Free The Snow Walker by Farley Mowat Page B

people, and so it might have happened. But one summer the Itkilit failed to appear on the plains; and as summer followed summer and they still failed to return, my people began to move slowly south and recover their land.
    The Itkilit stopped coming against us because they were dead in their thousands; dead from a fire that burned in their bodies, rotting the flesh so they stank like old corpses while life still lingered within them. This we know, for that fire, which was another gift from the Kablunait, afterwards swept out over the plains and my people also died in their thousands.
    Now the Itkilit are no more than a handful scattered through the dark shadows of the forests; and the wide country where my people once dwelt is nearly empty of men.
    So it ends… But this bow I hold in my hand is where it began.
     
    darkness had fallen and the fire was nearly out. Hekwaw stirred the coals until the fire was reborn under the touch of the night wind. His face was turned from me as he dropped the crossbow onto the flames and I could barely hear his words:
    “Take back your gift, Koonar. Take it back to the lands of the Innuhowik and the Kablunait… its work here is done.”

 
    Two Who Were One
_______
    After death carried the noose to Angutna and Kipmik, their memory lived on with the people of the Great Plains. But death was not satisfied and, one by one, he took the lives of the people until none was left to remember. Before the last of them died, the story was told to a stranger and so it is that Angutna and Kipmik may cheat oblivion a little while longer.
    It begins on a summer day when Angutna was only a boy. He had taken his father’s kayak and paddled over the still depths of the lake called Big Hungry until he entered a narrow strait called Muskox Thing. Here he grounded the kayak beneath a wall of looming cliffs and climbed cautiously upward under a cloud-shadowed sky. He was hunting for Tuktu, the caribou, which was the source of being for those who lived in the heart of the tundra. Those people knew of the sea only as a legend. For them seals, walrus and whales were mythical beasts. For them the broad-antlered caribou was the giver of life.
    Angutna was lucky. Peering over a ledge he saw three caribou bucks resting their rumbling bellies on a broad step in the cliffs. They were not sleeping, and one or other of them kept raising his head to shake off the black hordes of flies that clung to nostrils and ears, so Angutna was forced to crawl forward an inch or two at a time. It took him an hour to move twenty yards, but he moved with such infinite caution that the bucks remained unaware of his presence. He had only a few more yards to crawl before he could drive an arrow from his short bow with enough power to kill.
    Sunlight burst suddenly down through the yielding grey scud and struck hot on the crouched back of the boy and the thick coats of the deer. The warmth roused the bucks and one by one they got to their feet. Now they were restless, alert, and ready to move. In an agony of uncertainty Angutna lay still as a rock. This was the first time he had tried to stalk Tuktu all by himself, and if he failed in his first hunt he believed it would bode ill for his luck in the years ahead.
    But the burst of sunlight had touched more than the deer and the boy. It had beamed into a cleft in the cliffs overhanging the ledge where it had wakened two sleeping fox pups. Now their catlike grey faces peered shortsightedly over the brilliant roll of the lake and the land. Cloudy black eyes took in the tableau of the deer and the boy; but in their desire to see more, the pups forgot the first precept of all wild things—to see and hear but not to be seen or heard. They skittered to the edge of the cleft, shrilling a mockery of the dog fox’s challenge at the strange beasts below.
    The bucks turned their heavy heads and their ears flopped anxiously until their eyes found the pups scampering back and forth far over their heads.