disgorge not snow, as they had expected, but a bitter, driving rain.

  They raced toward the nearby shore, but there was little shelter there. Gone were the thick spruce and jackpine forests of the Putahow country, leaving a scattering of small and wind-distorted trees. The only protection they could find was behind a cluster of frost-shattered boulders. By the time they had the tent up everything was soaking wet.

  It was almost dark before the boys could gather enough twigs and brush for a fire, and when they eventually got it lit the wind and rain put it out again before they could even boil the tea billy. They gave up and crawled into the tent where Angeline had been doing what she could to arrange the drier robes for them to sleep under.

  They spent a miserable night, but cold and uncomfortable as they were they were not unhappy. As the tent flapped and snapped under the assault of wind and rain, they sat huddled together with robes pulled over their shoulders and sang to keep up their spirits. Angeline had a particularly sweet, clear voice, and at her brother’s urging she sang some songs she had learned at the mission school.

  Only Peetyuk, that usually amiable and jovial youth, seemed subdued. When Jamie teased him a little, calling him a “gloomy-gus,” he mustered a smile.

  “Forest country—that your country,” he explained. “You know that country and so I not worry there. Now we come my country. You not know so much. Now I worry for all. Soon rivers melting. After that ice go bad on small lakes. After that go bad on big lakes. If we not get to Innuit camps soon, we stuck. This rain no good. Much water come in rivers.”

  “That’s true,” Jamie agreed. “But I guess we’ll be all right on Nuelthin. It won’t thaw for a long time yet. How far do we go on it, Peetyuk?”

  “Maybe two-three days. After that must go on little rivers and lakes and over country.”

  “The rain is not so strong now,” Awasin said. “Perhaps it will stop soon. We should try and sleep a little.”

  “Only a fish could sleep in this tent,” Jamie grumbled. Nevertheless, it was not long before they were all dozing.

  The morning broke dry and warm with a south wind blowing and clear skies overhead. Cold, stiff and tired, the four crawled out at dawn. Peetyuk got a fire going, and after a hasty mug of tea and some fried deermeat the travelers hitched up the willing dogs and moved off.

  The rain had made shallow melt pools on top of the ice and had turned the overlying snow into thin slush. Nevertheless, it was good going for the sled and carioles, and the dogs seemed to share the impatience of their masters to get north. All that day they drove steadily on, stopping only twice to brew tea on willow fires at the shore and to have a bite to eat. Before noon they passed through a narrows into the northern part of Nuelthin-tua, and here they said good-by to the last trees. Ahead of them stretched the gigantic sweep of the Barrenlands, where the only wood they would find would be tiny clumps of willows huddled in the bottom of a few protected valleys.

  When they pitched camp that night they had covered twenty miles, which, considering that none of them had been able to ride on the overloaded sleds, was a good day’s run. And “run” was the right word, for the boys and Angeline literally ran much of the way.

  The following day—their sixth since leaving Kasmere House—they made equally good progress. There was frost at night, but in the daytime the temperature rose well above freezing and the thaw continued. Peetyuk grew more and more concerned and he led them on at the fastest pace dogs and people could maintain. Their camp at the end of the sixth day was on the shore of a deep bay which ran off to the northwest from the main body of Nuelthin.

  The hard pace had begun to tell on them and they took time
only to gulp down a hasty meal before crawling into their robes. The dogs went hungry, for the supplies of caribou meat were almost exhausted and the boys had seen no deer all the way up the lake.

  The spring-like weather seemed determined to persist. There was only a light frost that night and the morning sun rose white and hot in a cloudless sky. Once more Peetyuk got them moving almost before everyone was fully awake. “Sun too hot,” he told them with a worried frown. “Maybe little rivers break ice already.”

  As they drove up the bay (which now swung almost due west) sled and carioles threw up a steady spray, for the thaw water on top of the ice was several inches deep in places.

  “Good thing we have the canoes,” Jamie remarked to Awasin, who was driving alongside. “Another day like this and we’ll be using them. Either that or we’ll have to teach the dogs to swim.”

  Awasin was about to offer a joke in reply when he saw that Peetyuk had turned and was running back toward them, holding up his hand to warn Angeline to stop. In a moment the other teams had drawn up to Peetyuk’s sled.

  “Get guns quick,” he said urgently. “Around point, tuktu-mie—many deer. Angeline, you stay. Keep dogs quiet.”

  Slipping their rifles out of their deerskin cases, the boys ran swiftly for the cover of a long, low point of rock. When they reached the point they crawled slowly up to the crest and peered over it.

  Ten feet below them, and not fifty yards away, the black ice of the bay almost disappeared under a flowing tide of caribou. Perhaps a thousand animals were in sight, strung out in long, twisting skeins, crossing the bay from south to north. They moved slowly and the boys saw that they were all does—most of them with swollen bellies, for the fawning time was almost on them.

  Jamie and Awasin were so fascinated by the spectacle that they did not even think of raising their guns. As a dozen skeins of deer crossed in front of them, others descended to the bay ice from the southern hills. Away to the north they could see that the rising hills in that direction were lined and veined with countless lines of caribou. Each skein—and some consisted of as many as a hundred animals—seemed to be led by an old doe, perhaps one who had made the thousand-mile spring migration a score of times before.

  “Not wait all day,” Peetyuk said impatiently. “We also must go fast north. I shoot now.”

  He eased his rifle up to his shoulder, took quick aim and fired. The flat crash of the shot echoed over the ice, but the mass of the deer seemed to pay little heed to it. One barren doe sank to her knees, struggled to rise again, and then fell over on her side. The rest of the animals in the file behind swerved slightly and passed by her. Here and there a few does halted for a moment, thrust their heads out in the direction of the point, snorted, and continued on their way.

  “When does go north to fawn nothing stop them,” Peetyuk explained. “Not afraid wolf, people. Not stop for anything.”

  He proved the point a few minutes later. Having returned to their teams, the boys and Angeline drove right into the deer herds. The hungry dogs nearly went mad. Jamie was caught off guard and lost control of his team, which went belting across the ice at full gallop, leaving him running far astern and bellowing uselessly at them to stop.

  But the deer simply spread out to let the dogs go past, and when the team turned in pursuit of a single animal, the caribou only sprinted far enough to out-distance their pursuers before turning purposefully north at a sedate trot. Jamie’s dogs now tried to run in all directions at once and their frantic efforts soon resulted in such a tangle of traces that they and the cariole were brought to a standstill. When Jamie panted up to them he found the lines so fouled that it took him twenty minutes of yelling, thumping and sweating to get the dogs disentangled. Meantime Awasin and Peetyuk had butchered and quartered the barren doe, flung the meat on their sleds, and driven on to join him.

  Peetyuk shook his head sadly as he looked down at the tangled harness. “Maybe you be good driver some day,” he said. “Some white men learn, but take long time. Got white beard by then.”

  Too winded to reply, Jamie could do nothing but grunt disgustedly as Peetyuk’s sled swept past, heading toward the foot of the long bay.

  CHAPTER 8

  Race Against Time

  THE NORTHWEST BAY OF NUELTHIN ended in a snow-choked valley which wound away to the westward between high, barren hills. Without slackening pace, Peetyuk led the teams onto the ice of a river flowing out of this valley. The surface was rough and pitted and in places it had sagged, allowing thaw pools a foot in depth to form on top of it.

  They had gone several miles when Peetyuk halted the train and went carefully forward, testing the ice with the butt of his rifle. He came back in a few minutes looking very worried.

  “Rapid run under ice,” he told the others. “Melt ice from under. Too thin here. Must go shore.”

  “We’ll never get anywhere along the shore,” Jamie protested. “The drifts in this valley must be ten feet deep, and the snow’s so soft a butterfly would sink in it.”

  “Maybe wrong river anyway,” Peetyuk replied hesitantly. “This one go west, and big. River we want go northwest, and not very big. Should go out over country, not up big valley. Maybe I too much hurry. Maybe we go back and look again.”

  It was a depressing prospect, but there was really no alternative. They turned the sled and carioles about, and two hours later they reached the river mouth and were again on the bay ice. Here they halted while Peetyuk climbed a hill and scanned the north shore of the bay. When he scrambled down to join the others, his worried frown had been replaced by his usual grin.

  “I find!” he told them jubilantly, and led them off toward a little cove concealed behind a string of islands. They did not see the river they were seeking until they turned a final bend.

  “How did you ever find it, Pete?” Jamie asked.

  “Not see river, Jamie. See that…” and he pointed to the crest of one of the masking islands. On the skyline stood a pile of stones set one on top of the other and no more than three feet high. To a casual eye the pile looked like a natural object, for the whole of the Barrenland plains are sprinkled thickly and haphazardly with jumbled rocks deposited by the retreating glaciers of the ancient past.

  “He is inukok—stoneman,” Peetyuk explained. “Eskimo make him. Make many inukok all over country. Show way to go for other Eskimo. I think Kakumee make that one. Got right road now.”

  Although the afternoon was growing old, Peetyuk would not let them stop even long enough to boil the kettle. Wearily the dogs took up the strain, and just as wearily the three boys and the girl plodded on.

  This new river was not much more than a shallow stream winding its way up from the bay in a northwesterly direction over open, rolling plains criss-crossed with long gravel ridges completely free of snow. Innumerable small ponds and lakes lay in the snow-filled valleys, and the edges of these lakes had already thawed, leaving a narrow ring of open water between their shores and the rotting ice.

  Mikkiku, or Little River, which was what Peetyuk called it, offered hard traveling. Not only was its ice rotten, but it was studded with boulders. There was a great deal of melt water on the surface, and the travelers could plainly hear the ominous mutter of a river in spate under the decaying ice.

  The toboggan-like carioles were not well suited to these conditions, since they lay flat on the surface and tended to build up masses of heavy slush ahead of them. Everything aboard the carioles soon became soaked. On the other hand, Peetyuk’s Eskimo-style sled, with its high runners, rode easily through the slush so that his load remained dry.

  All four were soon soaked to the knees, and the bitter cold of the ice water chilled and numbed their legs. There were still two or three hours of daylight remaining when Angeline, who had gamely kept up with the rest and never uttered a word of complaint, slipped through a melt hole and plunged into the water to her waist.

  Awasin quickly hauled her out and then declared that the day’s journey was at an end.


  “That is enough,” he said wearily. “I know we must go fast, but we will kill the dogs if we go too hard.”

  Peetyuk gave in. “Okay, we camp. Good sand ridge here. Maybe find wood for fire.”

  Leaving the others to unload the carioles and spread the things to dry on the slope of a little sandy hill, he went scurrying off upstream and shortly returned carrying a huge armful of bone-dry, silver-colored sticks. “One time forest grow far out on country,” he explained when they asked him where he had found this surprising windfall. “Long, long time ago trees die, I not know why. Wood stand up and never rot. Very good for fire.”

  These relics of a warmer climate and of the retreating tree line burned with a hot, white flame that sent steam curling from the moccasins, sleeping robes and stockings which hung over rocks and sticks all around the fire.

  They ate a big meal of deer steaks fried in marrow fat and, since the sky was still clear, they decided against setting up the tent. Restored by good food, dry clothes and a rest, Jamie, Awasin and Angeline climbed to the top of the sand hill for a look at the surrounding country.

  It was Angeline’s first real look at the true Barrenlands and for a time she was silent in the face of the immensity of space, the vast panorama of rolling hills, rock ridges, and broad valleys that seemed to reach to the end of the world.

  “I think I do not like it,” she said softly, and shivered a little. “It is too big…and empty.”

  “It is not empty, sister,” Awasin told her. “Do you see the many little dots that look like rocks? Watch…they move a little, eh? They are caribou. This is indeed the land of the deer. They come to us in the forests for a little while, in winter, but this is their land. When Jamie and I came north last year with Denikazi, we met so many deer sometimes we could hardly move among them. No, it is not an empty land.”