Free People of the Deer by Farley Mowat Page B

consisted largely of things that would be of no aid to the dying men and women in the camps. There were white beans; sacks of white beans, for people who had no fuel for fires and whose world was still one of ice and snow.
    Loading his tired dogs with the things that could be used, Franz started north again: two hundred miles of bitter driving, with the spring thaws already making progress very difficult.
    Time had been running out.
    Franz had traveled almost a thousand miles on behalf of the People. He came to the camps again in time to learn that Eepuk, Aljut, Uktilohik, Elaitutna, Epeetna, Okinuk, Oquinuk and Homoguluk—people he knew well—had not been able to await his corning. It was spring. These dead ones were buried under rock piles where the snow had left the ridges. There were others, too, who did not have the benefit of graves, but whose bodies were attended to by wolves and wolverines, so that their spirits may never know the rest that comes only to those who are buried properly. In the camps where these had died there had been none left to bury them.
    Franz had done much for the Ihalmiut, and in so doing had done much for himself. The old bitterness and anger, the legacy of his own treatment at the hands of white men, was all gone. No, not quite gone, but turned against those who deserved it, and no longer against the People of the Little Hills.
    As for the People—it was only another spring for them, no different from twoscore springs which had been theirs during the last half-century.
    And there was something to balance the ledger this time, for now a message had gone out. Now the government could not ignore the People any longer, nor plead ignorance of the charges who had been placed in its care by the white man’s law. The message had gone out. The response to it had been too slow, and badly bungled, but at least there had been a response; and at long last the government acknowledged that in the great plains there lived a people who were its wards.
    Fifty years of darkness had intervened between the time of Tyrrell’s visit and this belated recognition of the People he had found. Now half a century of casual forgetfulness was at an end, and for the second time in their long history as squatters in this land of ours, the existence of the Ihalmiut was admitted. And surely this was a bright victory for the conscience of our race, not dimmed or clouded because that victory came too late to do more than prolong the last dying spasms of the People of the Little Hills.

4. The Lifeblood of the Land
    On the day following the arrival of Hans and the children, I was awakened by the sound of heavy firing. The crash of gunshots intruded itself into my dreams until I thought I was again back in the Italian hills, listening to an exchange of rifle fire between the German outposts and our own. When I came to full consciousness the firing remained, so I hurriedly pulled on my clothes and went out into the June morning.
    Franz, Anoteelik and Hans were sitting on the ridge above the cabin and they were steadily firing their rifles across the river. On the sloping southern bank nearly a hundred deer, all does, were milling in stupid anxiety. I could see the gray bursts of dust as bullets sang off the rocks, and I could hear the flat thud of bullets going home in living flesh.
    The nearest animals were waist-deep in the fast brown water and could not return to shore, for the press of deer behind cut off retreat. The does that were still on land were running in short, futile starts, first east then west again, and it was some time before they began to gallop with long awkward strides, along the riverbank. Their ponderous bellies big with fawn swung rhythmically as they fled upstream, for their time was nearly on them.
    When the last of the straggling herd had passed out of range beyond the first bend of the river, the firing stopped and the three hunters ran down the bank and hurriedly began to clear the snow