TUKTU TELLS HER STORY
With his long, swinging trot, Whitefoot rapidly made his way out of the
Valley of the Good Spirit. Once only did Tuktu look back at the cloud of
shimmering, many-colored mist. At one point it glowed a rich deep red,
and as she looked, this turned to rose and finally to a faint pink and
then vanished. Nowhere was the Good Spirit to be seen.
Out of the valley, over the hill, climbed Whitefoot, and Tuktu turned
him in the direction of the camp. There presently she fastened him where
Aklak had put him to graze. Her father and brother had not returned. As
in a dream, she looked back to the hills around the Valley of the Good
Spirit. Could it be that she had been there? Was it not all a dream? But
if it were a dream, it had been a wonderful dream--the most beautiful of
all dreams. She knew that Kutok and Aklak would not believe the story
she had to tell. They would say that she had been asleep and the dream
spirits had visited her. She looked across to the distant hills above
the valley, and with a suddenness that startled her, she realized that
not a deer was to be seen. Of course not. Had she not seen them move out
of the upper end of the valley? There was the proof.
With the realization of this, all thought of anything else was driven
from the mind of Tuktu--even the wonderful experience she had been
through. The great herd was moving and there were no herders! She must
get word back to the herders on the coast. She would take the other pack
deer, for Whitefoot must be tired. Perhaps she would meet her father and
brother on the way. She had just prepared to start when in the distance
she saw Kutok and Aklak approaching. When they reached her, they were in
high spirits. They had had good hunting and they brought with them
plenty to eat.
“They have moved!” cried Tuktu. “The deer have left the Valley of the
Good Spirit.” Kutok threw down his load and hurried to the rise of
ground from which he had been accustomed to watch the deer on the
distant hills. Long he looked, searching every bit of ground within
range of his eyes. Not a deer was to be seen.
“It is so, Little Tuktu,” said he on his return. “The herd has started
for the winter grazing grounds. It is time that we also should move.
Aklak shall go back to carry word to the herders, while you and I will
follow the deer. They will move slowly, so there is no hurry. But it is
well that we should catch up with them soon, lest the wolves attack,
finding them unguarded.”
So Aklak started back to the summer camp to send up the herders and to
help break the camp and move toward the winter home. Tuktu and her
father, with a small skin iglu or tent wherein to sleep, and food enough
for their immediate needs, started at once to catch up with the great
herd. Through years of experience, Kutok knew in what direction the deer
would travel and the shortest way to reach them.
They traveled too fast for much talking. Tuktu longed to tell her father
what she had seen in the Valley of the Good Spirit, but somehow she
couldn’t. “He will laugh at me,” she thought. “He will not believe, and
he will laugh at me; and I do not want to be laughed at.” So she said
nothing. But all the time there was a song in her heart.
It was not until Aklak had rejoined them that she told of her adventure
in the Valley of the Good Spirit. At first Aklak laughed, as she had
known he would. “It was a dream, Tuktu,” he cried. “It was a dream. You
must have slept through that fog while Father and I were hunting, and
the dream spirits took you with them. No one ever has seen the Good
Spirit, and no one ever will.”
But Tuktu stubbornly insisted that it was not a dream, until at last
even Aklak began to believe that it might be so. You would have laughed
to hear him ply her with questions, all the time pretending that he
didn’t believe a word of it. But Tuktu caught him looking at her with a
respect in his black eyes which was new in her experience. And she
noticed, too, that he no longer teased her, and that now he was never
selfish. The biggest share of anything was always hers. Never had he
been so gentle and thoughtful. Yet never once could she get him to say
that he believed her story of the Valley of the Good Spirit.
Now there was one thing that Tuktu did not tell Aklak. It was that the
last deer chosen was from their father’s own herd. Never had Kutok had a
deer chosen by the Good Spirit from his herd until now. Tuktu had known
that it was her father’s deer, because she had been near enough to see
the ear-mark. Besides, there was no other deer in the herd to compare
with it. Sometimes when Aklak insisted that it was all a dream, she
would be almost persuaded that he was right. Then she would remember
that it was her father’s finest deer Speedfoot, which had been chosen.
“If,” she would say to herself, “we cannot find Speedfoot in the round
up, I shall know for a certainty that I did not dream. It will be the
proof.”
Thereafter she spent many hours wandering in and out through the great
herd looking for this particular deer and rejoicing that she could not
find it.